Does "scientific literacy" mean believing anything anyone with a degree in a scientific field tells you? If so then I guess I would have to believe in various Gods, because there have been countless thousands of genuine scientists who have believed in a god of one sort or another. Many great scientists have not been atheists. So if I'm an atheist does that mean I am scientifically illiterate? It sounds to me like scientific literacy is actually just a form of obedience.
Scientist: "Humans are raising the temperature of the planet and soon the sea will rise, and fields will burn and the oceans will boil. We are doomed unless we go back to pre-industrial civilization and accept our oneness with nature.
Denier: "Are you sure about that?"
Scientist: "Yes, damnit! If you and everyone else on this doomed planet does not stop burning stuff all life on earth will perish and very soon."
Denier: "Wow. That sounds ominous. Are you sure you're sure?"
Scientist: "I have a PhD in Climate Science. Believe me. We are all going to die unless we can stop our deadly addiction to combustion. I am a scientist."
Denier: "Okay. I bow to your vastly superior intellect. I will put out this cigarette and never again engage in the sin of combustion. I guess I'll have to sell my car. Can I borrow your bike?"
It would probably raise their property values. I wonder if the greenies are rushing out to sell their waterfront property since it will soon be submerged. Then AGW deniers like me can idiotically buy their waterfront homes for pennies on the dollar and await the Great Submergence which will no doubt happen in short order. If I really believed in AGW I'd definitely be buying up property in Alaska. Alaskan property would eventually be some of the most valuable on the globe if AGW theory is correct. Of course whether eventually means 100 years or 1000,000 isn't clear to me. Either way property values at the equator are doomed. Doomed, I tell you. I'm pro AGW if only because of the interesting financial opportunities it would present. I'll be burning things just on principle. To help things along. Starting forest fires for fun and profit!
No, I'm suggesting that although coal might seem advantageous in the short term, it is severely detrimental to the host country and indeed to the rest of the world in the long term, and actually poses serious local problems in the short term as well.
Great. Now as soon as you can prove that to a certainly of 100% based on real science, not computer-model pseudo-science you'll have a case to bring to the Chinese. And you know what? They'd probably still ignore you.
Like any experiment, first you'll need a control. My suggestion would be to clone the planet earth so that we have a sister planet where no humans are allowed to live for 100 years. Then after 100 years you can compare the average temperatures of each. Then you'll have some actual experimental data to back up AGW.
It would also help to be able to prove that Peak Oil is not going to happen at any time in the next few hundred years because once we run out of oil and coal and natural gas and trees to burn we'll have no choice but to make the changes you want all over the world.
Can you demonstrate a temperature increase of at least a few degrees over the past decade or two at various reporting stations? That would definitely get people's attention.
You have to be able to demonstrate that we have a dire emergency. Not 1000 or 10,000 years from now, but while people today will still be alive. Otherwise you will just be ignored. No one would want to make the kinds of changes the greenies want even if AGW were truly scientifically proven. So you need to have a very convincing case. So far I don't think you do. Even if you could convince governments you won't convince most people. Which means you'll have the rather daunting problem of enforcement. Trying to stop combustion all over the planet will be pretty tough. I wish you luck.
Your points are well taken. Nevertheless I think it might be possible for even a relatively small group of people with different skills to build a launchable spacecraft for free. Not an interstellar craft of course. The only current tech that may be able to do that involves nuclear weapons. Probably in addition to a lunar smelter and manufacturing facility. So that's government only.
Nevertheless I have to wonder about the potential for some kind of space project that people work on in their spare time. Weekends, vacations, sabbaticals. Retired engineers and scientists. University students. If money is the only thing stopping our species from further space exploration it seems like a large organization of highly motivated people could achieve something with very little money.
How do large open source software projects get 'funding'? Surely there are a lot of man hours in something like Firefox or Linux. Where did the money come from to pay for all that work?
I wouldn't read too much into The Great Silence. It is surprising that there are no bright beacons, unless you consider pulsars to be beacons, but neither the radio silence nor the lack of probes in every star system really prove very much. SETI is a needle in a haystack search. A large number of improbable events would have to occur for us to receive a signal that way. For all we know there could be loud transmissions from Epsilon Indi or Gliese 581, but on a frequency that more or less requires a radio telescope that isn't at the bottom of a vast oxygen-nitrogen ocean. Our atmosphere is virtually opaque to many frequencies and the idea of the 'water hole' meaning anything special to other species is a huge stretch.
It seems like those 'techniques' are mostly just assumptions about what a guilty person would say. An intelligent suspect will not answer any questions period. Whether guilty or not. Not even with their attorney present. Even if torture is used the best thing to do is just to STFU. Even if you are innocent. And I'm not only talking about the 5th amendment and suspects in the US.
I don't drive a hybrid but at idle the engine is pretty quiet. I use a hypermiling technique called "pulse and glide" where you accelerate up to speed and then let the car glide for a while in neutral.
During the glide the tire noise is much louder than the engine. I have to wonder if differences between tire noise is more dangerous than differences between ICE and electric motors. Depending on the tires I could easily imagine an ICE car being quieter than a hybrid. Some tires are very quiet.
But in this case he would lose any grant money from the government. Regardless of how objective the scientists may be the government is not. The scientist might win a Nobel prize, but first he would be demonized in the media as a shill for the oil companies and hated by every greenie on the planet and considered a crackpot by the vast majority of non-scientists.
Stanley Lippman's C++ Primer, 4th ed. and Inside the C++ Object Model.
Why C++ and not something like Python or Java? Becuase C++ is what you use to program games and I think one of the best thing a kid can to is try to write a simple game.
I'd also recommend a book on Qt 4 or whatever your favorite cross platform GUI library is. He should understand early on that there is more than just Windows or OS X out there and Qt looks good in all 3 major OSes.
If he is interested in writing a simple game I'd also recommend some texts on assembly language so that he can practice using inline assembly in inner loops. Great fun and it helps build intuition about how computers 'think'. Obviously DirectX and/or OpenGL are also quite essential.
He could even play around with game engines like Torque, Ogre, Leadwerks, Unreal Development Kit, CryEngine 2, Unity, or Unigine.
If he is interested in writing internet apps then C/C++ is probably not the best platform. In that case maybe C#/Mono might be better. And don't forget the MIT's computer introductory computer science courses.
If you can find a Windows 7 x64 driver for my Chaintech AV-710 sound card that actually works I would be most grateful and would immediately pirate a copy of Windows 7 Embedded so that your employer could gain even more market share. Working drivers exist for Linux and XP x64, but not for Windows 7 x64.
Would you hesitate to say something good about your company and its products to a friend at a coffee shop?
I bet he would now.
Neither do you have reason to hesitate about saying good things about your company and its products in social media.
He does now. He's clearly working for a bunch of dishonest, lying, scumbags who would rather make money through fraud/deception than actually offering something that sells itself because it's actually good. If it's actually good all he'd have to do is post a link and tell people that he works on a product that does X. People could decide for themselves whether it's any good or not.
But not disclosing your relationship with the company that makes the product is deception and might even be against the law. Even if you genuinely love the product.
Or how about AstroturfingForDollars or PaidShill? It's not a bad idea. As long as you disclose your bias astroturfing isn't really astroturfing anymore.
I don't think he owns the company. So it's not 'his' company. Even if he likes the product, pretending not to be a company employee being ordered to post warm and fuzzy fake posts is deception. It is completely unethical. Only a sociopath would feel no guilt at all doing something like that.
My integrity, the ability to look myself in the mirror without shame, is more important to me than having to quit and take a pay cut working somewhere else. You won't be able to buy back your self-respect and integrity with the extra money you are making. I don't know if you have children or not, but if you did have them would you want them to know that you are deceiving people for money?
Nevertheless the simplest solution is to just ignore the request and lie to the unethical liars (your employer) if asked. Also, if you notice what you feel is astroturfing you can make an anonymous post (ideally from an internet cafe) admitting that employees of the company have been asked to astroturf. Astroturfing is an unambiguous form of fraud.
I have noticed that dedicated liars like to assume that everyone else is a liar too. Despite what you may want to believe there actually are people who would only lie to save their own life or some other emergency situation. I haven't encountered many scenarios where lying was a life or death decision.
You do realize that the TSA is not a privately owned company, right? The only alternative to the free market is government owned businesses and those don't tend to work so well. Any system run by people is going to be flawed. The question is not "what is the perfect system?" The question is which system sucks less. And that would definitely be privately owned companies. Especially if they are not corporations.
Also the two examples you mentioned: patent trolling and lobbying for laws that give them an unfair advantage are only possible with a government that interferes with the market.
Fear. The noblest of motivations. We should let fear guide us in all of our endeavors. There is no greater guiding principle than fear and the desire to be safe. Look how much it has improved the US since 9/11.
I don't trust anything the FBI says. Any more than I would trust an announcement from the NKVD (The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs). What is the purpose of this announcement supposed to be? To induce paranoia and racism against any student whose genetics cannot be traced from Western Europe? Is it something along the lines of "If you see something, say something."? And look where that got us. The persecution of innocent people who look middle eastern or Indian or Pakistani. I think it's clear that our government's vision of an ideal society is to that of East Germany except more racially pure.
The school's campus in Dubai needed a bailout and an unlikely savior had stepped forward: a Dubai-based company that offered to provide money and students.
Simon was tempted. She also worried that the company, which had investors from Iran and wanted to recruit students from there, might be a front for the Iranian government, she said. If so, an agreement could violate federal trade sanctions and invite enemy spies.
The CIA couldnâ(TM)t confirm that the company wasnâ(TM)t an arm of Iranâ(TM)s government. Simon rejected the offer and shut down undergraduate programs in Dubai, at a loss of $3.7 million.
Un-fucking-believable. Paranoia, distrust, racism. It's truly a shameful time to be an American. Yes. College students are a threat. All Iranians and people from Dubai are a threat. Everyone and everything except lily white Americans of pure European descent are threats to our 'national security'. Trust no one. There are conspiracies everywhere you look and only the FBI and CIA can save us. Better increase their funding or we're all gonna die!
We were always dark to any size radio telescope that is easy for us to imagine. If the aliens have radio telescopes hundreds or even thousands of miles in diameter, dishes that are on a planetary scale, then all bets are off, but otherwise we have been pretty quiet even to Alpha Centauri. 99.9% of our transmissions stay within the earth's atmosphere. It's really only things like weather radar that might indicate our presence to a truly immense alien dish.
I think it's pretty likely that we have always been more or less radio quiet even to our nearest neighbors. Well except for the recent intentional transmissions from the Ukraine and Australia and once or twice even from Arecibo. Although as usual we cowardly Americans choose to let fear guide our actions. Our most serious Arecibo transmission was sent to a galaxy so distant that it may as well not have been sent at all. Damn cowards. If we were serious Arecibo would be the place to start. Of course the Chinese will soon have a dish even bigger and better than Arecibo. If they want to transmit no one is going to stop them. We should be making regular weekly or at least monthly transmissions to all of our nearest neighbors that can be reached from Arecibo. Unfortunately that wouldn't include Alpha Centauri, our nearest of near neighbors. For that we'd have to rely on Australia or Chile.
I ended up with a Mini, but I seriously considered a CR-Z. I also like the looks. One problem I had though was with the seat. My back was already hurting me after the 15 minute test drive. Probably the most un-ergonomic car seat I've ever experienced in a modern car.
I average about 35 mpg with a mix of back road and highway driving. When hyper-miling at 55 mph or less I can approach 50 MPG with pulse-and-glide. Mostly back roads though. What do you average with the CR-Z?
Actually I tried pinned apps and all the other post-XP GUI crap and I hated it. Pinned apps are definitely a step backward. Task switchers and app launchers should be separate. Probably the only reason Microsoft is combining the two functions is to emulate the OS X dock which I also hate.
I have yet to see a single argument as to why any of the newer Windows GUI stuff is more productive in any way. Just because something is newer doesn't mean it is better. Admittedly GUIs tend to be very personal things. Some people love docks, not only in OSX but in Linux as well. I don't prefer the XP fisher price GUI because I love it. I prefer it because it doesn't suck as badly as the Windows 7 version. I much prefer several Linux GUIs. The freedom to choose your own GUI is one of my favorite features in Linux. It's just wonderful. There is no excuse for doing things any other way.
I think Windows 2000/XP was the only good operating system Microsoft has ever made or will ever make. If they finally make a MinWin kernel with modular, customizable GUIs only then will I be impressed. Only then will they be able to compete with Linux. It's pathetic that Microsoft can design a modular install system for Windows 7 Embedded, but aren't willing to offer a consumer version of that. Microsoft is anti-consumer in every way. I never used to hate Microsoft but I am starting to now. Rather than upgrading to Windows 8 I am seriously considering dumping Windows completely except for playing games. Once I am no longer able to use XP x64 due to lack of driver support or whatever I will probably only boot to Windows to play games.
If someone is tampering with their meter, they are a criminal and should be prosecuted.
Well, duh. Has anyone here denied that stealing electricity is unethical and against the law? I suspect that outside of third world countries electricity theft is exceedingly rare. So you get to cut your electricity bill by 25% if you are smart or 50% or more if you are stupid and you're going to risk going to prison and getting a criminal record for that? Unless you use absolutely immense amounts of electricity, in which case you can probably afford it anyway, the risk totally isn't justified by the reward. I tend not to believe anything the FBI says anyway. They're a bunch of professional liars. They are almost certainly exaggerating.
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Does "scientific literacy" mean believing anything anyone with a degree in a scientific field tells you? If so then I guess I would have to believe in various Gods, because there have been countless thousands of genuine scientists who have believed in a god of one sort or another. Many great scientists have not been atheists. So if I'm an atheist does that mean I am scientifically illiterate? It sounds to me like scientific literacy is actually just a form of obedience.
Scientist: "Humans are raising the temperature of the planet and soon the sea will rise, and fields will burn and the oceans will boil. We are doomed unless we go back to pre-industrial civilization and accept our oneness with nature.
Denier: "Are you sure about that?"
Scientist: "Yes, damnit! If you and everyone else on this doomed planet does not stop burning stuff all life on earth will perish and very soon."
Denier: "Wow. That sounds ominous. Are you sure you're sure?"
Scientist: "I have a PhD in Climate Science. Believe me. We are all going to die unless we can stop our deadly addiction to combustion. I am a scientist."
Denier: "Okay. I bow to your vastly superior intellect. I will put out this cigarette and never again engage in the sin of combustion. I guess I'll have to sell my car. Can I borrow your bike?"
It would probably raise their property values. I wonder if the greenies are rushing out to sell their waterfront property since it will soon be submerged. Then AGW deniers like me can idiotically buy their waterfront homes for pennies on the dollar and await the Great Submergence which will no doubt happen in short order. If I really believed in AGW I'd definitely be buying up property in Alaska. Alaskan property would eventually be some of the most valuable on the globe if AGW theory is correct. Of course whether eventually means 100 years or 1000,000 isn't clear to me. Either way property values at the equator are doomed. Doomed, I tell you. I'm pro AGW if only because of the interesting financial opportunities it would present. I'll be burning things just on principle. To help things along. Starting forest fires for fun and profit!
No, I'm suggesting that although coal might seem advantageous in the short term, it is severely detrimental to the host country and indeed to the rest of the world in the long term, and actually poses serious local problems in the short term as well.
Great. Now as soon as you can prove that to a certainly of 100% based on real science, not computer-model pseudo-science you'll have a case to bring to the Chinese. And you know what? They'd probably still ignore you.
Like any experiment, first you'll need a control. My suggestion would be to clone the planet earth so that we have a sister planet where no humans are allowed to live for 100 years. Then after 100 years you can compare the average temperatures of each. Then you'll have some actual experimental data to back up AGW.
It would also help to be able to prove that Peak Oil is not going to happen at any time in the next few hundred years because once we run out of oil and coal and natural gas and trees to burn we'll have no choice but to make the changes you want all over the world.
Can you demonstrate a temperature increase of at least a few degrees over the past decade or two at various reporting stations? That would definitely get people's attention.
You have to be able to demonstrate that we have a dire emergency. Not 1000 or 10,000 years from now, but while people today will still be alive. Otherwise you will just be ignored. No one would want to make the kinds of changes the greenies want even if AGW were truly scientifically proven. So you need to have a very convincing case. So far I don't think you do. Even if you could convince governments you won't convince most people. Which means you'll have the rather daunting problem of enforcement. Trying to stop combustion all over the planet will be pretty tough. I wish you luck.
Your points are well taken. Nevertheless I think it might be possible for even a relatively small group of people with different skills to build a launchable spacecraft for free. Not an interstellar craft of course. The only current tech that may be able to do that involves nuclear weapons. Probably in addition to a lunar smelter and manufacturing facility. So that's government only.
Nevertheless I have to wonder about the potential for some kind of space project that people work on in their spare time. Weekends, vacations, sabbaticals. Retired engineers and scientists. University students. If money is the only thing stopping our species from further space exploration it seems like a large organization of highly motivated people could achieve something with very little money.
How do large open source software projects get 'funding'? Surely there are a lot of man hours in something like Firefox or Linux. Where did the money come from to pay for all that work?
I wouldn't read too much into The Great Silence. It is surprising that there are no bright beacons, unless you consider pulsars to be beacons, but neither the radio silence nor the lack of probes in every star system really prove very much. SETI is a needle in a haystack search. A large number of improbable events would have to occur for us to receive a signal that way. For all we know there could be loud transmissions from Epsilon Indi or Gliese 581, but on a frequency that more or less requires a radio telescope that isn't at the bottom of a vast oxygen-nitrogen ocean. Our atmosphere is virtually opaque to many frequencies and the idea of the 'water hole' meaning anything special to other species is a huge stretch.
It seems like those 'techniques' are mostly just assumptions about what a guilty person would say. An intelligent suspect will not answer any questions period. Whether guilty or not. Not even with their attorney present. Even if torture is used the best thing to do is just to STFU. Even if you are innocent. And I'm not only talking about the 5th amendment and suspects in the US.
I don't drive a hybrid but at idle the engine is pretty quiet. I use a hypermiling technique called "pulse and glide" where you accelerate up to speed and then let the car glide for a while in neutral.
During the glide the tire noise is much louder than the engine. I have to wonder if differences between tire noise is more dangerous than differences between ICE and electric motors. Depending on the tires I could easily imagine an ICE car being quieter than a hybrid. Some tires are very quiet.
But in this case he would lose any grant money from the government. Regardless of how objective the scientists may be the government is not. The scientist might win a Nobel prize, but first he would be demonized in the media as a shill for the oil companies and hated by every greenie on the planet and considered a crackpot by the vast majority of non-scientists.
Stanley Lippman's C++ Primer, 4th ed. and Inside the C++ Object Model.
Why C++ and not something like Python or Java? Becuase C++ is what you use to program games and I think one of the best thing a kid can to is try to write a simple game.
I'd also recommend a book on Qt 4 or whatever your favorite cross platform GUI library is. He should understand early on that there is more than just Windows or OS X out there and Qt looks good in all 3 major OSes.
If he is interested in writing a simple game I'd also recommend some texts on assembly language so that he can practice using inline assembly in inner loops. Great fun and it helps build intuition about how computers 'think'. Obviously DirectX and/or OpenGL are also quite essential.
He could even play around with game engines like Torque, Ogre, Leadwerks, Unreal Development Kit, CryEngine 2, Unity, or Unigine.
If he is interested in writing internet apps then C/C++ is probably not the best platform. In that case maybe C#/Mono might be better. And don't forget the MIT's computer introductory computer science courses.
If you can find a Windows 7 x64 driver for my Chaintech AV-710 sound card that actually works I would be most grateful and would immediately pirate a copy of Windows 7 Embedded so that your employer could gain even more market share. Working drivers exist for Linux and XP x64, but not for Windows 7 x64.
Only people below a certain age do that. Older people don't mind 'walls of text'. Not everyone grew up texting on cell phones.
Would you hesitate to say something good about your company and its products to a friend at a coffee shop?
I bet he would now.
Neither do you have reason to hesitate about saying good things about your company and its products in social media.
He does now. He's clearly working for a bunch of dishonest, lying, scumbags who would rather make money through fraud/deception than actually offering something that sells itself because it's actually good. If it's actually good all he'd have to do is post a link and tell people that he works on a product that does X. People could decide for themselves whether it's any good or not.
Telling people that you work on product X and asking people to check it out is not astroturfing, and also not what this slimy company asked him to do.
But not disclosing your relationship with the company that makes the product is deception and might even be against the law. Even if you genuinely love the product.
Or how about AstroturfingForDollars or PaidShill? It's not a bad idea. As long as you disclose your bias astroturfing isn't really astroturfing anymore.
I don't think he owns the company. So it's not 'his' company. Even if he likes the product, pretending not to be a company employee being ordered to post warm and fuzzy fake posts is deception. It is completely unethical. Only a sociopath would feel no guilt at all doing something like that.
My integrity, the ability to look myself in the mirror without shame, is more important to me than having to quit and take a pay cut working somewhere else. You won't be able to buy back your self-respect and integrity with the extra money you are making. I don't know if you have children or not, but if you did have them would you want them to know that you are deceiving people for money?
Nevertheless the simplest solution is to just ignore the request and lie to the unethical liars (your employer) if asked. Also, if you notice what you feel is astroturfing you can make an anonymous post (ideally from an internet cafe) admitting that employees of the company have been asked to astroturf. Astroturfing is an unambiguous form of fraud.
I have noticed that dedicated liars like to assume that everyone else is a liar too. Despite what you may want to believe there actually are people who would only lie to save their own life or some other emergency situation. I haven't encountered many scenarios where lying was a life or death decision.
You do realize that the TSA is not a privately owned company, right? The only alternative to the free market is government owned businesses and those don't tend to work so well. Any system run by people is going to be flawed. The question is not "what is the perfect system?" The question is which system sucks less. And that would definitely be privately owned companies. Especially if they are not corporations.
Also the two examples you mentioned: patent trolling and lobbying for laws that give them an unfair advantage are only possible with a government that interferes with the market.
Fear. The noblest of motivations. We should let fear guide us in all of our endeavors. There is no greater guiding principle than fear and the desire to be safe. Look how much it has improved the US since 9/11.
I don't trust anything the FBI says. Any more than I would trust an announcement from the NKVD (The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs). What is the purpose of this announcement supposed to be? To induce paranoia and racism against any student whose genetics cannot be traced from Western Europe? Is it something along the lines of "If you see something, say something."? And look where that got us. The persecution of innocent people who look middle eastern or Indian or Pakistani. I think it's clear that our government's vision of an ideal society is to that of East Germany except more racially pure.
The school's campus in Dubai needed a bailout and an unlikely savior had stepped forward: a Dubai-based company that offered to provide money and students.
Simon was tempted. She also worried that the company, which had investors from Iran and wanted to recruit students from there, might be a front for the Iranian government, she said. If so, an agreement could violate federal trade sanctions and invite enemy spies.
The CIA couldnâ(TM)t confirm that the company wasnâ(TM)t an arm of Iranâ(TM)s government. Simon rejected the offer and shut down undergraduate programs in Dubai, at a loss of $3.7 million.
Un-fucking-believable. Paranoia, distrust, racism. It's truly a shameful time to be an American. Yes. College students are a threat. All Iranians and people from Dubai are a threat. Everyone and everything except lily white Americans of pure European descent are threats to our 'national security'. Trust no one. There are conspiracies everywhere you look and only the FBI and CIA can save us. Better increase their funding or we're all gonna die!
We were always dark to any size radio telescope that is easy for us to imagine. If the aliens have radio telescopes hundreds or even thousands of miles in diameter, dishes that are on a planetary scale, then all bets are off, but otherwise we have been pretty quiet even to Alpha Centauri. 99.9% of our transmissions stay within the earth's atmosphere. It's really only things like weather radar that might indicate our presence to a truly immense alien dish.
I think it's pretty likely that we have always been more or less radio quiet even to our nearest neighbors. Well except for the recent intentional transmissions from the Ukraine and Australia and once or twice even from Arecibo. Although as usual we cowardly Americans choose to let fear guide our actions. Our most serious Arecibo transmission was sent to a galaxy so distant that it may as well not have been sent at all. Damn cowards. If we were serious Arecibo would be the place to start. Of course the Chinese will soon have a dish even bigger and better than Arecibo. If they want to transmit no one is going to stop them. We should be making regular weekly or at least monthly transmissions to all of our nearest neighbors that can be reached from Arecibo. Unfortunately that wouldn't include Alpha Centauri, our nearest of near neighbors. For that we'd have to rely on Australia or Chile.
I ended up with a Mini, but I seriously considered a CR-Z. I also like the looks. One problem I had though was with the seat. My back was already hurting me after the 15 minute test drive. Probably the most un-ergonomic car seat I've ever experienced in a modern car.
I average about 35 mpg with a mix of back road and highway driving. When hyper-miling at 55 mph or less I can approach 50 MPG with pulse-and-glide. Mostly back roads though. What do you average with the CR-Z?
Actually I tried pinned apps and all the other post-XP GUI crap and I hated it. Pinned apps are definitely a step backward. Task switchers and app launchers should be separate. Probably the only reason Microsoft is combining the two functions is to emulate the OS X dock which I also hate.
I have yet to see a single argument as to why any of the newer Windows GUI stuff is more productive in any way. Just because something is newer doesn't mean it is better. Admittedly GUIs tend to be very personal things. Some people love docks, not only in OSX but in Linux as well. I don't prefer the XP fisher price GUI because I love it. I prefer it because it doesn't suck as badly as the Windows 7 version. I much prefer several Linux GUIs. The freedom to choose your own GUI is one of my favorite features in Linux. It's just wonderful. There is no excuse for doing things any other way.
I think Windows 2000/XP was the only good operating system Microsoft has ever made or will ever make. If they finally make a MinWin kernel with modular, customizable GUIs only then will I be impressed. Only then will they be able to compete with Linux. It's pathetic that Microsoft can design a modular install system for Windows 7 Embedded, but aren't willing to offer a consumer version of that. Microsoft is anti-consumer in every way. I never used to hate Microsoft but I am starting to now. Rather than upgrading to Windows 8 I am seriously considering dumping Windows completely except for playing games. Once I am no longer able to use XP x64 due to lack of driver support or whatever I will probably only boot to Windows to play games.
If someone is tampering with their meter, they are a criminal and should be prosecuted.
Well, duh. Has anyone here denied that stealing electricity is unethical and against the law? I suspect that outside of third world countries electricity theft is exceedingly rare. So you get to cut your electricity bill by 25% if you are smart or 50% or more if you are stupid and you're going to risk going to prison and getting a criminal record for that? Unless you use absolutely immense amounts of electricity, in which case you can probably afford it anyway, the risk totally isn't justified by the reward. I tend not to believe anything the FBI says anyway. They're a bunch of professional liars. They are almost certainly exaggerating.