Funny how Boeing and SpaceX are competing for it but there is no mention of Boeing in the title. I smell bias.
You mean Americans who have subsidised Boeing with orders of magnitude more money in tax breaks over the decades than they have SpaceX... Yeah, they might be biased.
The rest of us just are probably just exited that a company is seriously attempting radical reductions in cost per unit of weight to orbit.
I would love to see Boing or any other mega-corporation attempt similar reductions in launch cost, but I doubt that will happen unless they are challenged by an outside company, like SpaceX...
Which brings me back to cheerleading for SpaceX. It's almost impossible to discuss space business without sounding like a SpaceX cheerleader.
Every obstacle that you put between people and their goals have a filtering effect. If you catch X% of terrorists, then the number of attacks will drop by X%, to a first approximation at least. Keep in mind that most terrorists aren't geniuses and that terrorist have limited amounts of motivation and imagination.
It is true that the government and other security workers are incompetent, but that incompetence is not complete and utter, it is only partial, which means that it can be measured as a percentage. If you have a system that ought to catch X% of terrorists, but the operators only manage to use it correctly half of the time, the system will catch X/2 % of attempts.
Most people are not imaginative enough to think of novel ways of doing things, so it makes a lot of sense to come up with ways of preventing "the last attack" if there is a cheap and reasonably effective way of doing so. Most of the time there isn't a cheap and efficient way, like with Friday's attack in Paris. It is probably fundamentally impossible to detect rifles in urban areas using any kind of small and cheap technology.
Would-be terrorist might easily over-estimate the effectiveness of these measures and be unnecessarily and unproportionally deterred, since they like most people probably don't realise how ineffective these systems usually are. If Islamic terrorists had kept trying to check in bombs as luggage at airports and then not boarding the planes they would easily have slipped quite a few bombs past the system by now, but when measures where installed, the Islamists basically stopped trying and began to resort to highjacking planes at gunpoint instead. It was not until 2001 that they realised that you could kill more victims by doing suicide attacks. That took a good while for them to figure out.
The new measures that were installed after 9/11 are incredibly expensive in terms of manpower and equipment and not very hard to bypass, so I doubt that they make sense (you could probably lower the risk of terror more by using the money elsewhere), but I don't doubt that they do deter would-be terrorists to some extent.
Then you should do whatever you can to estimate the bias as a function of time, or sample number, or what have you.
It makes no sense to throw your hands up and say "we know about a bias on our measurements, but we're not going to use that information to try to remove the bias".
Yeah they do. Especially the ones that improves the rate at which you can charge your battery.
It is better for the phone maker if you have a relatively low capacity battery with rapid charging than a high capacity battery with slow charging, since the former will be charged a lot more often and will get a lot hotter when it is charged and will therefore wear out a lot sooner, which will prompt you to buy a new phone.
Sony is the one company that is consistently doing the opposite of this, by making high-end Android phones that last for two days, but that does not seem to be a winning strategy for them.
If the bias is known to be X percent on average, how about you subtract those X percent from the number to get an unbiased result? You might even come up with a way to estimate the bias in each particular case based on input from the sensors.
I thing apps like RunKeeper are already doing this sort of thing, because they seem pretty accurate to me, if perhaps a little too optimistic...
The thing is, you don't win users by under-estimating their achievements.
I think you are being a little bit too categorical. There are simple things that can be done to prevent terrorist attacks and it makes sense to do those things.
For example, it makes sense that if someone checks in a bag at the airport but does not board the plane, the plane does not get to fly until that particular luggage has removed. I'm sure that 9999 times out of 10000 it's just that the passenger has fallen asleep while waiting for the plane, but being a little late is still a cheap price to pay to avoid a 1/10000 chance of being killed.
It would also be easy for border stations to take pictures of refugees/migrants and run them through a face recognition algorithm against a picture database of all the photos that the Islamists themselves have posted on the Internet. I bet you could catch and detain at least 10% of all IS infiltrators at the border of Europe by doing that.
It would also be fairly easy to force immigrants from the Middle east and Africa to submit their fingerprints, DNA profiles and other biometric data and store that for a limited period in order to help police track down suspects. (And before you ask, yes I would gladly submit my biometric data if I immigrated to a foreign country. I would take it as a sign that the country takes its social contract seriously.)
One simple thing that could be done to dampen the blow of terror is to create a fund for survivors and for those financially dependent on the dead.
Well, for starters we have to stop attacking their countries.
Killing Saddam Hussein was a huge mistake. The world would be a much better place if Saddam was still the dictator of Iraq, or if he had been succeeded by one of his sons, or if he had been deposed in a coup by some other Iraqi ruler without outside help. Rulers like Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad are the least bad currently available options in these countries. We should not upset things by trying to remove them.
Let the Arabs do what we did back in the day. Countries like the US, or France, or really any western democracy, were not granted their freedoms and rights by some outside force.
With that said, I do not think that it makes any sense whatsoever to try to fight religious lunatics by killing them. These people dream of being "martyred" in battle, because they think it will secure them a better spot in their afterlife. When we think that killing the Islamists will work we are projecting rational thoughts and motivations onto people who are motivated by irrational beliefs.
If we should to do something rash here in Europe (which I'm not sure we should) internment camps like the ones the US put US-Japanese citizens in during WW2 would be a much better idea. The Islamists do like their freedom as much as the rest of us. God's powers apparently do not extend inside the walls of prisons.
It is true that in most modern societies people do like to work and people will actively seek work, but there are exceptions.
The exception that interests me, since I live in the developed world, are welfare-dependent neighbourhoods in developed countries where a large percentage of people have been unable to find work for so long that they have given up. They collect whatever welfare they can get. They find little jobs (often tax-evasive jobs) here and there, on and off. They borrow money if they can. They find ways to cut back on spending. They adapt. They settle. They eventually accept that that is their lot. This is nothing new, of course.
The thing that troubles me is that a lot of the "young", especially the young men, are uninterested in work. They want to increase their income, of course, but their thoughts and ideas about increasing their income are usually not realistic. Actually, this is nothing new either.
The thing that is new and that really troubles me is that intellectuals are thinking about creating a system where those people can go on indefinitely. A lot of these intellectuals (probably most of them) enjoy work themselves, but they have an idealogical conviction that work is evil and must be phased out, so that we can do better things with our time.
That sounds great (if we define work as "painful and unrewarding tasks") but the thing that I don't understand is what people will use as bargaining chips if their work is no longer expected or needed in the economy.
Trotting out that "why work when you get paid" canard is just telling everyone "I wouldn't work if I was paid", which reflects rather poorly on you. Most people have no problem doing what others consider "work" even if they already have some money in the bank. If your life is so desolate you can't understand that, well, then you might want to take care of yourself before condemning this scheme.
No, that is not what that means. Do work on your reading comprehension.
Most of us, I included, like to work because we have constantly and consistently been indoctrinated from a fairly young age to value work. We also been conditioned to think that in addition to being good in and of itself, work will also be rewarded through external rewards, like money. Now, if some that indoctrination is removed, things will change.
There are neighbourhoods very close to where I live where almost everyone is living on welfare. I really hope what I see when I visit those places are not visions of the future.
I have been browsing the web with Debian Iceweasel on a Hurd VM in Virtualbox for about two hours now (this is the no-joke part of the post, I even watched a couple of clips on youtube) and I've done a little bit of research on the state of the project. About 80% of Debian packages actually run...
I have not attempted to compile Wine, but I hear it's been working since 2013...
OpenGL support is being worked on, of course...
You know what that means.
Yes. It will happen. As the prophecy foretells.
Someone will eventually play Duke Nukem Forever on Hurd.
The question is, is the group of people who are happy-not-working large enough to bankrupt the group of people who would keep working?
I think you'll find that that is not a constant ratio. It's going to be changing over time depending on a vast array of factors.
If you think of "wanting to work" and "not wanting to work" as two memes that can spread in the population, replacing one another as they infect an individual, you can begin to reason about that.
I think the "not wanting to work" meme is a lot easier to acquire than the "wanting to work" meme if you look at it apart from any kind social context. It's a simple idea that doesn't require any effort by the individual. The wanting to work meme is vastly more complex and requires a lot of effort of the individual.
Of course, we find that the opposite has happened. The wanting to work meme has clearly won.
I think the reason why the wanting to work meme is so successful in most societies is that those of us who have grown up in a social context where work is the norm can predict that working can bring tremendous rewards, financial and otherwise, compared to not working. We want those rewards, so we are happy to willingly infect ourselves with the wanting to work meme.
I think it's probably mostly determined by your social context.
If you've lived your whole life in a social context where almost everyone either works or studies and everyone talks about work and school, the idea of not working (of not ever working) will seem abhorrent to you and you will do almost anything to avoid long-term unemployment.
If you've lived your whole life in a social context where a lot of people are unemployed and not studying and where people find ways to subsist on welfare, plus various sketchy sources of income, you will probably not be very inclined to try to have a career. And let's face it, it usually takes a lot of effort to maintain a career. If the social conditioning is not there, you're not going to have the drive and the stamina that you need.
All of your assumptions are unproven and I dare say wrong. Why would this only be sustainable by taxing the rich? The money needed for the basic income already exists. This is not so much free money, as a different way of assigning it. We already have welfare systems, but we spend a huge amount of effort and money into the whole management of it in an attempt to make it "fair".
Your assumption that normal tax income cannot finance a basic income scheme needs proof, and you've not provided any.
It's a basic fact of the universe that things have to come from somewhere.
The money to pay for welfare has to come either from taxes paid by workers, or from taxes paid by corporations and/or rich capitalist, or be printed out of thin air. If we don't print money and almost nobody works for a living (why work if you can get money for free?) then the only remaining source of money are the corporations and their owners.
Any reform that makes it easier and more profitable for regular people to buy and own small amounts of stock and other capital.
The government can help by simplifying tax codes where tax codes are too complicated for private individuals to deal with on their own. You could make the capital gains tax progressive at the lower end. You could have a tax code where a person could keep some small amount (say 100k) of capital in a designated account at their bank and not pay capital gains tax until they exceed that amount. The capital gains tax could be replaced by a simple percentage tax on the total capital exceeding $100k (you could also let each person choose which version of the tax code they prefer to use),
Imagine what the world would be like if people who had decent paying jobs in the 1900's had been buying stock for some tiny fraction of their income instead of spending it on stuff they didn't really need.
The problem with all these basic income schemes is that they will cause (or speed up) a gradual, but eventually overwhelming, shift in power from regular people to the super rich.
If you draw a simple diagram of how money must flow in the economy you will see that the only long-term sustainable way to fund a basic income scheme without creating massive inflation is by taxing the rich and/or the corporations that they own. This sounds great, until you realize that once the rich pay all the taxes and the rest of us pay virtually no taxes, the rich will effectively own the government. It will no longer seem corrupt when the government does their bidding. Kids will learn in school that the big corporation and their glorious and intelligent owners own the government fair and square and are the source of all of our wealth.
And of course, once the rich literally own the government the rest of us will pretty much have to settle for whatever they care to give us.
The current system is far from perfect, but it is a system where the government gets its money from the hands of regular people and therefore has to at the very least make believe that it is serving regular people.
I think developers probably do use the libraries most of the time, but time libraries are easy to misuse if you don't know what you're doing and you're not willing to research and learn before you write code.
Today's average programmer (a web developer) is typically expected to write orders of magnitude more code than people were in the 1960's. Of course the code quality is going to be lower.
But the stakes are a lot lower too. It's not like someone's crappy JavaScrip is going to down a satellite, or accidentally launch a nuclear strike against Russia. Your average code monkey today might perhaps bring down Google or Facebook for a couple of hours if they make a really nasty mistake, which would probably be a net good, all things considered.
Yeah, I was choosing between the 15" MacBook Pro and the Dell XPS 15 and I was leaning towards the Dell with the matte screen, until I discovered that it was no longer available in my market.
The new XPS 15 will be available in mid-November, hopefully with a matte screen option. 1920x1080 is a bit on the low side for a 15" laptop, but it is acceptable, especially when you save $1k+ compared to a Mac.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny how Boeing and SpaceX are competing for it but there is no mention of Boeing in the title. I smell bias.
You mean Americans who have subsidised Boeing with orders of magnitude more money in tax breaks over the decades than they have SpaceX... Yeah, they might be biased.
The rest of us just are probably just exited that a company is seriously attempting radical reductions in cost per unit of weight to orbit.
I would love to see Boing or any other mega-corporation attempt similar reductions in launch cost, but I doubt that will happen unless they are challenged by an outside company, like SpaceX...
Which brings me back to cheerleading for SpaceX. It's almost impossible to discuss space business without sounding like a SpaceX cheerleader.
So how do you explain that the luggage compartment bombings largely stopped after measures were put in place?
It's cute, but I'm not sure it's particularly profound.
Well, this is obviously leading up to the discovery that you can average pictures of toast, windows, dog butts and what not to get a picture of Jesus.
Every obstacle that you put between people and their goals have a filtering effect. If you catch X% of terrorists, then the number of attacks will drop by X%, to a first approximation at least. Keep in mind that most terrorists aren't geniuses and that terrorist have limited amounts of motivation and imagination.
It is true that the government and other security workers are incompetent, but that incompetence is not complete and utter, it is only partial, which means that it can be measured as a percentage. If you have a system that ought to catch X% of terrorists, but the operators only manage to use it correctly half of the time, the system will catch X/2 % of attempts.
Most people are not imaginative enough to think of novel ways of doing things, so it makes a lot of sense to come up with ways of preventing "the last attack" if there is a cheap and reasonably effective way of doing so. Most of the time there isn't a cheap and efficient way, like with Friday's attack in Paris. It is probably fundamentally impossible to detect rifles in urban areas using any kind of small and cheap technology.
Would-be terrorist might easily over-estimate the effectiveness of these measures and be unnecessarily and unproportionally deterred, since they like most people probably don't realise how ineffective these systems usually are. If Islamic terrorists had kept trying to check in bombs as luggage at airports and then not boarding the planes they would easily have slipped quite a few bombs past the system by now, but when measures where installed, the Islamists basically stopped trying and began to resort to highjacking planes at gunpoint instead. It was not until 2001 that they realised that you could kill more victims by doing suicide attacks. That took a good while for them to figure out.
The new measures that were installed after 9/11 are incredibly expensive in terms of manpower and equipment and not very hard to bypass, so I doubt that they make sense (you could probably lower the risk of terror more by using the money elsewhere), but I don't doubt that they do deter would-be terrorists to some extent.
Then you should do whatever you can to estimate the bias as a function of time, or sample number, or what have you.
It makes no sense to throw your hands up and say "we know about a bias on our measurements, but we're not going to use that information to try to remove the bias".
Yeah they do. Especially the ones that improves the rate at which you can charge your battery.
It is better for the phone maker if you have a relatively low capacity battery with rapid charging than a high capacity battery with slow charging, since the former will be charged a lot more often and will get a lot hotter when it is charged and will therefore wear out a lot sooner, which will prompt you to buy a new phone.
Sony is the one company that is consistently doing the opposite of this, by making high-end Android phones that last for two days, but that does not seem to be a winning strategy for them.
If the bias is known to be X percent on average, how about you subtract those X percent from the number to get an unbiased result? You might even come up with a way to estimate the bias in each particular case based on input from the sensors.
I thing apps like RunKeeper are already doing this sort of thing, because they seem pretty accurate to me, if perhaps a little too optimistic...
The thing is, you don't win users by under-estimating their achievements.
I think you are being a little bit too categorical. There are simple things that can be done to prevent terrorist attacks and it makes sense to do those things.
For example, it makes sense that if someone checks in a bag at the airport but does not board the plane, the plane does not get to fly until that particular luggage has removed. I'm sure that 9999 times out of 10000 it's just that the passenger has fallen asleep while waiting for the plane, but being a little late is still a cheap price to pay to avoid a 1/10000 chance of being killed.
It would also be easy for border stations to take pictures of refugees/migrants and run them through a face recognition algorithm against a picture database of all the photos that the Islamists themselves have posted on the Internet. I bet you could catch and detain at least 10% of all IS infiltrators at the border of Europe by doing that.
It would also be fairly easy to force immigrants from the Middle east and Africa to submit their fingerprints, DNA profiles and other biometric data and store that for a limited period in order to help police track down suspects. (And before you ask, yes I would gladly submit my biometric data if I immigrated to a foreign country. I would take it as a sign that the country takes its social contract seriously.)
One simple thing that could be done to dampen the blow of terror is to create a fund for survivors and for those financially dependent on the dead.
Well, for starters we have to stop attacking their countries.
Killing Saddam Hussein was a huge mistake. The world would be a much better place if Saddam was still the dictator of Iraq, or if he had been succeeded by one of his sons, or if he had been deposed in a coup by some other Iraqi ruler without outside help. Rulers like Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad are the least bad currently available options in these countries. We should not upset things by trying to remove them.
Let the Arabs do what we did back in the day. Countries like the US, or France, or really any western democracy, were not granted their freedoms and rights by some outside force.
France has been bombing terrorists in Iraq and Syria. Just last week they announced they were sending their aircraft carrier in for another tour.
Exactly right. IS is striking back at France in retaliation of France's attacks on them in Syria.
See http://www.theguardian.com/wor... for example.
Note that I'm not trying to justify anything.
With that said, I do not think that it makes any sense whatsoever to try to fight religious lunatics by killing them. These people dream of being "martyred" in battle, because they think it will secure them a better spot in their afterlife. When we think that killing the Islamists will work we are projecting rational thoughts and motivations onto people who are motivated by irrational beliefs.
If we should to do something rash here in Europe (which I'm not sure we should) internment camps like the ones the US put US-Japanese citizens in during WW2 would be a much better idea. The Islamists do like their freedom as much as the rest of us. God's powers apparently do not extend inside the walls of prisons.
It is true that in most modern societies people do like to work and people will actively seek work, but there are exceptions.
The exception that interests me, since I live in the developed world, are welfare-dependent neighbourhoods in developed countries where a large percentage of people have been unable to find work for so long that they have given up. They collect whatever welfare they can get. They find little jobs (often tax-evasive jobs) here and there, on and off. They borrow money if they can. They find ways to cut back on spending. They adapt. They settle. They eventually accept that that is their lot. This is nothing new, of course.
The thing that troubles me is that a lot of the "young", especially the young men, are uninterested in work. They want to increase their income, of course, but their thoughts and ideas about increasing their income are usually not realistic. Actually, this is nothing new either.
The thing that is new and that really troubles me is that intellectuals are thinking about creating a system where those people can go on indefinitely. A lot of these intellectuals (probably most of them) enjoy work themselves, but they have an idealogical conviction that work is evil and must be phased out, so that we can do better things with our time.
That sounds great (if we define work as "painful and unrewarding tasks") but the thing that I don't understand is what people will use as bargaining chips if their work is no longer expected or needed in the economy.
Trotting out that "why work when you get paid" canard is just telling everyone "I wouldn't work if I was paid", which reflects rather poorly on you. Most people have no problem doing what others consider "work" even if they already have some money in the bank. If your life is so desolate you can't understand that, well, then you might want to take care of yourself before condemning this scheme.
No, that is not what that means. Do work on your reading comprehension.
Most of us, I included, like to work because we have constantly and consistently been indoctrinated from a fairly young age to value work. We also been conditioned to think that in addition to being good in and of itself, work will also be rewarded through external rewards, like money. Now, if some that indoctrination is removed, things will change.
There are neighbourhoods very close to where I live where almost everyone is living on welfare. I really hope what I see when I visit those places are not visions of the future.
I have been browsing the web with Debian Iceweasel on a Hurd VM in Virtualbox for about two hours now (this is the no-joke part of the post, I even watched a couple of clips on youtube) and I've done a little bit of research on the state of the project. About 80% of Debian packages actually run...
I have not attempted to compile Wine, but I hear it's been working since 2013...
OpenGL support is being worked on, of course...
You know what that means.
Yes. It will happen. As the prophecy foretells.
Someone will eventually play Duke Nukem Forever on Hurd.
And here's the link for that: https://www.gnu.org/software/h...
Yeah, if you use the pre/installed image it pretty much just works. The window manager is icewm.
Posted from my Hurd VM.
The question is, is the group of people who are happy-not-working large enough to bankrupt the group of people who would keep working?
I think you'll find that that is not a constant ratio. It's going to be changing over time depending on a vast array of factors.
If you think of "wanting to work" and "not wanting to work" as two memes that can spread in the population, replacing one another as they infect an individual, you can begin to reason about that.
I think the "not wanting to work" meme is a lot easier to acquire than the "wanting to work" meme if you look at it apart from any kind social context. It's a simple idea that doesn't require any effort by the individual. The wanting to work meme is vastly more complex and requires a lot of effort of the individual.
Of course, we find that the opposite has happened. The wanting to work meme has clearly won.
I think the reason why the wanting to work meme is so successful in most societies is that those of us who have grown up in a social context where work is the norm can predict that working can bring tremendous rewards, financial and otherwise, compared to not working. We want those rewards, so we are happy to willingly infect ourselves with the wanting to work meme.
I think it's probably mostly determined by your social context.
If you've lived your whole life in a social context where almost everyone either works or studies and everyone talks about work and school, the idea of not working (of not ever working) will seem abhorrent to you and you will do almost anything to avoid long-term unemployment.
If you've lived your whole life in a social context where a lot of people are unemployed and not studying and where people find ways to subsist on welfare, plus various sketchy sources of income, you will probably not be very inclined to try to have a career. And let's face it, it usually takes a lot of effort to maintain a career. If the social conditioning is not there, you're not going to have the drive and the stamina that you need.
I call bullshit on this.
All of your assumptions are unproven and I dare say wrong. Why would this only be sustainable by taxing the rich? The money needed for the basic income already exists. This is not so much free money, as a different way of assigning it. We already have welfare systems, but we spend a huge amount of effort and money into the whole management of it in an attempt to make it "fair".
Your assumption that normal tax income cannot finance a basic income scheme needs proof, and you've not provided any.
It's a basic fact of the universe that things have to come from somewhere.
The money to pay for welfare has to come either from taxes paid by workers, or from taxes paid by corporations and/or rich capitalist, or be printed out of thin air. If we don't print money and almost nobody works for a living (why work if you can get money for free?) then the only remaining source of money are the corporations and their owners.
Funny how some parts of the inelastic demand can still move up in value...
That's because housing has extremely inelastic supply in many areas, especially in areas where people want to live.
Most other things that poor people pay for tend to have elastic supply, so those prices are not going to increase by any noticeable amount.
What reform do you suggest?
Any reform that makes it easier and more profitable for regular people to buy and own small amounts of stock and other capital.
The government can help by simplifying tax codes where tax codes are too complicated for private individuals to deal with on their own. You could make the capital gains tax progressive at the lower end. You could have a tax code where a person could keep some small amount (say 100k) of capital in a designated account at their bank and not pay capital gains tax until they exceed that amount. The capital gains tax could be replaced by a simple percentage tax on the total capital exceeding $100k (you could also let each person choose which version of the tax code they prefer to use),
Imagine what the world would be like if people who had decent paying jobs in the 1900's had been buying stock for some tiny fraction of their income instead of spending it on stuff they didn't really need.
The problem with all these basic income schemes is that they will cause (or speed up) a gradual, but eventually overwhelming, shift in power from regular people to the super rich.
If you draw a simple diagram of how money must flow in the economy you will see that the only long-term sustainable way to fund a basic income scheme without creating massive inflation is by taxing the rich and/or the corporations that they own. This sounds great, until you realize that once the rich pay all the taxes and the rest of us pay virtually no taxes, the rich will effectively own the government. It will no longer seem corrupt when the government does their bidding. Kids will learn in school that the big corporation and their glorious and intelligent owners own the government fair and square and are the source of all of our wealth.
And of course, once the rich literally own the government the rest of us will pretty much have to settle for whatever they care to give us.
The current system is far from perfect, but it is a system where the government gets its money from the hands of regular people and therefore has to at the very least make believe that it is serving regular people.
I think developers probably do use the libraries most of the time, but time libraries are easy to misuse if you don't know what you're doing and you're not willing to research and learn before you write code.
Today's average programmer (a web developer) is typically expected to write orders of magnitude more code than people were in the 1960's. Of course the code quality is going to be lower.
But the stakes are a lot lower too. It's not like someone's crappy JavaScrip is going to down a satellite, or accidentally launch a nuclear strike against Russia. Your average code monkey today might perhaps bring down Google or Facebook for a couple of hours if they make a really nasty mistake, which would probably be a net good, all things considered.
You know the 1080p XPS 15 has a matte display right?
The early 2015 XPS 15 has a matte display, but the XPS 15 is not available in my market. I guess they sold out sooner than they thought.
The new XPS 15 will be available in mid-November according to Dell.
Yeah, I was choosing between the 15" MacBook Pro and the Dell XPS 15 and I was leaning towards the Dell with the matte screen, until I discovered that it was no longer available in my market.
The new XPS 15 will be available in mid-November, hopefully with a matte screen option. 1920x1080 is a bit on the low side for a 15" laptop, but it is acceptable, especially when you save $1k+ compared to a Mac.