I know most people don't realize it, but a weaker dollar would HELP the U.S. The whole reason we're in an economic mess in the first place is because the U.S. corporations have shipped a lot of the U.S. manufacturing overseas. China selling off their U.S. debt would appreciate the renminbi & depreciate the dollar, thus making U.S. manufacturing more attractive and providing much needed jobs. Of course, none of this benefits you if you are a rentier making profits on the backs of high U.S. unemployment & cheap labor in China, & those people have convinced the largely ignorant populace to support a strong dollar against their best interest.
I was thinking this bill could actually much worse than just wishing for a scientific process that doesn't exist: there is a large and gaping flaw in its logic. Much of our regulations are issued because of large-scale damage to the ecosystem that costs much more to deal with its consequences than prevent (e.g., the added health costs of air pollution). However, in large systems, especially those involving human beings and livelihood, it is utterly impossible to reproduce something, like the climate change over the entire Earth,. According to the logic, to regulate dumping chemicals in a lake, you'd have to show that not dumping chemicals in the same lake under the same conditions doesn't result in mass fish die offs, increased risk of cancer for local inhabitants, etc. Since regulations are issued only after something becomes a problem, you can't ever reproduce the pristine conditions. How do you know it was chemicals and wasn't the weather that killed all those fish? You didn't reproduce the experiment.
As for the EPA using secret science, this is an utter load of bull-shit. All of EPA's studies are on-line and publically available. Here is a link to the searchable database containing the superfund site Records of Decision: http://www.epa.gov/superfund/c...
This is another manufactured crisis like the "war" on Christmas attempting to make people on the left (or anyone who doesn't agree with them) into demons. Assholes.
I concur. Last quarter MS said Surface sales doubled, but they haven't given any solid numbers and last quarter they had a $0.9 billion write-off in order to dump their old inventory. One estimate suggests that sales can't be more than 1 million at best, more likely something like 850k. Now, compare that to Apple's 14.1 million units over the same quarter and that Apple is something like 30% of the tablet market, you realize that any projections of MS Surface capturing any substantial part of the market are just silly.
On the bright side, I did just see my first Surface being used in the wild recently. Granted, we didn't actually use it for anything, but I finally did meet someone who bought one. Maybe MS can do what they did with Xbox and just continue dumping money into it until they out-subidize their competitors (a.k.a. stereotypical monopolist behavior).
A gps software from Microsoft once attempted to get my Dad to drive along what we think was a power line to the top of the tallest peak in Virginia. Pretty interesting stuff, not only was there no road there, it was far too steep for a vehicle anyway. Fortunately we were able to find a hiking trailhead through other means (reading signs instead of listening to a robot....maybe what these people should have done too.)
We do have to remind ourselves that security needs to be proportionate to risk.
Exactly. You can make your phone the most secure thing in the world, requiring a randomized string of alphanumerics umpteen characters long that you recite from memory, but you've also made it utterly impractical to use.
One thing I noticed about this method is that they didn't get their fingerprints from the iphone itself, on the site they got them from a glass bottle. There's a lot of residue from fingerprints on my screen and a lot of potential fingerprints, but some of them are smudged from where I moved my finger, but I'd like to see if someone can use prints from an actual phone, everything else requires that the attacker have physical access to places you've been, but by far the most likely scenario where this will be useful will be to keep people out if I leave my phone somewhere unintentionally.
Shoot, I couldn't care less about blocking other people's texting, what I want is to block texting to my own phone selectively. If they aren't in my contacts list, I don't want their text message. This is mostly, but not entirely due to AT&T's (and everyone else's) abusive pricing strategy for texts. What I would call fair is rates for text messages that are charged the same as the equivalent amount of voice data. As it is, Apple never did a better thing by creating Messages for iOS and imessage.app for OS X. It's a pity they don't open their standard so that android devices or linux computers can use the same protocol and I would never have to pay for another text message.
The new mac pro is likely to be very quiet. I know, this isn't something we think about as much as the specs., but as someone who has their home/media/gaming rig humming behind them, quiet is good. Same goes for work, if I'm running all the cores 100% and can still have a conversation in my office or listen to classical music without headphone or annoying my neighbor, that's a good thing. I've considered buying an apple tv or mac mini for media, but I have enough computers around already (probably too many) and if I can have my cake and eat it too with media and high framerate gaming on a single machine, I'm all for it. So the mac pro is innovative, despite your assertion, it just doesn't innovate in a way you would want.
I couldn't care less about expandability, long ago I figured out that rather than upgrade my machines later in life, I just "upgrade" them when purchasing them and then don't worry about it for five years or so until the purchase (incidentally, is it just me or is lifetime of PCs getting longer?).
Whoops, I forgot to add, that it also looks like the Surface Pro is a little too expensive to be pick up a big section of the market. People who want to drop $1000 might just be buy a laptop instead. It's too expensive for a glorified e-book reader, but my guess is it isn't also a complete replacement for a work laptop.
Full disclosure: as a long time Apple and Linux user, I'm completely new to the whole Surface thing. I don't think I've ever even seen one, Pro or RT. But I too have also read that the Surface Pro seems like a nice little machine, and can do things the ipad can't do as easily because of the I/O and display ports, whereas the ipad can give you cellular data if you need that and the resolution on the display is higher. In fact, the two machines seem to be broadly comparable:
So why the abysmal sales of the Surface Pro? My guess would also be the price point, Apple has a low price point ($499 for retina display, but the ipad 2 is only $399) that you can expand the storage in it to get high storage (up to 128 Gb at $799 with cellular is $929) or the cellular stuff. MS put out the RT at a low price point too ($349) with the Pro as its higher end model (64 Gb for $899, 128 Gb for $999). So the MS low end is lower than the ipad and the high end is higher.
Could it be that the RT is too limited in terms of what you can do with it, and that Apple got people to buy ipads because they made all their apps for the iphone immediately available on the ipad, so people knew what they were getting?
Do you realize that you just spent your whole post describing the detail of what you hate about metro, but never actually mentioned what it is you like about 2012 and the "nice new stuff"? As an OS X/linux user who has not yet even seen Win8, I was all ready to hear about what is nice & new in it, but I never found out. This isn't a criticism, just an observation: an uninformed reader might take away that your emphasis on what is wrong with Windows 8 drowns out any benefit.
It all depends on how the acts are portrayed. When they blew up Alderaan, all the characters were horrified, except for the evil people we the audience were supposed to see as evil. As TFA points out, when they dismember or mutilate a droid, everyone, even people we the audience are supposed to interpret as the good guys, sometimes laugh or make light of it. See the difference? If they showed someone having remorse for the number of deactivated droids in the droid wars, it wouldn't be a problem. The author's point is also that the droids do suffer when bad things happen to them, they're not necessarily the unfeeling machines of today. In fairness to Lucas, in ROTJ at one point he does show some droids being tortured, but it was being done by people we were supposed to see as evil (Jabba and his henchmen).
. Dude, whatever. You keep you glasses and your kinect, I'll take the new mac pro and we'll see who gets more accomplished. The inventions you are describing are very innovative and clever, but they are not a phone or tablet that will end up in every home, they are not a device that will replace computers. They are in essence toys with a limited marketshare.
That's true. I've also checked the odometer and speedometer against the the highway mileposts and at low speeds against the automatic radar stations that say "Your speed is: X". For the mileposts, I time how long it takes me to drive ten miles according the milepost signs on a flat stretch of road in very light traffic so I don't have to change lanes. On the Honda Civic Hybrid, the speedometer is accurate to within a mile per hour at 70 mph as well as 25 mph. Pretty good. As far as I can tell, the odometer is accurate to within a tenth of a mile or so as well, but I haven't checked with the new set of tires I got, which might have changed things.
From all of this, it seems like Honda is doing a better job of accuracy than some of the other car makers. Perhaps that suit against Hyundai about falsely reporting the fuel economy was warranted. I felt the one against Honda probably wasn't, i.e., Honda was sued because many people didn't get the advertised fuel economy, but I've not had a problem. I have heard rumors that BMW sets their speedometers about 5 mph faster than the real world as a marketing thing to fool their drivers into thinking the cars are faster than they are, but never saw any proof. Apparently this kind of thing really does happen.
When I am going faster than the car in front of me, I turn on my turn signal and when it's clear, I get in the left lane, pass the car and then get back into the right lane. It's not my fault that others choose to disregard the speed limit and then attempt to intimidate other drivers on the road by driving aggressively. I admit that my actions might exacerbate the issue, but frankly, I'm sick and tired of Americans not actually giving a shit about the rest of society and see no reason why I should accommodate people who disregard the rules and display unsafe and aggressive behavior. If someone runs up behind me suddenly, I can see that they are in a hurry and will get out of the way as soon as I can, until then they need to BACK OFF!
I have made that calculation, and many others besides. My trip MPG is consistently ~1 mpg off the one I calculate from the gas pumps at fill-up and from the odometer. While not perfect, you couldn't realistically ask for a better estimate than that.
In fact, the web-site fueleconomy.gov allows people to put in real world estimates of their fuel economy and show that data side-by-side the EPA estimates. Here's the one for my car, a 2010 Honda Civic Hybrid. The real world estimates (based on 11 data points) are about 1 mpg off from the EPA estimates. That's pretty darn good. While I will admit that there might be some companies who are gaming the system, it's not EPA's fault that they are doing that. By posting the real world fuel economy estimates, EPA is actually trying to combat that behavior. What I see here going on in this thread (and all too commonly on/. and American society in general) is a bunch of people demonizing the government for no good reason when they should be blaming the companies/individuals who are actually conducting the bad behavior.
Yeah, well, here's back at ya: aggressive drivers like yourself make me want to drive as slowly as possible (which is also the safe thing to do with an aggressive driver, gradually decelerate until the speed is appropriate for the space the driver behind you is maintaining). I try to get out of the left lane as soon as I can, but hey man, my tax payer dollars helped pay for that road and I've got a right to drive the speed limit in whatever lane I want. I don't care what you think about it, why should you have the right to whatever speed you wish but I don't?
When I had an alarm system connected in my previous residence, the saleswoman from the alarm company told me that the number one black market item in a home for a burglar to obtain is a gun. Highest street value. Making guns rarer means fewer gun deaths, period, there's no uncertainty there or bullshit answers about how criminals will always have guns. That includes accidental shootings and thefts and subsequent use of the stolen guns to kill people. To use the analogy from further up the thread, if every home had heroine there would be more heroine addicts, guaranteed.
But conservatives/libertarians/etc. are not motivated by rationality nearly as well as fear (evidence here for evidence), so unfortunately they will not accept any rational arguments the way liberals expect them to.
More importantly, I think many of the "killer apps" of the modern day are independent of operating system:
This is important. The slashdot crowd can talk about how you can't run most apps on a tablet, but a lot of these apps you just mentioned are made for tablets. No one doubts that MS will maintain a strong presence in the corporate world for a long time, but increasingly people aren't computing with PCs any more, they're using mobile devices. In any case, even in the corporate world, people are losing interest in MS. I do get e-mails about training for ipad users, I have yet to get one for Win8. In fact, IT has banned win8 from its computers thus far.
If you head over to statcounter and add up the iOS plus OS X versus all the windows flavors, you find that the peak in MS dominance of usage share occurred in May, 2009 at 94.33%. The minimum? February, 2013 at 86.04%. Apple is inversely correlated: max at Feb., 2013, minimum at Dec., 2008. This is not a coincidence. Similarly, if you look at Win8 adoption rates, you find that win8 is being adopted at 0.3% of usage share per month. Win7 was adopted at 1.1% per month. Even Vista was adopted at 0.5% per month, a greater adoption rate than Win8!! Microsoft has failed with its newest OS, and moreover the crest of each new OS they've released has been lower and lower. I'll admit that right now that non-MS stuff is a lot like people without a TV, growing, but still insignificant, but just wait until somebody like Valve releases a gaming OS or console based on linux, you could see the usage share of MS start to drop more rapidly.
How about climate change? The Virginia Attorney General scored points with his Tea Party supporters by claiming that Michael Mann (of the hockey stick and climate-gate fame) had misapprioriated VA funds by conducting fraud. I'm no fan of the behavior of some tenured professors, but on the other hand without tenure, jack-asses like Cuccinelli would get to dictate who researches what. The result would be what communism looked like in the cold war: if you research a politically unpalatable topic, or a topic that later becomes politically unpalatable, you get "disappeared". This is not a better alternative.
That's a good point. I looked and looked but can't find evidence that Gartner considered an xbox as something running "Windows". I did find this article that says that Apple TV was outselling the Xbox on a per quarter basis as late as last year. Lifetime sales of Xbox are still higher, but Xbox has been around a long while. While I don't doubt that a new Xbox release would reverse this, what I don't get is what Microsoft would possibly do with a new console that would make it worth buying. A little hardware refresh won't make any magic happen. On the other hand, there is this funny quote from the founder of Valve saying that an Apple iTunes-style walled garden gaming platform would eat Sony's, Nintendo's and Microsoft's lunch, so go figure. I can't imagine that Apple looks at the gaming space and thinks there's an opening there though, it's pretty saturated. On the other hand, there's a lot of clever little games out there for the iTunes store made by indie developers, maybe they really could create an opening for themselves.
Consistency; The noise from a wind far is there usually 24/7 at a fairly constant rate. All the examples you cite are intermittent. There are periods if quiet between when trains and aircraft go by. When building roadways millions are spent on berms and sound fences to mitigate the noise. Even then there are periods of time, usually at night when people are trying to sleep, that roadways are much quieter.
You've obviously never lived in a major city in the U.S. The highway noise is 24/7 and constant, no intermittent about it. No amount of berms and sound fences will stop it, in part because of the Acoustic Shadow effect. Sure a highway doesn't throb, but that's not much of an issue with the newer wind turbines. The older wind turbines (70s era vintage, from the last energy crisis) had prop. speeds that were fast enough to throb, but people realized that having the props spin so fast was inefficient and was reducing the lifetime of the props due to fracturing, so the newer turbines all have automatic transmissions and gear boxes in them to keep the prop rotating at the same speed regardless of wind strength. As far as I know the props spin nice and slow now. Kills less birds, no throbbing.
As the owner of a Honda Civic Hybrid, I can attest that my battery suffers this too. When I first bought my car, I realized that the fuel economy was much worse in cold weather than in mild temperatures. In hot weather the battery just needs ~10-15 mins. to cool off after you start the car, but in cold weather I get worse fuel economy persistently. At first I thought it was something like the air pressure in the tires, but man... even after getting religious about keeping my tire pressure up I still get worse fuel economy.
Another thing that I've thought might cause it is that the air density at 32 F is only about 93% of air at 70 F (~20 C). This may become significant at high speeds because IIRC air resistance doubles every 10 mph or so so colder air may mean significantly more resistance at high speeds.
Regardless of other factors, the battery definitely holds less charge in cold weather.
Slashdot Mirror
I know most people don't realize it, but a weaker dollar would HELP the U.S. The whole reason we're in an economic mess in the first place is because the U.S. corporations have shipped a lot of the U.S. manufacturing overseas. China selling off their U.S. debt would appreciate the renminbi & depreciate the dollar, thus making U.S. manufacturing more attractive and providing much needed jobs. Of course, none of this benefits you if you are a rentier making profits on the backs of high U.S. unemployment & cheap labor in China, & those people have convinced the largely ignorant populace to support a strong dollar against their best interest.
Your comment has a je ne sais quoi.
No, I am je ne sais quoi. His comment had none of me, I assure you.
I was thinking this bill could actually much worse than just wishing for a scientific process that doesn't exist: there is a large and gaping flaw in its logic. Much of our regulations are issued because of large-scale damage to the ecosystem that costs much more to deal with its consequences than prevent (e.g., the added health costs of air pollution). However, in large systems, especially those involving human beings and livelihood, it is utterly impossible to reproduce something, like the climate change over the entire Earth,. According to the logic, to regulate dumping chemicals in a lake, you'd have to show that not dumping chemicals in the same lake under the same conditions doesn't result in mass fish die offs, increased risk of cancer for local inhabitants, etc. Since regulations are issued only after something becomes a problem, you can't ever reproduce the pristine conditions. How do you know it was chemicals and wasn't the weather that killed all those fish? You didn't reproduce the experiment.
As for the EPA using secret science, this is an utter load of bull-shit. All of EPA's studies are on-line and publically available. Here is a link to the searchable database containing the superfund site Records of Decision: http://www.epa.gov/superfund/c...
This is another manufactured crisis like the "war" on Christmas attempting to make people on the left (or anyone who doesn't agree with them) into demons. Assholes.
I concur. Last quarter MS said Surface sales doubled, but they haven't given any solid numbers and last quarter they had a $0.9 billion write-off in order to dump their old inventory. One estimate suggests that sales can't be more than 1 million at best, more likely something like 850k. Now, compare that to Apple's 14.1 million units over the same quarter and that Apple is something like 30% of the tablet market, you realize that any projections of MS Surface capturing any substantial part of the market are just silly.
On the bright side, I did just see my first Surface being used in the wild recently. Granted, we didn't actually use it for anything, but I finally did meet someone who bought one. Maybe MS can do what they did with Xbox and just continue dumping money into it until they out-subidize their competitors (a.k.a. stereotypical monopolist behavior).
A gps software from Microsoft once attempted to get my Dad to drive along what we think was a power line to the top of the tallest peak in Virginia. Pretty interesting stuff, not only was there no road there, it was far too steep for a vehicle anyway. Fortunately we were able to find a hiking trailhead through other means (reading signs instead of listening to a robot....maybe what these people should have done too.)
We do have to remind ourselves that security needs to be proportionate to risk.
Exactly. You can make your phone the most secure thing in the world, requiring a randomized string of alphanumerics umpteen characters long that you recite from memory, but you've also made it utterly impractical to use.
One thing I noticed about this method is that they didn't get their fingerprints from the iphone itself, on the site they got them from a glass bottle. There's a lot of residue from fingerprints on my screen and a lot of potential fingerprints, but some of them are smudged from where I moved my finger, but I'd like to see if someone can use prints from an actual phone, everything else requires that the attacker have physical access to places you've been, but by far the most likely scenario where this will be useful will be to keep people out if I leave my phone somewhere unintentionally.
Shoot, I couldn't care less about blocking other people's texting, what I want is to block texting to my own phone selectively. If they aren't in my contacts list, I don't want their text message. This is mostly, but not entirely due to AT&T's (and everyone else's) abusive pricing strategy for texts. What I would call fair is rates for text messages that are charged the same as the equivalent amount of voice data. As it is, Apple never did a better thing by creating Messages for iOS and imessage.app for OS X. It's a pity they don't open their standard so that android devices or linux computers can use the same protocol and I would never have to pay for another text message.
The new mac pro is likely to be very quiet. I know, this isn't something we think about as much as the specs., but as someone who has their home/media/gaming rig humming behind them, quiet is good. Same goes for work, if I'm running all the cores 100% and can still have a conversation in my office or listen to classical music without headphone or annoying my neighbor, that's a good thing. I've considered buying an apple tv or mac mini for media, but I have enough computers around already (probably too many) and if I can have my cake and eat it too with media and high framerate gaming on a single machine, I'm all for it. So the mac pro is innovative, despite your assertion, it just doesn't innovate in a way you would want.
I couldn't care less about expandability, long ago I figured out that rather than upgrade my machines later in life, I just "upgrade" them when purchasing them and then don't worry about it for five years or so until the purchase (incidentally, is it just me or is lifetime of PCs getting longer?).
Whoops, I forgot to add, that it also looks like the Surface Pro is a little too expensive to be pick up a big section of the market. People who want to drop $1000 might just be buy a laptop instead. It's too expensive for a glorified e-book reader, but my guess is it isn't also a complete replacement for a work laptop.
Full disclosure: as a long time Apple and Linux user, I'm completely new to the whole Surface thing. I don't think I've ever even seen one, Pro or RT. But I too have also read that the Surface Pro seems like a nice little machine, and can do things the ipad can't do as easily because of the I/O and display ports, whereas the ipad can give you cellular data if you need that and the resolution on the display is higher. In fact, the two machines seem to be broadly comparable:
http://ipad.about.com/od/ipad_competition/a/Microsoft-Surface-Pro-Vs-Ipad-4-Comparison-Chart.htm
So why the abysmal sales of the Surface Pro? My guess would also be the price point, Apple has a low price point ($499 for retina display, but the ipad 2 is only $399) that you can expand the storage in it to get high storage (up to 128 Gb at $799 with cellular is $929) or the cellular stuff. MS put out the RT at a low price point too ($349) with the Pro as its higher end model (64 Gb for $899, 128 Gb for $999). So the MS low end is lower than the ipad and the high end is higher.
Could it be that the RT is too limited in terms of what you can do with it, and that Apple got people to buy ipads because they made all their apps for the iphone immediately available on the ipad, so people knew what they were getting?
Do you realize that you just spent your whole post describing the detail of what you hate about metro, but never actually mentioned what it is you like about 2012 and the "nice new stuff"? As an OS X/linux user who has not yet even seen Win8, I was all ready to hear about what is nice & new in it, but I never found out. This isn't a criticism, just an observation: an uninformed reader might take away that your emphasis on what is wrong with Windows 8 drowns out any benefit.
It all depends on how the acts are portrayed. When they blew up Alderaan, all the characters were horrified, except for the evil people we the audience were supposed to see as evil. As TFA points out, when they dismember or mutilate a droid, everyone, even people we the audience are supposed to interpret as the good guys, sometimes laugh or make light of it. See the difference? If they showed someone having remorse for the number of deactivated droids in the droid wars, it wouldn't be a problem. The author's point is also that the droids do suffer when bad things happen to them, they're not necessarily the unfeeling machines of today. In fairness to Lucas, in ROTJ at one point he does show some droids being tortured, but it was being done by people we were supposed to see as evil (Jabba and his henchmen).
Apple is definitely having an idea shortage.
. Dude, whatever. You keep you glasses and your kinect, I'll take the new mac pro and we'll see who gets more accomplished. The inventions you are describing are very innovative and clever, but they are not a phone or tablet that will end up in every home, they are not a device that will replace computers. They are in essence toys with a limited marketshare.
You seemed to have missed the part where I wrote: "I try to get out of the left lane as soon as I can..."
What part of "I try to get out of the left lane as soon as I can..." did you not understand?
That's true. I've also checked the odometer and speedometer against the the highway mileposts and at low speeds against the automatic radar stations that say "Your speed is: X". For the mileposts, I time how long it takes me to drive ten miles according the milepost signs on a flat stretch of road in very light traffic so I don't have to change lanes. On the Honda Civic Hybrid, the speedometer is accurate to within a mile per hour at 70 mph as well as 25 mph. Pretty good. As far as I can tell, the odometer is accurate to within a tenth of a mile or so as well, but I haven't checked with the new set of tires I got, which might have changed things.
From all of this, it seems like Honda is doing a better job of accuracy than some of the other car makers. Perhaps that suit against Hyundai about falsely reporting the fuel economy was warranted. I felt the one against Honda probably wasn't, i.e., Honda was sued because many people didn't get the advertised fuel economy, but I've not had a problem. I have heard rumors that BMW sets their speedometers about 5 mph faster than the real world as a marketing thing to fool their drivers into thinking the cars are faster than they are, but never saw any proof. Apparently this kind of thing really does happen.
When I am going faster than the car in front of me, I turn on my turn signal and when it's clear, I get in the left lane, pass the car and then get back into the right lane. It's not my fault that others choose to disregard the speed limit and then attempt to intimidate other drivers on the road by driving aggressively. I admit that my actions might exacerbate the issue, but frankly, I'm sick and tired of Americans not actually giving a shit about the rest of society and see no reason why I should accommodate people who disregard the rules and display unsafe and aggressive behavior. If someone runs up behind me suddenly, I can see that they are in a hurry and will get out of the way as soon as I can, until then they need to BACK OFF!
I have made that calculation, and many others besides. My trip MPG is consistently ~1 mpg off the one I calculate from the gas pumps at fill-up and from the odometer. While not perfect, you couldn't realistically ask for a better estimate than that.
/. and American society in general) is a bunch of people demonizing the government for no good reason when they should be blaming the companies/individuals who are actually conducting the bad behavior.
In fact, the web-site fueleconomy.gov allows people to put in real world estimates of their fuel economy and show that data side-by-side the EPA estimates. Here's the one for my car, a 2010 Honda Civic Hybrid. The real world estimates (based on 11 data points) are about 1 mpg off from the EPA estimates. That's pretty darn good. While I will admit that there might be some companies who are gaming the system, it's not EPA's fault that they are doing that. By posting the real world fuel economy estimates, EPA is actually trying to combat that behavior. What I see here going on in this thread (and all too commonly on
Yeah, well, here's back at ya: aggressive drivers like yourself make me want to drive as slowly as possible (which is also the safe thing to do with an aggressive driver, gradually decelerate until the speed is appropriate for the space the driver behind you is maintaining). I try to get out of the left lane as soon as I can, but hey man, my tax payer dollars helped pay for that road and I've got a right to drive the speed limit in whatever lane I want. I don't care what you think about it, why should you have the right to whatever speed you wish but I don't?
When I had an alarm system connected in my previous residence, the saleswoman from the alarm company told me that the number one black market item in a home for a burglar to obtain is a gun. Highest street value. Making guns rarer means fewer gun deaths, period, there's no uncertainty there or bullshit answers about how criminals will always have guns. That includes accidental shootings and thefts and subsequent use of the stolen guns to kill people. To use the analogy from further up the thread, if every home had heroine there would be more heroine addicts, guaranteed.
But conservatives/libertarians/etc. are not motivated by rationality nearly as well as fear (evidence here for evidence), so unfortunately they will not accept any rational arguments the way liberals expect them to.
More importantly, I think many of the "killer apps" of the modern day are independent of operating system:
This is important. The slashdot crowd can talk about how you can't run most apps on a tablet, but a lot of these apps you just mentioned are made for tablets. No one doubts that MS will maintain a strong presence in the corporate world for a long time, but increasingly people aren't computing with PCs any more, they're using mobile devices. In any case, even in the corporate world, people are losing interest in MS. I do get e-mails about training for ipad users, I have yet to get one for Win8. In fact, IT has banned win8 from its computers thus far.
If you head over to statcounter and add up the iOS plus OS X versus all the windows flavors, you find that the peak in MS dominance of usage share occurred in May, 2009 at 94.33%. The minimum? February, 2013 at 86.04%. Apple is inversely correlated: max at Feb., 2013, minimum at Dec., 2008. This is not a coincidence. Similarly, if you look at Win8 adoption rates, you find that win8 is being adopted at 0.3% of usage share per month. Win7 was adopted at 1.1% per month. Even Vista was adopted at 0.5% per month, a greater adoption rate than Win8!! Microsoft has failed with its newest OS, and moreover the crest of each new OS they've released has been lower and lower. I'll admit that right now that non-MS stuff is a lot like people without a TV, growing, but still insignificant, but just wait until somebody like Valve releases a gaming OS or console based on linux, you could see the usage share of MS start to drop more rapidly.
How about climate change? The Virginia Attorney General scored points with his Tea Party supporters by claiming that Michael Mann (of the hockey stick and climate-gate fame) had misapprioriated VA funds by conducting fraud. I'm no fan of the behavior of some tenured professors, but on the other hand without tenure, jack-asses like Cuccinelli would get to dictate who researches what. The result would be what communism looked like in the cold war: if you research a politically unpalatable topic, or a topic that later becomes politically unpalatable, you get "disappeared". This is not a better alternative.
That's a good point. I looked and looked but can't find evidence that Gartner considered an xbox as something running "Windows". I did find this article that says that Apple TV was outselling the Xbox on a per quarter basis as late as last year. Lifetime sales of Xbox are still higher, but Xbox has been around a long while. While I don't doubt that a new Xbox release would reverse this, what I don't get is what Microsoft would possibly do with a new console that would make it worth buying. A little hardware refresh won't make any magic happen. On the other hand, there is this funny quote from the founder of Valve saying that an Apple iTunes-style walled garden gaming platform would eat Sony's, Nintendo's and Microsoft's lunch, so go figure. I can't imagine that Apple looks at the gaming space and thinks there's an opening there though, it's pretty saturated. On the other hand, there's a lot of clever little games out there for the iTunes store made by indie developers, maybe they really could create an opening for themselves.
Consistency; The noise from a wind far is there usually 24/7 at a fairly constant rate. All the examples you cite are intermittent. There are periods if quiet between when trains and aircraft go by. When building roadways millions are spent on berms and sound fences to mitigate the noise. Even then there are periods of time, usually at night when people are trying to sleep, that roadways are much quieter.
You've obviously never lived in a major city in the U.S. The highway noise is 24/7 and constant, no intermittent about it. No amount of berms and sound fences will stop it, in part because of the Acoustic Shadow effect. Sure a highway doesn't throb, but that's not much of an issue with the newer wind turbines. The older wind turbines (70s era vintage, from the last energy crisis) had prop. speeds that were fast enough to throb, but people realized that having the props spin so fast was inefficient and was reducing the lifetime of the props due to fracturing, so the newer turbines all have automatic transmissions and gear boxes in them to keep the prop rotating at the same speed regardless of wind strength. As far as I know the props spin nice and slow now. Kills less birds, no throbbing.
As the owner of a Honda Civic Hybrid, I can attest that my battery suffers this too. When I first bought my car, I realized that the fuel economy was much worse in cold weather than in mild temperatures. In hot weather the battery just needs ~10-15 mins. to cool off after you start the car, but in cold weather I get worse fuel economy persistently. At first I thought it was something like the air pressure in the tires, but man... even after getting religious about keeping my tire pressure up I still get worse fuel economy.
Another thing that I've thought might cause it is that the air density at 32 F is only about 93% of air at 70 F (~20 C). This may become significant at high speeds because IIRC air resistance doubles every 10 mph or so so colder air may mean significantly more resistance at high speeds.
Regardless of other factors, the battery definitely holds less charge in cold weather.