Happy Birthday to me!
on
Happy Pi Day
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· Score: 1
It's my birthday too! 27. Anyone else out there with today as their birthday? There's gotta be more of you, I have 2 coworkers and a few friends with the same birthday.
I have been pulled more than once over and every time I have been treated with respect. You're making huge generalizations. Most police and troopers are good people. Heck, here in PA the State Police protested a raise in fines by not giving ANY tickets for a period of time a few years ago.
Are some cops assholes on a power trip? Sure. Are most just decent hard working people? Yep. I've been pulled over at least 10 or 12 times in my 11 years driving. I've found almost every single cop to be extremely friendly -- even the one who pulled me over for going vastly over the speed limit. It only makes sense to be nice, since their attitude and behavior can be used against them in court, and if they're writing a ticket they get the last laugh anyway. Note that I've never been pulled over for anything more serious than speeding, and I pull over immediately; perhaps an arresting DUI or domestic disturbance officer would not be so friendly.
However, 2 times I've been pulled over, the cops were tremendous assholes. It's probably because neither one had a good reason to pull me over. One kept loudly insinuating that I was lying and twisted my words, then threw my license at me when he left (screeching off to another call; probably pissed that he couldn't stay to write me a BS ticket), and the other guy never even told me why he pulled me over, just asked me if knew not to pass a cop (I was going maybe 61 in a 60 and he was still on an onramp that could not legally merge when I "passed" him).
So, it seems the police are like anyone else. I dread having to pull over and maybe get a ticket, but don't dread actually dealing with them.
Then again, since I moved to CA I haven't been pulled over in 5+ years, in stark contrast to the copland that is the Seattle area.
This could not interest me less...
on
The Children of Hurin
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I know I'm going to get modded down for this...
and I'm not complaining about this item being posted, because I don't expect all articles to interest me (and it clearly is news for nerds)...
But seriously, why are nerds so caught up in weird fantasy stories? Whenever religion comes up, Slashdotters decry the made up fairy tales of the bible (or whatever holy book), calling all followers ignorant morons. Yet they fall all over themselves to hear about some elf boy's magical adventures in Neverland Ranch.. er, wait, Middle Earth. My bad.
Double standard? Is it because readers of fantasy books understand that it's fantasy, where readers of holy books take them too literally?
Maybe we care more about having fun than about worrying about optimum input devices, highest possible mouse resolution, upgrading our video cards every 6 months, and so on. All to end up with a "gaming" PC that makes too much noise and crashes all the time (or is down for repairs).
I like to come home, flip on my 360, know it'll work (joke's on me I guess) and play games for an hour or two.. then put it away and go on with my life. It's nice to have a system that just does what it's supposed to do. The game makers know what hardware I'll be using and optimize the game for it. Perfect.
Go ahead, tar and feather me as a Mac user, but I work with computers all day; the last thing I want to do is come home and mess with one too. I love my job, but home time is relax time.
Seriously, can noone else see this game as a hilariously ironic commentary on China's futile attempts to lower pollution in order to have blue skies for the Olympics?
Of course this: http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8874472Economist article seems to not be loading right now, but they even have a blue sky monitoring scale which counts days without brutal amounts of smog, and are trying to figure out if they can somehow control the weather.
Right. In the area I'm in, I see that kind of behavior all the time. And you're right that it's a mentality and habit that follows the driver everywhere. I've had people tailgating me through 20mph school zones. For that matter, I've had people tailgate me in parking lots.
Why is this the only topic where slashdotters tend to go all "what about the children?"
Maybe you're being tailgated because you're driving 20mph? Seriously, 20mph school zones are the result of a bunch of overprotective PTA moms who are convinced that everyone is out to get their precious kids, and lowering speed limits to absurdly low levels will solve the problem. Everyone driving 30mph in your 25mph zone? Simple, lower the limit to 20mph and suddenly everyone will be safe! Or at least it'll be easy pickings for a police officer.
Anybody want to run the numbers on how many feet it takes to stop from an HONEST 25mph? If you're too dumb to stop from 25mph when a kid darts out in front of you, 20mph ain't going to save you. I'm not advocating blowing thru school zones, just that 20mph is absurdly slow. It's not reaction time + braking distance, because you don't react to a child magically appearing in front of your bumper, you begin braking as they dart off the sidewalk and you stop before they even get to the street. In a couple hundred thousand miles of driving, I've NEVER had to avoid a child. Overprotective parents in gated communities just want you to think you're a muderous maniac. When I am in a residential area, I slow down out of respect and caution. When I am somewhere that kids are playing, I slow down more to be careful. But I sure as hell don't spend my time comparing my speedometer to some arbitrary limit. It's called judgement.
If you want a simple rule, just drive 20mph in every school zone, obey every speed limit and sign, stop paying attention, and when you run over some kid because you were monitoring your speed based on a sign and not on conditions, you'll avoid jail time because you weren't breaking the law. Congrats. I'd rather change my thinking to avoid killing anyone to begin with. I can live with a speeding ticket, I can't live with killing someone because I didn't exercise caution. Hear about that guy in Seattle who killed a pedestrian and just got off with no jail time? He was a concerned parent with a kid in the back seat, talking on his cell phone, of course not paying attention to the crosswalk. He hit a bicyclist 2 years earlier. But I bet he's real good at watching speed limits and complains about dangerous speeders!
Another interesting aspect of the problem is how many people who aren't these kind of habitual tailgaters will become tailgaters when speeds drop, e.g., on exit ramps. They maintain a safe distance until the speed gets down to 50 or 40mph. Then it's as if they forget that much past 30mph is fatal crash territory, and they plant themselves one foot off the next car.
I'd have to see it to know if I wanted to defend it, but if otherwise reasonable people are tailgating you when you get off the freeway, maybe they don't want to drive 30mph on a ramp for a mile just because you feel like driving really slow on a one-lane straight ramp. I think the fact that they don't normally tailgate indicates that maybe you are wrong and they are right. On my way to work, the exit-only lane (still part of the freeway) is well over a mile long, and everyone just starts driving 50mph for no reason even though we are still on the freeway. Talk about maddening. And 30mph is not fatal crash territory unless you hit a concrete wall with no airbags. If someone rearends you at that speed, there will be at most a minor bump, and if you're a crappy driver you might lose control and skid to a stop. Sorry, but roads where everyone is driving the same direction and speed are not where you should focus your concerns. You should worry about a head-on or being t-boned.
I think the root cause for all this is a lack of re
If you'll re-read the post you're responding to, you'll see he didn't care about the "casual speeder." He was criticising the maniacs who drive as much as 50% over the speed limit. Not to be insensitive, but if you were driving like that, you're doing exactly what he was criticising and risking others' lives in the process. If you were driving responsibly (although not legally) in your haste to get to the hospital, chill out. He doesn't care. Nor do I or most other people.
Even ambulances with sirens and lights operating don't drive that fast, because the risk of seriously hurting or killing someone else is too great compared to the benefit gained from time saved. No, ambulances with lights and sirens don't drive that fast because they recognize that they're driving very slow heavy diesel trucks not meant to accelerate, brake, OR handle, and that most of their time savings therefore come from safely negotiating intersections without stopping and waiting in traffic. If they have to spend a long time on the highway there is a problem anyway, as their base is too far from the people they need to serve.
Ambulance drivers are smart enough to realize it's unsafe to drive an AMBULANCE as fast as a car, or even most of the SUVs that soccer moms are ignorantly piloting.
And, sorry to pull out the autobahn again, but seriously, the speed itself isn't that unsafe. I'm not saying I should be able to drive 120mph thru traffic in the US because I realize myself and my roadgoing counterparts are not as well trained, and people simply aren't expecting to see that here.
But it's simply unintelligent to say that you can't drive quickly with reasonable safety.
I'm sorry, but I think the OP can figure out whether a.001% increase in his.001% chance of being in an accident on this particular trip is worth it in order to see his father before he dies.
Criticize people for causing accidents. Give them fines, even jail time if they were truly being reckless. But don't tell me my speed alone makes me 20x as likely to be in an accident.
Tailgating is a problem too. It really pisses me off, that even in non-rushhour traffic, some idiot is always less than a car-length off my back end. Leaving a buffer zone allows you to avoid using your breaks when traffic slows.
I wonder how much aggressive driving (someone speeding up to 90, and then cutting in front of you for seemingly no reason), contributes to breaking shock waves. I've seen it happen often enough where someone will make an unnecessary maneuver to get 30 feet ahead of traffic. Excessive following distance is a major problem, too. They block the flow of traffic, and invite people to cut in front of them. Every day I see a car in the left-hand lane with at least a 1/8th mile following distance. IN RUSH HOUR TRAFFIC!
It seems that people just get in the mindset that they're stuck in traffic so they might as well tune out. The result is that at the fringes of rush hour (before it gets bad, and also once the worst is past), you see the very worst driving. Someone puttering along at 50mph in the left lane because they are thinking that "traffic is bad," and anticipating the next slowdown by leaving a Grand Canyon-sized following distance in front of them... but the slowdown never materializes. In fact, they are the slowdown, because they're holding up a freeway that could otherwise flow freely.
Of course, it would be asking too much to expect people to leave their brain engaged for their whole commute so that they can manage a neither-too-small-nor-too-large following distance.
I am an Apple user and thus somewhat bias. I do however question the release of the iPhone without g3 support. I also believe that it needs a removable battery so that I could keep a spare.
On another note no one can say that the iPhone did not change the face of the cell phone market. I can't say if the new Air will do the same thing for the notebook market or not. I agree with the moderators -- "interesting." I'm an Apple user, too, and couldn't disagree more.
The iPhone is plenty fast with EDGE. The only problem I really have is occasionally I try to load something and it just hangs, does nothing at all. Not slow transfer, just hangs. When EDGE data transfer works, it's fast enough. Not as fast as WiFi, but even on WiFi I notice some slowness (rendering probably). I had an EVDO phone and while a file download would go fast, I didn't find web surfing to be much faster than on the iPhone. Again, probably limited by rendering speed.
So I disagree about the non-3G thing. I also disagree about the removable battery thing; sure, it would be nice, but I've NEVER carried an extra battery for any phone I've ever had, so it's not really a significant drawback to me. And I think the iPhone really has changed the face of the cell phone market, which, moving on to your last point, the Air will never do to the laptop market. The Air is just another thin laptop with nothing particularly innovative about it. It's not the kind of product I'm interested anyway, but it doesn't really bring much new to the table. The iPhone interface alone is a complete game-changer as far as I'm concerned. What's so unique about the Air?
Thank you for bringing some sanity into this argument. Before you showed up it was dominated by idiotic hippies ranting about our mindless consumer-driven existence, the destruction of the environment, Microsoft, and just about everything else that has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
99.999% uptime is orders of magnitude more expensive than 99.99%, which in turn is orders of magnitude more expensive than 99.9% uptime, and so on.
The added cost is simply not worth it, in any sense of the word, to the general public.
I, for one, would prefer to deal with a day's worth of power loss in a major storm, than paying 10x as much for my electricity in order to make it bulletproof.
The savings would be better spent elsewhere.
Note that this is not an argument against proper planning and preventative maintenance to REDUCE downtime as much as possible, just an argument against designing everything in the world to survive a nuclear bomb when that level of reliability is simply not worth the cost.
Sorry if not all of us live up to your high standards of being nerds just because we can't check all of the dork boxes. Not sure it's grounds for calling us unintelligent, though.
... maybe this is news for us nerds who can't stand Sci-Fi or Star Trek or RPGs but don't complain every time an article about one of the above is posted?
That's pretty cool if you live in a climate when your main problem is dirt / rain. But what about ice/sleet/freezing rain, which is the bane of my existence now that I'm living in the Midwest. Move.
Did you just ask why a MacBook Pro costs more than a low-end Dell Vostro?
Does that question even need an answer?
Wow.
And more on-topic, I, for one, am all for buying quality, pricey gear, but I hate spending money on services. If a coach ticket costs $300 and a first class ticket costs $2300, all I can think is "man, I can get some cool gear for the $2000 I save by having slightly less room for my knees to breathe for a few hours." It's even better if you just take a sleeping pill and check out.
The pigs are a lot more polite on this side of the Atlantic. Would those be the ones that killed the Brazilian electrician? Or the ones that pulled the gun on the guy with the MP3 player? There's a reason they used to not let your cops carry guns...
Seriously? You can debate hardware design -- I like both the MBA and the Thinkpads, and the Thinkpad might very well age better. But there's no way on earth Vista or XP is less cluttered or faster.
I'm a libertarian but didn't pay a whole lot of attention to Ron Paul's campaign. I would have voted for him in the primary but instead I voted Democrat to try to help Barack win support in CA.
Yet somehow I managed to get precisely 0 spams from Ron Paul's campaign. I also got zero facebook invites from his campaign.
Are you the guy with 10,000 pieces of spyware on his computer, too?
If you liked Bill, you'll probably like Hilary. But there's a chance Obama could be a hell of a lot better. Except for the fact that Hillary has come out against some of Bill's better policies, like, you know, free trade.
I'm afraid a Hillary presidency would be like a Bill presidency but without the intelligence or charm.
I'm voting for Obama, but I must say, he is a bit of a wildcard. About 2% of me wonders if he could turn out to be a terrible president a la Bush, given his fuzziness on the specifics of the issues. The other 98% of me just hopes for a change.
I almost registered as a republican for the first time ever so that I could throw my CA vote Ron Paul's way.
As the Hillary/Obama race tightened up I instead registered as Dem so I could throw Obama my vote; for once my vote might actually make a difference.
But then, I like McCain above all the other likely Republican nominees so I'm not losing much. He'd probably lose to Obama but beat Hillary, so in a way I feel like I can't lose.
Although, looking at it more rationally, it's more like the country can't truly win. I think Obama or McCain would make a fine "make a difference" candidate but not truly bring about the change we need from someone like Paul.
I bet you're the kind of person that gets spyware. The simple matter is that you don't have problems unless you're stupid. Yes, I'm not going to try to be more polite- that's the simple fact. Unless you are stupid, you will have no problems whatsoever. Don't install smiley toolbars, you will not get spyware. I've never known a single Windows user who actually knew what he was doing to have any problems with his machine. Apple does do a very good job at designing computers that are hard for idiots to break (ironic since Windows brought PCs to the masses) but if you don't go swinging a sledgehammer around the OS, you. will. not. have. problems. I think the "stupid" label more accurately applies to a guy who can't appreciate that 98% of the PC-using world has the same gripes and issues with Windows. I've never gotten spyware on a Windows machine either, but that doesn't mean it doesn't ruin the computing experience for everyone; worrying about what kinds of sites you can or can't go to, loading antivirus software and keeping it updated, not using the Outlook preview pane, and so on.
"Stupid" describes a guy who doesn't understand why Apple doesn't just sell OS X for standard x86 PCs.
"Stupid" is a man who attributes all of Apple's sales to trendy hipsters who don't understand the True Power (TM) of Microsoft products.
"Stupid" is someone who thinks he is better than the entire Apple-buying populace but never bothers to try to explain the countless engineers and tech heads who use Apple products because they judge them to be better products.
Also, you might want to reconsider saying that Windows brought computing to the masses. It wouldn't be hard at all to argue that the Macintosh GUI (well before Windows and possibly your date of birth) made computing accessible to the masses. Though if you're just counting by install base, Windows is your champion.
Slashdot Mirror
It's my birthday too! 27. Anyone else out there with today as their birthday? There's gotta be more of you, I have 2 coworkers and a few friends with the same birthday.
Are some cops assholes on a power trip? Sure. Are most just decent hard working people? Yep. I've been pulled over at least 10 or 12 times in my 11 years driving. I've found almost every single cop to be extremely friendly -- even the one who pulled me over for going vastly over the speed limit. It only makes sense to be nice, since their attitude and behavior can be used against them in court, and if they're writing a ticket they get the last laugh anyway. Note that I've never been pulled over for anything more serious than speeding, and I pull over immediately; perhaps an arresting DUI or domestic disturbance officer would not be so friendly.
However, 2 times I've been pulled over, the cops were tremendous assholes. It's probably because neither one had a good reason to pull me over. One kept loudly insinuating that I was lying and twisted my words, then threw my license at me when he left (screeching off to another call; probably pissed that he couldn't stay to write me a BS ticket), and the other guy never even told me why he pulled me over, just asked me if knew not to pass a cop (I was going maybe 61 in a 60 and he was still on an onramp that could not legally merge when I "passed" him).
So, it seems the police are like anyone else. I dread having to pull over and maybe get a ticket, but don't dread actually dealing with them.
Then again, since I moved to CA I haven't been pulled over in 5+ years, in stark contrast to the copland that is the Seattle area.
I know I'm going to get modded down for this...
and I'm not complaining about this item being posted, because I don't expect all articles to interest me (and it clearly is news for nerds)...
But seriously, why are nerds so caught up in weird fantasy stories? Whenever religion comes up, Slashdotters decry the made up fairy tales of the bible (or whatever holy book), calling all followers ignorant morons. Yet they fall all over themselves to hear about some elf boy's magical adventures in Neverland Ranch.. er, wait, Middle Earth. My bad.
Double standard? Is it because readers of fantasy books understand that it's fantasy, where readers of holy books take them too literally?
Maybe we care more about having fun than about worrying about optimum input devices, highest possible mouse resolution, upgrading our video cards every 6 months, and so on. All to end up with a "gaming" PC that makes too much noise and crashes all the time (or is down for repairs).
I like to come home, flip on my 360, know it'll work (joke's on me I guess) and play games for an hour or two.. then put it away and go on with my life. It's nice to have a system that just does what it's supposed to do. The game makers know what hardware I'll be using and optimize the game for it. Perfect.
Go ahead, tar and feather me as a Mac user, but I work with computers all day; the last thing I want to do is come home and mess with one too. I love my job, but home time is relax time.
Okay, maybe not weather. I was able to get a mirror to come up several seconds later.
:)
http://kerrycollison.net/index.php?/archives/5379-Talking-dirty-in-China-Beijing-wants-to-clear-the-air-for-the-Olympics.html
I guess I was thinking about cloud seeding when I originally read that article
Seriously, can noone else see this game as a hilariously ironic commentary on China's futile attempts to lower pollution in order to have blue skies for the Olympics?
Of course this: http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8874472Economist article seems to not be loading right now, but they even have a blue sky monitoring scale which counts days without brutal amounts of smog, and are trying to figure out if they can somehow control the weather.
Right. In the area I'm in, I see that kind of behavior all the time. And you're right that it's a mentality and habit that follows the driver everywhere. I've had people tailgating me through 20mph school zones. For that matter, I've had people tailgate me in parking lots.
Why is this the only topic where slashdotters tend to go all "what about the children?"
Maybe you're being tailgated because you're driving 20mph? Seriously, 20mph school zones are the result of a bunch of overprotective PTA moms who are convinced that everyone is out to get their precious kids, and lowering speed limits to absurdly low levels will solve the problem. Everyone driving 30mph in your 25mph zone? Simple, lower the limit to 20mph and suddenly everyone will be safe! Or at least it'll be easy pickings for a police officer.
Anybody want to run the numbers on how many feet it takes to stop from an HONEST 25mph? If you're too dumb to stop from 25mph when a kid darts out in front of you, 20mph ain't going to save you. I'm not advocating blowing thru school zones, just that 20mph is absurdly slow. It's not reaction time + braking distance, because you don't react to a child magically appearing in front of your bumper, you begin braking as they dart off the sidewalk and you stop before they even get to the street. In a couple hundred thousand miles of driving, I've NEVER had to avoid a child. Overprotective parents in gated communities just want you to think you're a muderous maniac. When I am in a residential area, I slow down out of respect and caution. When I am somewhere that kids are playing, I slow down more to be careful. But I sure as hell don't spend my time comparing my speedometer to some arbitrary limit. It's called judgement.
If you want a simple rule, just drive 20mph in every school zone, obey every speed limit and sign, stop paying attention, and when you run over some kid because you were monitoring your speed based on a sign and not on conditions, you'll avoid jail time because you weren't breaking the law. Congrats. I'd rather change my thinking to avoid killing anyone to begin with. I can live with a speeding ticket, I can't live with killing someone because I didn't exercise caution. Hear about that guy in Seattle who killed a pedestrian and just got off with no jail time? He was a concerned parent with a kid in the back seat, talking on his cell phone, of course not paying attention to the crosswalk. He hit a bicyclist 2 years earlier. But I bet he's real good at watching speed limits and complains about dangerous speeders!
Another interesting aspect of the problem is how many people who aren't these kind of habitual tailgaters will become tailgaters when speeds drop, e.g., on exit ramps. They maintain a safe distance until the speed gets down to 50 or 40mph. Then it's as if they forget that much past 30mph is fatal crash territory, and they plant themselves one foot off the next car.
I'd have to see it to know if I wanted to defend it, but if otherwise reasonable people are tailgating you when you get off the freeway, maybe they don't want to drive 30mph on a ramp for a mile just because you feel like driving really slow on a one-lane straight ramp. I think the fact that they don't normally tailgate indicates that maybe you are wrong and they are right. On my way to work, the exit-only lane (still part of the freeway) is well over a mile long, and everyone just starts driving 50mph for no reason even though we are still on the freeway. Talk about maddening. And 30mph is not fatal crash territory unless you hit a concrete wall with no airbags. If someone rearends you at that speed, there will be at most a minor bump, and if you're a crappy driver you might lose control and skid to a stop. Sorry, but roads where everyone is driving the same direction and speed are not where you should focus your concerns. You should worry about a head-on or being t-boned.
I think the root cause for all this is a lack of re
Even ambulances with sirens and lights operating don't drive that fast, because the risk of seriously hurting or killing someone else is too great compared to the benefit gained from time saved. No, ambulances with lights and sirens don't drive that fast because they recognize that they're driving very slow heavy diesel trucks not meant to accelerate, brake, OR handle, and that most of their time savings therefore come from safely negotiating intersections without stopping and waiting in traffic. If they have to spend a long time on the highway there is a problem anyway, as their base is too far from the people they need to serve.
Ambulance drivers are smart enough to realize it's unsafe to drive an AMBULANCE as fast as a car, or even most of the SUVs that soccer moms are ignorantly piloting.
And, sorry to pull out the autobahn again, but seriously, the speed itself isn't that unsafe. I'm not saying I should be able to drive 120mph thru traffic in the US because I realize myself and my roadgoing counterparts are not as well trained, and people simply aren't expecting to see that here.
But it's simply unintelligent to say that you can't drive quickly with reasonable safety.
I'm sorry, but I think the OP can figure out whether a
Criticize people for causing accidents. Give them fines, even jail time if they were truly being reckless. But don't tell me my speed alone makes me 20x as likely to be in an accident.
I wonder how much aggressive driving (someone speeding up to 90, and then cutting in front of you for seemingly no reason), contributes to breaking shock waves. I've seen it happen often enough where someone will make an unnecessary maneuver to get 30 feet ahead of traffic. Excessive following distance is a major problem, too. They block the flow of traffic, and invite people to cut in front of them. Every day I see a car in the left-hand lane with at least a 1/8th mile following distance. IN RUSH HOUR TRAFFIC!
It seems that people just get in the mindset that they're stuck in traffic so they might as well tune out. The result is that at the fringes of rush hour (before it gets bad, and also once the worst is past), you see the very worst driving. Someone puttering along at 50mph in the left lane because they are thinking that "traffic is bad," and anticipating the next slowdown by leaving a Grand Canyon-sized following distance in front of them... but the slowdown never materializes. In fact, they are the slowdown, because they're holding up a freeway that could otherwise flow freely.
Of course, it would be asking too much to expect people to leave their brain engaged for their whole commute so that they can manage a neither-too-small-nor-too-large following distance.
On another note no one can say that the iPhone did not change the face of the cell phone market. I can't say if the new Air will do the same thing for the notebook market or not. I agree with the moderators -- "interesting." I'm an Apple user, too, and couldn't disagree more.
The iPhone is plenty fast with EDGE. The only problem I really have is occasionally I try to load something and it just hangs, does nothing at all. Not slow transfer, just hangs. When EDGE data transfer works, it's fast enough. Not as fast as WiFi, but even on WiFi I notice some slowness (rendering probably). I had an EVDO phone and while a file download would go fast, I didn't find web surfing to be much faster than on the iPhone. Again, probably limited by rendering speed.
So I disagree about the non-3G thing. I also disagree about the removable battery thing; sure, it would be nice, but I've NEVER carried an extra battery for any phone I've ever had, so it's not really a significant drawback to me. And I think the iPhone really has changed the face of the cell phone market, which, moving on to your last point, the Air will never do to the laptop market. The Air is just another thin laptop with nothing particularly innovative about it. It's not the kind of product I'm interested anyway, but it doesn't really bring much new to the table. The iPhone interface alone is a complete game-changer as far as I'm concerned. What's so unique about the Air?
Thank you for bringing some sanity into this argument. Before you showed up it was dominated by idiotic hippies ranting about our mindless consumer-driven existence, the destruction of the environment, Microsoft, and just about everything else that has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
99.999% uptime is orders of magnitude more expensive than 99.99%, which in turn is orders of magnitude more expensive than 99.9% uptime, and so on.
The added cost is simply not worth it, in any sense of the word, to the general public.
I, for one, would prefer to deal with a day's worth of power loss in a major storm, than paying 10x as much for my electricity in order to make it bulletproof.
The savings would be better spent elsewhere.
Note that this is not an argument against proper planning and preventative maintenance to REDUCE downtime as much as possible, just an argument against designing everything in the world to survive a nuclear bomb when that level of reliability is simply not worth the cost.
Sorry if not all of us live up to your high standards of being nerds just because we can't check all of the dork boxes.
Not sure it's grounds for calling us unintelligent, though.
... maybe this is news for us nerds who can't stand Sci-Fi or Star Trek or RPGs but don't complain every time an article about one of the above is posted?
Wow, Vista runs well on a 3ghz box with 1 gig of RAM? Call the media.
Did you just ask why a MacBook Pro costs more than a low-end Dell Vostro?
Does that question even need an answer?
Wow.
And more on-topic, I, for one, am all for buying quality, pricey gear, but I hate spending money on services. If a coach ticket costs $300 and a first class ticket costs $2300, all I can think is "man, I can get some cool gear for the $2000 I save by having slightly less room for my knees to breathe for a few hours." It's even better if you just take a sleeping pill and check out.
Yes, because if it was built in California, them shady Chinese wouldn't be able to get their grubby little paws on it.
Great logic.
Seriously? You can debate hardware design -- I like both the MBA and the Thinkpads, and the Thinkpad might very well age better. But there's no way on earth Vista or XP is less cluttered or faster.
I'm a libertarian but didn't pay a whole lot of attention to Ron Paul's campaign. I would have voted for him in the primary but instead I voted Democrat to try to help Barack win support in CA.
Yet somehow I managed to get precisely 0 spams from Ron Paul's campaign. I also got zero facebook invites from his campaign.
Are you the guy with 10,000 pieces of spyware on his computer, too?
Yes, clearly these are the same people complaining about not being able to afford music. Bravo.
I'm afraid a Hillary presidency would be like a Bill presidency but without the intelligence or charm.
I'm voting for Obama, but I must say, he is a bit of a wildcard. About 2% of me wonders if he could turn out to be a terrible president a la Bush, given his fuzziness on the specifics of the issues. The other 98% of me just hopes for a change.
I almost registered as a republican for the first time ever so that I could throw my CA vote Ron Paul's way.
As the Hillary/Obama race tightened up I instead registered as Dem so I could throw Obama my vote; for once my vote might actually make a difference.
But then, I like McCain above all the other likely Republican nominees so I'm not losing much. He'd probably lose to Obama but beat Hillary, so in a way I feel like I can't lose.
Although, looking at it more rationally, it's more like the country can't truly win. I think Obama or McCain would make a fine "make a difference" candidate but not truly bring about the change we need from someone like Paul.
This is what you get when a bunch of hippies convince small-minded people that corporations have more power and are more evil than the government.
It is your beloved cure-all government that is the source of the problem. Microsoft cannot imprison you. The government can.
Corporations only have the power to buy government that you socialist sheeple demand.
See, we can both play this clever game of calling people 'sheeple'. It's almost as clever as calling Microsoft M$.
"Stupid" describes a guy who doesn't understand why Apple doesn't just sell OS X for standard x86 PCs.
"Stupid" is a man who attributes all of Apple's sales to trendy hipsters who don't understand the True Power (TM) of Microsoft products.
"Stupid" is someone who thinks he is better than the entire Apple-buying populace but never bothers to try to explain the countless engineers and tech heads who use Apple products because they judge them to be better products.
Also, you might want to reconsider saying that Windows brought computing to the masses. It wouldn't be hard at all to argue that the Macintosh GUI (well before Windows and possibly your date of birth) made computing accessible to the masses. Though if you're just counting by install base, Windows is your champion.