More importantly, I don't get why anyone would advertise that 350M is being spent to create 20 "permanent" positions. That's 17.5M per fulltime job!

I'm sure they'll listen to Reason.

(sorry, couldn't resist)

I think Macs tend to make a rather poor budgeting choice.

Typing this message on my more than 4-year old $1000 (cheapest model) MacBook with 440 full battery cycles and still decent (2-3h) battery live, I disagree.

I would like to see how that sub-$500 laptop is doing after 4 years...my bet is you'd probably need to retrieve it from a landfill first.

Non-ironically, yes indeed. Get the cheapest macbook (without extended warranty), and be done with it.

I did this 4 years ago, so it's one of the plastic models, and still no problems whatsoever. I use it several hours daily, am using it to type this message. Even the battery is still good after 450 full cycles (the warranty is 80% capacity after 300 cycles). Not as good as new, but still lasts 2.5-3 hours during normal browsing/typing. The biggest problem is the backlight is getting less bright (this is normal but still annoying), which is starting to get noticeable in bright daylight (outside). It has not had any problem ever, hardware or software, and since I always just close the lid it has a 90 day uptime (most of which spent in sleep mode of course, but still). Hmm, I should probably install updates...

Performance is absolutely no problem for everyday use (not gaming), and we're talking an "ancient" Core 2 Duo model.

Basically it's hard not to come across as a fanboy after having used Dell and HP for years, but well..that's what it is.

Disturbing is very much the word you're looking for, indeed.

Some more choice quotes:

"Being a high energy oxidizer, dioxygen difluoride reacted vigorously with organic compounds, even at temperatures close to its melting point. It reacted instantaneously with solid ethyl alcohol, producing a blue flame and an explosion. When a drop of liquid 02F2 was added to liquid methane, cooled at 90K. , a white flame was produced instantaneously, which turned green upon further burning. When 0.2 (mL) of liquid 02F2 was added to 0.5 (mL) of liquid CH4 at 90K., a violent explosion occurred."

And he's just getting warmed up, if that's the right phrase to use for something that detonates things at -180C (that's -300 Fahrenheit, if you only have a kitchen thermometer). The great majority of Streng's reactions have surely never been run again. The paper goes on to react FOOF with everything else you wouldn't react it with: ammonia ("vigorous", this at 100K), water ice (explosion, natch), chlorine ("violent explosion", so he added it more slowly the second time) [..]

Or how about this one:

But today's compound makes no noise and leaves no wreckage. It merely stinks. But it does so relentlessly and unbearably. It makes innocent downwind pedestrians stagger, clutch their stomachs, and flee in terror. It reeks to a degree that makes people suspect evil supernatural forces. It is thioacetone.

No one's quite sure what the actual odorant is [..] And no one seems to have much desire to find out, either. There are sound historical reasons for this reluctance. The canonical example (Chemische Berichte 1889, 2593) is the early work in the German city of Freiburg in 1889 (see page 4 of this textbook), which quotes the first-hand report. This reaction produced"an offensive smell which spread rapidly over a great area of the town causing fainting, vomiting and a panic evacuation."

[..] They were dispersed with other observers around the laboratory, at distances up to a quarter of a mile , and one drop of either acetone gem-dithiol or the mother liquors from crude trithioacetone crystallisations were placed on a watch glass in a fume cupboard. The odour was detected downwind in seconds. "

My favorite source for actually scary chemicals is Things I won't work with, a chemists weblog detailing all sorts of stuff that, well, he won't work with. Random quote:

The experimental section of the paper enjoins the reader to wear a face shield, leather suit, and ear plugs, to work behind all sorts of blast shields, and to use Teflon and stainless steel apparatus so as to minimize shrapnel. Hmm. Ranking my equipment in terms of its shrapneliferousness is not something that's ever occurred to me, I have to say. It's safe to assume that any procedure which involves considering which parts of the apparatus I'd prefer to have flying past me will not get much business in my lab, no matter how dashing I might look in a leather suit.

So obviously you have something to hide. Doubleplusungood.

You're an exception. Many people just don't keep that thing organized. Even if you do, navigating it is cumbersome. Programs crap it up anyway, so in XP I basically launched applications in 2 ways:

1. Quickstart bar, for pretty much anything I use at least once a week - I think many people did/do this.
2. Win+R, which strictly speaking does not even show the menu - this shortcut I'm sure is only commonly used by geeks.

So I barely used the XP start menu (and to the extend that I did, had it set to classic Win95 style).

So, the very first thing I had to do in Win7 is figure out how to get the quickstart bar back (it's possible, but a bit annoying) and I actually really like the "Win-button type a few characters of the program name " style of starting applications. Everything else in there except for the shutdown button, I absolutely never touch.

I do exactly the same on Macs btw, use QuickSilver or Spotlight (whatever you prefer), Alt/Cmd-space, type some chars in the application name, go. Often used programs are in the dock. The way I start applications on both OS's is pretty much identical, then.

So that means you can go through your "generous" and expensive 1 GB dataplan in 112 seconds or slightly under 2 minutes then.

Or less than 30 seconds with cheaper plans that allow maybe 250 MB/month.

Recent datalimits feel like it's still 1995 or something. Only without a cable attached.

"Amazon will likely succeed only in alienating customer with PlayBooks who have already purchased lots of streaming video content."

Is this just an elaborate way to say "nobody will care", or is this thing more popular than I imagine? I have never even seen a PlayBook, never mind buying streaming video content for it.

Probably, and indeed that is (a basic form of) programming. And yet I believe most people could not do even that if their live depended on it. If someone bothered to do the research, I think they'd find that the majority of people who even have a remote idea of how to use a computer (know how to read mail and how to click links on "the internet") are not actually able to create an Excel spreadsheet with a column A that lists some items, a column B that lists prices for said items, and then stick a SUM(B1:Bxx) in there somewhere, say. At least, not without prior extensive instructions on how to do exactly that one trivial task, of course.

Its amazing how far a single article of FUD goes these days - Microsoft is not "going soft" on .Net, they just weren't willing to discuss it during a talk about something else entirely, while in Windows 8, .Net is still there and stronger than ever.

"Stronger than ever" how?

Rather, it's amazing that .NET made it this far, while Microsoft itself (apart from its development division) hasn't used it for basically anything (that was released, anyway), also clearly won't in the future, and it's clear that the Windows group upper management hates it.

That's not FUD, that's just facing facts.

This is completely standard in most of Europe and has been for decades, so no electrician would look funny at that. From this thread I get the feeling most European electricians would rather be in for quite a shock if they ever saw a US wiring scheme, though.

16A (230V) is both the maximum per socket, as well as the standard maximum per circuit. Nearly any power strips and extension cords are equally rated at ~3600W (which, you'll note, is what you get by multiplying those two).

...my speedometer indicates a number somewhat higher than the speed limit. This differs per car but in my case the speedometer is off by 3-6 km/h (the difference increases with speed) according to the average indicated by several SatNavs I tried. I'm assuming these are quite accurate, because they can calculate an average over a somewhat longer distance; I also live in a very flat country.

For example, if my speedometer reads 125 km/h I'm actually doing 120 km/h (that's 75 MPH for the metric-impaired).

The fun thing is that the car system is actively lying about your speed (because the manufacturer wants to stay on the safe side); I have a ScanGauge that indicates a lower (correct) speed as reported by the board computer, which I assume is also the number used to keep track of distance covered. So it seems that the speedometer logic purposely increases this number by some small factor.

my new 2010 CR-V has a real time miles per gallon calculator on the dashboard and i can easily go above 30mpg at 65mph

Yeah, hybrids easily get 50-60 mpg at similar speeds though. So do small diesels (those can do even better, in fact).

the only time it drops a lot is when i accelerate which is a lot since i'm in NYC and we have a lot of traffic lights.

You do realize these are exactly the circumstances where a hybrid drivetrain actually helps a lot, even compared to small diesel engines?