You have to move out of mom's basement to understand the value of Apple products, and afford them, of course.

Making people pay $1500 to be their beta tester is a bit ballsy, though. Of course if you have customers who are dumb enough to pay for a half-baked and potentially buggy beta product that will be superseded by a new model in six months, have at it.

"something like a Chrome-powered Mac mini with a small SSD instead of a hard drive, and of course without the high Mac mini price"

So basically nothing like a Mac mini...

Quite well. Fusion splices don't corrode.

The situation with Visio is scary. There is nothing that works nearly as well as it, and Microsoft has been doing their damnedest to eff it up ever since they acquired it. One of these days they're going to be successful and make it unusable, like they did with Windows 8.

It's when a theory is implausible and the "critical thinkers" spend years obsessed with beating a dead horse they get labeled conspiracy nut tinfoil hat wearing wackos, like the 911 truthers, the we-didn't-go-to-the-moon people, or the nutbags who are still asking for Obama's birth certificate. Critical thinking is fine and welcome in this country. Obsessing about implausible made up scenarios driven by agendas or outrage isn't.

Reagan got it right? Remember Trickle Down Economics? Middle class wages have been stagnant ever since and we continue to struggle with deficits partly due to Reagan's "right" policies. Something has been trickling down, but it's not wealth and prosperity.

So basically criminals don't care about breaking the law, therefore we shouldn't have any laws and should just pack guns.

I agree. Unfortunately I posted without reading the OP. I support background check databases, not gun registries.

Actually, I should clarify. I don't agree with the OP's idea of a database to track gun owners. I'm all for databases supporting background checks, like NICS.

Outside of a database, how else do you effectively and in a reasonable amount of time identify someone who is unfit to buy a weapon at a point of sale? Give them an ad hoc mental examination? Ask them nicely if they have a history of criminal violence? Lie detector test? A database is more effective than anything else to do this.

You know and I know that it's impossible to prove that a database has stopped any instance of someone shooting up a school. But it logically follows that a database can identify someone who is a felon, mentally unstable, has a PFA against them, etc. It raises the barrier and makes it more difficult for any of these people to get a weapon. Could they get one elsewhere? If they tried hard enough, probably. It's likely it has stopped several mass violence events by at least stopping some of the less motivated potential mass killers, the low hanging fruit. But using the logic behind your often cited argument, we should just have gun and ammo stands outside schools, because, hey, these people are going to get a weapon somehow and shoot up a school, right?

This is the classic flawed "if it's not 100% effective at stopping gun violence, we shouldn't do it at all" argument. It's been beaten to death.

I'm sure a $2K flight ticket really influenced everyone involved this deal when there was $16B at stake.

I see I pissed off someone who likes shit pizza.