The extended battery life is useful but can be provided by anything capable of supplying power via usb. it may well be quite inefficient since you charge a battery to charge another battery. External battery packs are readily available and could also service other devices such as your phone.
incidentally I made a diy battery pack with 10 AA cells which plugs into a cigarette lighter adapter, and modded a twin lighter adapter with a usb port to allow me to charge the pack using a solar panel or in car. I did this for a marine radio but it works with most devices wanting 12 or 5 volts.
My Tablet has a kick stand which requires little space to have it a usable angle the bluetooth keyboard (ps3) has a range of 10 meters and will act as a handy remote when the tablet is being used with a hdmi compatible screen.
Third while the keyboard doesnt have a track pad it does have a pointer nipple and 2 mouse buttons which works quite well and is quite difficult to accidentally move the cursor, other keyboard mouse options can be better usb host means a full size keyboard / mouse option can be added wired or wirelessly.
With the keyboard not being physically attached you can just pick up the tablet and do tablety things and with a press of a button the keyboard links up when you want to do laptop type tasks.
There is unlikely to be any problems with intermittent connections which might become an issue with the physical connections on the dock.
An obvious point is that there are +/- points to both options in fact you might ask is $150 too much for the transformer dock when the bluetooth option is also an option and cheaper ($40 for the ps3 keyboard for example).
The transformer dock could be easily improved by changing the connection method to bluetooth for the operation of the keyboard and mouse. with increased flexibility the option of portrait orientation might be achievable.
A USB Hub and maybe an amp or speakers might be other options.
Ps3 keyboard works quite nicely with android even if it has a nipple for a mouse and it is relatively cheap. Since it is bluetooth you need no dongles and can just hit the ps3 button and connect.
It is the smoothest solution to the sometime problem of wanting to write at length on a tablet. It is also handy when your tablet is connected by hdmi for use as a media centre/ tv web browser ect.
It really makes a difference as to what you can use a tablet for.
There is a massive supply chain and investment that goes into the production of these shiny toys. That is the catastrophe when all of a sudden you can't bring your product to market. That investment can become a massive loss.
Any company that uses lawyers to ban competing products is going to get a bad reputation and damage their own sales.
Is an iPad such a bad product that it can not compete with a Samsung tablet? If I want a Samsung tablet and I can't buy it because of Apple, I really don't think I will buy an iPad instead. I probably will buy a different tablet from a different manufacturer.
I may well refuse to buy Apple products in general due to their interference manipulating what I can buy.
Change the company names and the products to suit your own preferences, it doesn't really matter who's manipulating markets through court rooms. They deserve to lose sales due to their tactics.
Products should compete on their merits not on legal technicalities where 2 engineering teams solved similar problems, independently of each other.
Tablets are quite tidy devices for consumption of media but without a keyboard they are horrible for input such as this post for example.
However a tablet is completely transformed with the addition of a keyboard. Yesterday I bought a Sony PS3 bluetooth keyboard. It is brilliant full size keys but about the same length as the tablet, it has a mouse nipple and two mouse buttons built in. Now writing is easy and it is far more flexible than my netbook. The keyboard can be used as a remote so I can plug the tablet to my tv and use it as a media centre.
If i just want to show someone i just pick up the tablet if i want to work on something i press the ps3 button to turn on the keyboard.
It really does transform the tablet to a useful portable computer. The keyboard cost less than 40 euro about double that of a wireless dongle type keyboard but not needing a dongle sticking out the side makes it very worth the extra cash. Incidentally the tablet screen which is bigger and brighter than my netbook screen is able to be orientated as i want it to be and of course i can zoom to any size i need the browser screen to be.
I finally feel like my tablet is more than just a toy.
got to admit i dislike encoding artifacts but i've only really seen it on sky broadcasts as they are too cheap to apply a decent bitrate.
I'm not saying there is no difference in quality, there most certainly is but most people accept some defects and if you think DVD can be bad did you ever watch VHS? that is a huge difference but people still collected their video cassettes as it was the best available option. People did transfer to DVD preferring to buy in that format while tapes got old and wouldn't play properly. Blueray is top end and still expensive hardware and still expensive disks.
Blueray can not turn a mediocre film into a good or excellent one. An excellent film will grab you and the recording medium comes a distant second.
for a car analogy , you might prefer to only travel in new cars and refuse to travel in an older car, for me it is the older car or walk. I have no doubt your new car feels great to drive and feels sharp and clean like a new suit. But you cut your cloth to what you can afford.
personally i don't bother with blueray in any form. Most people these days have a dvd drive on a computer but how may have a blueray drive? I think its more a financial than technical barrier.
Honestly who needs blueray when dvd is more than good enough and when it is on a computer even dvd quality is just icing. youtube is successful not for its high fidelity but its range of stuff available on most subjects.
I'm old enough to have recorded the chart show in mono on a radio cassette. Sure there was a bit of hiss and the tapes wore and got chewed up but it was good enough for my purposes back then.
These days it is hard to record anything below good enough quality. We would prefer the first edition hardback but the yellowing paperback is what most of us can afford these days with paycuts increased taxation and rocketing fuel bills.
maybe if we were not getting austerity measures forced upon us and had a bit more cash to spend on our little luxurys we would go back to the premium product but that seems to still be some time away.
You don't even need to be poorly paid when living expenses are outpacing your salary , If your buying your own house you still have to make the payments which are now a bigger proportion of your income than you expected them to be 5 or 10 years into paying for your now devalued home.
The nice thing about that site was google song copy link download done in around 10 seconds or so. Sure you can do it for yourself but it is slower a lot slower. On the negative side sometimes its a poor version of the song you wanted plus the sound quality is never that good. Doing it yourself it is just as crappy but it takes longer.
The other good thing was for your typical house party there is always someone with a desire for some song you don't have and wouldn't want in your collection you could just pay it on youtube but at some point it is going to be buffering coz there is 40 meg of video streaming when all you really want is 4 meg of audio ((and who gets blamed for that) so if you can queue it up and keep the people happy and nobody really cares about the clipping or it being recorded too quiet. sometimes low-fi is good enough.
what your references are saying is that he thinks its disappointing that while most Americans will mix during work and work related functions at the weekends America is still segregated along racial lines pretty much the same as in the 1950's.
The 2nd amendment attacks you refer to are that maybe it isn't a great idea for people to be carrying guns routinely. Not banning guns but discouraging people from having them.
I can understand your feelings in a country where you have to look out for you and yours with no safety net sure puts you at a disadvantage and defenceless if you don't have a gun (but the criminals still have guns). If everyone was equal there would be nobody to look down upon and be able to have the comfort of saying at least i'm not black. Oh and that superior attitude you have because your not black also can come back to haunt you now you have no guns but the black dudes still have them.
It is strange that the most powerful nation on earth will bankrupt it's citizens with private health care supply cheap food to it's people but not tell them whats in it (and that cheap crud is destroying the health of the nation). Seems the only way to get health care in your declining years is to have fought for your country. America as a country has some great achievements but at what cost to its citizens. How much of a nightmare is it if you were to lose your job next month with the current number of jobless Americans how long could you last if you didn't get rehired quickly?
America is a great place to be if your high enough up the ladder to have some stability in your life but that could easily be taken away from you by cancer a heart attack or even a simple car wreck just to name a few.
Jobs get exported oversea's for better profit margins and cheaper toys from china. The sad thing is i doubt there is anything anyone could do to change things in the US now, you just have to ride the roller coaster and hope you don't get flung off. Maybe I have the wrong impression of the usa and don't get me wrong of all the Americans i have met i wouldn't say i'd met anyone other than decent hard working people. If anything the internet has shown me is that we are all generally decent people with similar ethics and values.
"Perhaps it is just a cultural gulf, and I do think that Americans in general place a lot more faith in self-reliance than they do on collective solutions such as giving the police a monopoly on the use of force to deter criminal conduct. And yes, when it comes to defending yourself against thugs, nothing works so well as a gun. Even a small woman can turn a 250 pound would be rapist into a corpse if she has a pistol and knows how to use it.
It may be a cliche, but an armed society does tend to be a polite society. In the more rural areas of the US where the rate of gun ownership tends to be high, the crime rates tend to be low, mainly because of the willingness of the local folks to deal out their own rough justice to people who attempt to victimize them."
As an American you may well say as a European it is no concern of mine of how America treats it's people but much as you can feel sympathy for kids in African countries with no clean water it is also easy to feel sympathy for the many Americans let down by their own nation.
The Daily show had something about this the other night. Seems the EPA uses drones to monitor what the cattle ranchers do and try to stop cattle crapping into the water supply. I would imagine there would be a lot of drones used on that job.
not really if there were races they are quite intermixed by now, I'm definitely a mongrel. there is at least a mix of irish , welsh scots, and french that I know of. could easy be more. My brother would say he is English!
well if it's anything like the one I consumed,a 10 day course of a targeted antibiotic and a testicle the size of a tennis ball and painkillers to target said inflamed nut.
not all bacteria is bad but some are worse than others, and left untreated it could cause renal failure and my death.
I actually have one which has a small base unit which clips to a sheet of paper and tracks the pens position. i imagine it wouldn't be that hard to build it into the side of a phone clip it to the paper and start working maybe. Merging these two types of technology could work, the swipe keyboard were you trace from the letters you want to make the words or there was a system on ubuntu which traced letters moving the most likely letters to be closer to the horizontal path you moved the mouse.
See the technology is almost there and if built in to a phone you could have your desktop in your pocket. Admittedly the size might be closer to the early cell phones of the 90's
you might be able to slide on a small projection system on to a phone so your phone can be light and easy to carry with this one small peripheral for i/o
If I can think of these things presumably there are engineers already working on prototype phones with good i/o
what is a phone other than a computer in a tiny case. The main problems are screen size and input. solve these and it might replace your desktop and it would be with you all day not in a bag but just a pocket.
do you really think a phone isnt powerful enough to do word processing for example. It is the io which is a problem now i could see that solved in the next few years
don't know what it costs, But this is a British tool its called a python basically something similar to a firemans hose packed with explosive. fired out across the mine field by a rocket.
It isn't designed to clear a mine field, just quickly clear a path through a minefield, according to another video it was first used in Afghanistan fun video if you like explosions
Hardly Ecstasy is a horrible drug, yeah you feel great for an evening but there are some pretty extreme lows. Your mileage may vary.
Just don't see a reason to make a bad day so much worse, the only consolation is knowing that it pretty much is just chemically induced and given time will fade. It might be 2 or 3 days later you get like that. Habitual use of any drug isn't great excess alcohol tends to make people allergic to you, getting stoned seriously inhibits your motivation, the rest just seem to be harmful to some degree.
Better a clear mind some focus and the knowledge that no matter how bad your day is there will be better days to come. (better to feel crap than feel nothing)
Here's a dose of reality try visiting www.fas.ie and doing a job search. not for any particular job but any. To save you time i'll give you the results for county Cork (not the City of Cork Irelands second largest city but the whole county) the result as of a few days ago was 184 jobs / training listed.
For the city of Cork there are 45,000 or so people out of work about 245 people for each job available. However even that figure is optimistic as a lot of those jobs are requiring specific skills and those that don't can be met by thousands upon thousands of people who are looking for anything just to get from the dole queue.
Now you do realise that if you choose to be unemployed that you quit you do not qualify for any benefits. Actually even qualifying still means up to a three month wait before you get paid.
Sure there is no law saying you can't quit but your welcome to try and survive between jobs in the meantime. As an individual it would be hard, imagine it is not just you but you support a wife and a couple of children. Assuming you rent how many months is your landlord going to wait for the rent, how are you going to feed your children? keep the lights on?
The only reason the figures are no worse here is because people are leaving the country and seeking work elsewhere Canada and Australia are the top destinations if you qualify, if your over 26 unless your highly skilled you won't be wanted in Australia and that assumes you can raise the money to move in the first place.
Four years ago it wasn't like this you could find jobs, you could decide you wanted a change and you would be able to do as you suggest.
When you say media you ignored Sky and Sky News in particular is not limited to sky subscribers and is fta in various forms. With the digital switch over Murdoch has pretty much everybody in the UK's eyes covered.
Has everyone forgot that the sun on sundays website was registered prior to the closure of the news of the world? Murdoch knew he couldn't save the news of the world after the phone hacking scandal and so stopped the presses for a while. The sun on sunday is as much the news of the world as Sellafield and Windscale
Your kidding right? If the choice is poor work or no work then you have to take the poor work and leaving that job you hate means finding a better job, but there wasn't a better job which is why you took the only job available. Technically there is a choice but it isn't really optional.
I don't think it is "a lack of desire to get married" that causes people to be single at 30 I think most people would choose to be married if they only were in a position to be married.
First there is the issue of meeting someone who is compatible with you enough to want to spend your life with them and them you. Then there is the problem of being secure enough to be able to provide a reasonable income with some job security.
It is very hard these days to have the stability in your life to make marriage a reasonable prospect. Least ways when I was 30 I wasn't marriage material. Now that doesn't mean a life of celibacy I can't even remember the names of all the women I have slept with over the years but there were few I really wanted to be with forever and most felt the same way about me.
I'm divorced now but I still hope to remarry it's simpler these days I'll settle for a reasonable place to live a job that will pay the bills and a few extra's and a woman who loves me and I love her. It's still hard to get all these things together at the same time with any degree of stability.
I guess there are some people who haven't realised that its not what you have but who you share it with that matters but i think that comes to most of us eventually.
If you can do it check the pulse if that is abnormal it is a problem of some sort. I'd say play it safe, I guess it depends where you are as to what you do. In ireland it would probably cost you if you don't have private insurance or a medical card maybe 60 euro if your just checked out by a dr in the UK you can just go and be checked, in the usa well that might be a bigger problem.
Stents are actually cheap for what they do, In 2009 I know a Dr wasted a stent and it was about 600 euro worth of stent he scrapped. It is a relatively cheap procedure and as the alternative is cutting open your chest under a general anaesthetic i'll go with the stent while it helps me.
Do you really? Seems most of what you get is a bunch of hype which tends to lead to disappointment when you buy into it. The truely great movies do not need it. The mediocre need it big time. Movies are usually limited in supply If you wanted to go see a movie tomorrow you have a choice of maybe 12 locally and they are pretty much the same nationally (when i was younger it was a choice of what was on at the Odeon or what was on at the ABC 2 for the week maybe a second week if it was popular). These days we are all fairly well networked so if you want an honest opinion you can ask your friends or just download a screener and see for yourself.
You know what would be good, if movies were made available for the first half or the first half hour. legally on torrents. Trailers are bull they tell you very little but the first half hour would either grab you and leave you wanting more or leave you looking for something else. As not everybody likes every kind of movie it could possibly result in bigger audiences for movies that might be seen as rubbish by some people or a brilliant chick flick (for example) for another section of the population. that could work for ebooks , concert dvd's in fact why not give the option to buy the last half immediately...
In a heart attack, the heart muscle is deprived of oxygen and begins to die, and later becomes scar tissue, which leaves your heart with a reduced capacity to pump blood round your body.
This could potentially be the chance to regenerate the Heart Muscle repairing the damage.
The 50% rate after an initial heart attack is around 6 to 8 years (30% die from an initial heart attack) with a 25% chance of death in the first year. Quite depressing, although after year 1 its 3% compared to 1.5% for normal folk. Obviously the greater the damage caused by the blockage the more likely it is to kill you sooner rather than later. In the case of severe damage maybe stem cells might be an effective treatment and well worth the risk of cancer later in life.
It is worth remembering that it takes 20 - 30 minutes before the heart muscle begins to die so if you think you may be having a heart attack go for treatment and proper diagnosis fast. Leaving it for a few hours might not kill you but it will reduce your long term chances and quality of life.
For me it just felt like i couldn't catch my breath, for a friend of mine his pulse was 43 I forget his BP but 43 is very low for a fat old bloke, I got him to a Dr against his wishes (he had an appointment 3 hours later he wanted to wait for that) and he now has a triple bypass and a pacemaker. 2 years on he is still ok but waiting would have killed him.
My health is pretty good because i had minimal damage i have 2 stents fitted which work really well and a noticeable increase in energy levels immediately after. The stents are fitted from your groin and 3 days later i was out of hospital. A heart attack isn't necessarily painful some people will feel a pain in the left arm or pressure on their chest sometimes it might feel like indigestion or heart burn.
Just taking issue with your touchpad problem maybe you are looking too hard. To disable touchpad in Mint 11 , Mint 12 or Ubuntu 12.04 (just examples of versions I have recent experience with)
Fn key F7 enables and disables the touchpad that is on an aspire one but I would be surprised if most laptops didn't have similar keys. You don't need an applet to do this.
Now there are issues that can be annoying but that shouldn't be one of them. There isn't a perfect operating system. Windows 7 is pretty good right? so why Windows 8? OSX multiple revisions IOS Android the same.
Now the original poster asked if Mint is a good alternative to Ubuntu for a novice and I would say yes because of Unity mainly. A logical menu system organised into sound/video, graphics, internet, office ect helps direct you to suitable software for the task in hand. Unity doesn't do this if its not on the Dock you need to know the name of what your looking for. Software wise you pretty much have the same versions as in the equivalent Ubuntu version.
For a novice I would always recommend a dual boot system possibly a VM , since if you know how to do something in Windows easily, and doing the same task requires you to spend a lot of time figuring out how to do the same thing with different software in Linux then if you just want to get it done use what you know. You can work with the linux version when you are not under pressure, it is not a religion.
I don't know anything about your Dell but how well is your hardware supported? Does everything just work? If not you are not going to have a pain free experience. Still its probably worth using the hardware testing software to generate a report so the issues get back to developers who may well tackle the issue.
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The extended battery life is useful but can be provided by anything capable of supplying power via usb. it may well be quite inefficient since you charge a battery to charge another battery. External battery packs are readily available and could also service other devices such as your phone.
incidentally
I made a diy battery pack with 10 AA cells which plugs into a cigarette lighter adapter, and modded a twin lighter adapter with a usb port to allow me to charge the pack using a solar panel or in car. I did this for a marine radio but it works with most devices wanting 12 or 5 volts.
My Tablet has a kick stand which requires little space to have it a usable angle the bluetooth keyboard (ps3) has a range of 10 meters and will act as a handy remote when the tablet is being used with a hdmi compatible screen.
Third while the keyboard doesnt have a track pad it does have a pointer nipple and 2 mouse buttons which works quite well and is quite difficult to accidentally move the cursor, other keyboard mouse options can be better usb host means a full size keyboard / mouse option can be added wired or wirelessly.
With the keyboard not being physically attached you can just pick up the tablet and do tablety things and with a press of a button the keyboard links up when you want to do laptop type tasks.
There is unlikely to be any problems with intermittent connections which might become an issue with the physical connections on the dock.
An obvious point is that there are +/- points to both options in fact you might ask is $150 too much for the transformer dock when the bluetooth option is also an option and cheaper ($40 for the ps3 keyboard for example).
The transformer dock could be easily improved by changing the connection method to bluetooth for the operation of the keyboard and mouse. with increased flexibility the option of portrait orientation might be achievable.
A USB Hub and maybe an amp or speakers might be other options.
Ps3 keyboard works quite nicely with android even if it has a nipple for a mouse and it is relatively cheap. Since it is bluetooth you need no dongles and can just hit the ps3 button and connect.
It is the smoothest solution to the sometime problem of wanting to write at length on a tablet.
It is also handy when your tablet is connected by hdmi for use as a media centre/ tv web browser ect.
It really makes a difference as to what you can use a tablet for.
There is a massive supply chain and investment that goes into the production of these shiny toys. That is the catastrophe when all of a sudden you can't bring your product to market. That investment can become a massive loss.
Any company that uses lawyers to ban competing products is going to get a bad reputation and damage their own sales.
Is an iPad such a bad product that it can not compete with a Samsung tablet? If I want a Samsung tablet and I can't buy it because of Apple, I really don't think I will buy an iPad instead. I probably will buy a different tablet from a different manufacturer.
I may well refuse to buy Apple products in general due to their interference manipulating what I can buy.
Change the company names and the products to suit your own preferences, it doesn't really matter who's manipulating markets through court rooms. They deserve to lose sales due to their tactics.
Products should compete on their merits not on legal technicalities where 2 engineering teams solved similar problems, independently of each other.
Tablets are quite tidy devices for consumption of media but without a keyboard they are horrible for input such as this post for example.
However a tablet is completely transformed with the addition of a keyboard. Yesterday I bought a Sony PS3 bluetooth keyboard. It is brilliant full size keys but about the same length as the tablet, it has a mouse nipple and two mouse buttons built in. Now writing is easy and it is far more flexible than my netbook.
The keyboard can be used as a remote so I can plug the tablet to my tv and use it as a media centre.
If i just want to show someone i just pick up the tablet if i want to work on something i press the ps3 button to turn on the keyboard.
It really does transform the tablet to a useful portable computer. The keyboard cost less than 40 euro about double that of a wireless dongle type keyboard but not needing a dongle sticking out the side makes it very worth the extra cash. Incidentally the tablet screen which is bigger and brighter than my netbook screen is able to be orientated as i want it to be and of course i can zoom to any size i need the browser screen to be.
I finally feel like my tablet is more than just a toy.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18529739
only 98% of the island of Lanai thou , the plan was for Google to pay for the other 2% but things didn't quite work out...
got to admit i dislike encoding artifacts but i've only really seen it on sky broadcasts as they are too cheap to apply a decent bitrate.
I'm not saying there is no difference in quality, there most certainly is but most people accept some defects and if you think DVD can be bad did you ever watch VHS? that is a huge difference but people still collected their video cassettes as it was the best available option. People did transfer to DVD preferring to buy in that format while tapes got old and wouldn't play properly. Blueray is top end and still expensive hardware and still expensive disks.
Blueray can not turn a mediocre film into a good or excellent one. An excellent film will grab you and the recording medium comes a distant second.
for a car analogy , you might prefer to only travel in new cars and refuse to travel in an older car, for me it is the older car or walk. I have no doubt your new car feels great to drive and feels sharp and clean like a new suit. But you cut your cloth to what you can afford.
personally i don't bother with blueray in any form. Most people these days have a dvd drive on a computer but how may have a blueray drive? I think its more a financial than technical barrier.
Honestly who needs blueray when dvd is more than good enough and when it is on a computer even dvd quality is just icing. youtube is successful not for its high fidelity but its range of stuff available on most subjects.
I'm old enough to have recorded the chart show in mono on a radio cassette. Sure there was a bit of hiss and the tapes wore and got chewed up but it was good enough for my purposes back then.
These days it is hard to record anything below good enough quality. We would prefer the first edition hardback but the yellowing paperback is what most of us can afford these days with paycuts increased taxation and rocketing fuel bills.
maybe if we were not getting austerity measures forced upon us and had a bit more cash to spend on our little luxurys we would go back to the premium product but that seems to still be some time away.
You don't even need to be poorly paid when living expenses are outpacing your salary , If your buying your own house you still have to make the payments which are now a bigger proportion of your income than you expected them to be 5 or 10 years into paying for your now devalued home.
The nice thing about that site was google song copy link download done in around 10 seconds or so.
Sure you can do it for yourself but it is slower a lot slower. On the negative side sometimes its a poor version of the song you wanted plus the sound quality is never that good. Doing it yourself it is just as crappy but it takes longer.
The other good thing was for your typical house party there is always someone with a desire for some song you don't have and wouldn't want in your collection you could just pay it on youtube but at some point it is going to be buffering coz there is 40 meg of video streaming when all you really want is 4 meg of audio ((and who gets blamed for that) so if you can queue it up and keep the people happy and nobody really cares about the clipping or it being recorded too quiet.
sometimes low-fi is good enough.
what your references are saying is that he thinks its disappointing that while most Americans will mix during work and work related functions at the weekends America is still segregated along racial lines pretty much the same as in the 1950's.
The 2nd amendment attacks you refer to are that maybe it isn't a great idea for people to be carrying guns routinely. Not banning guns but discouraging people from having them.
I can understand your feelings in a country where you have to look out for you and yours with no safety net sure puts you at a disadvantage and defenceless if you don't have a gun (but the criminals still have guns). If everyone was equal there would be nobody to look down upon and be able to have the comfort of saying at least i'm not black. Oh and that superior attitude you have because your not black also can come back to haunt you now you have no guns but the black dudes still have them.
It is strange that the most powerful nation on earth will bankrupt it's citizens with private health care supply cheap food to it's people but not tell them whats in it (and that cheap crud is destroying the health of the nation). Seems the only way to get health care in your declining years is to have fought for your country. America as a country has some great achievements but at what cost to its citizens. How much of a nightmare is it if you were to lose your job next month with the current number of jobless Americans how long could you last if you didn't get rehired quickly?
America is a great place to be if your high enough up the ladder to have some stability in your life but that could easily be taken away from you by cancer a heart attack or even a simple car wreck just to name a few.
Jobs get exported oversea's for better profit margins and cheaper toys from china. The sad thing is i doubt there is anything anyone could do to change things in the US now, you just have to ride the roller coaster and hope you don't get flung off. Maybe I have the wrong impression of the usa and don't get me wrong of all the Americans i have met i wouldn't say i'd met anyone other than decent hard working people. If anything the internet has shown me is that we are all generally decent people with similar ethics and values.
http://atlanticreview.org/archives/434-Murder-Rate-in-the-United-States-and-Germany.html
is an interesting page comparing murder rates between germany and the the usa.
maybe this comment explains things quite well.
"Perhaps it is just a cultural gulf, and I do think that Americans in general place a lot more faith in self-reliance than they do on collective solutions such as giving the police a monopoly on the use of force to deter criminal conduct. And yes, when it comes to defending yourself against thugs, nothing works so well as a gun. Even a small woman can turn a 250 pound would be rapist into a corpse if she has a pistol and knows how to use it.
It may be a cliche, but an armed society does tend to be a polite society. In the more rural areas of the US where the rate of gun ownership tends to be high, the crime rates tend to be low, mainly because of the willingness of the local folks to deal out their own rough justice to people who attempt to victimize them."
As an American you may well say as a European it is no concern of mine of how America treats it's people but much as you can feel sympathy for kids in African countries with no clean water it is also easy to feel sympathy for the many Americans let down by their own nation.
The Daily show had something about this the other night. Seems the EPA uses drones to monitor what the cattle ranchers do and try to stop cattle crapping into the water supply. I would imagine there would be a lot of drones used on that job.
not really if there were races they are quite intermixed by now, I'm definitely a mongrel. there is at least a mix of irish , welsh scots, and french that I know of. could easy be more. My brother would say he is English!
As for Americans there is a huge mix...
I tend to use my netbook more than my tablet I was thinking why payout for a bluetooth keyboard for the tablet. So
http://anselm.hoffmeister.be/computer/hidclient/index.html.en lets you use your mouse and keyboard with a tablet or phone. Yes maybe a little redundant but at least you can try it out with out paying out for yet another keyboard mouse set.
well if it's anything like the one I consumed ,a 10 day course of a targeted antibiotic and a testicle the size of a tennis ball and painkillers to target said inflamed nut.
not all bacteria is bad but some are worse than others, and left untreated it could cause renal failure and my death.
Here are a few devices pico projectors (60" - 120" max size) many already connect to iPhones
http://www.amazon.com/Optoma-EP-PK-101-Pico-Pocket-Projector/dp/B001L4L7AQ
how about a digital pen.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Delectronics&field-keywords=digital+pen+writer
I actually have one which has a small base unit which clips to a sheet of paper and tracks the pens position. i imagine it wouldn't be that hard to build it into the side of a phone clip it to the paper and start working maybe. Merging these two types of technology could work, the swipe keyboard were you trace from the letters you want to make the words or there was a system on ubuntu which traced letters moving the most likely letters to be closer to the horizontal path you moved the mouse.
or maybe
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/cellphone/e722/
a projected full size keyboard (bluetooth)
See the technology is almost there and if built in to a phone you could have your desktop in your pocket. Admittedly the size might be closer to the early cell phones of the 90's
you might be able to slide on a small projection system on to a phone so your phone can be light and easy to carry with this one small peripheral for i/o
If I can think of these things presumably there are engineers already working on prototype phones with good i/o
what is a phone other than a computer in a tiny case. The main problems are screen size and input.
solve these and it might replace your desktop and it would be with you all day not in a bag but just a pocket.
do you really think a phone isnt powerful enough to do word processing for example. It is the io which is a problem now i could see that solved in the next few years
don't know what it costs, But this is a British tool its called a python basically something similar to a firemans hose packed with explosive. fired out across the mine field by a rocket.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eeaou2L2sI&feature=related
It isn't designed to clear a mine field, just quickly clear a path through a minefield, according to another video it was first used in Afghanistan fun video if you like explosions
Hardly Ecstasy is a horrible drug, yeah you feel great for an evening but there are some pretty extreme lows. Your mileage may vary.
Just don't see a reason to make a bad day so much worse, the only consolation is knowing that it pretty much is just chemically induced and given time will fade. It might be 2 or 3 days later you get like that. Habitual use of any drug isn't great excess alcohol tends to make people allergic to you, getting stoned seriously inhibits your motivation, the rest just seem to be harmful to some degree.
Better a clear mind some focus and the knowledge that no matter how bad your day is there will be better days to come. (better to feel crap than feel nothing)
Here's a dose of reality try visiting www.fas.ie and doing a job search. not for any particular job but any. To save you time i'll give you the results for county Cork (not the City of Cork Irelands second largest city but the whole county) the result as of a few days ago was 184 jobs / training listed.
For the city of Cork there are 45,000 or so people out of work about 245 people for each job available. However even that figure is optimistic as a lot of those jobs are requiring specific skills and those that don't can be met by thousands upon thousands of people who are looking for anything just to get from the dole queue.
Now you do realise that if you choose to be unemployed that you quit you do not qualify for any benefits. Actually even qualifying still means up to a three month wait before you get paid.
Sure there is no law saying you can't quit but your welcome to try and survive between jobs in the meantime. As an individual it would be hard, imagine it is not just you but you support a wife and a couple of children. Assuming you rent how many months is your landlord going to wait for the rent, how are you going to feed your children? keep the lights on?
The only reason the figures are no worse here is because people are leaving the country and seeking work elsewhere Canada and Australia are the top destinations if you qualify, if your over 26 unless your highly skilled you won't be wanted in Australia and that assumes you can raise the money to move in the first place.
Four years ago it wasn't like this you could find jobs, you could decide you wanted a change and you would be able to do as you suggest.
When you say media you ignored Sky and Sky News in particular is not limited to sky subscribers and is fta in various forms. With the digital switch over Murdoch has pretty much everybody in the UK's eyes covered.
Has everyone forgot that the sun on sundays website was registered prior to the closure of the news of the world? Murdoch knew he couldn't save the news of the world after the phone hacking scandal and so stopped the presses for a while.
The sun on sunday is as much the news of the world as Sellafield and Windscale
Your kidding right? If the choice is poor work or no work then you have to take the poor work and leaving that job you hate means finding a better job, but there wasn't a better job which is why you took the only job available. Technically there is a choice but it isn't really optional.
I don't think it is "a lack of desire to get married" that causes people to be single at 30 I think most people would choose to be married if they only were in a position to be married.
First there is the issue of meeting someone who is compatible with you enough to want to spend your life with them and them you. Then there is the problem of being secure enough to be able to provide a reasonable income with some job security.
It is very hard these days to have the stability in your life to make marriage a reasonable prospect. Least ways when I was 30 I wasn't marriage material. Now that doesn't mean a life of celibacy I can't even remember the names of all the women I have slept with over the years but there were few I really wanted to be with forever and most felt the same way about me.
I'm divorced now but I still hope to remarry it's simpler these days I'll settle for a reasonable place to live a job that will pay the bills and a few extra's and a woman who loves me and I love her. It's still hard to get all these things together at the same time with any degree of stability.
I guess there are some people who haven't realised that its not what you have but who you share it with that matters but i think that comes to most of us eventually.
If you can do it check the pulse if that is abnormal it is a problem of some sort. I'd say play it safe, I guess it depends where you are as to what you do. In ireland it would probably cost you if you don't have private insurance or a medical card maybe 60 euro if your just checked out by a dr in the UK you can just go and be checked, in the usa well that might be a bigger problem.
Stents are actually cheap for what they do, In 2009 I know a Dr wasted a stent and it was about 600 euro worth of stent he scrapped. It is a relatively cheap procedure and as the alternative is cutting open your chest under a general anaesthetic i'll go with the stent while it helps me.
Do you really?
Seems most of what you get is a bunch of hype which tends to lead to disappointment when you buy into it. The truely great movies do not need it. The mediocre need it big time. Movies are usually limited in supply If you wanted to go see a movie tomorrow you have a choice of maybe 12 locally and they are pretty much the same nationally (when i was younger it was a choice of what was on at the Odeon or what was on at the ABC 2 for the week maybe a second week if it was popular). These days we are all fairly well networked so if you want an honest opinion you can ask your friends or just download a screener and see for yourself.
You know what would be good, if movies were made available for the first half or the first half hour.
legally on torrents. Trailers are bull they tell you very little but the first half hour would either grab you and leave you wanting more or leave you looking for something else. As not everybody likes every kind of movie it could possibly result in bigger audiences for movies that might be seen as rubbish by some people or a brilliant chick flick (for example) for another section of the population.
that could work for ebooks , concert dvd's in fact why not give the option to buy the last half immediately...
In a heart attack, the heart muscle is deprived of oxygen and begins to die, and later becomes scar tissue, which leaves your heart with a reduced capacity to pump blood round your body.
This could potentially be the chance to regenerate the Heart Muscle repairing the damage.
The 50% rate after an initial heart attack is around 6 to 8 years (30% die from an initial heart attack) with a 25% chance of death in the first year. Quite depressing, although after year 1 its 3% compared to 1.5% for normal folk. Obviously the greater the damage caused by the blockage the more likely it is to kill you sooner rather than later. In the case of severe damage maybe stem cells might be an effective treatment and well worth the risk of cancer later in life.
It is worth remembering that it takes 20 - 30 minutes before the heart muscle begins to die so if you think you may be having a heart attack go for treatment and proper diagnosis fast. Leaving it for a few hours might not kill you but it will reduce your long term chances and quality of life.
For me it just felt like i couldn't catch my breath, for a friend of mine his pulse was 43 I forget his BP but 43 is very low for a fat old bloke, I got him to a Dr against his wishes (he had an appointment 3 hours later he wanted to wait for that) and he now has a triple bypass and a pacemaker. 2 years on he is still ok but waiting would have killed him.
My health is pretty good because i had minimal damage i have 2 stents fitted which work really well and a noticeable increase in energy levels immediately after. The stents are fitted from your groin and 3 days later i was out of hospital. A heart attack isn't necessarily painful some people will feel a pain in the left arm or pressure on their chest sometimes it might feel like indigestion or heart burn.
Just taking issue with your touchpad problem maybe you are looking too hard. To disable touchpad in Mint 11 , Mint 12 or Ubuntu 12.04 (just examples of versions I have recent experience with)
Fn key F7 enables and disables the touchpad that is on an aspire one but I would be surprised if most laptops didn't have similar keys. You don't need an applet to do this.
Now there are issues that can be annoying but that shouldn't be one of them. There isn't a perfect operating system. Windows 7 is pretty good right? so why Windows 8? OSX multiple revisions IOS Android the same.
Now the original poster asked if Mint is a good alternative to Ubuntu for a novice and I would say yes because of Unity mainly. A logical menu system organised into sound/video, graphics, internet, office ect helps direct you to suitable software for the task in hand. Unity doesn't do this if its not on the Dock you need to know the name of what your looking for. Software wise you pretty much have the same versions as in the equivalent Ubuntu version.
For a novice I would always recommend a dual boot system possibly a VM , since if you know how to do something in Windows easily, and doing the same task requires you to spend a lot of time figuring out how to do the same thing with different software in Linux then if you just want to get it done use what you know. You can work with the linux version when you are not under pressure, it is not a religion.
I don't know anything about your Dell but how well is your hardware supported? Does everything just work? If not you are not going to have a pain free experience. Still its probably worth using the hardware testing software to generate a report so the issues get back to developers who may well tackle the issue.