I cannot believe the CS crowd that still uses TI calculators, or that anyone takes them seriously. Where I went to school, algebraic calculators were for high-school kids and English majors. If you were math, science or engineering, you had an HP and used RPN. Anything else is kids stuff.

So when was this written? 1975? This is totally outdated. I see anti-Utah crap on Slashdot all the time, including total fantasy about the difficulty of obtaining caffeinated soda in Utah. Most of the Mormons I know live on Coke or Mountain Dew; it's one of the few vices they can have.

They can advertise now. That law was passed in the early 1990s and overturned sometime in the late 1990s, long before the 2002 Olympics. I think it lasted like five years; basically, it was a "bribe" to some Mormon lawmakers. They agreed to ban advertising in return for liberalizing the rules on alcohol in restaurants. But that is all long past. Except in your head.

The "private club" law for full liquor service was abolished three years ago.

You can buy full-strength beer at the liquor stores, brewpubs, or directly from the "factory stores" of the microbreweries. There are at least 10 microbreweries in Salt Lake alone. Epic Brewing on State Street in Salt Lake, just a mile straight down from the capitol building and even closer to the Mormon Temple, sells 9%+ beers right off the shelf. http://www.epicbrewing.com/

This is still true about wine and liquor being sold only in state stores, but it's been decades since they were hidden off in the middle of nowhere. And a LOT of states have that restriction. In Wisconsin, after 10PM I could not even buy Ginger Ale at the grocery store as it was considered a "mixer" and the entire aisle in the grocery store was LOCKED OFF behind metal gates.

The Utah state liquor stores started changing this around 1977 with the wine store in Salt Lake's landmark Trolley Square shopping center. There are beautiful stores in prime areas of Salt Lake now, including a large new store right across from Cottonwood Mall. These are modern beverage stores with large stocks of wine, reviews, magazines, etc.

Again, the private club system was ended in 2009. It had eased up before that. I'm not saying that in Mexican Hat or Delta or some other town of 137 residents that it may not be a problem, I'm just saying you need to stop bitching about this and find something current to complain about.

Really? I'd say a dry county (like where Jack Daniels is made) where you are forbidden to buy or even DRINK alcohol is much stricter.

While the US system has it's roots in the British Empire system, they are NOT the same.

The US system broke off and established it's own measurement standards after gaining independence in the Revolutionary War (known in England as the War Of Stupid Snotty Idiots Over There) in 1783.

The Imperial System was not standardized until 1824, and there are differences.

The US still is standardized behind-the-scenes on SI units, and are used in science, medicine, by the US government, military, etc.

There was a heavy-handed push to suddenly convert everyone to metric in the late-1970s and was handled so badly that the backlash is still felt now; things like gas stations suddenly sold fuel in liters, but the old mechanical pumps read in gallons. Some changed had been made to make the pumps count in liter fractions, but at a lot of stations you had to do some math (before everyone had a handheld calculator) to figure out what you actually owed (multiply the price by 1.4 or something) and a lit of small stations certainly "rounded" things to there favor. Grocery stores, and other places often had similar problems, and consumers left feeling like

I remember filling my mother's car and the total in liters was like 3l more than the tank could hold in gallons.

Americans don't like the government telling them how to live. That's why we left Europe in the first place. And once they felt like they were being cheated--the metric conversions always seemed to work out in favor of the seller--the government had to back off.

Same here. I lost it after I saw that cartoon.

That's really unfair to assume that the poster must be American, since Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen were the team that introduced Doctor Who to the USA, and are still the most beloved here by most viewers.

I'm not a huge Tom Baker fan (Peter Davision was my favorite, because he had better stories), but Elisabeth Sladen was my favorite companion. I recall at 13 having tears in my eyes when she left the Tardis.

To me, Elisabeth Sladen will always be Sara-Jane Smith.

I could go on a rant here about the English always complaining how awful all Americans are, and then talk about one of my grandfathers getting half his head blown off saving your nation (and a great uncle got gassed saving it 30 years earlier when y'all started the previous war you then wanted us to bail you out of), but this is not the place for it.

And, you *DO* sound "like a hater".

\begin{sarcasm} It's okay folks, this is Apple we are talking about! You know, the moral company who does everything right. They have products produced by just-above-slave-labor Foxconn in China that people--the very same people who love Apple--would be screaming about if it was Nike or Coca-Cola or (heaven forbid) McDonald's doing the same thing. But this is Apple! Their uber-hip coolness overrides any questionable moral or ethical decisions. When you whip out your iPad in Starbucks, people know that you're the kind of person who thinks like they do. You're instantly on the winning team, out to stop oppression of the masses. And when you tether it to your iPhone, they know you own a Prius or a Subaru. And they have a pretty good guess about your political bumper stickers.... So, it's all good! Apple would never shaft their customers...you can ask the owners of products like the Apple ]I[, the Lisa, or the MacCube if you don't believe me. And when your $1000 Apple Cinema Display is unplugged from it's power brick and destroys the logic board into thinking that the supply is bad, they will accept that it was just Steve Job's way of helping them improve their life with even better Apple technology. Apple owners know this, in the same way that SUV owners learn...if you own a small Chevy SUV that gets 20MPG, you're an evil wasteful meat-eating fascist out to destroy the planet. But if you own a Subaru or Toyota wagon/SUV with the same 20MPG, then you're an environmentalist who should get priority parking. \end{sarcasm}

You hit the nail square on the head there. I have access to several former employers; I even have access to one site where I shut off my own access before I walked out the door. But then my replacement did not work out and they begged me to help them find out what was going on...I had to come back into the building and hack into my old servers with a boot disk to restore my access and undo the work of my "successor".

Generally, a true IT professional can be trusted after they leave, because if they wanted to get confidential information, they had plenty of chances while they worked there. Most of us don't even care what the data is, we just don't want to lose it. for the company.

As a company, you generally have no risk from a true professional IT person. Not a lot of risk from engineers, either...some are crooks, but most are ready when they leave to work on something new anyway. Your highest risk staff are folks like sales, who already work on commission and are likely to be doing the same thing with a similar customer list at their next employer. They are also likely to have poor security practices among their group and therefore know the passwords of a half-dozen coworkers.

.

Because this is the state controlled media. This is like catching Number 10 or the White House talking about their new border security system, and showing a picture of the Great Wall of China.

For those readers who were around during the Cold War and old enough to remember it, things like this were not uncommon, state-controlled media that was a mouthpiece of the government making various claims about great technical accomplishments that were later found to be faults, sometimes laughably so. Like the Soviets claiming they had invented baseball and television.

It's harder to get away with this in the western world. People can demand evidence. You can't do this in China. The government is the evidence.

You have some very valid points. I've worked in manufacturing.

One thing to remember in this case, however, is the machines in question were not the Dell Crap line machines, they were the premium-quality Optiplex line, where you pay more to get a reliable machine for Enterprise users.

And the bad caps? Not the work of poor QC from a "Chinese peasant", but industrial espionage from some Taiwanese capacitor firms who had engineers steal a formula from from a company in Japan, but got it wrong.

And Dell bought low-end capacitors from cut-rate suppliers. They are not the first to make this mistake, but on your premium line, where you charge premium prices, you should be buying name-brand components. Good electrolytics are expensive.

This story was all covered by IEEE Spectrum. They have a story on the Dell scandal as well.

Steve Jobs was working, writing the words of his Beatles cat-a-log victory
part of his Apple Music lawsuit his-tory.
For years he kept working,
Buying the rights to those songs while he pulled out his hair
but now we don't care.

All the the massive egos,
Where do they all belong?
All the massive egos,
Redmond and Cu-per-tin-o.

Exactly, it's probably a bit of a kludge, and making it into a stable, documented, supported feature is going to be expensive with a lot of support and a small user base.

I have modes like this in some of my own products, and sometimes I'm leery of even having some other people on my own team have access to the debug modes, because of the potential for disaster and a WHOLE lot of handholding from me.

It's not worth the time it would take for me to set it up for broader use, and if I did, they would break things and then come running to me.

It depends on your level in society. With a high enough status, the rules don't apply.

A lot of people have built homes from disused airplanes. Nothing new there.

This is "much ado about nothing" from a rich woman interested in some self-serving publicity about how wonderful she is.

A "meditation pavilion"? Really? She recycles a couple wings, which are rather easily to recycle anyway by melting them down, but then throw away most of the airplane instead of using the fuselage as a home. Then, as others have mentioned, she cuts the top off a mountain for her feminine palace-thing.

And the "use all parts of the Buffalo" quote is more self-serving crap. First of all, it's a Bison, not a Buffalo. Second, they only "used all parts" because they were bloody hard to obtain. You try killing a giant, angry bull with a rock and a stick and see how hard it is.

When times were good, and they had lots of bison, they just cut off the best parts and left the rest to rot--this can be documented from the multiple "buffalo jump" sites where they chased Bison off cliffs. You take all the parts from a couple because you need them, but when it gets down to the end, you just cut off the humps and tongues. The "perfectly ecological Native American" is a myth invented by Europeans. The Native Americans are the same as humans all over the globe. What a shock.

Agreed, what about all of the work of Willem Kolff? We've had artificial hearts for years. The first long-term artificial heart implant into a human was Dr. Barney Clark, who despite multiple medical problems (the US FDA only approved implantation of the early hearts into patients who were already at an end-of life status) lived for 112 days. The modern version of that heart is now used as a transplantation bridge and has been implanted over 800 times. The basic problem with the Kolff/Jarvik heart design was one of materials science from the early 1980s; we just did not have the polymer science to prevent some of the clotting problems. There are multiple LVADs and other similar products out there. This has been an active area of research for ~40 years, and we've been implanting products like this since 1982. So how is this big news?