Don't be a dick. "Prayers are with you" is shorthand for "I feel powerless to help this situation personally and I'm hurting, so I'm doing the one thing I can to help me deal with this horrible situation." Yes, we get it that your lack of religion makes you a more intelligent, enlightened, and good looking person. Golf clap for your superiority. But one of your neighbors is grieving and the best you can come up with is to demean his coping mechanism?
Did telling him his religion is stupid make the world a better place? No? Then gloat in private, please.
If a normal person suddenly becomes unhinged which do you think they'll be able to do immediately, buy a gun or build some sort of explosive?
Wikipedia's "Terrorism in the United States" article contains the word "bomb" 231 times. I think that's sufficient to demonstrate that the unhinged have plenty of non-gun weapons at their disposal.
I don't want a crazy person to shoot my kid. Or stab him. Or blow him up. Or gas him. Or hit him with a car. Or run over him with a lawnmower. Or drop him off a pier. I want that crazy person to leave my kid the hell alone, but by definition he's probably not mentally capable of doing that. The proactive answer, then, is for me to try to find the crazy people around me, identify the ones that might be prone to harming my kid and yours, and figure out how to help him not want to do that. Yeah, that's hard - really freaking hard - but I don't think there's a good-enough alternative.
No. It's worse than doing nothing because it breeds complacency. And then when this almost inevitably happens again, people will either say 1) "but I thought we fixed this! I guess it's hopeless." or 2) "OK, a ban didn't work this time, but the next one will! I'm sure of it!"
Treat the cause, not the symptoms. It's trite but it's true.
An undeserving-of-a-name asshole blew up a building in Oklahoma City with an explosive made out of garden fertilizer and diesel fuel. At some point, you have to decide that it's just not possible (or effective) to outlaw everything that can possibly be used to harm someone.
When something breaks at work and we have a root cause analysis meeting, it'd be easy to say "Joe mistyped something" and then we could all leave. It's never that simple, though. Why was Joe's mistake able to propagate outward? Why wasn't it caught? Why didn't automatic monitors kick in? Yes, Joe screwed up. But why did the rest of us fail to stop that from being a problem?
And I think we need to do a lot more root cause analysis here. A nameless non-person shot up a school. Yes, the blame is his. But could we - as a society, as his neighbors, as his employers, as his teachers - have seen this coming and done something to prevent it? I don't know. The fictional Dexter character hid his "true self" from those around him, and for all I know that's the common case. I doubt it, though. I'd bet that most people crazy enough to do something this awful throw off sign after sign after sign but no one does anything about it.
I don't know what "does anything about it" would look like, honestly. I just don't. But I'd sure be interested in sitting down with my neighbors, my coworkers, and my government to bounce ideas around.
Those people probably didn't need an automatic.223-caliber rifle. I have plenty of perspective today.
That's exactly what a lot of hunters use. A.22 bullet is tiny, and a semi-automatic rifle (like the one the shooter seems to have had) is standard issue for hunters who don't want to have to reload after every shot.
I don't know where I stand on religion, and maybe this makes me a vengeful asshole, but I sincerely hope you're right and that the gunman is being gang-raped by a line of demons as we speak.
Apparently the White House [1], let alone the NRA, doesn't think it's time to discuss the culture that causes these kinds of shootings
You couldn't be more wrong. It's time to discuss the culture, not to start reactively banning things. This is a classic XY problem. "X" is "wants to stop random violence". "Y" is "wants to ban guns". "Y" doesn't fix "X". This son of a bitch walked into a school with a weapon and used it. The weapon itself is interchangeable - although it was a gun this time, it just as easily could have been a bomb, poison gas, or a well-aimed car. Our choice as a society is whether we want to enumerate and ban all the things people can use as weapons, or if we'd rather figure out why people want to use weapons in the first place.
Banning stuff is easy. It's utterly ineffective at solving the initial problem, but it's easy. I challenge you - and me - and all of us - to figure out why the hell people want to kill kids in a school. Answering that question may be a lot harder, but that's the task we need to be putting our efforts into.
Because some crazy fucker walking into a gym with a pipe bomb would be much better.
Maybe a better answer is that we need to treat our crazy people. It's not a matter of expense; either you pay money to treat mental illness, or you pay money to clean up after them. I'd rather spend on getting them help than in burying our children.
Citation strongly needed. I've only seen two or three heat pumps, ever, and those were in brand new and very expensive homes. Perhaps they're popular where you are, but I am extremely skeptical about heat pumps being remotely near a majority of electric heating units.
I just checked my electric bill; I'm paying about $0.14 per kWh. That gives:
(1050 kWh / year) * ($0.14 / kWh) = $147 / year
A 90% efficient PSU is half as wasteful as an 80% PSU, and half of $147 is about $73. If you can pay $73 to upgrade from an 80% efficient PSU to a 90% efficient PSU, you'll get 100% return on investment in one year. That's ignoring the extra cooling demands of the higher efficiency unit (and ignoring the decreased heating demands because electric heat is freaking expensive so $73 in electric heating would offset, what, $10 of gas heat?).
TL;DR: you're almost always better off buying the high efficiency PSU.
My wife isn't a whole lot bigger than that, but she graduated from Army Airborne School. Assuming that a random small woman isn't capable of kicking your ass into next week is sexist at best and dangerous at worst.
The fun part is that Apple demands 30% of any upsells through the app, even free apps.
Of course, Apple demands 0.0% for upsells not through the app. I can buy books through bn.com and load them into the Nook app on my iPad without Apple seeing a penny of revenue.
The root cause of this, and many of the other errors in city location observed throughout Australia, is actually quite simple and I don't know why Apple haven't fixed it yet.
First, I'm not making an excuse for Apple; their PR department can do that for them. That said, Apple didn't generate their own mapping data. They imported it from many databases, prominently including TomTom's. I wonder how TomTom handles those locations, and what the data that they shipped to Apple looks like. I mean, are those "map centers" marked as physical locations in the TomTom database, or is that just something Apple was inferring from the data? Or was the Australian data formatted subtly differently from, say, Canada, so that the importer ran correctly but the results weren't quite right?
The end responsibility is Apple's of course as they're the one who shipped the resulting product. Still, I wonder what root cause actually led to the screwups.
...says the guy who has literally never posted anything other than about how Windows 8, Surface, and IE10 are much better than the competition (and the older products they're replacing).
Free tip to shills (and yes, I'm calling you a shill): mix it up a little. Talk about something funny at work. Mention a local restaurant. Make a car analogy. Just don't come in and make comment after predictable comment saying the exact same thing.
And in the unlikely event that you're not a shill? Get a hobby. Seriously. There is more to life than the most recent software releases of any megacorporation. Explore your other interests a little. It's a big world!
You felt so strongly that the "cool" Windows 8 UI is the way of the future and that people who prefer the "old, lame way" are "lazy, old dogs" that you just had to register a Slashdot account today to say it. I respect the strength of your convictions.
We already have death panels. The difference is that under the "old" system, your death panel makes more money the more people they kill. But the people that are (indirectly) paid to kill you are ok because it's "private."
Maybe it's a good idea to take out a life insurance policy with the same insurer. "Oh, $100,000 is too much for a new lung? OK. That works out to $735,000 for my widow."
If they answer in the negative, then their claim about Samsung becomes nothing but sheer unfounded speculation.
I'm not sure how you draw that conclusion. I might reasonably allege that you should have recognized your ex wife. My failure to realize that you've had previous dealings with her doesn't let you off the hook.
Note that in no way am I defending the travesty of the ruling. It's utterly ridiculous. But it doesn't seem unreasonable that a major corporation's legal department would have a list somewhere of people they've sued (or been sued by), and might want to consult that list before starting new legal proceedings.
It weighs almost as much as an entry level MacBook Air, and is thicker on average. The MBA has much better battery life. How is the Surface Pro more portable?
Liar. The $829 64GB iPad comes with LTE, which isn't an option on the Surface Pro. A wifi-only 64GB iPad is $200 less than Surface Pro at $699. It seems like Microsodt has issued a talking point: "always compare prices against the most expensive alternative. Just ignore the extra features we don't have."
Does that office version run on iPad, or are you being intentionally misleading (aka trolling)?
No (but Microsoft has announced it). But my point was that it does run on a MacBook Air which is only $100 more and is much better suited to using Office than is a keyboardless, stylus-based tablet.
That says nothing of $300 netbooks which can also run Office, but still with a full keyboard. Given that Surface Pro is the same size, weight, and cost as a full-fledged laptop, I can't imagine many Office users willing to trade in their keyboards for styluses and touch screens.
Windows 8 is having the same problems as Windows Phone. It's like an Apple device with the same price.
Except that a Surface Pro will cost much more than an iPad 4, and with $100 of a full-fledged MacBook Air. The hype around Surface seems to be "you can run Office!" but there's a native version of Office for OS X. By capability, Surface Pro should be positioned against iPads, Nexuses, Fires, and other tablets. By price, though, it's going head-to-head with actual laptops. You know, those more familiar, more powerful devices with real built-in keyboards?
If the ability to run Office were a litmus test, I wouldn't get a Surface Pro with its stylus (!!!!) and no keyboard. I'd get an actual laptop that's symbiotically evolved alongside Office for the last 15 years to actually be good at it.
I do not get the Surface / Surface Pro positioning at all. I just don't. Instead of setting it next to something that makes it look good by comparison, they're holding it up next to something that makes it look bad.
Well, it kind of does. He wouldn't be starting from scratch; he'd be starting from a deployed, functional CMS ready to receive data.
Alternatively, what about MediaWiki? It's tailored for lots of people editing content, and the page history functions seem completely appropriate for a government website (so that citizens can track document changes over time).
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be a dick. "Prayers are with you" is shorthand for "I feel powerless to help this situation personally and I'm hurting, so I'm doing the one thing I can to help me deal with this horrible situation." Yes, we get it that your lack of religion makes you a more intelligent, enlightened, and good looking person. Golf clap for your superiority. But one of your neighbors is grieving and the best you can come up with is to demean his coping mechanism?
Did telling him his religion is stupid make the world a better place? No? Then gloat in private, please.
If a normal person suddenly becomes unhinged which do you think they'll be able to do immediately, buy a gun or build some sort of explosive?
Wikipedia's "Terrorism in the United States" article contains the word "bomb" 231 times. I think that's sufficient to demonstrate that the unhinged have plenty of non-gun weapons at their disposal.
I don't want a crazy person to shoot my kid. Or stab him. Or blow him up. Or gas him. Or hit him with a car. Or run over him with a lawnmower. Or drop him off a pier. I want that crazy person to leave my kid the hell alone, but by definition he's probably not mentally capable of doing that. The proactive answer, then, is for me to try to find the crazy people around me, identify the ones that might be prone to harming my kid and yours, and figure out how to help him not want to do that. Yeah, that's hard - really freaking hard - but I don't think there's a good-enough alternative.
Banning stuff does solve things.
No. It's worse than doing nothing because it breeds complacency. And then when this almost inevitably happens again, people will either say 1) "but I thought we fixed this! I guess it's hopeless." or 2) "OK, a ban didn't work this time, but the next one will! I'm sure of it!"
Treat the cause, not the symptoms. It's trite but it's true.
An undeserving-of-a-name asshole blew up a building in Oklahoma City with an explosive made out of garden fertilizer and diesel fuel. At some point, you have to decide that it's just not possible (or effective) to outlaw everything that can possibly be used to harm someone.
When something breaks at work and we have a root cause analysis meeting, it'd be easy to say "Joe mistyped something" and then we could all leave. It's never that simple, though. Why was Joe's mistake able to propagate outward? Why wasn't it caught? Why didn't automatic monitors kick in? Yes, Joe screwed up. But why did the rest of us fail to stop that from being a problem?
And I think we need to do a lot more root cause analysis here. A nameless non-person shot up a school. Yes, the blame is his. But could we - as a society, as his neighbors, as his employers, as his teachers - have seen this coming and done something to prevent it? I don't know. The fictional Dexter character hid his "true self" from those around him, and for all I know that's the common case. I doubt it, though. I'd bet that most people crazy enough to do something this awful throw off sign after sign after sign but no one does anything about it.
I don't know what "does anything about it" would look like, honestly. I just don't. But I'd sure be interested in sitting down with my neighbors, my coworkers, and my government to bounce ideas around.
Those people probably didn't need an automatic .223-caliber rifle. I have plenty of perspective today.
That's exactly what a lot of hunters use. A .22 bullet is tiny, and a semi-automatic rifle (like the one the shooter seems to have had) is standard issue for hunters who don't want to have to reload after every shot.
To the bastard who did this, you'll rot in hell.
I don't know where I stand on religion, and maybe this makes me a vengeful asshole, but I sincerely hope you're right and that the gunman is being gang-raped by a line of demons as we speak.
Apparently the White House [1], let alone the NRA, doesn't think it's time to discuss the culture that causes these kinds of shootings
You couldn't be more wrong. It's time to discuss the culture, not to start reactively banning things. This is a classic XY problem. "X" is "wants to stop random violence". "Y" is "wants to ban guns". "Y" doesn't fix "X". This son of a bitch walked into a school with a weapon and used it. The weapon itself is interchangeable - although it was a gun this time, it just as easily could have been a bomb, poison gas, or a well-aimed car. Our choice as a society is whether we want to enumerate and ban all the things people can use as weapons, or if we'd rather figure out why people want to use weapons in the first place.
Banning stuff is easy. It's utterly ineffective at solving the initial problem, but it's easy. I challenge you - and me - and all of us - to figure out why the hell people want to kill kids in a school. Answering that question may be a lot harder, but that's the task we need to be putting our efforts into.
Because some crazy fucker walking into a gym with a pipe bomb would be much better.
Maybe a better answer is that we need to treat our crazy people. It's not a matter of expense; either you pay money to treat mental illness, or you pay money to clean up after them. I'd rather spend on getting them help than in burying our children.
Most electric heating is done with heat pumps.
Citation strongly needed. I've only seen two or three heat pumps, ever, and those were in brand new and very expensive homes. Perhaps they're popular where you are, but I am extremely skeptical about heat pumps being remotely near a majority of electric heating units.
"Not a major factor"? That 120W spread over a year yields:
120W * (1kW / 1000W) * (24 hours / 1 day) * (365 days / 1 year) = 1050 kWh / year
I just checked my electric bill; I'm paying about $0.14 per kWh. That gives:
(1050 kWh / year) * ($0.14 / kWh) = $147 / year
A 90% efficient PSU is half as wasteful as an 80% PSU, and half of $147 is about $73. If you can pay $73 to upgrade from an 80% efficient PSU to a 90% efficient PSU, you'll get 100% return on investment in one year. That's ignoring the extra cooling demands of the higher efficiency unit (and ignoring the decreased heating demands because electric heat is freaking expensive so $73 in electric heating would offset, what, $10 of gas heat?).
TL;DR: you're almost always better off buying the high efficiency PSU.
My wife isn't a whole lot bigger than that, but she graduated from Army Airborne School. Assuming that a random small woman isn't capable of kicking your ass into next week is sexist at best and dangerous at worst.
The fun part is that Apple demands 30% of any upsells through the app, even free apps.
Of course, Apple demands 0.0% for upsells not through the app. I can buy books through bn.com and load them into the Nook app on my iPad without Apple seeing a penny of revenue.
He could just have told the guy managing his blind trust money...
...absolutely nothing. Blind trust. Blind.
The root cause of this, and many of the other errors in city location observed throughout Australia, is actually quite simple and I don't know why Apple haven't fixed it yet.
First, I'm not making an excuse for Apple; their PR department can do that for them. That said, Apple didn't generate their own mapping data. They imported it from many databases, prominently including TomTom's. I wonder how TomTom handles those locations, and what the data that they shipped to Apple looks like. I mean, are those "map centers" marked as physical locations in the TomTom database, or is that just something Apple was inferring from the data? Or was the Australian data formatted subtly differently from, say, Canada, so that the importer ran correctly but the results weren't quite right?
The end responsibility is Apple's of course as they're the one who shipped the resulting product. Still, I wonder what root cause actually led to the screwups.
...says the guy who has literally never posted anything other than about how Windows 8, Surface, and IE10 are much better than the competition (and the older products they're replacing).
Free tip to shills (and yes, I'm calling you a shill): mix it up a little. Talk about something funny at work. Mention a local restaurant. Make a car analogy. Just don't come in and make comment after predictable comment saying the exact same thing.
And in the unlikely event that you're not a shill? Get a hobby. Seriously. There is more to life than the most recent software releases of any megacorporation. Explore your other interests a little. It's a big world!
At the end of his "review" he said he was using Windows 8 on a desktop, not a tablet.
The guy is clearly a dumbass for reviewing Microsoft's latest desktop OS offering on a desktop.
We all knew there were usability issues on the desktop.
So you feel that should make it immune from bad reviews, even though it's the OS now shipping on consumer desktop machines?
Your rant would make more sense if I had modded him down instead of replying to him directly.
You felt so strongly that the "cool" Windows 8 UI is the way of the future and that people who prefer the "old, lame way" are "lazy, old dogs" that you just had to register a Slashdot account today to say it. I respect the strength of your convictions.
We already have death panels. The difference is that under the "old" system, your death panel makes more money the more people they kill. But the people that are (indirectly) paid to kill you are ok because it's "private."
Maybe it's a good idea to take out a life insurance policy with the same insurer. "Oh, $100,000 is too much for a new lung? OK. That works out to $735,000 for my widow."
If they answer in the negative, then their claim about Samsung becomes nothing but sheer unfounded speculation.
I'm not sure how you draw that conclusion. I might reasonably allege that you should have recognized your ex wife. My failure to realize that you've had previous dealings with her doesn't let you off the hook.
Note that in no way am I defending the travesty of the ruling. It's utterly ridiculous. But it doesn't seem unreasonable that a major corporation's legal department would have a list somewhere of people they've sued (or been sued by), and might want to consult that list before starting new legal proceedings.
It weighs almost as much as an entry level MacBook Air, and is thicker on average. The MBA has much better battery life. How is the Surface Pro more portable?
Liar. The $829 64GB iPad comes with LTE, which isn't an option on the Surface Pro. A wifi-only 64GB iPad is $200 less than Surface Pro at $699. It seems like Microsodt has issued a talking point: "always compare prices against the most expensive alternative. Just ignore the extra features we don't have."
Does that office version run on iPad, or are you being intentionally misleading (aka trolling)?
No (but Microsoft has announced it). But my point was that it does run on a MacBook Air which is only $100 more and is much better suited to using Office than is a keyboardless, stylus-based tablet.
That says nothing of $300 netbooks which can also run Office, but still with a full keyboard. Given that Surface Pro is the same size, weight, and cost as a full-fledged laptop, I can't imagine many Office users willing to trade in their keyboards for styluses and touch screens.
Windows 8 is having the same problems as Windows Phone. It's like an Apple device with the same price.
Except that a Surface Pro will cost much more than an iPad 4, and with $100 of a full-fledged MacBook Air. The hype around Surface seems to be "you can run Office!" but there's a native version of Office for OS X. By capability, Surface Pro should be positioned against iPads, Nexuses, Fires, and other tablets. By price, though, it's going head-to-head with actual laptops. You know, those more familiar, more powerful devices with real built-in keyboards?
If the ability to run Office were a litmus test, I wouldn't get a Surface Pro with its stylus (!!!!) and no keyboard. I'd get an actual laptop that's symbiotically evolved alongside Office for the last 15 years to actually be good at it.
I do not get the Surface / Surface Pro positioning at all. I just don't. Instead of setting it next to something that makes it look good by comparison, they're holding it up next to something that makes it look bad.
Well, it kind of does. He wouldn't be starting from scratch; he'd be starting from a deployed, functional CMS ready to receive data.
Alternatively, what about MediaWiki? It's tailored for lots of people editing content, and the page history functions seem completely appropriate for a government website (so that citizens can track document changes over time).