If you can't tell the difference, and arn't refraining from something for ethical/religious reasons, why does it matter? Whether you tell me that food is a delicacy from France or it's from down the street, it's going to taste the same to me. Either I'll like it or I won't. Stop worrying about this authenticity crap. You can't brand fish that way.
Personally, I think food should be labeled as what it is. If I buy something that says it's hamburger, I don't expect there to be 20 percent textured soy protein mixed in with the meat. Likewise, if I order a fish off a menu or buy it in a store, I expect it to be the fish it says it is.
Unfortunately, the fish industry seems particularly prone to this sort of mislabeling. Lots of types of fish seem to have "common names" that aren't particularly descriptive of what they actually are, yet they're allowed to be used on labels and in stores.
Example: I've seen a fish called "super white tuna" on menus at a number of sushi restaurants. I think it's pretty yummy myself; it can be so fatty that it actually tastes like butter. That's gotta be some exclusive, high-grade tuna, right? Wrong. Two problems here: First, this particular fish is illegal to sell in some countries because it can be so fatty that it causes (ahem) anal leakage. Seems like such a friendly-sounding fish should carry a warning label or something, no? Second, and most importantly, "super white tuna" isn't really tuna. It's actually a fish called escolar. It's not even in the same family as tuna. So why is this labeling legal?
Escolar isn't alone, either. "Rock cod" isn't really cod, for example. Seems to me this entire industry could use a lot more regulation and oversight, for multiple reasons. In the meantime, you pretty much have to bring a guidebook with you to know what you're getting when you order fish these days, and whether it's fished in sustainable ways. I recommend the app from the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
It isn't so much that what was once rubbish is now considered fine dining, but rather that due to multiculturalism, many foods that were once unpopular in a foreign country are being driven by populations that are made up of many more nationalities.
Actually, it's not so much about "fine dining" as the cycle of once-populous varieties being overfished almost to the point of extinction, forcing the mass-market fisheries to switch to different kinds of fish. The orange roughy craze of a few years ago was a fine example. You wouldn't have seen orange roughy on menus in the 70s or earlier; it's a variety of fish commonly called a "slimehead," and it's really ugly-looking, something like an angler fish. It also doesn't taste like much. That's why they marketed it as a "fine dining" fish, even though it's pretty easy to catch in huge amounts by deep trawling -- because they needed to trump up some reason why you'd actually eat it. Explain away that bland taste as "subtle, delicately flavored flesh," ship the fish to stores already filleted (so the customer never sees the whole fish), and never mention the word "slimehead," and it becomes the new market darling. Of course, as it turned out, orange roughy can live for over 100 years and they don't even begin breeding until they're 20 or 30, so they're incredibly susceptible to overfishing. Hence why you hardly ever see this "miracle fish" on menus anymore;10-15 years into the "craze" and the supplies are already dangerously depleted. On to the next fish.
Desktop PCs and servers seem to have largely overcome the need to reboot regularly, but other segments of the industry seem to be moving backwards. My Android handset actually says in the manual that you should power cycle it regularly. With a firmware upgrade, it even started giving me a warning from time to time, telling me I had not power cycled the phone in X amount of times and that I should do that now or risk instability. (Am I crazy for assuming that a phone OS is a markedly less complex environment than a Linux server? And here I thought Android applications ran in a fully memory-managed, garbage-collecting environment.)
And if you threatened anyone at a workplace in the manner you just threatened me, you would find yourself in jail. Most workplaces now do not tolerate violence, or the threat of it. You would be charged with assault, as that is what you just committed. In my state, it is a second degree misdemeanor, which has a maximum penalty of 60 days in jail and a $500 fine. After your jail time, you will find that you will no longer be employed.
Oh please. He would get called into a manager's office and chewed out. If you called the police they probably wouldn't even show up. Maybe it's you who need to "grow up."
Regardless, the company did the dev work and GUI, not the government: point (4) is invalid.
OK fine, some random company whose sole customer is the government. What's the difference? The story reads like an episode of the Twilight Zone. "I have invented a computer that can solve all the world's problems." I was actually expecting a zinger at the end -- "the board of directors voted the computer to be the new CEO."
1. Integrates multiple, disparate global databases and extracts information from them like magic. 2. Combines text, numeric data, and multimedia as if they were ingredients in a cake recipe. 3. Has a UI that looks just like something from a Hollywood movie. 4. Designed and implemented by the government.
Add that its name is derived from a fantasy novel, and why, yes, I do believe that this story is absolutely true.
e-Ink screens definitely can and do fail. The question is whether an airport scanner can make them fail.
Me, I'm thinking it's much easier to break your screen by packing your Kindle poorly than to break it by exposing it to X-rays or microwaves, but it's easier to get Amazon to replace your Kindle if you can grab a headline.
Boy, talk about a flimsy claim. It's as if eWeek couldn't resist running a juicy rumor, so when they couldn't find a single piece of evidence in support of the rumor, that became their headline (thus allowing them to run a story based on the rumor). They couldn't even find anyone to make the claim in a quote.
Let the anecdotal evidence begin. I've sent B&N Nooks (with e-ink displays) through airport security scanners at least a dozen times. No ill effects.
That's kind of my point. You don't really send in the test. You wait a couple weeks and then you say whatever your kid should hear. Save it for when the kid's feeling discouraged.
We know genetic tests for sports achievement are bullshit anyway. If we relied strictly on genetic factors (and the received wisdom about them), there would be no white men playing basketball.
. You lose all claim to the moral high ground when you drag third-parties, who would otherwise be completely uninvolved, into your fight.
Ummmm, right. You been watching the news lately, or do you commute directly from downtown San Francisco to your log cabin?
You're right, though, that some people affected by Critical Mass are "completely uninvolved," in the sense that they're only in the City in the first place because they commute from out of town for work. Since they're not participating members of the San Francisco community, don't vote here, don't pay taxes here, and don't rely on city services for their day-to-day lives, their opinions on civic planning and other issues that affect the communities and neighborhoods of San Francisco are largely inconsequential. Sorry you were late for Friday dinner.
It's totally infeasible. Cities are big. The downtown areas where you do your shopping are just a tiny part of it (and probably aren't the places where most of the accidents happen). In San Francisco -- which is just 49 square miles of land -- the majority of it is residential. You're going to build elevated pedestrian walkways between the second stories of people's houses?
Also, I'm pretty sure building such walkways in downtown SF would be illegal because they'd be considered eyesores. There are plenty of places where zoning laws only allow buildings to be built so high, or only this many billboards are allowed, or lighted signs are allowed in one area but not another. Blocking out the sky with walkways every couple of city blocks would surely be regulated.
If you doubt a word I've written, just google for "critical mass".
OK, here you're being disingenuous. Critical Mass is a bicycling demonstration, held regularly to raise awareness of bicycling issues and the need for more bike-friendly streets in San Francisco. It inconveniences you because it's meant to, as a way to call attention to the fact that a great many people in San Francisco (not you, apparently) would like to ride their bikes to get around the city, but can't or don't do it as often as they'd like because the streets are too often unsafe, poorly maintained, and full of drivers who think they own the road. To claim that this once-monthly protest event (which takes place on a Friday evening) has anything to do with how bicyclists affect the normal flow of daily traffic in San Francisco is a total distortion of the truth.
My interpretation is that when the cars are going straight ahead there is enough noise (tire, wind?) such that pedestrians don't get whacked - but when a car is creeping along, like a turn or parking maneuver, pedestrians can't always hear them.
That's exactly my experience. It's not the movie trope of a speeding car coming flying through an intersection and the child's bike is seen flying up into the air. It's when drivers are actually trying to obey the speed limit -- either parking, or backing out of a driveway, or turning a corner in a 25mph residential zone -- that it becomes a problem. That's when the hybrid cars make almost no noise at all. And you don't need to be hit with high-speed force to be injured in a car accident. If that car hits you slowly but doesn't stop moving, you can be in real trouble. All it takes is a somewhat-oblivious driver in a silent car.
They're supposed to adhere to the normal rules that apply to other vehicles on the road but generally don't. And they regularly don't comply with the minimum speed limit regulations creating an unsafe situation for everybody involved when people have to drive along at a crawl and figure out how to pass.
I agree that this is a problem but you don't seem to understand what the problem actually is. You've just written two contradictory sentences. On the one hand, cyclists are supposed to behave exactly like cars and do everything that cars do. On the other hand, cyclists cannot travel at the same speed as cars. So what should they do to appease you? One way cyclists have learned to accommodate cars is to break the traffic laws, in order to get out of cars' way. But you've said that's not acceptable.
Drivers seem to want it both ways. Or rather, they don't want it any way at all -- they won't slow down for cyclists, they'll fly into a screaming tizzy whenever they see a cyclist run a stop sign, yet Lord knows they won't allow their taxes to be used to pay for bike lanes. Hence, cyclists think drivers are unreasonable and figure, "fuck 'em."
Meanwhile, road raging drivers like to think they'll "teach bikers a lesson," by swerving into them, cutting them off with sudden turns, and other clever pranks -- and whenever I see that I just think to myself, when you're rotting in jail for vehicular manslaughter, facing the rest of your life knowing you killed some 19-year-old girl because she wouldn't let you play speed-n-brake with the traffic lights... will it have been worth it?
The problem with EVs isn't as bad as some people make out though since much of the noise is from the tyres on the road and air being forced aside; the engine contributes relatively little.
In traffic, maybe. But I don't think this is necessarily about people crossing at the light at a crosswalk at a busy intersection.
I live in a city, where there's a lot of ambient noise. That city is San Francisco, where, as you can imagine, there are a lot of hybrid cars. And I can tell you, while not being elevated in my mind quite to the level of "cause for concern" just yet, quiet cars can be a problem.
I live on a predominantly residential street, where people have their cars in garages with very short driveways that cross the public sidewalk. The sound a combustion engine makes when it's backing out of a garage at low speed is very much more noticeable than the more-or-less complete silence of a hybrid engine. If, as you're walking along, you were fussing with your shopping bags, or tugging on your dog's leash, or looking over your shoulder to see if the bus is coming, it would be very easy to get run over by a hybrid car without ever realizing it was coming.
Hybrid cars also round streetcorners in front of you when you're preparing to cross the street. Some of the cross-streets on the street I live on are one-way, single-lane streets, on hills, with a building right on the corner. It's very easy to be surprised by a car making a lefthand turn as you're walking up the road -- even more so if the car doesn't make any noise.
The problem isn't a crisis, but it really is about more than just accommodating "stupid people," or handicapped people who can't hear at normal levels. Regular people can very easily miss a hybrid car coming.
Also, I think some of the people who scoff at this idea live in parts of America where you're essentially wedded to your car. There are many cities, however -- San Francisco, Boston, Portland, New York, Seattle -- where a lot of people, or even a majority, don't rely on a car for most of their travel. That means they spend at least part of their day on foot or on a bike on public streets. In New York and San Francisco, lots of people don't even own cars. So maybe you're not likely to get run down by a hybrid car every day, but if you're on the street every day, all year long... it could happen.
My parents do a lot of RVing, too, and I've joined them on trips, and I'm not sure I've ever seen any RV park with a "perimeter fence" around it. Especially not in a forested area like the OP describes. Also, he discounted the possibility of fiber runs, because he can't run cables underground and hanging cables get damaged. As for mounting APs on structures, I assume that's what he's doing now.
He mentioned this. He says there are already TV cables strung tree-to-tree, and the problem is that they occasionally get melted by heat from the various fire pits around the property. It seems to me he could still investigate using cables as much as possible, though...
Surely, any snowbird that can afford an RV can afford a 4G connection?
I don't think the OP's question was "how can I encourage everybody at the RV park to get a 4G connection for $80/month each." It was "how can I upgrade the RV park's WiFi network to improve the coverage everybody already gets in the park."
Ahh, I kinda took his request for "no rooting required" as meaning he didn't want to jump through hoops to install an OS on it. I guess he just wants someone else to offer a vertically-integrated, locked-down product like Apple's. (Why?)
That's pretty much how I read it, too. They're saying it's equivalent to saying something like, "Staying still will reduce the risk of changing position." What are the precise risk factors that could cause you to change position? "Movement."
There are plenty of competitors and even some that have superior specs to either of the ones being discussed here. The key is price. Both Amazon and B&N are expecting you to buy content to stock your device, and that's how they plan to make up for the deep discounts on the hardware.
I have an HP laptop that came with a built-in optical drive (you can't swap it out), and I'm not kidding you, with the screen brightness turned down, the stock battery gives me around 7.5 hours running time, with WiFi enabled. Long gone are the days when you had to lug around a couple extra pounds worth of pluggable drives and extra batteries. The whole kit n' kaboodle weighs 4.4 lbs -- heavier than a MacBook Air, to be sure, but lighter than a lot of women's purses.
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If you can't tell the difference, and arn't refraining from something for ethical/religious reasons, why does it matter? Whether you tell me that food is a delicacy from France or it's from down the street, it's going to taste the same to me. Either I'll like it or I won't. Stop worrying about this authenticity crap. You can't brand fish that way.
Personally, I think food should be labeled as what it is. If I buy something that says it's hamburger, I don't expect there to be 20 percent textured soy protein mixed in with the meat. Likewise, if I order a fish off a menu or buy it in a store, I expect it to be the fish it says it is.
Unfortunately, the fish industry seems particularly prone to this sort of mislabeling. Lots of types of fish seem to have "common names" that aren't particularly descriptive of what they actually are, yet they're allowed to be used on labels and in stores.
Example: I've seen a fish called "super white tuna" on menus at a number of sushi restaurants. I think it's pretty yummy myself; it can be so fatty that it actually tastes like butter. That's gotta be some exclusive, high-grade tuna, right? Wrong. Two problems here: First, this particular fish is illegal to sell in some countries because it can be so fatty that it causes (ahem) anal leakage. Seems like such a friendly-sounding fish should carry a warning label or something, no? Second, and most importantly, "super white tuna" isn't really tuna. It's actually a fish called escolar. It's not even in the same family as tuna. So why is this labeling legal?
Escolar isn't alone, either. "Rock cod" isn't really cod, for example. Seems to me this entire industry could use a lot more regulation and oversight, for multiple reasons. In the meantime, you pretty much have to bring a guidebook with you to know what you're getting when you order fish these days, and whether it's fished in sustainable ways. I recommend the app from the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
It isn't so much that what was once rubbish is now considered fine dining, but rather that due to multiculturalism, many foods that were once unpopular in a foreign country are being driven by populations that are made up of many more nationalities.
Actually, it's not so much about "fine dining" as the cycle of once-populous varieties being overfished almost to the point of extinction, forcing the mass-market fisheries to switch to different kinds of fish. The orange roughy craze of a few years ago was a fine example. You wouldn't have seen orange roughy on menus in the 70s or earlier; it's a variety of fish commonly called a "slimehead," and it's really ugly-looking, something like an angler fish. It also doesn't taste like much. That's why they marketed it as a "fine dining" fish, even though it's pretty easy to catch in huge amounts by deep trawling -- because they needed to trump up some reason why you'd actually eat it. Explain away that bland taste as "subtle, delicately flavored flesh," ship the fish to stores already filleted (so the customer never sees the whole fish), and never mention the word "slimehead," and it becomes the new market darling. Of course, as it turned out, orange roughy can live for over 100 years and they don't even begin breeding until they're 20 or 30, so they're incredibly susceptible to overfishing. Hence why you hardly ever see this "miracle fish" on menus anymore;10-15 years into the "craze" and the supplies are already dangerously depleted. On to the next fish.
Desktop PCs and servers seem to have largely overcome the need to reboot regularly, but other segments of the industry seem to be moving backwards. My Android handset actually says in the manual that you should power cycle it regularly. With a firmware upgrade, it even started giving me a warning from time to time, telling me I had not power cycled the phone in X amount of times and that I should do that now or risk instability. (Am I crazy for assuming that a phone OS is a markedly less complex environment than a Linux server? And here I thought Android applications ran in a fully memory-managed, garbage-collecting environment.)
And if you threatened anyone at a workplace in the manner you just threatened me, you would find yourself in jail. Most workplaces now do not tolerate violence, or the threat of it. You would be charged with assault, as that is what you just committed. In my state, it is a second degree misdemeanor, which has a maximum penalty of 60 days in jail and a $500 fine. After your jail time, you will find that you will no longer be employed.
Oh please. He would get called into a manager's office and chewed out. If you called the police they probably wouldn't even show up. Maybe it's you who need to "grow up."
LA to Vegas would make more economic sense.
Would it? L.A. to Vegas means crossing state lines, making it a multi-state venture and probably getting the Federal government involved, too.
Regardless, the company did the dev work and GUI, not the government: point (4) is invalid.
OK fine, some random company whose sole customer is the government. What's the difference? The story reads like an episode of the Twilight Zone. "I have invented a computer that can solve all the world's problems." I was actually expecting a zinger at the end -- "the board of directors voted the computer to be the new CEO."
1. Integrates multiple, disparate global databases and extracts information from them like magic.
2. Combines text, numeric data, and multimedia as if they were ingredients in a cake recipe.
3. Has a UI that looks just like something from a Hollywood movie.
4. Designed and implemented by the government.
Add that its name is derived from a fantasy novel, and why, yes, I do believe that this story is absolutely true.
e-Ink screens definitely can and do fail. The question is whether an airport scanner can make them fail.
Me, I'm thinking it's much easier to break your screen by packing your Kindle poorly than to break it by exposing it to X-rays or microwaves, but it's easier to get Amazon to replace your Kindle if you can grab a headline.
Boy, talk about a flimsy claim. It's as if eWeek couldn't resist running a juicy rumor, so when they couldn't find a single piece of evidence in support of the rumor, that became their headline (thus allowing them to run a story based on the rumor). They couldn't even find anyone to make the claim in a quote.
Let the anecdotal evidence begin. I've sent B&N Nooks (with e-ink displays) through airport security scanners at least a dozen times. No ill effects.
Hey, 1996 calling. Does our interpretation of how Java works still fit? Because if you're not using it anymore, we'd like it back.
That's kind of my point. You don't really send in the test. You wait a couple weeks and then you say whatever your kid should hear. Save it for when the kid's feeling discouraged.
We know genetic tests for sports achievement are bullshit anyway. If we relied strictly on genetic factors (and the received wisdom about them), there would be no white men playing basketball.
Great idea. I'm glad this service exists. You know what it's going to be really good for?
Lying. Saving your money but telling your kid you ran the test anyway, and what it said.
. You lose all claim to the moral high ground when you drag third-parties, who would otherwise be completely uninvolved, into your fight.
Ummmm, right. You been watching the news lately, or do you commute directly from downtown San Francisco to your log cabin?
You're right, though, that some people affected by Critical Mass are "completely uninvolved," in the sense that they're only in the City in the first place because they commute from out of town for work. Since they're not participating members of the San Francisco community, don't vote here, don't pay taxes here, and don't rely on city services for their day-to-day lives, their opinions on civic planning and other issues that affect the communities and neighborhoods of San Francisco are largely inconsequential. Sorry you were late for Friday dinner.
It's totally infeasible. Cities are big. The downtown areas where you do your shopping are just a tiny part of it (and probably aren't the places where most of the accidents happen). In San Francisco -- which is just 49 square miles of land -- the majority of it is residential. You're going to build elevated pedestrian walkways between the second stories of people's houses?
Also, I'm pretty sure building such walkways in downtown SF would be illegal because they'd be considered eyesores. There are plenty of places where zoning laws only allow buildings to be built so high, or only this many billboards are allowed, or lighted signs are allowed in one area but not another. Blocking out the sky with walkways every couple of city blocks would surely be regulated.
If you doubt a word I've written, just google for "critical mass".
OK, here you're being disingenuous. Critical Mass is a bicycling demonstration, held regularly to raise awareness of bicycling issues and the need for more bike-friendly streets in San Francisco. It inconveniences you because it's meant to, as a way to call attention to the fact that a great many people in San Francisco (not you, apparently) would like to ride their bikes to get around the city, but can't or don't do it as often as they'd like because the streets are too often unsafe, poorly maintained, and full of drivers who think they own the road. To claim that this once-monthly protest event (which takes place on a Friday evening) has anything to do with how bicyclists affect the normal flow of daily traffic in San Francisco is a total distortion of the truth.
My interpretation is that when the cars are going straight ahead there is enough noise (tire, wind?) such that pedestrians don't get whacked - but when a car is creeping along, like a turn or parking maneuver, pedestrians can't always hear them.
That's exactly my experience. It's not the movie trope of a speeding car coming flying through an intersection and the child's bike is seen flying up into the air. It's when drivers are actually trying to obey the speed limit -- either parking, or backing out of a driveway, or turning a corner in a 25mph residential zone -- that it becomes a problem. That's when the hybrid cars make almost no noise at all. And you don't need to be hit with high-speed force to be injured in a car accident. If that car hits you slowly but doesn't stop moving, you can be in real trouble. All it takes is a somewhat-oblivious driver in a silent car.
They're supposed to adhere to the normal rules that apply to other vehicles on the road but generally don't. And they regularly don't comply with the minimum speed limit regulations creating an unsafe situation for everybody involved when people have to drive along at a crawl and figure out how to pass.
I agree that this is a problem but you don't seem to understand what the problem actually is. You've just written two contradictory sentences. On the one hand, cyclists are supposed to behave exactly like cars and do everything that cars do. On the other hand, cyclists cannot travel at the same speed as cars. So what should they do to appease you? One way cyclists have learned to accommodate cars is to break the traffic laws, in order to get out of cars' way. But you've said that's not acceptable.
Drivers seem to want it both ways. Or rather, they don't want it any way at all -- they won't slow down for cyclists, they'll fly into a screaming tizzy whenever they see a cyclist run a stop sign, yet Lord knows they won't allow their taxes to be used to pay for bike lanes. Hence, cyclists think drivers are unreasonable and figure, "fuck 'em."
Meanwhile, road raging drivers like to think they'll "teach bikers a lesson," by swerving into them, cutting them off with sudden turns, and other clever pranks -- and whenever I see that I just think to myself, when you're rotting in jail for vehicular manslaughter, facing the rest of your life knowing you killed some 19-year-old girl because she wouldn't let you play speed-n-brake with the traffic lights... will it have been worth it?
The problem with EVs isn't as bad as some people make out though since much of the noise is from the tyres on the road and air being forced aside; the engine contributes relatively little.
In traffic, maybe. But I don't think this is necessarily about people crossing at the light at a crosswalk at a busy intersection.
I live in a city, where there's a lot of ambient noise. That city is San Francisco, where, as you can imagine, there are a lot of hybrid cars. And I can tell you, while not being elevated in my mind quite to the level of "cause for concern" just yet, quiet cars can be a problem.
I live on a predominantly residential street, where people have their cars in garages with very short driveways that cross the public sidewalk. The sound a combustion engine makes when it's backing out of a garage at low speed is very much more noticeable than the more-or-less complete silence of a hybrid engine. If, as you're walking along, you were fussing with your shopping bags, or tugging on your dog's leash, or looking over your shoulder to see if the bus is coming, it would be very easy to get run over by a hybrid car without ever realizing it was coming.
Hybrid cars also round streetcorners in front of you when you're preparing to cross the street. Some of the cross-streets on the street I live on are one-way, single-lane streets, on hills, with a building right on the corner. It's very easy to be surprised by a car making a lefthand turn as you're walking up the road -- even more so if the car doesn't make any noise.
The problem isn't a crisis, but it really is about more than just accommodating "stupid people," or handicapped people who can't hear at normal levels. Regular people can very easily miss a hybrid car coming.
Also, I think some of the people who scoff at this idea live in parts of America where you're essentially wedded to your car. There are many cities, however -- San Francisco, Boston, Portland, New York, Seattle -- where a lot of people, or even a majority, don't rely on a car for most of their travel. That means they spend at least part of their day on foot or on a bike on public streets. In New York and San Francisco, lots of people don't even own cars. So maybe you're not likely to get run down by a hybrid car every day, but if you're on the street every day, all year long... it could happen.
My parents do a lot of RVing, too, and I've joined them on trips, and I'm not sure I've ever seen any RV park with a "perimeter fence" around it. Especially not in a forested area like the OP describes. Also, he discounted the possibility of fiber runs, because he can't run cables underground and hanging cables get damaged. As for mounting APs on structures, I assume that's what he's doing now.
He mentioned this. He says there are already TV cables strung tree-to-tree, and the problem is that they occasionally get melted by heat from the various fire pits around the property. It seems to me he could still investigate using cables as much as possible, though...
Surely, any snowbird that can afford an RV can afford a 4G connection?
I don't think the OP's question was "how can I encourage everybody at the RV park to get a 4G connection for $80/month each." It was "how can I upgrade the RV park's WiFi network to improve the coverage everybody already gets in the park."
Ahh, I kinda took his request for "no rooting required" as meaning he didn't want to jump through hoops to install an OS on it. I guess he just wants someone else to offer a vertically-integrated, locked-down product like Apple's. (Why?)
That's pretty much how I read it, too. They're saying it's equivalent to saying something like, "Staying still will reduce the risk of changing position." What are the precise risk factors that could cause you to change position? "Movement."
There are plenty of competitors and even some that have superior specs to either of the ones being discussed here. The key is price. Both Amazon and B&N are expecting you to buy content to stock your device, and that's how they plan to make up for the deep discounts on the hardware.
I have an HP laptop that came with a built-in optical drive (you can't swap it out), and I'm not kidding you, with the screen brightness turned down, the stock battery gives me around 7.5 hours running time, with WiFi enabled. Long gone are the days when you had to lug around a couple extra pounds worth of pluggable drives and extra batteries. The whole kit n' kaboodle weighs 4.4 lbs -- heavier than a MacBook Air, to be sure, but lighter than a lot of women's purses.