Some of the revelations, however, while detailing operations that are technically legal, do paint the organzation in a light that shows it to be an unchecked body with too much power and not enough supervision.
"Honey, where are the parental controls settings on this NSA thing again? I can't find them using the damn remote!"
There are a lot of people in New Orleans who would disagree with that.
Wait, the U.S. military shot down a hurricane that was about to attack U.S. citizens? Or it fought the hurricane, and drove it back into the sea, after it dared to attack U.S. soil?
Look, I appreciate the cleanup efforts that the National Guard was able to engage in, after the local politicians finally got their act together enough to let the National Guard and FEMA into their jurisdictions (which they held off doing for a very long time, at the cost of many lives, and a lot of property), but to say that the military in this case was protecting citizens, rather than engaging in a relief operation, is a lie.
India developed nuclear capability after the 1970 nuclear non-proliferation treaty which created the so-called "Nuclear Club". India is still not a signatory to this treaty, along with Israel, Pakistan, South Sudan, and (now that they've withdrawn from it) North Korea.
The intent was to prevent them from, or at least slow progress on, developing an ICBM delivery system for nuclear warheads, without them becoming signatory to the treaty. They could have had the technology for the asking, if the became a signatory.
For this same reason, it's unlikely that there would be a similar transfer to any non-signatory state, and probably not Taiwan, which claims they are abiding to the treaty, but have so far refused to become signatory to it.
It's pretty hypocritical to complain about the blocking of a technology transfer of this particular technology under the circumstances, given that India tested it's Agni V ICBM last September, and can hit targets in pretty much all of Europe, Asia, and Austrailia, and much of Africa.
How about we just gameify gamification? Then we can quit talking about it, and trying to sell the idea to VCs who, like the rest of us, don't think it's going to work to solve interesting problems, and if it does, well, the people playing the gamefication game will self-solve the problem for us, won't they?
I totally agree with the parent, the collection size is pathetic. I have >6,000 physical books I personally own, and they fit in a spare bedroom with room for a desk and about 20 computers on two bakers racks in it, along with several filing cabinets.
The reading experience on eReaders is shit (I say this having worked on 3 of them, if you include the iPad), title selection is limited to things available as eBooks which leaves out almost everything that isn't pablum or that didn't come off copyright pre Sonny Bono "Save The Mouse For Disney!" copyright extensions (0 books come off copyright and enter the public domain in 2014), and it's trivially easy to both track reading habits, and to engage in censorship fairly instantly (think Snapchat for politically "inconvenient" books).
This is just a really, really stupid idea. Excuse me now, I have to get back to building my EMP Gun Kit that I bought online.
As a military intelligence officer he released military intelligence during wartime in a war that LEGALLY approved by all political parties in both the US and the UK.
Citation needed.
Specifically, where are the Articles of War, ratified by both houses of the Congress of the U.S., and signed by the President of the U.S. which are required for the U.S. to actually BE in a state of war, such that this was in fact an act which occurred during wartime?
Complaint #1: ESR's reasoning, and the only theoretically justifiable one in the entire blog post, is that bzr is slow. All version control systems are slow. The more you keep the modification history around, the more people you have hitting a single repo, the slower they get.
When Apple moved from CVS to SVN, it was because of two things: The first was Linux-based Apple RAID boxes that Apple was OEM'ing from a third part had some bug where they lost data, and this messed up some of the CVS backing files. With a single backing file, as in SVN, this situation only improved because the switch came around the time the bugs in AppleRAID had already been resolved; otherwise, it would have been the whole repo, not just a couple of files, getting screwed up. The second one was that the CVS repo was slow. This was pixable by sharding it so different projects used repos on different servers. The new SVN server on the other hand, was lightening fast... until we moved over the entire modification history from the CVS server to the SVN server, and all the CVS users stopped hitting the CVS server, and started hitting the SVN server instead. Then the SVN server was just as slow as the CVS server had been, and we were back to the status quo.
The lesson you should take from this is that it doesn't matter your version control system is slow, because they *ALL* are, and so it doesn't make a difference what VCS you end up using, as long as the primary maintainer likes it.
Complaint #2: ESR claims that, because it's in bzr and not git, it's harder to submit patches to EMACS. This is patently false. The older an Open Source project is, the harder it is to submit patches, and you VCS doesn't matter to this, because the difficulty isn't the VCS, it's the politics of change.
As projects get older and older, there's kingdom building that happens, and it's nigh impossible to get a change in that's going to cross one or more boundaries between kingdoms. The more kingdoms you code changes go into, the more code it changes, the more impossible it is to get those changes in. One of the big deals here is the "I won't approve your patch until you rewrite it the way I would have written it if I'd done it, but since I don't have the time (except to review and complain, of course -- then I have buckets of time), I'm not going to take the patch". This is called "time to get a new king instead of an asshole" effect for short.
The lesson you should take from this is that it's not the VCS, it's the politics, and yeah, if you switch VCSs, you'll get a window when not everyone is up enough on the new stuff that they can get in your way, if you're working with smart people: they will be. So switching VCSs is typically a means of cutting through red tape that shouldn't be there in the first place, and it never works for long.
Non-complaint #1: ESR states that bzr is "old and crufty" and that "it's mailing lists are dying and patches are dwindling", and that this is somehow bad.
It's not bad: that's what happens with mature, purpose-built tools: once the damn things work well enough, unless you have someone pushing change for changes sake to get themselves into the commit log or README file, the changes dry up, and the tool tends not to change. So activity on a mailing list or in a commit log for a mature tool is not a way to value that tool.
Before anyone jumps on me for this posting please read this: I personally don't use bzr, so I have no skin in this game. I've used over a dozen different VCSs, and with the exception on one that ran on DOS, which I would never use again, they're all pretty much solving the same problem, and you shouldn't really give a damn about what a projects primary maintainer likes to use, as long as the thing does the job.
The dude does have a very legitimate beef though, considering he's taken these around to probably dozens of countries and crossed several hundred borders with them. He apparently had some "raw" material with him to make new flutes, but that wood typically needs to be completely dry and aged. Either way the carved flutes were likely sealed and shouldn't have been destroyed without a very, very good reason, which I doubt the CBP had.
It think because it's about out of control security apparatus, so it's kind of topical?
I guess they will start siezing wood furniture from Ikea now, since,, you know, wood is an agricultural product.
This isn't worthy of being a story, we all grew up using command lines.
At least one of those programs is Windows-only, and all the rest have Windows versions, and Visual Basic is Windows-only.
I'm pretty sure he has little or no familiarity with the UNIX programming environment, and he's not even aware of COM-based programming using third party libraries and components on Windows well enough to know that you can in fact script all Microsoft GUI products, and many third party products on Windows use the same techniques making them fully scriptable as well.
This isn't the first time Mars729's called GUI's "walled gardens", and it's not the first time he's posted erroneous info about their scriptability, but then he *is* using Windows. He posted a similar comment to the "How Ya Gonna Get 'Em Down On the UNIX Farm?" thread 4 days ago.
While I am a really tired of PC I do not think that is the reason. Of course my school didn't ban books. It had a far better solution. In my Jr. High School they had a small book shelf that had books that required parents permission. One of the books on that shelf was Brave New World which I will never understand being restricted since it was anti drug and anti casual sex. It was not a problem for me since my parents gave me permission to read what ever.
Uh... Brave New World is all about sex, drugs, and shallow relationships. One of the plot points centered around one of the characters mis-dialing her birth control device (her "Malthusian belt"), and any message to the contrary was only by way of negative examples. It was also about the consequence to a society which had effectively "banned God". Another plot point revolves around Shakespeare's works having gotten banned, and so anyone whose into banning books in the first place would probably have as much love for their act being vilified as they do for Fahrenheit 451. I could see both sides coming down hard on that one (Liberals for the pro-religion message, conservatives for the sex and Soma, both for the anti-banning message).
I read Silas Marner in 3rd grade, only finding out afterward that I wasn't supposed to have been allowed that book at that age, and went on to strike a deal with the bookmobile lady to let me check out more books at higher levels of difficulty than I was "supposed to be reading", since I went through about one a day over the summer, and the bookmobile was a once a week thing. I still average a book a day, but make most of that up on the weekends. I'm betting Silas Marner's plot pisses off Objectivists.
There really is no excuse for the banning of books, and most of the reasoning for bans involves politics and criticism of government officials.
Actually, it dates back to at least 1933, although I'm going to guess that given the context, the GP is probably referring to Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School and its influence in Britain during the 1960's during "The Cultural Revlution", which drove a lot of the adoption of the P.C. mindset in institutions of higher learning.
BTW: the adoption of the term and its application by conservatives pretty much owes itself to the William S. Lind book "Who stole our culture?", and is rarely used by conservative thinkers outside his clique.
Care to present any citation other than Fox News or other RWNJ outlet that there was any actual corruption involved, rather than just a random association of someone who'd gone to school with someone else? Thought not....
You guys are rich.
Why is corruption required to make a bad decision? Who said anything about corruption, other than you? Stupid doesn't require a conspiracy.
How about we agree to it for French videos originated in France (not Quebec, Louisiana, or elsewhere)?
If it was uploaded from France, it's subject to the tax, otherwise it's not? If it's a French Culture Tax, then obviously, it's because of the value to the world of the French Culture, right?
Hollywood not in here sindrome dates back to the early 20th century. That is one of the reasons if not the main reason why professional dubbing for cinema was never a viable industry in the US for a large part of the 20th century. And also why foreign films most of the time have had niche status relagated to film festivals. Contrast that to France, Germany, Italy or Spain who have a domestic film industry going back almost 100 years, and yet they import foreign films and dub them for their local audience. And this means we don't have to remake foreign films, we give them the original product.
Clearly, you have missed out on the whole "Kung Fu Theatre" 1AM genre thing...
So here's a going commercial entity, clearly not a government, and they have had a huge website failure at a critical time. So let's apply the same "logic" that has been used to slam Obamacare and the Healthcare.gov website.
...
All these, and all the other criticisms of Healthcare.gov, all sound really crazy when applied to this similar situation, don't they? This might be a clue that this kind of hysterical reaction is equally foolish when applied to the Healthcare.gov rollout problems.
Unless you add a "6: Picked the wrong contractor for other than technical reasons".
Yes, I read that part, but... "closer to a 30 mpg highway rating" is meaningless, and contains no data. If they improve by another half a mile per tank of gas, they would technically be "closer" and the statement would be true.
I want to know "how much closer", preferably with a comparison to an otherwise identical steel vehicle, so we can see what a truck intended to haul heavy loads gets in terms of mileage from using soft aluminum instead of solid steel for its construction.
The Mac tax has always been about the actual parts they use and that there are cheaper alternatives. For this comparison, they try to match the parts exactly. That of course is going to cost more because you are paying 3rd party markup prices while Apple is being direct from the manufacturer. The article even admits that you can buy things like a different video card that is equivalent for half the price. The question isn't if you can make the exact same system (or as close as possible) for cheaper but whether you can make an equivalent system for cheaper, and the answer to that is almost always yes.
So if you can build a cheaper equivalent... why aren't you in business, building cheaper equivalents and getting rich off the fact that it's costing you less to build equivalent hardware?
People erroneously think SF is a metropolis, like NY - it's not. By that standard, there's more late night food places in Ogden, Utah, than there is in SF.
It used to be, or at least, it was more like NY than it is now. But late-night stuff has been driven out of the city by gentrification. You could at least find stuff to do on the weekend nights, before.
Sorry, but you just about made my head explode there.
Your claim is that having a lot of single people with a larger amount of disposable income than ever before, and more than likely, marginal cooking skills on top of that, and who generally work "flex hours" so they can stay out later at night than someone with a 7AM retail job, has *reduced* the incentive to take people's money late at night that restaurants and other venues are now closing early?
How exactly is not staying open to collect the free money a result of gentrification again?
This is absurd. Yes, Vista was a disaster, but Windows 7 was a huge upgrade from XP.
then why won't all XP software run on Windows 7, and why hasn't everyone seen the error of their ways, and upgraded their XP systems?
My dad owns a number of companies which all went out and bought extra XP systems and stuck them in a closet for future deployment because of the software compatibility issues between XP and Windows 7 and later. Specifically, they don't want to have to re-buy all their machines, and re-buy all their existing software, and rewrite from scratch all their Microsoft COM component based glue code the next time they hire a new person into the office.
Microsoft is out of its teeny little mind if it believes small cash flow based businesses have the available capital to enable them to do this; the incompatibility is killing adoption of anything later than Windows XP for almost every business I know that has 100 or less employees, which is 95% of all businesses in the U.S..
A minimum 3-story building with underground parking requirement for all new commercial construction would go a long way towards fixing all of the land shortage in the Silicon Valley area.
Not really possible. Apple had to get a special waiver from Santa Clara to build the 6 4 story buildings on their Infinite Loop campus. They are actually configured structurally to be 5 story buildings, but the additional waivers fell through at the last minute, so they were stuck with 4 (while everyone else is stuck with the statutory 3). Santa Clara and San Jose don't want tall buildings.
That said, the folks I know who live in SF live there because there's nothing for them to do in the SV area. Being young, they like being able to walk from their apartments to the hottest clubs or concerts or whatever. Most of those folks move back out to the suburbs by the time they have their first kid, but there's always a new batch of youngsters waiting in the wings to take those apartments when they leave.
They practically roll up the sidewalks in SF at 9PM. If you want late night food, you have to go to some place in the Castro, a club that serves food (assuming they let you in), a bar (kitchen usually closes at 10), or go to the waffle house, Denny's, Mel's, or one of a couple (mostly take-out) pizza places.
If you are doing dinner and a movie, you pretty much have to do the dinner first, or nothing will be open after the movie lets out.
People erroneously think SF is a metropolis, like NY - it's not. By that standard, there's more late night food places in Ogden, Utah, than there is in SF.
So unless you are an alcoholic or a "club kid", you are not living in SF for the thriving night life.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the revelations, however, while detailing operations that are technically legal, do paint the organzation in a light that shows it to be an unchecked body with too much power and not enough supervision.
"Honey, where are the parental controls settings on this NSA thing again? I can't find them using the damn remote!"
O RLY?
There are a lot of people in New Orleans who would disagree with that.
Wait, the U.S. military shot down a hurricane that was about to attack U.S. citizens? Or it fought the hurricane, and drove it back into the sea, after it dared to attack U.S. soil?
Look, I appreciate the cleanup efforts that the National Guard was able to engage in, after the local politicians finally got their act together enough to let the National Guard and FEMA into their jurisdictions (which they held off doing for a very long time, at the cost of many lives, and a lot of property), but to say that the military in this case was protecting citizens, rather than engaging in a relief operation, is a lie.
Why the US prevented the technology transfer:
India developed nuclear capability after the 1970 nuclear non-proliferation treaty which created the so-called "Nuclear Club". India is still not a signatory to this treaty, along with Israel, Pakistan, South Sudan, and (now that they've withdrawn from it) North Korea.
The intent was to prevent them from, or at least slow progress on, developing an ICBM delivery system for nuclear warheads, without them becoming signatory to the treaty. They could have had the technology for the asking, if the became a signatory.
For this same reason, it's unlikely that there would be a similar transfer to any non-signatory state, and probably not Taiwan, which claims they are abiding to the treaty, but have so far refused to become signatory to it.
It's pretty hypocritical to complain about the blocking of a technology transfer of this particular technology under the circumstances, given that India tested it's Agni V ICBM last September, and can hit targets in pretty much all of Europe, Asia, and Austrailia, and much of Africa.
How about we just gameify gamification? Then we can quit talking about it, and trying to sell the idea to VCs who, like the rest of us, don't think it's going to work to solve interesting problems, and if it does, well, the people playing the gamefication game will self-solve the problem for us, won't they?
I really like the idea of a HUD displaying time and other pertinent information
Give me your jacket, your boots and your sunglasses.
I totally agree with the parent, the collection size is pathetic. I have >6,000 physical books I personally own, and they fit in a spare bedroom with room for a desk and about 20 computers on two bakers racks in it, along with several filing cabinets.
The reading experience on eReaders is shit (I say this having worked on 3 of them, if you include the iPad), title selection is limited to things available as eBooks which leaves out almost everything that isn't pablum or that didn't come off copyright pre Sonny Bono "Save The Mouse For Disney!" copyright extensions (0 books come off copyright and enter the public domain in 2014), and it's trivially easy to both track reading habits, and to engage in censorship fairly instantly (think Snapchat for politically "inconvenient" books).
This is just a really, really stupid idea. Excuse me now, I have to get back to building my EMP Gun Kit that I bought online.
As a military intelligence officer he released military intelligence during wartime in a war that LEGALLY approved by all political parties in both the US and the UK.
Citation needed.
Specifically, where are the Articles of War, ratified by both houses of the Congress of the U.S., and signed by the President of the U.S. which are required for the U.S. to actually BE in a state of war, such that this was in fact an act which occurred during wartime?
Do you know how hard it is for them to do that? It takes like a whole hour to "encourage" a city to have been founded in a different place.
The big prank is San Francisco. Every time we move it somewhere safe, someone moves it back.
Time traveling sock puppets?
Or just the Wikipedia editors?
Two complaints, one non-complaint
Complaint #1: ESR's reasoning, and the only theoretically justifiable one in the entire blog post, is that bzr is slow. All version control systems are slow. The more you keep the modification history around, the more people you have hitting a single repo, the slower they get.
When Apple moved from CVS to SVN, it was because of two things: The first was Linux-based Apple RAID boxes that Apple was OEM'ing from a third part had some bug where they lost data, and this messed up some of the CVS backing files. With a single backing file, as in SVN, this situation only improved because the switch came around the time the bugs in AppleRAID had already been resolved; otherwise, it would have been the whole repo, not just a couple of files, getting screwed up. The second one was that the CVS repo was slow. This was pixable by sharding it so different projects used repos on different servers. The new SVN server on the other hand, was lightening fast ... until we moved over the entire modification history from the CVS server to the SVN server, and all the CVS users stopped hitting the CVS server, and started hitting the SVN server instead. Then the SVN server was just as slow as the CVS server had been, and we were back to the status quo.
The lesson you should take from this is that it doesn't matter your version control system is slow, because they *ALL* are, and so it doesn't make a difference what VCS you end up using, as long as the primary maintainer likes it.
Complaint #2: ESR claims that, because it's in bzr and not git, it's harder to submit patches to EMACS. This is patently false. The older an Open Source project is, the harder it is to submit patches, and you VCS doesn't matter to this, because the difficulty isn't the VCS, it's the politics of change.
As projects get older and older, there's kingdom building that happens, and it's nigh impossible to get a change in that's going to cross one or more boundaries between kingdoms. The more kingdoms you code changes go into, the more code it changes, the more impossible it is to get those changes in. One of the big deals here is the "I won't approve your patch until you rewrite it the way I would have written it if I'd done it, but since I don't have the time (except to review and complain, of course -- then I have buckets of time), I'm not going to take the patch". This is called "time to get a new king instead of an asshole" effect for short.
The lesson you should take from this is that it's not the VCS, it's the politics, and yeah, if you switch VCSs, you'll get a window when not everyone is up enough on the new stuff that they can get in your way, if you're working with smart people: they will be. So switching VCSs is typically a means of cutting through red tape that shouldn't be there in the first place, and it never works for long.
Non-complaint #1: ESR states that bzr is "old and crufty" and that "it's mailing lists are dying and patches are dwindling", and that this is somehow bad.
It's not bad: that's what happens with mature, purpose-built tools: once the damn things work well enough, unless you have someone pushing change for changes sake to get themselves into the commit log or README file, the changes dry up, and the tool tends not to change. So activity on a mailing list or in a commit log for a mature tool is not a way to value that tool.
Before anyone jumps on me for this posting please read this: I personally don't use bzr, so I have no skin in this game. I've used over a dozen different VCSs, and with the exception on one that ran on DOS, which I would never use again, they're all pretty much solving the same problem, and you shouldn't really give a damn about what a projects primary maintainer likes to use, as long as the thing does the job.
Not sure why this is on ./
The dude does have a very legitimate beef though, considering he's taken these around to probably dozens of countries and crossed several hundred borders with them. He apparently had some "raw" material with him to make new flutes, but that wood typically needs to be completely dry and aged. Either way the carved flutes were likely sealed and shouldn't have been destroyed without a very, very good reason, which I doubt the CBP had.
It think because it's about out of control security apparatus, so it's kind of topical?
I guess they will start siezing wood furniture from Ikea now, since,, you know, wood is an agricultural product.
This isn't worthy of being a story, we all grew up using command lines.
At least one of those programs is Windows-only, and all the rest have Windows versions, and Visual Basic is Windows-only.
I'm pretty sure he has little or no familiarity with the UNIX programming environment, and he's not even aware of COM-based programming using third party libraries and components on Windows well enough to know that you can in fact script all Microsoft GUI products, and many third party products on Windows use the same techniques making them fully scriptable as well.
This isn't the first time Mars729's called GUI's "walled gardens", and it's not the first time he's posted erroneous info about their scriptability, but then he *is* using Windows. He posted a similar comment to the "How Ya Gonna Get 'Em Down On the UNIX Farm?" thread 4 days ago.
While I am a really tired of PC I do not think that is the reason.
Of course my school didn't ban books. It had a far better solution. In my Jr. High School they had a small book shelf that had books that required parents permission. One of the books on that shelf was Brave New World which I will never understand being restricted since it was anti drug and anti casual sex. It was not a problem for me since my parents gave me permission to read what ever.
Uh... Brave New World is all about sex, drugs, and shallow relationships. One of the plot points centered around one of the characters mis-dialing her birth control device (her "Malthusian belt"), and any message to the contrary was only by way of negative examples. It was also about the consequence to a society which had effectively "banned God". Another plot point revolves around Shakespeare's works having gotten banned, and so anyone whose into banning books in the first place would probably have as much love for their act being vilified as they do for Fahrenheit 451. I could see both sides coming down hard on that one (Liberals for the pro-religion message, conservatives for the sex and Soma, both for the anti-banning message).
I read Silas Marner in 3rd grade, only finding out afterward that I wasn't supposed to have been allowed that book at that age, and went on to strike a deal with the bookmobile lady to let me check out more books at higher levels of difficulty than I was "supposed to be reading", since I went through about one a day over the summer, and the bookmobile was a once a week thing. I still average a book a day, but make most of that up on the weekends. I'm betting Silas Marner's plot pisses off Objectivists.
There really is no excuse for the banning of books, and most of the reasoning for bans involves politics and criticism of government officials.
I'm sorry. I don't actually believe there is a thing called "cultural Marxism".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism
Actually, it dates back to at least 1933, although I'm going to guess that given the context, the GP is probably referring to Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School and its influence in Britain during the 1960's during "The Cultural Revlution", which drove a lot of the adoption of the P.C. mindset in institutions of higher learning.
BTW: the adoption of the term and its application by conservatives pretty much owes itself to the William S. Lind book "Who stole our culture?", and is rarely used by conservative thinkers outside his clique.
Sorry, but that's just brilliant.
It truly is fortune-worthy.
Care to present any citation other than Fox News or other RWNJ outlet that there was any actual corruption involved, rather than just a random association of someone who'd gone to school with someone else? Thought not....
You guys are rich.
Why is corruption required to make a bad decision? Who said anything about corruption, other than you? Stupid doesn't require a conspiracy.
How about we agree to it for French videos originated in France (not Quebec, Louisiana, or elsewhere)?
If it was uploaded from France, it's subject to the tax, otherwise it's not? If it's a French Culture Tax, then obviously, it's because of the value to the world of the French Culture, right?
Hollywood not in here sindrome dates back to the early 20th century. That is one of the reasons if not the main reason why professional dubbing for cinema was never a viable industry in the US for a large part of the 20th century. And also why foreign films most of the time have had niche status relagated to film festivals. Contrast that to France, Germany, Italy or Spain who have a domestic film industry going back almost 100 years, and yet they import foreign films and dub them for their local audience. And this means we don't have to remake foreign films, we give them the original product.
Clearly, you have missed out on the whole "Kung Fu Theatre" 1AM genre thing...
So here's a going commercial entity, clearly not a government, and they have had a huge website failure at a critical time. So let's apply the same "logic" that has been used to slam Obamacare and the Healthcare.gov website.
...
All these, and all the other criticisms of Healthcare.gov, all sound really crazy when applied to this similar situation, don't they? This might be a clue that this kind of hysterical reaction is equally foolish when applied to the Healthcare.gov rollout problems.
Unless you add a "6: Picked the wrong contractor for other than technical reasons".
Then the situations are pretty much identical.
The upcoming F-150 will push Ford's pickups closer to a 30 mpg highway rating
Read more: http://www.autonews.com/article/20131223/OEM04/312239954/ford-rolls-dice-with-aluminum-f-150#ixzz2ogVVCODu
Yes, I read that part, but... "closer to a 30 mpg highway rating" is meaningless, and contains no data. If they improve by another half a mile per tank of gas, they would technically be "closer" and the statement would be true.
I want to know "how much closer", preferably with a comparison to an otherwise identical steel vehicle, so we can see what a truck intended to haul heavy loads gets in terms of mileage from using soft aluminum instead of solid steel for its construction.
So what exactly is the mileage after this?
Their most significant finding, though will be that "ice breaker ships are tearing up all the sea ice!".
The Mac tax has always been about the actual parts they use and that there are cheaper alternatives. For this comparison, they try to match the parts exactly. That of course is going to cost more because you are paying 3rd party markup prices while Apple is being direct from the manufacturer. The article even admits that you can buy things like a different video card that is equivalent for half the price. The question isn't if you can make the exact same system (or as close as possible) for cheaper but whether you can make an equivalent system for cheaper, and the answer to that is almost always yes.
So if you can build a cheaper equivalent... why aren't you in business, building cheaper equivalents and getting rich off the fact that it's costing you less to build equivalent hardware?
People erroneously think SF is a metropolis, like NY - it's not. By that standard, there's more late night food places in Ogden, Utah, than there is in SF.
It used to be, or at least, it was more like NY than it is now. But late-night stuff has been driven out of the city by gentrification. You could at least find stuff to do on the weekend nights, before.
Sorry, but you just about made my head explode there.
Your claim is that having a lot of single people with a larger amount of disposable income than ever before, and more than likely, marginal cooking skills on top of that, and who generally work "flex hours" so they can stay out later at night than someone with a 7AM retail job, has *reduced* the incentive to take people's money late at night that restaurants and other venues are now closing early?
How exactly is not staying open to collect the free money a result of gentrification again?
If your statement is correct...
This is absurd. Yes, Vista was a disaster, but Windows 7 was a huge upgrade from XP.
then why won't all XP software run on Windows 7, and why hasn't everyone seen the error of their ways, and upgraded their XP systems?
My dad owns a number of companies which all went out and bought extra XP systems and stuck them in a closet for future deployment because of the software compatibility issues between XP and Windows 7 and later. Specifically, they don't want to have to re-buy all their machines, and re-buy all their existing software, and rewrite from scratch all their Microsoft COM component based glue code the next time they hire a new person into the office.
Microsoft is out of its teeny little mind if it believes small cash flow based businesses have the available capital to enable them to do this; the incompatibility is killing adoption of anything later than Windows XP for almost every business I know that has 100 or less employees, which is 95% of all businesses in the U.S..
A minimum 3-story building with underground parking requirement for all new commercial construction would go a long way towards fixing all of the land shortage in the Silicon Valley area.
Not really possible. Apple had to get a special waiver from Santa Clara to build the 6 4 story buildings on their Infinite Loop campus. They are actually configured structurally to be 5 story buildings, but the additional waivers fell through at the last minute, so they were stuck with 4 (while everyone else is stuck with the statutory 3). Santa Clara and San Jose don't want tall buildings.
That said, the folks I know who live in SF live there because there's nothing for them to do in the SV area. Being young, they like being able to walk from their apartments to the hottest clubs or concerts or whatever. Most of those folks move back out to the suburbs by the time they have their first kid, but there's always a new batch of youngsters waiting in the wings to take those apartments when they leave.
They practically roll up the sidewalks in SF at 9PM. If you want late night food, you have to go to some place in the Castro, a club that serves food (assuming they let you in), a bar (kitchen usually closes at 10), or go to the waffle house, Denny's, Mel's, or one of a couple (mostly take-out) pizza places.
If you are doing dinner and a movie, you pretty much have to do the dinner first, or nothing will be open after the movie lets out.
People erroneously think SF is a metropolis, like NY - it's not. By that standard, there's more late night food places in Ogden, Utah, than there is in SF.
So unless you are an alcoholic or a "club kid", you are not living in SF for the thriving night life.