True, but we're trying to solve a problem here. On the one hand, we have gee-whiz EV's that are still coming and not yet here. On the other hand, we have hybrids, which are here right now and have been proven for years. They fit perfectly into our current infrastructure and provide the perfect technological transition to the gee-whiz: hybrid, plugin hybrid, EV.
I'd personally prefer to see all this enthusiasm put into hybrids, which would essentially pay for technological improvements in the EV arena, which would slash gasoline usage, which would allow a smart grid to be created before it's needed by cars, which would not be a car-on-a-leash, and which can be applied to any auto class (car, truck, etc) right NOW.
Seriously, when we have alternatives that give a huge benefit and people don't use them, how do you expect the magical leap to occur?
I drive a hybrid, and thus use 1/2 to 1/3 of the gas that most drivers use. (Perhaps including you?) Widespread hybrid adoption -- throughout manufacturer's product lineups and by consumers -- would slash our gas consumption without increasing electricity consumption, and without requiring any new infrastructure. It would drive innovation in EV drivetrains (batteries, control, motors), and would set up the perfect transition: hybrid, plugin hybrid, EV.
How about harnessing your enthusiasm on something that is here right now, that accomplishes a huge chunk of the task right now, that will finance the future you want right now, that will work for absolutely anyone right now and not just the already-energy-unfriendly suburbanite-with-garage? But you prefer to scream "Luddite!" at people who won't get onboard with your vision, instead of pushing something that's already working and that will accelerate the coming of your vision.
(No, I'm not saying US manufacturers have it right. They should have hybrids in every single market segment, from econo-cars to trucks. They're way behind the curve and with products like the Volt they're trying to do a Hail Mary and leapfrog the Japanese, but...)
The average commute for people is far less than 100 miles, which means the only thing you could be missing out on is a truck for hauling or a car for road trip vacations.
1. There are more than three possible modes for people (commute, haul, road trip vacation). It would not be unusual for me to drive over 100 miles on a Saturday, with various errands to run, events, friends and family to visit, etc. Not a couple-of-times-a-year vacation, but a regular occurrence. Few people I know have a car that's only used for commuting: most have a car that happens to be used for the commute, but it's also used for other things as well. A car-on-a-leash would basically have to be dedicated to commuting on weekdays and short errands on weekends, increasing the number of cars per family.
2. The 100 miles capacity is probably a maximum: weather can lower mileage directly (rain) or indirectly (air conditioning).
3. Is that 100 miles with just a single passenger, or with several?
The bottom line is that the 100 miles is probably a best-case scenario and it has a hard penalty: a half-hour wait IF (big if) you happen to have a charging station in your area, and the installation of charging stations is starting at zero.
With my hybrid car, it's not a worry and I'm currently using half the gas that people who are someday (but not yet) going to get an EV.
We live in a condo in a very efficient urban setting. No place to plug in the EV, though. And unless the electric company decides to foot the bill, I doubt that we'll have 360 underground parking spaces wired to charge vehicles.
Not saying that it can't fly, but until we have reasonable hybrids from all manufacturers and until these hybrids have a larger market penetration, EV's are a pipe dream for the vast majority of drivers. Hybrids would halve our gasoline consumption without increasing electricity consumption, would push EV technologies (batteries, motors, control systems) forward, and fit exactly into our current refueling infrastructure. All this EV hype would be better directed at hybrids first, then plugin hybrids, then EVs.
Some of this is about capturing and motivating imagination.
Simply getting to the moon, taking steps on it, and coming back alive did that 30 years ago. It took 1800's sci-fi and made it reality. It took Lewis and Clark and made it reality. It was much like someone who had only heard of airplanes watching an airplane at a county fair. It sparked the imagination.
But that's old hat now. To keep up with sci-fi, we need to move on to space commerce and permanent off-earth colonies. Mine asteroids, put a telescope on the far side of the moon, have a permanent base on the moon from which probes go all over the solar system... Give kids the dream that they might actually live and work for months or years off-earth. Not just "astronauts", but actual careers.
Send astronauts to Mars? Whoop-de-doo. It's not much different from sending astronauts (temporarily) to the Moon: it's farther and it's a different color but that's about it. Sure, we will eventually set foot on Mars, but what we really need now are fewer Lewis-and-Clarks and more pioneers in wagons.
Give the next generation the dream of moving and living somewhere, not just visiting. Otherwise, you're like Hollywood doing a sequel: more, louder, bigger, but not different. Boring. Airplanes moved from circus curiosities to war machines, then to carrying cargo and carrying passengers. They were commercialized and that attracted a LOT of people into the industry. Do the same for space, and leave behind the bad-sequel vision.
I'm not a conspiracy theory buff, but I do have to say that the study -- at least as reported in the media -- immediately raised red flags for me. Why?
Who buys organic food because it's got more nutritional value? I don't know anyone -- including myself and my wife -- who does. You buy organic food because of what is NOT in it, and what it does NOT do to the land.
Sort of like seeing a study that says that antibiotics do not make you run faster and don't increase your IQ.
The parent posting gets it: REBOOT, not MODERNIZE.
I think the Masters of Orion series could use a reboot. Personally, I think the last MOO was heading in the right direction, but wasn't quite ready and lost a lot of their fan base from previous releases and was then orphaned.
(Perhaps this isn't truly a reboot, either. The main problems were: 1) Very different play that lost a lot of the fan base, 2) Lots-o-bugs, and 3) they had a good idea about having you manage strategies and let the AI handle tactics, but it was buggy and obscure enough that people ended up micromanaging and fighting the AI.)
As a kid, I could actually hear some EM quite distinctly. It was only the stronger pulse-like stuff, like arcing transformer a hundred meters away, or lightning strikes within about 2km. I can still hear lightning strikes that are fairly close as a faint crack in my head, a second or so before the thunder, but this ability seem to be diminishing as I age.
This is the most interesting post in the thread. And actually should be followed up on.
When I read the linked Slashdot thread on the iPhone, I was pleasantly surprised to find that almost all high-scoring posts were in fact reasonable and ultimately proved to be correct. Sort of restores my faith in Slashdot.
I think that people who defend non-hybrid cars on Slashdot should have their Geek Card revoked. They're defending a century-old technology that does not have a wide performance range, coupled to a century-old technology that, through a hideously complex set of gears, extends the performance band to tolerable limits.
Versus a car that has a gasoline engine that has a different power cycle than 95% of the other cars on the road and not one but TWO electric motor/generators, combined with an elegantly simply mechanical device so that all three can work together in any combination. Each of these is purpose-built for a task, so the combination is not only more efficient than a single, inflexible engine, but each part is subject to less stress making it more reliable.
Not to mention that the car has a Cd of 0.25 and you can enter it and start it with only a Star-Trek-like device in your pocket. Starships don't have keys!
Even if it was inferior in most ways, the pure geek factor of a hybrid should win in Slashdot every time. Those who disagree need to see if perhaps they haven't been drinking too much management juice, which causes your technicals to shrivel and fall off.
Next thing you know, they'll be defending Intel GMA over dedicated graphics chips.
Um, no. The Prius -- especially the 2010 which I bought -- accelerates well: you'll be swerving around a minivan or a Hummer full of kids before you swerve around me. And I have absolutely no problems keeping up with traffic on US interstates.
You're either terribly opinionated or you're reflecting on how some Prius drivers DRIVE their vehicles (as opposed to what the car is capable of). In fact, it is my experience that the SLOWEST cars, the ones that leave 20-car gaps in front of them in heavy traffic and go 30 MPH on merging ramps, are non-hybrid cars being driven by people who evidently are trying to get hybrid mileage out of them. (Or who got a manual transmission and hate it.)
Yep, you can drive a Prius 70-80 and still be getting 40 MPG.
They don't hesitate to spill everyone else's beans because "people have the right to know", but when one of their own is in danger, they resort to censorship. (And I do not mean "discretion" or "self-censorship", but rather the censorship of others.)
They have not hesitated to endanger people's lives by saying they're US military, etc. They have not hesitated to give the throat-slitters a platform to encourage them to slaughter innocents. Perhaps if we could send a few NYT editors to get kidnapped, they might not be so eager to demand that we have a right to know things that get people killed.
Yes, the PS3 has a nice upscaler, and if we first show our Corpse Bride DVD to someone on our 40" LCD, it looks wonderful. "Plain old DVD, really? Why get Blu-ray?"
Then we pop in the Blu-ray version. If we could A/B it, things would pop out, but we don't have to. Simply point to the textures in the clay. It is SHARP. Didn't see that before. If necessary, switch back to regular DVD and now that they know what to look for, it's clear that texture is missing.
(Not to mention that Blu-ray's hi-def lets you have menus with a regular -- i.e. computer -- density of information, and not have to resort to 6 submenus in order to get all of the chapters in there.)
Last, let's repeat again that downloads do not include extras. And extras are, among our friends, anyhow, an enjoyable part of a movie evening. Without extras, you may as well be watching a really nice VHS tape.
I always knew that I did poorly in classes that required formal proofs, ranging from Geometry to Analysis of Algorithms. I always had problems because I could not tell what was "obvious" and what was not. As an intuitive thinker, I'd either not be "rigorous enough", or, after being told I wasn't rigorous enough, I'd try to compensate and end up trying to prove "obvious" things. (They were somehow defined as "obvious", but I could certainly see lots of nooks and crannies in them that could contain problems.)
And I still cringe when someone says they "hate theory". I love theory, because it's theory that actually illuminates things. But most people have all kinds of unpleasant experiences with "theory classes" taught by people who do not understand the subject matter. The result is that the teaching is brittle: if you stray away from the teacher's guide in your question, you are herded back onto the straight-n-narrow path with confusing hand-waving and hurled jargon. It makes no sense to you, but the teacher says it with authority and you assume that you're too dumb to understand it, and eventually come to hate "theory classes".
This starts at early ages with math education. And it might be called "the hard place". Opposite this hard place is the rock of boring, rote repetition.
Some of us manage to get through this relatively intact. I guess we have a strong attraction to underlying explanations ("theory") and enough school-smarts that we get good grades, encouraging us that perhaps we are smart and what we don't understand is in fact understandable if we apply ourselves.
The trick is how to balance the ideal math education with the abilities/training of the huge number of teachers required to teach it. (Who have themselves been warped by their own math education.) And to balance the need for rote things (multiplication tables come to mind) with curiosity and enticement to learn.
I agree that hail probably isn't going to compromise the cabin. The suggestion that I've seen, however, is the hail being ingested into the engines (at 500 mph closing speed) and killing them like a bird strike. Not sure how realistic this scenario is, but it sounds plausible to this amateur observer.
Whoa, who took the sugar off of your Frosted Mini Wheats this morning?
First, the original post was misleading as to the location and I mentioned that. Second the main point of my reply was to give credit to Arlington County, which is much more than a single neighborhood, and which contains much more than DARPA (things like the NSF and the Pentagon, for example), and to tie it in to the diversity discussion regarding San Francisco, Silicon Valley, etc.
Congratulations on picking up on one small point -- and taking great offense that you might actually be incorrect -- instead of looking at the rest of the posting, which in fact added value to the discussion.
DARPA is in Arlington, Virginia, one of the most diverse and well-educated counties in the country. (And the smallest self-governing county in the country.) Arlington County is also a leader in smart growth, planning, sustainable growth (or whatever you call it), with places like Tyson's Corner, Virginia, openly pointing to it as the inspiration for what they want to become.
Virginia Square is a neighborhood and a Metro stop, not a town.
... Ballmer talks seriously about "threats" or "opponents" that are easily dealt with. That lets him go back later and seem like the hard-fighting conqueror.
But he trash talks and laughs at things that actually make him afraid. It's like the cat whose fur stands on end when it's afraid, to make it look larger. He can't help it.
When he's feeling confident about beating back Apple, he'll talk about how they're worthy competitors who are a threat in this area and have exploited MS's weakness in that area. When he's scared witless, he'll laugh that they're overpriced, they under-deliver, MS has been doing the same thing forever, and it's only a matter of time until Apple sees the error of their ways (and consumers as well, one would guess).
It's Ballmer's way of whistling through the graveyard.
I see a lot of people mentioning features, but what about how they are tied together? I am not familiar with the Nokia 7650, but if it has the typical Nokia interface who cares if it has a built-in microwave oven, a hot tub, and ultra-high-definition 120 fps video recording?
The iPhone does not have the latest and greatest HW specs nor necessarily every software feature known to Linus, but it looks good, is extremely well though out, and it hangs together in a very nice, intuitive way.
Your nice typing loses credibility once your bigotry shows through. Apple's userbase is not full of people who are "fooled into paying for pricy stuff they really do not need". Many of us are quite sophisticated, computer-wise, and are getting exactly what we need, which works in the way we want.
Keep believing that everyone who doesn't make your choice is stupid if you want, but...
SO you believe that Ballmer must be stating only the facts, no agenda here?
What I've noticed from Ballmer over the years is a consistent pattern: what Ballmer perceives as a manageable threat, he mentions as a threat, but what he views as a huge threat he mocks and makes fun of.
Look at Open Source, or Macs, or the iPhone. When he's really threatened, he disrespects and mocks in order to appear especially confident. A sort of Tough Guy Reverse Psychology.
So yes, I know Linux partisans will say it's a desktop threat to MS with more potential because every Windows box is a potential Linux box, but I think Ballmer's "tell", as it were, is saying that he is scared by the Mac and in particular the fact that Apple has an obvious and coherent Mac-iPod-iPhone spectrum of products that can easily include netbooks, tablets, surfaces, or any other form-factor. And that Apple has basically managed an end run around Microsoft in the content realm (Music & Movies).
Yep, they only have one plane and one helicopter that looks like that. SO unique. No need to figure out which one he's on...
Those of us who live in the DC area know different, and in fact it's not unusual to see several presedential look-alike helicopters in the air at once.
"Air Force One" is not a particular plane, it's the plane the president is on. Same for the helicopter. The news made a big deal of this when Bush flew back to Texas and they called it something like Special Flight 7600 instead of Air Force One because he was no longer president.
They lost credibility before they even got into the issue of Dvorak. They assume that any two things that look vaguely similar must in fact be nearly exactly similar. Going by their reasoning, everyone now-a-days drives a car with a steering wheel, and engine, and four tires, so all cars must be the same.
With that kind of poor reasoning, who cares what they have to say regarding Dvorak?
I can see a dozen 802.11g networks around us, but I'm the only a/n 5GHz network that I can see. It doesn't penetrate walls as well, but that's good enough in our condo. (The upside of lower penetration is that it's harder to intercept, and we interfere less with any neighbors who might move to 5GHz.)
We use a/n because my first-gen Intel Macbook does a/b/g but not n.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but we're trying to solve a problem here. On the one hand, we have gee-whiz EV's that are still coming and not yet here. On the other hand, we have hybrids, which are here right now and have been proven for years. They fit perfectly into our current infrastructure and provide the perfect technological transition to the gee-whiz: hybrid, plugin hybrid, EV.
I'd personally prefer to see all this enthusiasm put into hybrids, which would essentially pay for technological improvements in the EV arena, which would slash gasoline usage, which would allow a smart grid to be created before it's needed by cars, which would not be a car-on-a-leash, and which can be applied to any auto class (car, truck, etc) right NOW.
Seriously, when we have alternatives that give a huge benefit and people don't use them, how do you expect the magical leap to occur?
I drive a hybrid, and thus use 1/2 to 1/3 of the gas that most drivers use. (Perhaps including you?) Widespread hybrid adoption -- throughout manufacturer's product lineups and by consumers -- would slash our gas consumption without increasing electricity consumption, and without requiring any new infrastructure. It would drive innovation in EV drivetrains (batteries, control, motors), and would set up the perfect transition: hybrid, plugin hybrid, EV.
How about harnessing your enthusiasm on something that is here right now, that accomplishes a huge chunk of the task right now, that will finance the future you want right now, that will work for absolutely anyone right now and not just the already-energy-unfriendly suburbanite-with-garage? But you prefer to scream "Luddite!" at people who won't get onboard with your vision, instead of pushing something that's already working and that will accelerate the coming of your vision.
(No, I'm not saying US manufacturers have it right. They should have hybrids in every single market segment, from econo-cars to trucks. They're way behind the curve and with products like the Volt they're trying to do a Hail Mary and leapfrog the Japanese, but...)
The average commute for people is far less than 100 miles, which means the only thing you could be missing out on is a truck for hauling or a car for road trip vacations.
1. There are more than three possible modes for people (commute, haul, road trip vacation). It would not be unusual for me to drive over 100 miles on a Saturday, with various errands to run, events, friends and family to visit, etc. Not a couple-of-times-a-year vacation, but a regular occurrence. Few people I know have a car that's only used for commuting: most have a car that happens to be used for the commute, but it's also used for other things as well. A car-on-a-leash would basically have to be dedicated to commuting on weekdays and short errands on weekends, increasing the number of cars per family.
2. The 100 miles capacity is probably a maximum: weather can lower mileage directly (rain) or indirectly (air conditioning).
3. Is that 100 miles with just a single passenger, or with several?
The bottom line is that the 100 miles is probably a best-case scenario and it has a hard penalty: a half-hour wait IF (big if) you happen to have a charging station in your area, and the installation of charging stations is starting at zero.
With my hybrid car, it's not a worry and I'm currently using half the gas that people who are someday (but not yet) going to get an EV.
We live in a condo in a very efficient urban setting. No place to plug in the EV, though. And unless the electric company decides to foot the bill, I doubt that we'll have 360 underground parking spaces wired to charge vehicles.
Not saying that it can't fly, but until we have reasonable hybrids from all manufacturers and until these hybrids have a larger market penetration, EV's are a pipe dream for the vast majority of drivers. Hybrids would halve our gasoline consumption without increasing electricity consumption, would push EV technologies (batteries, motors, control systems) forward, and fit exactly into our current refueling infrastructure. All this EV hype would be better directed at hybrids first, then plugin hybrids, then EVs.
Some of this is about capturing and motivating imagination.
Simply getting to the moon, taking steps on it, and coming back alive did that 30 years ago. It took 1800's sci-fi and made it reality. It took Lewis and Clark and made it reality. It was much like someone who had only heard of airplanes watching an airplane at a county fair. It sparked the imagination.
But that's old hat now. To keep up with sci-fi, we need to move on to space commerce and permanent off-earth colonies. Mine asteroids, put a telescope on the far side of the moon, have a permanent base on the moon from which probes go all over the solar system... Give kids the dream that they might actually live and work for months or years off-earth. Not just "astronauts", but actual careers.
Send astronauts to Mars? Whoop-de-doo. It's not much different from sending astronauts (temporarily) to the Moon: it's farther and it's a different color but that's about it. Sure, we will eventually set foot on Mars, but what we really need now are fewer Lewis-and-Clarks and more pioneers in wagons.
Give the next generation the dream of moving and living somewhere, not just visiting. Otherwise, you're like Hollywood doing a sequel: more, louder, bigger, but not different. Boring. Airplanes moved from circus curiosities to war machines, then to carrying cargo and carrying passengers. They were commercialized and that attracted a LOT of people into the industry. Do the same for space, and leave behind the bad-sequel vision.
I'm not a conspiracy theory buff, but I do have to say that the study -- at least as reported in the media -- immediately raised red flags for me. Why?
Who buys organic food because it's got more nutritional value? I don't know anyone -- including myself and my wife -- who does. You buy organic food because of what is NOT in it, and what it does NOT do to the land.
Sort of like seeing a study that says that antibiotics do not make you run faster and don't increase your IQ.
The parent posting gets it: REBOOT, not MODERNIZE.
I think the Masters of Orion series could use a reboot. Personally, I think the last MOO was heading in the right direction, but wasn't quite ready and lost a lot of their fan base from previous releases and was then orphaned.
(Perhaps this isn't truly a reboot, either. The main problems were: 1) Very different play that lost a lot of the fan base, 2) Lots-o-bugs, and 3) they had a good idea about having you manage strategies and let the AI handle tactics, but it was buggy and obscure enough that people ended up micromanaging and fighting the AI.)
As a kid, I could actually hear some EM quite distinctly. It was only the stronger pulse-like stuff, like arcing transformer a hundred meters away, or lightning strikes within about 2km. I can still hear lightning strikes that are fairly close as a faint crack in my head, a second or so before the thunder, but this ability seem to be diminishing as I age.
This is the most interesting post in the thread. And actually should be followed up on.
When I read the linked Slashdot thread on the iPhone, I was pleasantly surprised to find that almost all high-scoring posts were in fact reasonable and ultimately proved to be correct. Sort of restores my faith in Slashdot.
Bad form replying to myself, but...
I think that people who defend non-hybrid cars on Slashdot should have their Geek Card revoked. They're defending a century-old technology that does not have a wide performance range, coupled to a century-old technology that, through a hideously complex set of gears, extends the performance band to tolerable limits.
Versus a car that has a gasoline engine that has a different power cycle than 95% of the other cars on the road and not one but TWO electric motor/generators, combined with an elegantly simply mechanical device so that all three can work together in any combination. Each of these is purpose-built for a task, so the combination is not only more efficient than a single, inflexible engine, but each part is subject to less stress making it more reliable.
Not to mention that the car has a Cd of 0.25 and you can enter it and start it with only a Star-Trek-like device in your pocket. Starships don't have keys!
Even if it was inferior in most ways, the pure geek factor of a hybrid should win in Slashdot every time. Those who disagree need to see if perhaps they haven't been drinking too much management juice, which causes your technicals to shrivel and fall off.
Next thing you know, they'll be defending Intel GMA over dedicated graphics chips.
Um, no. The Prius -- especially the 2010 which I bought -- accelerates well: you'll be swerving around a minivan or a Hummer full of kids before you swerve around me. And I have absolutely no problems keeping up with traffic on US interstates.
You're either terribly opinionated or you're reflecting on how some Prius drivers DRIVE their vehicles (as opposed to what the car is capable of). In fact, it is my experience that the SLOWEST cars, the ones that leave 20-car gaps in front of them in heavy traffic and go 30 MPH on merging ramps, are non-hybrid cars being driven by people who evidently are trying to get hybrid mileage out of them. (Or who got a manual transmission and hate it.)
Yep, you can drive a Prius 70-80 and still be getting 40 MPG.
They don't hesitate to spill everyone else's beans because "people have the right to know", but when one of their own is in danger, they resort to censorship. (And I do not mean "discretion" or "self-censorship", but rather the censorship of others.)
They have not hesitated to endanger people's lives by saying they're US military, etc. They have not hesitated to give the throat-slitters a platform to encourage them to slaughter innocents. Perhaps if we could send a few NYT editors to get kidnapped, they might not be so eager to demand that we have a right to know things that get people killed.
Yes, the PS3 has a nice upscaler, and if we first show our Corpse Bride DVD to someone on our 40" LCD, it looks wonderful. "Plain old DVD, really? Why get Blu-ray?"
Then we pop in the Blu-ray version. If we could A/B it, things would pop out, but we don't have to. Simply point to the textures in the clay. It is SHARP. Didn't see that before. If necessary, switch back to regular DVD and now that they know what to look for, it's clear that texture is missing.
(Not to mention that Blu-ray's hi-def lets you have menus with a regular -- i.e. computer -- density of information, and not have to resort to 6 submenus in order to get all of the chapters in there.)
Last, let's repeat again that downloads do not include extras. And extras are, among our friends, anyhow, an enjoyable part of a movie evening. Without extras, you may as well be watching a really nice VHS tape.
1. Be able to buy your phone from anybody who sells them.
More stores selling more phones has to lead to lower prices
This sounds like a recipe for lowest-common-denominator phones... like we had before the iPhone.
I always knew that I did poorly in classes that required formal proofs, ranging from Geometry to Analysis of Algorithms. I always had problems because I could not tell what was "obvious" and what was not. As an intuitive thinker, I'd either not be "rigorous enough", or, after being told I wasn't rigorous enough, I'd try to compensate and end up trying to prove "obvious" things. (They were somehow defined as "obvious", but I could certainly see lots of nooks and crannies in them that could contain problems.)
And I still cringe when someone says they "hate theory". I love theory, because it's theory that actually illuminates things. But most people have all kinds of unpleasant experiences with "theory classes" taught by people who do not understand the subject matter. The result is that the teaching is brittle: if you stray away from the teacher's guide in your question, you are herded back onto the straight-n-narrow path with confusing hand-waving and hurled jargon. It makes no sense to you, but the teacher says it with authority and you assume that you're too dumb to understand it, and eventually come to hate "theory classes".
This starts at early ages with math education. And it might be called "the hard place". Opposite this hard place is the rock of boring, rote repetition.
Some of us manage to get through this relatively intact. I guess we have a strong attraction to underlying explanations ("theory") and enough school-smarts that we get good grades, encouraging us that perhaps we are smart and what we don't understand is in fact understandable if we apply ourselves.
The trick is how to balance the ideal math education with the abilities/training of the huge number of teachers required to teach it. (Who have themselves been warped by their own math education.) And to balance the need for rote things (multiplication tables come to mind) with curiosity and enticement to learn.
I agree that hail probably isn't going to compromise the cabin. The suggestion that I've seen, however, is the hail being ingested into the engines (at 500 mph closing speed) and killing them like a bird strike. Not sure how realistic this scenario is, but it sounds plausible to this amateur observer.
Whoa, who took the sugar off of your Frosted Mini Wheats this morning?
First, the original post was misleading as to the location and I mentioned that. Second the main point of my reply was to give credit to Arlington County, which is much more than a single neighborhood, and which contains much more than DARPA (things like the NSF and the Pentagon, for example), and to tie it in to the diversity discussion regarding San Francisco, Silicon Valley, etc.
Congratulations on picking up on one small point -- and taking great offense that you might actually be incorrect -- instead of looking at the rest of the posting, which in fact added value to the discussion.
DARPA is in Arlington, Virginia, one of the most diverse and well-educated counties in the country. (And the smallest self-governing county in the country.) Arlington County is also a leader in smart growth, planning, sustainable growth (or whatever you call it), with places like Tyson's Corner, Virginia, openly pointing to it as the inspiration for what they want to become.
Virginia Square is a neighborhood and a Metro stop, not a town.
... Ballmer talks seriously about "threats" or "opponents" that are easily dealt with. That lets him go back later and seem like the hard-fighting conqueror.
But he trash talks and laughs at things that actually make him afraid. It's like the cat whose fur stands on end when it's afraid, to make it look larger. He can't help it.
When he's feeling confident about beating back Apple, he'll talk about how they're worthy competitors who are a threat in this area and have exploited MS's weakness in that area. When he's scared witless, he'll laugh that they're overpriced, they under-deliver, MS has been doing the same thing forever, and it's only a matter of time until Apple sees the error of their ways (and consumers as well, one would guess).
It's Ballmer's way of whistling through the graveyard.
I see a lot of people mentioning features, but what about how they are tied together? I am not familiar with the Nokia 7650, but if it has the typical Nokia interface who cares if it has a built-in microwave oven, a hot tub, and ultra-high-definition 120 fps video recording?
The iPhone does not have the latest and greatest HW specs nor necessarily every software feature known to Linus, but it looks good, is extremely well though out, and it hangs together in a very nice, intuitive way.
Your nice typing loses credibility once your bigotry shows through. Apple's userbase is not full of people who are "fooled into paying for pricy stuff they really do not need". Many of us are quite sophisticated, computer-wise, and are getting exactly what we need, which works in the way we want.
Keep believing that everyone who doesn't make your choice is stupid if you want, but...
SO you believe that Ballmer must be stating only the facts, no agenda here?
What I've noticed from Ballmer over the years is a consistent pattern: what Ballmer perceives as a manageable threat, he mentions as a threat, but what he views as a huge threat he mocks and makes fun of.
Look at Open Source, or Macs, or the iPhone. When he's really threatened, he disrespects and mocks in order to appear especially confident. A sort of Tough Guy Reverse Psychology.
So yes, I know Linux partisans will say it's a desktop threat to MS with more potential because every Windows box is a potential Linux box, but I think Ballmer's "tell", as it were, is saying that he is scared by the Mac and in particular the fact that Apple has an obvious and coherent Mac-iPod-iPhone spectrum of products that can easily include netbooks, tablets, surfaces, or any other form-factor. And that Apple has basically managed an end run around Microsoft in the content realm (Music & Movies).
Yep, they only have one plane and one helicopter that looks like that. SO unique. No need to figure out which one he's on...
Those of us who live in the DC area know different, and in fact it's not unusual to see several presedential look-alike helicopters in the air at once.
"Air Force One" is not a particular plane, it's the plane the president is on. Same for the helicopter. The news made a big deal of this when Bush flew back to Texas and they called it something like Special Flight 7600 instead of Air Force One because he was no longer president.
They lost credibility before they even got into the issue of Dvorak. They assume that any two things that look vaguely similar must in fact be nearly exactly similar. Going by their reasoning, everyone now-a-days drives a car with a steering wheel, and engine, and four tires, so all cars must be the same.
With that kind of poor reasoning, who cares what they have to say regarding Dvorak?
I can see a dozen 802.11g networks around us, but I'm the only a/n 5GHz network that I can see. It doesn't penetrate walls as well, but that's good enough in our condo. (The upside of lower penetration is that it's harder to intercept, and we interfere less with any neighbors who might move to 5GHz.)
We use a/n because my first-gen Intel Macbook does a/b/g but not n.
Faster, easier, nicer.