There is no subway around here (Boulder, CO). There is a decent bus system, which I use when it makes sense.
I have friends in Golden, CO. It's 45 minutes by car and about an hour and a half by bus (and requires two transfers). The direct (GS) bus doesn't run after 6PM and doesn't run on weekends, which means that you have to take a very indirect route that can take 3+ hours depending on the schedules.
I have other friends in Fort Collins, CO. It's 60 minutes by car, and there is no scheduled bus service. The best you can do is take the bus to the airport (1 1/2 hours), then take the bus back to Fort Collins (another 1 1/2 hours). All in all, you're looking at 3+ hours and $35 each way.
I know this because for 3 years in college in Boulder, I didn't have a car. I bummed rides from friends, walked, and rode the bus. It is *possible* to get almost anywhere in this area without a car, but most of the time it's not practical.
This is just wrong. Even the cheapest (non-netbook) Acer from two years ago has no problem running Windows 7. Even most netbooks made in the last couple of years run Windows 7 just fine.
Even my friend's 4-year-old ThinkPad T60 runs Windows 7 fine.
Almost every consumer-level PC sold 2 years ago had Windows Vista, and 7 has lower hardware demands than Vista.
Windows 7 runs fine on my brother's netbook, which has 1GB of memory and a 1.66GHz Atom. Find me a PC (not a netbook) made in the last 4 years that's slower than that.
As a CS major, I absolutely use LyX if I'm writing a paper for publication. The result looks like a formal paper, so it is treated like a formal paper. It's also much easier to typeset formulas in LyX.
That said, Word is my go-to weapon for everything else.
who ever said that? Hardware failures are just far more rare for Apple products than they are for the flimsy machines that everybody in the windows market makes.
That's just wrong.
Macs have a failure rate, according to Consumer Reports, of 19% per year. That's higher than Compaq, Sony, and Toshiba. It's also exactly the same as Acer.
The worst PC failure rate? 21% per year for Lenovo and Dell. That's 2% higher than Apple.
If you want to believe that Macs are more reliable, I can't stop you. But the data doesn't support your belief. The data says that Acer's cheap, "flimsy" PCs are just as reliable as Macs.
The idea that a MacBook is going to last 6 years is crap. According to Consumer Reports, the failure rate is about 19% per year, so the probability of your laptop making it to 6 years without a hardware failure is about 28%, 7 years is about 23%.
Notably, the failure rate of Acer PCs, which are some of the cheapest PCs around, is exactly the same as Macs - at 19%.
Also notably, a 6-year-old Mac today would be PowerPC based, which means it's increasingly incompatible with newer software and cant even run the most recent version of Mac OS X.
The idea that Macs "aren't made of the same stuff" is also crap. The MacBook, which is the most popular Mac, is made of plastic - just like every $350 PC. Indeed, Macs are made by many of the same ODMs that make PCs, like Quanta.
You can believe whatever you want to believe about the quality of Macs. But the statistics don't show that Macs fail any less than significantly cheaper PCs.
This idea that there are a bunch of 7+ year old Macs out there today is insane. Many of my professors have Macs, as do many of my classmates. ZERO of them have PowerPC Macs, which every Mac over about 5 1/2 years old would be.
It's easy to argue that Macs last 2.5 times as long when you just make up facts.
If you have a 5-year-old Mac at this point, it's PowerPC so you can't even run many newer applications (nor can you run the latest Mac OS). If it was a laptop, the battery is now pretty much useless (and it's difficult to find replacements) too.
My friend's T60, which he purchased in early 2006, still runs Windows 7 (and Fedora) great.
Lots of people on my campus have Macs, but the majority of them are unibody, which means that they are at most 3 years old. I never see pre-Magsafe Macs, which means that they are at most a little over four years old.
Claiming that "security, simplicity, and quality" all come free is at best misleading.
In 15 years of running Windows, I have never (to my knowledge) been hacked or infected with malware. I use the built-in Windows firewall, install updates as soon as they are available, and (now) I run Microsoft Security Essentials, which is free and easy to install. Time and time again we have seen that being "UNIX-based" doesn't really mean squat from a security perspective in a world where malware and hackers increasingly target applications like browsers and PDF viewers. Safari has not done particularly well in that regard, especially when you compare it with Chrome (which I use) or even IE8, both of which sandbox essentially the entire browser. Apple has repeatedly demonstrated that they did not take security seriously (e.g. DEP which was only added in 10.6, and an ASLR implementation that is still extremely limited).
Simplicity is in the eye of the beholder. I (and many people I know) find Windows to be simpler. Want to use a 5-button (back/forward) mouse on Mac OS? You need special software. On Windows, you just plug it in. In the case of my G5 mouse, Logitech doesn't even make Mac software for it, so you need to use a third-party program. Bind a mouse button to PTT in Ventrilo? Easy in Windows, damn near impossible in Mac OS X. Keep your computer from going to sleep when you shut the lid? Easy in Windows, hard in Mac OS X. Need to connect a Mac to a projector? Make sure you brought your dongle.
Obviously not everyone uses Ventrilo, not everyone has a 5-button mouse, and not everyone needs their laptop to stay on when they close the lid. But these are just the problems that I had when I briefly owned a Mac. But I do dispute the idea that Macs are somehow simpler when I have seen no data to that effect.
As for quality, well, it's been a mixed bag for Mac users. I know a lot of people who have trashed their MagSafe adapters or had their battery recalled and a lot of people who had overheating first-gen MacBooks. I seriously doubt that a plastic MacBook will hold up nearly as well as my (incidentally, cheaper) magnesium-frame ThinkPad T400 if it were dropped. I know that the Mac would do more poorly if Diet Coke were spilled on the keyboard (the T400 has keyboard drains).
Consumer Reports says that Macs are on the low-end for failures, at 19% per year. But Sony (17%), Toshiba (16%), and Compaq (18%) all have fewer repairs yet. Acer is tied with Apple at 19%, HP and Gateway are a point behind at 20%, and Dell/Lenovo are a bit further behind at 21%.
With your supposed "5-year" lifecylce, the chance of a failure in a Mac is 65%. For the worst PCs (Lenovo/Dell), it's 69%. That's not dramatically different.
I think I'm going to go with Consumer Reports rather than some random guy on Slashdot who (supposedly) has a bunch of friends with PowerPC Macs.
To be blunt, you have trouble with automated cars because you are a bad driver.
Note that when I say "bad", I'm referring to your judgement, not your skill.
The fact that you are regularly bumping up against the limits of your vehicle means that you're driving too fast, following too closely, and merging with too little margin.
Eventually, you will screw up, and when you do you'll cause a lot of damage because you have left very little margin for safety.
You are driving on public roads with other drivers, many of whom are unpredictable and far less skilled than you. This does not give you a license to drive aggressively - indeed, it mandates that you drive defensively to mininize the risks.
Go show off your skills at autocross or the track. Do everything you can to avoid using those skills on the highway.
Anyone who compares the cost of buying a new hybrid to keeping an older car is a moron.
Guess what? It's almost ALWAYS cheaper to keep an old car that's serviceable. Gas is too cheap and cars are too expensive. That applies to hybrids and non-hybrids alike.
People still buy new cars. There are a lot of reasons for that.
Moreover, the same idiots never consider the fact that there are used hybrids. My 2007 Prius with 45000 miles on it cost $13500, which was only about $2000 more than a 2007 Corolla.
Your figure of "10-12k cheaper than the Hybrid" for the Civic is totally pulled out of your ass too. The cheapest 4-door Civic in 2006 was $14760 (GX), the Hybrid was $22150 for a difference of $7390. Of course, the GX is missing a lot of things that the Hybrid has standard - like an automatic transmission, air conditioning, and power windows. If you compare the more similarly equipped EX, which was $18460, the difference was only $3690.
When you make up your numbers, compare cars that aren't comparable, ignore the used hybrid market, or compare a used vehicle to a new hybrid, it's very easy to make hybrids look much more expensive than they are. It's also misleading and dishonest.
Or when the majority of your driving is out of the cities.
Actually, decent hybrids are quite good on the highway. My Prius, in the real world, gets 50MPG on the highway (I get about 45MPG around town).
The advantage is less, true. Let's look at consumption, which is a better figure than MPG for comparisons because it's not an inverse scale.
On the highway, my Prius requires 4.70 liters of gas to go 100km. A similarly-sized Toyota Corolla requires 6.92 liters to go the same 100km. In town, my Prius requires 5.23 liters of gas to go 100km. A similarly-sized Toyota Corolla requires 9.04 liters to go the same 100km.
In either case, the Prius is better. The thing is, the difference is greater in the city. That's not because the Prius is better in the city (indeed, it's worse - despite what the EPA ratings say). But while the Prius is a little worse in the city, a conventional vehicle is way worse. That's the difference.
However, there's a twist: you drive a lot more if you drive on the highway frequently. If you're a city dweller (and you don't drive for a living), it's hard to rack up more than about 8000 miles per year. Cities just aren't big enough - while trips can take a long time, most of that time is spent at low speeds or stopped. Highway traffic - particularly regular highway traffic like a commute - racks up a lot of miles.
Consider two drivers: one is a city-dweller and drives 10000km per year. One commutes daily for 80km in each direction (there are several people in my office who do), for a total of about 40000km per year.
The city dweller saves more per mile than the commuter by buying a Prius (3.81 liters per 100km vs. 2.22 liters per 100km). But the commuter saves more per year, by far (888 liters vs 381 liters).
That makes the Prius (or another efficient hybrid) the obvious choice for a longer-distance commuter. Compared with even a moderate-sized car like the Corolla (which gets 34MPG highway), a commuter with a 50 mile commute can save over $600 per year. Over 5 years, that's $3000 - which is more than the difference between a Prius and a comparably-equipped Corolla.
It is true that Google switched from Navteq to Tele Atlas a few years back. However, we no longer use Tele Atlas data in the US. Google now uses Google-produced data throughout the US. Tele Atlas and other companies are used as data sources outside the US.
If you notice a problem, please report it using the link on every Google Maps page. We do take those reports seriously and we can fix the data if it is wrong.
Yyyyyeah. There do exist those of us who would rather not fly Redneck A
You know what makes Southwest better than the other airlines?
They're not like you.
They aren't pompous assholes who are too good to take the occasional traveler. They don't take themselves, their airline, or their industry too seriously. When they screw up, they are genuinely sorry.
Southwest understands that they are in the business of hauling people from A to B as efficiently as possible. They understand that people who fly Southwest aren't flying because they like flying, they are flying because it's the best way to get where they want to go.
Need to change your plans? They don't charge fees for that. No other airline does that.
Want to bring a bag or two? They don't charge you $30 to do it.
They aren't pricks, they get the job done, and they don't charge you BS fees. That's more than you can say for just about any other airline.
I can't tell what you're referring to but if you are talking about the faulty Wiimote wrist-straps that they replaced for everybody shortly after launch, those weren't optional accessories that you had to pay extra for.
No, he was talking about the Wii Remote Jacket. It wasn't originally included with the Wii or with the Wii Remote (Nintendo actually never calls it the "Wiimote").
The Wii Remote problem (injury) was not Nintendo's fault (any person can play with the Wii Remote without the jacket if they keep enough room around them). It wasn't a defective product. But Nintendo provided jackets for everyone, for free, then added them to the default package.
What cracks me up is that the Voodoo5 6000, which was never officially released and needed so much power that it required an external power brick, draws only about 70W. That's less than a mid-range card today.
The amount of power required by modern high-end GPUs has reached an absurd point.
World of Warcraft, for example, is well playable at 30fps. First person shooters are the worse because viewport motion depends on the framerate, which makes it difficult to aim at lower framerates.
You know what, I'll trust Israelis on this. They have a real terrorist threat of a much more significant magnitude, and they aren't renowned for money waste. And they do have air marshals.
Yes, and their entire air transit system handles about 1/4 as many people per year and about 1/5th as many aircraft movements per year as Denver. If the entire Israeli airport system were a single US airport, it wouldn't even rank in the top 20.
I think our current policies are a foolish endeavor myself, but saying that Israel has the answer just doesn't make sense when you look at the difference in scale.
This is the problem. We hide the truth to maintain a false reality. We maintain the false reality to keep young naive kids believing, hoping, having faith in government and it's power. Government does not exist to for any reason other than to gain power just as corporations only exist to profit. Accept it.
No, the problem is that people like you attempt to summarize a complex and flawed system as existing "for any reason other than to gain power", then implying that anyone who disagrees with you is out of touch.
The US Government certainly was not "designed for the sole purpose of winning wars", nor are we particularly effective at it.
Pretending that the US Government is some monolithic entity with no purpose other than to serve itself is every bit as naive as believing that it's a completely benevolent and just system devoid of corruption and waste.
While the 6000 didn't make it to market, there are examples of them in the wild. I remember a few years back, it was reported that somebody had gotten hold of one and sold it on eBay, and the buyer posted benchmarks so that people could see what might have been.
The amusing thing is that the Voodoo5 6000 draws around 4A (at 12V) at max load, which is 48W. Add in the PCI power and you're maybe up to 75W.
75W is what a lower-mid-range GPU draws today. The hottest GPU today (NVIDIA GTX 480) is 250W, over 3 times hotter than the Voodoo5 6000.
A Canadian writer once wrote something to the effect that Canadians defer to authority, while Americans bow to power. I suspect that's a distinction too subtle for most Americans to understand. Or appreciate.
Fortunately, even us stupid Americans can pick up on your not-so-subtle dig. Asshole.
I also live in a 900 sq. ft. condo (which I share with a roommate), have a single TV (although it's huge for the space at 40"), and a single car. I recently rigged three box fans in the window so that I wouldn't have to run the window A/C, which hasn't been on all year.
You know what? It's not so bad. I don't live materially differently from my parents, who live in a 4000 sq. ft house with a big yard and central A/C and have two vehicles (one an SUV).
And, FYI, I don't do this because I don't have the money. I do this because it's all I need and because it lets me save money to do things that I otherwise wouldn't be able to do. $500 less spent on electricity per year is $500 more I can spend on fun crap. Or save. Or give away.
I know several people who are in the exact opposite camp. I personally believe that all of KDE's options make it a usability nightmare, but many users (my friends appreciated) do like features like window grouping, focus follows mouse, complete shortcut customizations, and many of the other things you can do with a stock KDE install. Doing many of these things on Mac OS X typically requires third-party software, if it's possible at all.
The days of "fucking with video card drivers" or "rc scripts" are largely over. If you're running ATI or Intel graphics, you get open-source drivers that work out of the box in basically any modern distro (since they're in the kernel). NVIDIA is getting there quickly, and even the proprietary drivers are very easy to install on Ubuntu. No "fucking with configuration files" is required.
Personally, I use Windows on my personal machine. I play games (most recently the StarCraft II beta) and Windows is the platform for that. But I run Linux at work (Ubuntu 8.10), 8 hours a day. And I can say that the issues are overblown. If you don't try to run the new-super-chocolaty-super-alpha version of Ubuntu and instead stick to something more stable like an LTS release, Linux works pretty damn well.
You know what pisses me off about Macs? The fact that you can't make a MacBook not go to sleep when you close the lid without resorting to add-on hacks or attaching an external monitor. The fact that you need to hack Time Capsule to back up to a generic NAS. The fact that (on many recent Mac laptops) you get a headphone port, or a microphone port, but not both at the same time. The fact that you need yet another stupid dongle to hook up to a VGA projector or display.
At some point, Apple decided that they knew how I should use my computer better than I did. And I decided that I didn't need a Mac.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no subway around here (Boulder, CO). There is a decent bus system, which I use when it makes sense.
I have friends in Golden, CO. It's 45 minutes by car and about an hour and a half by bus (and requires two transfers). The direct (GS) bus doesn't run after 6PM and doesn't run on weekends, which means that you have to take a very indirect route that can take 3+ hours depending on the schedules.
I have other friends in Fort Collins, CO. It's 60 minutes by car, and there is no scheduled bus service. The best you can do is take the bus to the airport (1 1/2 hours), then take the bus back to Fort Collins (another 1 1/2 hours). All in all, you're looking at 3+ hours and $35 each way.
I know this because for 3 years in college in Boulder, I didn't have a car. I bummed rides from friends, walked, and rode the bus. It is *possible* to get almost anywhere in this area without a car, but most of the time it's not practical.
My 2007 Prius was $13500 used with 45000 miles, which is about $1500 more than a similarly equipped Corolla with similar mileage and age.
I bought it from out of state, so I qualify for a tax credit. Even if I did not, it works out to be cheaper long term than a Corolla.
This is just wrong. Even the cheapest (non-netbook) Acer from two years ago has no problem running Windows 7. Even most netbooks made in the last couple of years run Windows 7 just fine.
Even my friend's 4-year-old ThinkPad T60 runs Windows 7 fine.
Almost every consumer-level PC sold 2 years ago had Windows Vista, and 7 has lower hardware demands than Vista.
Windows 7 runs fine on my brother's netbook, which has 1GB of memory and a 1.66GHz Atom. Find me a PC (not a netbook) made in the last 4 years that's slower than that.
As a CS major, I absolutely use LyX if I'm writing a paper for publication. The result looks like a formal paper, so it is treated like a formal paper. It's also much easier to typeset formulas in LyX.
That said, Word is my go-to weapon for everything else.
That's just wrong.
Macs have a failure rate, according to Consumer Reports, of 19% per year. That's higher than Compaq, Sony, and Toshiba. It's also exactly the same as Acer.
The worst PC failure rate? 21% per year for Lenovo and Dell. That's 2% higher than Apple.
If you want to believe that Macs are more reliable, I can't stop you. But the data doesn't support your belief. The data says that Acer's cheap, "flimsy" PCs are just as reliable as Macs.
I do think you're lying.
The idea that a MacBook is going to last 6 years is crap. According to Consumer Reports, the failure rate is about 19% per year, so the probability of your laptop making it to 6 years without a hardware failure is about 28%, 7 years is about 23%.
Notably, the failure rate of Acer PCs, which are some of the cheapest PCs around, is exactly the same as Macs - at 19%.
Also notably, a 6-year-old Mac today would be PowerPC based, which means it's increasingly incompatible with newer software and cant even run the most recent version of Mac OS X.
The idea that Macs "aren't made of the same stuff" is also crap. The MacBook, which is the most popular Mac, is made of plastic - just like every $350 PC. Indeed, Macs are made by many of the same ODMs that make PCs, like Quanta.
You can believe whatever you want to believe about the quality of Macs. But the statistics don't show that Macs fail any less than significantly cheaper PCs.
This idea that there are a bunch of 7+ year old Macs out there today is insane. Many of my professors have Macs, as do many of my classmates. ZERO of them have PowerPC Macs, which every Mac over about 5 1/2 years old would be.
It's easy to argue that Macs last 2.5 times as long when you just make up facts.
If you have a 5-year-old Mac at this point, it's PowerPC so you can't even run many newer applications (nor can you run the latest Mac OS). If it was a laptop, the battery is now pretty much useless (and it's difficult to find replacements) too.
My friend's T60, which he purchased in early 2006, still runs Windows 7 (and Fedora) great.
Lots of people on my campus have Macs, but the majority of them are unibody, which means that they are at most 3 years old. I never see pre-Magsafe Macs, which means that they are at most a little over four years old.
Claiming that "security, simplicity, and quality" all come free is at best misleading.
In 15 years of running Windows, I have never (to my knowledge) been hacked or infected with malware. I use the built-in Windows firewall, install updates as soon as they are available, and (now) I run Microsoft Security Essentials, which is free and easy to install. Time and time again we have seen that being "UNIX-based" doesn't really mean squat from a security perspective in a world where malware and hackers increasingly target applications like browsers and PDF viewers. Safari has not done particularly well in that regard, especially when you compare it with Chrome (which I use) or even IE8, both of which sandbox essentially the entire browser. Apple has repeatedly demonstrated that they did not take security seriously (e.g. DEP which was only added in 10.6, and an ASLR implementation that is still extremely limited).
Simplicity is in the eye of the beholder. I (and many people I know) find Windows to be simpler. Want to use a 5-button (back/forward) mouse on Mac OS? You need special software. On Windows, you just plug it in. In the case of my G5 mouse, Logitech doesn't even make Mac software for it, so you need to use a third-party program. Bind a mouse button to PTT in Ventrilo? Easy in Windows, damn near impossible in Mac OS X. Keep your computer from going to sleep when you shut the lid? Easy in Windows, hard in Mac OS X. Need to connect a Mac to a projector? Make sure you brought your dongle.
Obviously not everyone uses Ventrilo, not everyone has a 5-button mouse, and not everyone needs their laptop to stay on when they close the lid. But these are just the problems that I had when I briefly owned a Mac. But I do dispute the idea that Macs are somehow simpler when I have seen no data to that effect.
As for quality, well, it's been a mixed bag for Mac users. I know a lot of people who have trashed their MagSafe adapters or had their battery recalled and a lot of people who had overheating first-gen MacBooks. I seriously doubt that a plastic MacBook will hold up nearly as well as my (incidentally, cheaper) magnesium-frame ThinkPad T400 if it were dropped. I know that the Mac would do more poorly if Diet Coke were spilled on the keyboard (the T400 has keyboard drains).
Consumer Reports says that Macs are on the low-end for failures, at 19% per year. But Sony (17%), Toshiba (16%), and Compaq (18%) all have fewer repairs yet. Acer is tied with Apple at 19%, HP and Gateway are a point behind at 20%, and Dell/Lenovo are a bit further behind at 21%.
With your supposed "5-year" lifecylce, the chance of a failure in a Mac is 65%. For the worst PCs (Lenovo/Dell), it's 69%. That's not dramatically different.
I think I'm going to go with Consumer Reports rather than some random guy on Slashdot who (supposedly) has a bunch of friends with PowerPC Macs.
To be blunt, you have trouble with automated cars because you are a bad driver.
Note that when I say "bad", I'm referring to your judgement, not your skill.
The fact that you are regularly bumping up against the limits of your vehicle means that you're driving too fast, following too closely, and merging with too little margin.
Eventually, you will screw up, and when you do you'll cause a lot of damage because you have left very little margin for safety.
You are driving on public roads with other drivers, many of whom are unpredictable and far less skilled than you. This does not give you a license to drive aggressively - indeed, it mandates that you drive defensively to mininize the risks.
Go show off your skills at autocross or the track. Do everything you can to avoid using those skills on the highway.
Anyone who compares the cost of buying a new hybrid to keeping an older car is a moron.
Guess what? It's almost ALWAYS cheaper to keep an old car that's serviceable. Gas is too cheap and cars are too expensive. That applies to hybrids and non-hybrids alike.
People still buy new cars. There are a lot of reasons for that.
Moreover, the same idiots never consider the fact that there are used hybrids. My 2007 Prius with 45000 miles on it cost $13500, which was only about $2000 more than a 2007 Corolla.
Your figure of "10-12k cheaper than the Hybrid" for the Civic is totally pulled out of your ass too. The cheapest 4-door Civic in 2006 was $14760 (GX), the Hybrid was $22150 for a difference of $7390. Of course, the GX is missing a lot of things that the Hybrid has standard - like an automatic transmission, air conditioning, and power windows. If you compare the more similarly equipped EX, which was $18460, the difference was only $3690.
When you make up your numbers, compare cars that aren't comparable, ignore the used hybrid market, or compare a used vehicle to a new hybrid, it's very easy to make hybrids look much more expensive than they are. It's also misleading and dishonest.
Actually, decent hybrids are quite good on the highway. My Prius, in the real world, gets 50MPG on the highway (I get about 45MPG around town).
The advantage is less, true. Let's look at consumption, which is a better figure than MPG for comparisons because it's not an inverse scale.
On the highway, my Prius requires 4.70 liters of gas to go 100km. A similarly-sized Toyota Corolla requires 6.92 liters to go the same 100km.
In town, my Prius requires 5.23 liters of gas to go 100km. A similarly-sized Toyota Corolla requires 9.04 liters to go the same 100km.
In either case, the Prius is better. The thing is, the difference is greater in the city. That's not because the Prius is better in the city (indeed, it's worse - despite what the EPA ratings say). But while the Prius is a little worse in the city, a conventional vehicle is way worse. That's the difference.
However, there's a twist: you drive a lot more if you drive on the highway frequently. If you're a city dweller (and you don't drive for a living), it's hard to rack up more than about 8000 miles per year. Cities just aren't big enough - while trips can take a long time, most of that time is spent at low speeds or stopped. Highway traffic - particularly regular highway traffic like a commute - racks up a lot of miles.
Consider two drivers: one is a city-dweller and drives 10000km per year. One commutes daily for 80km in each direction (there are several people in my office who do), for a total of about 40000km per year.
The city dweller saves more per mile than the commuter by buying a Prius (3.81 liters per 100km vs. 2.22 liters per 100km). But the commuter saves more per year, by far (888 liters vs 381 liters).
That makes the Prius (or another efficient hybrid) the obvious choice for a longer-distance commuter. Compared with even a moderate-sized car like the Corolla (which gets 34MPG highway), a commuter with a 50 mile commute can save over $600 per year. Over 5 years, that's $3000 - which is more than the difference between a Prius and a comparably-equipped Corolla.
Disclaimer: I work for Google in Geo.
It is true that Google switched from Navteq to Tele Atlas a few years back. However, we no longer use Tele Atlas data in the US. Google now uses Google-produced data throughout the US. Tele Atlas and other companies are used as data sources outside the US.
If you notice a problem, please report it using the link on every Google Maps page. We do take those reports seriously and we can fix the data if it is wrong.
You know what makes Southwest better than the other airlines?
They're not like you.
They aren't pompous assholes who are too good to take the occasional traveler. They don't take themselves, their airline, or their industry too seriously. When they screw up, they are genuinely sorry.
Southwest understands that they are in the business of hauling people from A to B as efficiently as possible. They understand that people who fly Southwest aren't flying because they like flying, they are flying because it's the best way to get where they want to go.
Need to change your plans? They don't charge fees for that. No other airline does that.
Want to bring a bag or two? They don't charge you $30 to do it.
They aren't pricks, they get the job done, and they don't charge you BS fees. That's more than you can say for just about any other airline.
No, he was talking about the Wii Remote Jacket. It wasn't originally included with the Wii or with the Wii Remote (Nintendo actually never calls it the "Wiimote").
The Wii Remote problem (injury) was not Nintendo's fault (any person can play with the Wii Remote without the jacket if they keep enough room around them). It wasn't a defective product. But Nintendo provided jackets for everyone, for free, then added them to the default package.
Apparently Apple doesn't think that way.
What cracks me up is that the Voodoo5 6000, which was never officially released and needed so much power that it required an external power brick, draws only about 70W. That's less than a mid-range card today.
The amount of power required by modern high-end GPUs has reached an absurd point.
You also left out one more factor - game type.
World of Warcraft, for example, is well playable at 30fps. First person shooters are the worse because viewport motion depends on the framerate, which makes it difficult to aim at lower framerates.
Yes, and their entire air transit system handles about 1/4 as many people per year and about 1/5th as many aircraft movements per year as Denver. If the entire Israeli airport system were a single US airport, it wouldn't even rank in the top 20.
I think our current policies are a foolish endeavor myself, but saying that Israel has the answer just doesn't make sense when you look at the difference in scale.
No, the problem is that people like you attempt to summarize a complex and flawed system as existing "for any reason other than to gain power", then implying that anyone who disagrees with you is out of touch.
The US Government certainly was not "designed for the sole purpose of winning wars", nor are we particularly effective at it.
Pretending that the US Government is some monolithic entity with no purpose other than to serve itself is every bit as naive as believing that it's a completely benevolent and just system devoid of corruption and waste.
My UMTS/HSDPA AWS mobile phone disagrees.
The amusing thing is that the Voodoo5 6000 draws around 4A (at 12V) at max load, which is 48W. Add in the PCI power and you're maybe up to 75W.
75W is what a lower-mid-range GPU draws today. The hottest GPU today (NVIDIA GTX 480) is 250W, over 3 times hotter than the Voodoo5 6000.
Fortunately, even us stupid Americans can pick up on your not-so-subtle dig. Asshole.
CPU cache.
This effectively blocks AdMob, because interactive (web/app) advertising without analytics is unmarketable.
I also live in a 900 sq. ft. condo (which I share with a roommate), have a single TV (although it's huge for the space at 40"), and a single car. I recently rigged three box fans in the window so that I wouldn't have to run the window A/C, which hasn't been on all year.
You know what? It's not so bad. I don't live materially differently from my parents, who live in a 4000 sq. ft house with a big yard and central A/C and have two vehicles (one an SUV).
And, FYI, I don't do this because I don't have the money. I do this because it's all I need and because it lets me save money to do things that I otherwise wouldn't be able to do. $500 less spent on electricity per year is $500 more I can spend on fun crap. Or save. Or give away.
I know several people who are in the exact opposite camp. I personally believe that all of KDE's options make it a usability nightmare, but many users (my friends appreciated) do like features like window grouping, focus follows mouse, complete shortcut customizations, and many of the other things you can do with a stock KDE install. Doing many of these things on Mac OS X typically requires third-party software, if it's possible at all.
The days of "fucking with video card drivers" or "rc scripts" are largely over. If you're running ATI or Intel graphics, you get open-source drivers that work out of the box in basically any modern distro (since they're in the kernel). NVIDIA is getting there quickly, and even the proprietary drivers are very easy to install on Ubuntu. No "fucking with configuration files" is required.
Personally, I use Windows on my personal machine. I play games (most recently the StarCraft II beta) and Windows is the platform for that. But I run Linux at work (Ubuntu 8.10), 8 hours a day. And I can say that the issues are overblown. If you don't try to run the new-super-chocolaty-super-alpha version of Ubuntu and instead stick to something more stable like an LTS release, Linux works pretty damn well.
You know what pisses me off about Macs? The fact that you can't make a MacBook not go to sleep when you close the lid without resorting to add-on hacks or attaching an external monitor. The fact that you need to hack Time Capsule to back up to a generic NAS. The fact that (on many recent Mac laptops) you get a headphone port, or a microphone port, but not both at the same time. The fact that you need yet another stupid dongle to hook up to a VGA projector or display.
At some point, Apple decided that they knew how I should use my computer better than I did. And I decided that I didn't need a Mac.
MARTA is not light rail, it's a traditional metro system.