Except in this case, convertible tablets are more like the Benz Patent Motorwagen to the 'pure' tablet's Model T. It's undeniable that it bears a common ancestor with the Honda Civic and the Model T, and that, indeed, the Motorwagen might be a common ancestor to BOTH the Civic and the Model T.
But as we all know, some evolutionary lines die out, unfit to survive in the niche they have been occupying. There is no reason to conclude, given the unimpressive success of convertible tablets to date, that they are poised for some sort of astounding comeback & success story.
And the thing is, that "$200 laptop" was certainly not a $200 laptop when it started its life. He bought it used on Craigslist.
If you read TFA, his reasons for liking it have to do with the *expandability* of the laptop versus the tablet: ports, dvd drive, more internal storage, replaceable battery. And if somebody else hadn't purchased it first, then resold it when they bought something new, he'd be spending a LOT more on a Thinkpad than he would on an iPad or a Xoom.
Looking at the specs on a Thinkpad X30, it's a 5-6 year old computer, and in terms of performance, I'd expect an iPad 2 or a Xoom to keep up with it just fine, performance-wise.
Does it not strike you as disconcerting that the manufacturer of a product pushes a $349(!!) extended warranty for their own product before you get out the door of their company store either?
No, why would it strike me as "disconcerting"? Warranties are huge profit generators for companies that offer them - if they lost money on the arrangement, they wouldn't offer the warranties. I find it no more disconcerting that Apple offers one than I do that every car manufacturer in existence offers the same style of extended protection plan, or that most computer manufacturers offer the exact same style of add-on warranty.
What I learn by being offered a "3 year extended warranty" is that the piece of kit that I'm buying is designed to last - and can reasonably be expected to run - for at least 3 years without any major issues. Extended warranties are "repair insurance" - many people buy them because they provide a little peace of mind - if something goes wrong, you know you have someone who will repair the issue for you. If you're comfortable fixing your own hardware, or you simply don't want to spend the money, then there's no need for it - I'd rather it be offered as an add-on, instead of having the cost built into the price.
Many of us have personal firsthand experience about these matters.
Are you seriously suggesting that "anecdote" is the singular form of "data"? Unless your title is "elected representative, people with firsthand experience with these matters," then you're engaging in hand-waving and are full of shit. Vague assertions that "many of us" (most of whom we could probably find posts here indicating that they have never owned, and would never own, an Apple product) know something about this without any more evidence than a link to the single support forum post don't cut it.
I notice that you don't address the actual point of my comments in your haste to chime in. Please explain for us, if you would be so kind, how ~450 forum posts reporting an issue in what is likely to be millions of units shipped in Q1 of 2011 constitutes evidence of anything which may be correctly termed a "very widespread" flaw with the *design of the laptop*? The summary and the headline are nothing but FUD, and you know it.
s/2011 Macbook Pros/New model of Android phone/g in the summary, with the same evidence - a link to a single thread containing a couple hundred support forum posts - and consider whether you'd uncritically accept that article & headline as being accurate, rather than sensationalist?
A few days of load testing would have confirmed this issue before the consumer had even known the product existed.
Provided it's an issue with the design, and not simply a bad batch of thermal paste, logic boards, or some other component. Again: 450 posts (many of them are follow-ups from users who already posted, so that doesn't even necessarily mean 450 *units*) in one apple discussion thread, out of several million units shipped does not suggest a "widespread issue" - there is, as yet, little-to-no evidence to support the assertion that this is a "very widespread" design issue.
But you knew all that already. Really, it's just fun to get your hate on, isn't it?
For a bunch of 'scientific' people who like to poke fun at anybody who questions evolution or espouses intelligent design or creationism, I'm constantly amazed at how easily flamebait articles and titles such as this manage to get taken with a shred of seriousness here. Of course, "A small number of 2011 MacBook Pros have been found to be defective" doesn't generate the ad impressions that a good piece of flamebait does.
1) The percentage is useful in determining whether this is, indeed, a "very widespread issue," or whether it represents a small overall failure rate due to a bad batch of thermal paste or components, damage during shipping, or perhaps somebody at the assembly line having a bad day and crossing a couple wires;
2) You will never get failures (or murder rates) to zero. It will never happen. At some point, it becomes too costly to prevent every possible failure. So, again, you look at rates of failure per units shipped, and drive that as low as you can. If you ship only 1000 units, and 500 of them fail, or you ship 1 million units, and 500 of them fail, there is a VAST difference in quality implied by those numbers.
3) Since any murder is apparently "significant" to you, would you then conclude that Detroit, MI (murder rate of 19.67 per 1,000 people) and Plano, TX (murder rate of 1.7 per 1,000 people) are equivalently "safe" cities? Obviously, the answer is "no" - this is why it helps to understand the rate of failures, so that we can compare whether or not the actual number of failures are similar to, better than, or worse than industry averages.
450 posts, many of them responses, or follow-on posts from users who already posted of their problems, and we conclude that this is a "very widespread issue" affecting each of the millions of units shipped each quarter, rather than the more reasonable conclusion, that some people are bound to get faulty hardware when you ship a couple million units in a quarter? Defend that, statistics fans.
And here's the thing: if your system is borked, they will repair it. The repair service is quite good, and if you're still under warranty (and you are, if you have a "2011 Macbook"), then they will repair it.
Great, so you're saying you completely agree with me - I'm glad we cleared that up.
I wasn't talking about an "individual" use - in fact, I specifically said, it may be fine for "individuals," but that if you are supporting a large organization with advanced requirements (remember - specialized jobs DO sometimes require those advanced features), LibreOffice being cheaper probably doesn't make much of a difference, because the support and ongoing maintenance is by far the larger portion of the cost of the software.
Given that there are known incompatibilities and headaches between LO- and MSO-generated files, it simply doesn't make sense to try and purchase and support two different packages in a large business which requires the advanced features; what you will save in up-front purchase costs is vanishingly small compared to the amount of wasted time of users, and the cost of support of 2 separate packages, over time.
If the contract were a contract of equals, where the consumer could say, "No, I don't like this portion", cross it out, and negotiate further, then I'd agree with you.
And if consumers were willing to foot the bill for all the legal fees from the lawyers required to review all of the millions of a la carte contracts you seem to imagine could be written up in no time at all, as well as put up with the weeks of delays in getting any service from any company, I'm sure companies would be willing to offer them. But since people grumble about $50 a month, imagine if you were also whacked with a couple thousand in legal fees every time you wanted to sign up for a service, and then had to wait weeks or months for the lawyers to review and agree on the terms before your service could be activated. I think that would be a *wildly* successful business model, don't you?
Again: if you don't like the terms under which the service is provided, do not purchase it. Or learn to accept that you make tradeoffs in which you limit your choices to a few predefined package deals in order to get cheaper service (remember those legal fees!) and faster service initiation (remember all that back and forth between their lawyers and yours before the contract is approved!)
If this model would be such a winning recipe, there's also nothing stopping you from assembling a coalition of like-minded people, pooling your money, and starting a business that operates in exactly this fashion. Lucky for you, there's also Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for you & your co-founders when you all find out that the world doesn't work the way you think it should, just because you earnestly wish nothing had tradeoffs and everything you want can be had for the cost of a wish.
Spent time in Army ROTC in college. While it'd be wonderful to imagine that we have laser-targeted, precisely computed responses to all forms of incoming fire, I also participated in enough squad and platoon drills to know that "anything that moves" looks mighty suspicious when you're under fire, don't know where it's coming from, and people start taking hits - and that's when we knew that the worst thing that would happen to us was that we'd get a death tone from our MILES gear, and we'd have to lay on the ground and "play dead" for a few minutes, and then get yelled at for screwing up the standard FM 7-8 response to the situation we were being tested on.
"If you want to buy their router" assumes that there is a choice of whether or not to buy their router. Which means that "BYO Router" terms are built into the contract, and are not specifically excluded from the contract.
If the contract says "you pay us this fee regardless of whether or not you buy a router from us," the yes, they should get to charge you, because that's the contract you agreed to. If the contract says "you can rent one from us for a monthly fee, or supply your own and not pay the fee," (my ISP offers these terms as well) then of course they shouldn't get to charge you.
Whether or not they "should" get to charge you are entirely dependent on the terms of the contract you sign. If you don't like the terms of the contract, DO NOT sign the contract. It's really that simple.
Not particularly, because it is impossible to find a contract that doesn't contain that clause.
I'm not sure where this sense of entitlement comes from. You are not entitled to "whatever service level you demand at whatever price you prefer" - if you sign the contract, you are indicating agreement with the service features & levels that you are being offered. Don't like the terms? Don't sign the contract.
If you sign a contract, and then unilaterally violate that contract because you don't happen to like the terms that much, then you will find yourself subject to the penalties specified in that contract for violation - including cancellation of service & early termination fees. Of course, they'd much rather keep you as a subscriber, so they're offering - after you've breached the contract - to allow you to add the tethering service at the standard rate, since it's something you seem to want to use.
Frankly, I think that's pretty generous. This is not a case where people had a contract that said "tethering is fine, no problem at all!" and suddenly ATT decided to start charging them an arm and a leg. This is people who have violated their contract, being offered the following choices: 1) Stop the violating behaviors; 2) Pay for the services you are using; 3) Lose your service;
So your choices are - regular ammunition, with longer range (allowing you the opportunity for better cover and more chance of surprise) and better penetration versus body armor and vehicle armor, versus subsonic ammo, which means you have to be pretty close, very precise (vs. body armor), and WELL within range of your enemies' weapons when they start returning fire.
Subsonic rounds aren't silent, by any means, either. They're quieter, but I doubt that they'd be so quiet these detectors couldn't "hear" them.
And when you (the customer) agree to a contract that says "tethering costs extra," and then you tether anyway without paying that extra fee... aren't you violating the very basic principles of how agreements work as well?
This isn't "changing" the contract, this is telling you, "Either abide by the contract you signed, or pay up for the services you're consuming."
Whether or not charging extra for tethering is reasonable is certainly debatable; that you're violating the contract (in which you agree that tethering costs extra and may be added to your plan if it's offered on your phone) by tethering without paying for the plan is not debatable.
You make a mistake ignoring price and reducing quality of product to one value (one dimension).
That's ironic, considering the only quantifiable thing you can cite as to why LibreOffice is better is "It's cheaper."
LibreOffice does not have all the advanced features of Office, and in a large organization (you know, with accounting departments and legal departments and writers and all of that sort of thing), those features ARE needed by some of the users. SO your choice is, by MS Office for everybody via an enterprise licensing agreement, and support one package; or buy MS Office ONLY for those who need the advanced features, and give everybody else LibreOffice - save SOME money on the purchase costs, but then saddle yourself with support of two packages for the foreseeable future, with all of their little incompatibilities causing hundreds or thousands of people headaches and wasted time across your entire organization.
Blindly asserting that "you don't need those features, do without them" is not a reasonable answer.
They could buy up the rights to do something new, and then produce complete trash. Owning the rights to any of those shows doesn't guarantee the resulting new production will be worth a damn - sets, actors, crews, locations, budgets, effects - all could very easily change, and those changes aren't guaranteed to be improvements on the originals that you so fondly remember.
I'd rather they go find new, interesting stories and focus on telling them well, rather than suffer through two years of "A FIREFLY CLASS VESSEL DOES NOT LOOK LIKE THAT INSIDE, AND THAT'S NOT THE ORIGINAL KAYLEE FRYE! THEY RUINED THE SHOW! DIE NETFLIX DIE!"
$8 per month per subscriber times 12 months in a year times 1,041,667 new subscribers equals 100 million dollars. Never mind promotional fees and product placement fees that companies could be paying them for placement in their original series; distribution deals with other outlets who pay a fee to show Netflix's new content, etc.
They have roughly 20 million subscribers according to their own investor relations page. Adding a million may take time, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that they'd pull in a million new viewers with a new (original/exclusive) series if it's well done and generates a lot of good word of mouth. Especially with Netflix coming native on internet-capable televisions and devices like Boxee Box, Google TV & Apple TV.
Break into your home when you're away at a concert.
Ah yes, because knowing I like Bruce Springsteen means I'm guaranteed to be at every concert he does within 100 miles of my home. If somebody wants to target me specifically, all they need to know is where I live (easy enough to find) and then sit outside my home until they see me leave. If they're not targeting me specifically, they aren't going to say "Let's find people who like Bruce Springsteen, and go see if they're out of the house at his concert, and rob them if they are!" Burglaries are overwhelmingly opportunistic crimes - go to a rich part of town, find a house with weak security (unlocked, open doors, no alarm system...), break in, grab what you can, and run. Either I'm being specifically targeted (in which case my musical preferences aren't going to make a bit of difference), or I'm not being specifically targeted (in which case, information about me on Facebook is irrelevant to my being targeted).
plant illegal substances on you while you're there,
Really? REALLY? How many times has this *ever* happened in the history of the world? You watch way too many spy movies.
If anybody's targeting me with the level of sophistication you're suggesting, they already know way more about me than anything they'll find on Facebook, because they already have me under surveillance, they've likely broken into my computer and cataloged its contents (and they'd easily notice a lot of Bruce Springsteen and Johnny Cash MP3's while they're there). And they're already well aware of my routine, and could find a much easier time and place to plant "illegal substances" on me than when I'm at a one-time event when I'm hanging out with half a dozen friends, rather than, say, at the spot I stop every day for my morning coffee on my way to work, or in my car which is parked in roughly the same spot every day, all day, while I'm at work, and in roughly the same spot all night, every night, when I'm at home.
Some of us prefer to not live our lives in fear of an asteroid smashing into the earth with no warning. I bet that fear must cripple you.
And from all indications, they are failing to compete on any level.
What were the good parts they're keeping, again? Reviews upon their initial alpha release indicated that they failed to deliver on the single feature that they claimed they were going to do better than Facebook: privacy and security controls. Claiming that there's some legitimate "more private" alternative to Facebook is just... wrong. There's a lot of good intentions and fancy talk, but good intentions haven't written a single line of code yet.
You want to make a more private alternative to Facebook? Build a site that provides the same sharing functionality, with better security & privacy controls, and then start charging membership fees instead of selling ad space. Until somebody does this, there will be no serious competitor to Facebook that provides any more privacy and data control to its users than Facebook does. And I think we can all agree that getting people to pay for what they're getting already for free is a tough prospect.
Can you please provide some numbers? How high is this accuracy?
Netflix doesn't give absolute numbers, but they put a million dollars on the line for a 10% increase in prediction accuracy, and it took the teams 3 years to build an algorithm that would achieve that improvement. Given that, I'd say their predictions are likely to be pretty good. This is supported by anecdotal evidence, as well - their recommendations, once you've input a few ratings of your own, tend to be pretty good.
(can it also predict that I might like watching movies but abhor the idea of using Netflix? This parenthesis only to exemplify that "statistical aberrations" can take more forms that any statistical model can predict... simply because being a model it will inherently be a simplified reflection of the reality).
This really is a rather stupid point. "Your computers can't predict anything about me if I'm not in their dataset, nyah nyah." Yeah, so what? If somebody took a few dozen movies you really loved, input those ratings into netflix, and then verbally recommended a couple of the netflix recommendations to you, the effect would be the same, and you would probably find that the recommendations are pretty solid.
Your avoidance of Netflix doesn't mean you're a super-special snowflake who no algorithm can predict things about. If we know what you like, and we have a large set of data about "many things many people like," then we can begin to form affinity groups with your tastes. From those groups, we can then find things that people who like many of the same things as you also like. Nobody's claiming that the models are 100% accurate, but your argument that a large data set to compare against will somehow compromise the prediction quality is just foolish - the machines are finding patterns in the like/dislike data which is similar to the user; this then suggests certain likely continuations of a pattern.
Slashdot Mirror
Except in this case, convertible tablets are more like the Benz Patent Motorwagen to the 'pure' tablet's Model T. It's undeniable that it bears a common ancestor with the Honda Civic and the Model T, and that, indeed, the Motorwagen might be a common ancestor to BOTH the Civic and the Model T.
But as we all know, some evolutionary lines die out, unfit to survive in the niche they have been occupying. There is no reason to conclude, given the unimpressive success of convertible tablets to date, that they are poised for some sort of astounding comeback & success story.
By your argument, yes. Since the Apple tablets are "early, expensive examples" of something. They've sold quite well.
And the thing is, that "$200 laptop" was certainly not a $200 laptop when it started its life. He bought it used on Craigslist.
If you read TFA, his reasons for liking it have to do with the *expandability* of the laptop versus the tablet: ports, dvd drive, more internal storage, replaceable battery. And if somebody else hadn't purchased it first, then resold it when they bought something new, he'd be spending a LOT more on a Thinkpad than he would on an iPad or a Xoom.
Looking at the specs on a Thinkpad X30, it's a 5-6 year old computer, and in terms of performance, I'd expect an iPad 2 or a Xoom to keep up with it just fine, performance-wise.
Which is to say, $100 less than the closest Android competitor that has remotely equivalent features?
No, why would it strike me as "disconcerting"? Warranties are huge profit generators for companies that offer them - if they lost money on the arrangement, they wouldn't offer the warranties. I find it no more disconcerting that Apple offers one than I do that every car manufacturer in existence offers the same style of extended protection plan, or that most computer manufacturers offer the exact same style of add-on warranty.
What I learn by being offered a "3 year extended warranty" is that the piece of kit that I'm buying is designed to last - and can reasonably be expected to run - for at least 3 years without any major issues. Extended warranties are "repair insurance" - many people buy them because they provide a little peace of mind - if something goes wrong, you know you have someone who will repair the issue for you. If you're comfortable fixing your own hardware, or you simply don't want to spend the money, then there's no need for it - I'd rather it be offered as an add-on, instead of having the cost built into the price.
Are you seriously suggesting that "anecdote" is the singular form of "data"? Unless your title is "elected representative, people with firsthand experience with these matters," then you're engaging in hand-waving and are full of shit. Vague assertions that "many of us" (most of whom we could probably find posts here indicating that they have never owned, and would never own, an Apple product) know something about this without any more evidence than a link to the single support forum post don't cut it.
I notice that you don't address the actual point of my comments in your haste to chime in. Please explain for us, if you would be so kind, how ~450 forum posts reporting an issue in what is likely to be millions of units shipped in Q1 of 2011 constitutes evidence of anything which may be correctly termed a "very widespread" flaw with the *design of the laptop*? The summary and the headline are nothing but FUD, and you know it.
s/2011 Macbook Pros/New model of Android phone/g in the summary, with the same evidence - a link to a single thread containing a couple hundred support forum posts - and consider whether you'd uncritically accept that article & headline as being accurate, rather than sensationalist?
Provided it's an issue with the design, and not simply a bad batch of thermal paste, logic boards, or some other component. Again: 450 posts (many of them are follow-ups from users who already posted, so that doesn't even necessarily mean 450 *units*) in one apple discussion thread, out of several million units shipped does not suggest a "widespread issue" - there is, as yet, little-to-no evidence to support the assertion that this is a "very widespread" design issue.
But you knew all that already. Really, it's just fun to get your hate on, isn't it?
For a bunch of 'scientific' people who like to poke fun at anybody who questions evolution or espouses intelligent design or creationism, I'm constantly amazed at how easily flamebait articles and titles such as this manage to get taken with a shred of seriousness here. Of course, "A small number of 2011 MacBook Pros have been found to be defective" doesn't generate the ad impressions that a good piece of flamebait does.
Bah, you're right. s/murder rate/violent crime rate/g.
Several thoughts in response to this:
1) The percentage is useful in determining whether this is, indeed, a "very widespread issue," or whether it represents a small overall failure rate due to a bad batch of thermal paste or components, damage during shipping, or perhaps somebody at the assembly line having a bad day and crossing a couple wires;
2) You will never get failures (or murder rates) to zero. It will never happen. At some point, it becomes too costly to prevent every possible failure. So, again, you look at rates of failure per units shipped, and drive that as low as you can. If you ship only 1000 units, and 500 of them fail, or you ship 1 million units, and 500 of them fail, there is a VAST difference in quality implied by those numbers.
3) Since any murder is apparently "significant" to you, would you then conclude that Detroit, MI (murder rate of 19.67 per 1,000 people) and Plano, TX (murder rate of 1.7 per 1,000 people) are equivalently "safe" cities? Obviously, the answer is "no" - this is why it helps to understand the rate of failures, so that we can compare whether or not the actual number of failures are similar to, better than, or worse than industry averages.
450 posts, many of them responses, or follow-on posts from users who already posted of their problems, and we conclude that this is a "very widespread issue" affecting each of the millions of units shipped each quarter, rather than the more reasonable conclusion, that some people are bound to get faulty hardware when you ship a couple million units in a quarter? Defend that, statistics fans.
And here's the thing: if your system is borked, they will repair it. The repair service is quite good, and if you're still under warranty (and you are, if you have a "2011 Macbook"), then they will repair it.
So if Apple adopted Dell's "run it up the flagpole, and see who salutes" hardware strategy, they'd have Dell's vast profit and valuation?
Wow. I'm sure they'll get right on destroying their business and profit margins in a rush to the bottom, now that you've suggested it.
Great, so you're saying you completely agree with me - I'm glad we cleared that up.
I wasn't talking about an "individual" use - in fact, I specifically said, it may be fine for "individuals," but that if you are supporting a large organization with advanced requirements (remember - specialized jobs DO sometimes require those advanced features), LibreOffice being cheaper probably doesn't make much of a difference, because the support and ongoing maintenance is by far the larger portion of the cost of the software.
Given that there are known incompatibilities and headaches between LO- and MSO-generated files, it simply doesn't make sense to try and purchase and support two different packages in a large business which requires the advanced features; what you will save in up-front purchase costs is vanishingly small compared to the amount of wasted time of users, and the cost of support of 2 separate packages, over time.
And if consumers were willing to foot the bill for all the legal fees from the lawyers required to review all of the millions of a la carte contracts you seem to imagine could be written up in no time at all, as well as put up with the weeks of delays in getting any service from any company, I'm sure companies would be willing to offer them. But since people grumble about $50 a month, imagine if you were also whacked with a couple thousand in legal fees every time you wanted to sign up for a service, and then had to wait weeks or months for the lawyers to review and agree on the terms before your service could be activated. I think that would be a *wildly* successful business model, don't you?
Again: if you don't like the terms under which the service is provided, do not purchase it. Or learn to accept that you make tradeoffs in which you limit your choices to a few predefined package deals in order to get cheaper service (remember those legal fees!) and faster service initiation (remember all that back and forth between their lawyers and yours before the contract is approved!)
If this model would be such a winning recipe, there's also nothing stopping you from assembling a coalition of like-minded people, pooling your money, and starting a business that operates in exactly this fashion. Lucky for you, there's also Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for you & your co-founders when you all find out that the world doesn't work the way you think it should, just because you earnestly wish nothing had tradeoffs and everything you want can be had for the cost of a wish.
Spent time in Army ROTC in college. While it'd be wonderful to imagine that we have laser-targeted, precisely computed responses to all forms of incoming fire, I also participated in enough squad and platoon drills to know that "anything that moves" looks mighty suspicious when you're under fire, don't know where it's coming from, and people start taking hits - and that's when we knew that the worst thing that would happen to us was that we'd get a death tone from our MILES gear, and we'd have to lay on the ground and "play dead" for a few minutes, and then get yelled at for screwing up the standard FM 7-8 response to the situation we were being tested on.
"If you want to buy their router" assumes that there is a choice of whether or not to buy their router. Which means that "BYO Router" terms are built into the contract, and are not specifically excluded from the contract.
If the contract says "you pay us this fee regardless of whether or not you buy a router from us," the yes, they should get to charge you, because that's the contract you agreed to. If the contract says "you can rent one from us for a monthly fee, or supply your own and not pay the fee," (my ISP offers these terms as well) then of course they shouldn't get to charge you.
Whether or not they "should" get to charge you are entirely dependent on the terms of the contract you sign. If you don't like the terms of the contract, DO NOT sign the contract. It's really that simple.
I'm not sure where this sense of entitlement comes from. You are not entitled to "whatever service level you demand at whatever price you prefer" - if you sign the contract, you are indicating agreement with the service features & levels that you are being offered. Don't like the terms? Don't sign the contract.
If you sign a contract, and then unilaterally violate that contract because you don't happen to like the terms that much, then you will find yourself subject to the penalties specified in that contract for violation - including cancellation of service & early termination fees. Of course, they'd much rather keep you as a subscriber, so they're offering - after you've breached the contract - to allow you to add the tethering service at the standard rate, since it's something you seem to want to use.
Frankly, I think that's pretty generous. This is not a case where people had a contract that said "tethering is fine, no problem at all!" and suddenly ATT decided to start charging them an arm and a leg. This is people who have violated their contract, being offered the following choices:
1) Stop the violating behaviors;
2) Pay for the services you are using;
3) Lose your service;
And if it helps avoid the "we're under fire, put lead in every direction until it stops" response?
I'd say it could save quite a few Afghan & Iraqi lives if it makes the return fire on a sniper or an ambush from a concealed location more precise.
Subsonic ammunition = lower velocity = shorter effective range.
So your choices are - regular ammunition, with longer range (allowing you the opportunity for better cover and more chance of surprise) and better penetration versus body armor and vehicle armor, versus subsonic ammo, which means you have to be pretty close, very precise (vs. body armor), and WELL within range of your enemies' weapons when they start returning fire.
Subsonic rounds aren't silent, by any means, either. They're quieter, but I doubt that they'd be so quiet these detectors couldn't "hear" them.
And when you (the customer) agree to a contract that says "tethering costs extra," and then you tether anyway without paying that extra fee... aren't you violating the very basic principles of how agreements work as well?
This isn't "changing" the contract, this is telling you, "Either abide by the contract you signed, or pay up for the services you're consuming."
Whether or not charging extra for tethering is reasonable is certainly debatable; that you're violating the contract (in which you agree that tethering costs extra and may be added to your plan if it's offered on your phone) by tethering without paying for the plan is not debatable.
That's ironic, considering the only quantifiable thing you can cite as to why LibreOffice is better is "It's cheaper."
LibreOffice does not have all the advanced features of Office, and in a large organization (you know, with accounting departments and legal departments and writers and all of that sort of thing), those features ARE needed by some of the users. SO your choice is, by MS Office for everybody via an enterprise licensing agreement, and support one package; or buy MS Office ONLY for those who need the advanced features, and give everybody else LibreOffice - save SOME money on the purchase costs, but then saddle yourself with support of two packages for the foreseeable future, with all of their little incompatibilities causing hundreds or thousands of people headaches and wasted time across your entire organization.
Blindly asserting that "you don't need those features, do without them" is not a reasonable answer.
They could buy up the rights to do something new, and then produce complete trash. Owning the rights to any of those shows doesn't guarantee the resulting new production will be worth a damn - sets, actors, crews, locations, budgets, effects - all could very easily change, and those changes aren't guaranteed to be improvements on the originals that you so fondly remember.
I'd rather they go find new, interesting stories and focus on telling them well, rather than suffer through two years of "A FIREFLY CLASS VESSEL DOES NOT LOOK LIKE THAT INSIDE, AND THAT'S NOT THE ORIGINAL KAYLEE FRYE! THEY RUINED THE SHOW! DIE NETFLIX DIE!"
$8 per month per subscriber times 12 months in a year times 1,041,667 new subscribers equals 100 million dollars. Never mind promotional fees and product placement fees that companies could be paying them for placement in their original series; distribution deals with other outlets who pay a fee to show Netflix's new content, etc.
They have roughly 20 million subscribers according to their own investor relations page. Adding a million may take time, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that they'd pull in a million new viewers with a new (original/exclusive) series if it's well done and generates a lot of good word of mouth. Especially with Netflix coming native on internet-capable televisions and devices like Boxee Box, Google TV & Apple TV.
You're joking... right?
Ah yes, because knowing I like Bruce Springsteen means I'm guaranteed to be at every concert he does within 100 miles of my home. If somebody wants to target me specifically, all they need to know is where I live (easy enough to find) and then sit outside my home until they see me leave. If they're not targeting me specifically, they aren't going to say "Let's find people who like Bruce Springsteen, and go see if they're out of the house at his concert, and rob them if they are!" Burglaries are overwhelmingly opportunistic crimes - go to a rich part of town, find a house with weak security (unlocked, open doors, no alarm system...), break in, grab what you can, and run. Either I'm being specifically targeted (in which case my musical preferences aren't going to make a bit of difference), or I'm not being specifically targeted (in which case, information about me on Facebook is irrelevant to my being targeted).
Really? REALLY? How many times has this *ever* happened in the history of the world? You watch way too many spy movies.
If anybody's targeting me with the level of sophistication you're suggesting, they already know way more about me than anything they'll find on Facebook, because they already have me under surveillance, they've likely broken into my computer and cataloged its contents (and they'd easily notice a lot of Bruce Springsteen and Johnny Cash MP3's while they're there). And they're already well aware of my routine, and could find a much easier time and place to plant "illegal substances" on me than when I'm at a one-time event when I'm hanging out with half a dozen friends, rather than, say, at the spot I stop every day for my morning coffee on my way to work, or in my car which is parked in roughly the same spot every day, all day, while I'm at work, and in roughly the same spot all night, every night, when I'm at home.
Some of us prefer to not live our lives in fear of an asteroid smashing into the earth with no warning. I bet that fear must cripple you.
And from all indications, they are failing to compete on any level.
What were the good parts they're keeping, again? Reviews upon their initial alpha release indicated that they failed to deliver on the single feature that they claimed they were going to do better than Facebook: privacy and security controls. Claiming that there's some legitimate "more private" alternative to Facebook is just... wrong. There's a lot of good intentions and fancy talk, but good intentions haven't written a single line of code yet.
You want to make a more private alternative to Facebook? Build a site that provides the same sharing functionality, with better security & privacy controls, and then start charging membership fees instead of selling ad space. Until somebody does this, there will be no serious competitor to Facebook that provides any more privacy and data control to its users than Facebook does. And I think we can all agree that getting people to pay for what they're getting already for free is a tough prospect.
Netflix doesn't give absolute numbers, but they put a million dollars on the line for a 10% increase in prediction accuracy, and it took the teams 3 years to build an algorithm that would achieve that improvement. Given that, I'd say their predictions are likely to be pretty good. This is supported by anecdotal evidence, as well - their recommendations, once you've input a few ratings of your own, tend to be pretty good.
This really is a rather stupid point. "Your computers can't predict anything about me if I'm not in their dataset, nyah nyah." Yeah, so what? If somebody took a few dozen movies you really loved, input those ratings into netflix, and then verbally recommended a couple of the netflix recommendations to you, the effect would be the same, and you would probably find that the recommendations are pretty solid.
Your avoidance of Netflix doesn't mean you're a super-special snowflake who no algorithm can predict things about. If we know what you like, and we have a large set of data about "many things many people like," then we can begin to form affinity groups with your tastes. From those groups, we can then find things that people who like many of the same things as you also like. Nobody's claiming that the models are 100% accurate, but your argument that a large data set to compare against will somehow compromise the prediction quality is just foolish - the machines are finding patterns in the like/dislike data which is similar to the user; this then suggests certain likely continuations of a pattern.