You think environmental impacts studies and lawsuits are what's keeping nuclear from being profitable enough to build? They're a fucking rounding error

The cost does not come from defending the lawsuit or doing the studies. The cost comes because such lawsuits can create delays. Delays mean that an operator may need to buy power from someone else, build other types of plants (like natural gas) or delay the retirement of obsolete plants. All of these actions carry significant costs.

Safety does have a cost. That doesn't mean that it's not absolutely the right thing to do when you're dealing with a technology that's intrinsically hazardous.

Why is IPv6 not based on MAC adresses? I've never understood this.

Well, first of all, it sort of is. The typical way to get an address on an IPv6 network is stateless auto-configuration, which basically allows your client to combine an advertised route prefix with the EUI-64 (basically a longer version of a MAC address that can be generated from a MAC address) to determine its IP. You don't need any configuration for new clients and they always get the same IP address. Note that Windows Vista/7 use a hashing function with random data and the MAC address so that you can't track a single machine based on its IPv6 address, which solves privacy concerns.

Second, you can't just use the MAC address because it's not easy to route traffic that way. Routing works today because networks are assigned contiguous blocks of addresses, so it's easy to tell where to route traffic based on the address prefix. If we just had MAC addresses (which contain no information about which devices are connected to which networks), routing would require huge tables that would frequently change. This works OK for a small to medium sized network (e.g. switched Ethernet) but it doesn't work at all for the Internet. Even medium-large organizations need to use subnets to effectively manage traffic, which aren't possible without network prefixes.

But if, as appears to be the case, Comcast threatens to resolve this by targeting video traffic specifically (which in practice means netflix), then they're in the wrong.

Except that it isn't the case, as far as I can tell. It seems that Level3 is playing us all for suckers - their press release doesn't indicate that Comcast is specifically targeting Internet video, it only refers to "Internet online movies and other content", which basically means "packets".

Level3 is trying to spin this as a network neutrality debate, when it's pretty clearly not. This is a peering dispute.

Level3 DOES NOT have to interconnect with Comcast to access Comcast subscribers. Comcast is not Tier 1, which means that there are alternate indirect routes between Comcast and Level3. However, not interconnecting with Comcast would create huge traffic imbalances that could jeopardize Level3's other peering relationships.

But getting back to your coke story, did your T-61 survive the incident? Did the drain holes work?

Unfortunately, the keyboard drains do nothing when you spill it in the vent holes. I've never tested the keyboard drains but I've seen videos of them working. I would imagine that the keyboard is screwed, although it's pretty easy and cheap to fix.

As for for the lack of a trackstick vs. gesturing on the touchpad, it is simply retraining the brain.

I use the touchpad actually, not the trackstick. And I do like certain gestures, like two finger scrolling. I use a utility called EnvyTouchPad, which ironically was designed to work around the awful clickpad on the HP Envy series (which is far, far worse than the Mac clickpads).

I have three major problems with the Mac touchpads:

1. It's noisy - considerably more so than even the HP clickpads. Some PC laptops have this problem too, but the ThinkPad is actually pretty quiet. It doesn't seem like a huge issue but it is socially awkward when I'm in class, especially considering that my courses are recorded for remote students and the microphones pick up everything.
2. It makes dragging much harder. Attempting to drag with one finger is problematic because of friction and the deadzone at the top of the touchpad. Instead, you have to use two fingers, which is wierd and error prone. Trying to do something like the right-mouse-button drag (which never appears in OS X but does appear in Windows under Boot Camp) is futile.
3. It's more error prone. If you want to right click, you can either use multiple fingers or assign a touch zone. Neither is as consistent as hitting a different button. The touch zone is not demarcated on the pad and even if it were (as it is on HP clickpads) there is no tactile feel. Multiple fingers work great except sometimes you mess up and rest part of your hand on the pad, causing misclicks.

The bottom line is that I just don't know why this is a good design. The only advantage I can think of is that you get slightly more touch room, but I have never found my T400 touchpad to be too small. Gestures are nice but they do not replace the need for buttons in my opinion.

I agree and disagree on the magnetic power adaptor. Right after diet coke spills, the second biggest cause of laptop destruction is the power adapter yanking the laptop to its death or cracking the solder joints in the motherboard. The Apple design solves both of those problems.

The T400 (as with most ThinkPads) doesn't have the power jack soldered to the motherboard - it's a separate part that's connected via a wire. The part runs about $12 on eBay and takes about 10 minutes to replace.

I have never actually yanked a laptop off of a table due to the power adapter. I'm not saying that it doesn't happen, but it just doesn't happen often enough to warrant an $80 MagSafe adapter. I have no issue with MagSafe in particular, what I have an issue with is that the adapters are so expensive and the MagSafe patent prevents anyone else from making compatible replacements.

However, while the Thinkpad has the Thinklight, the MAC has the backlit keyboard.

Actually, the new Air (the one I had) doesn't have a backlit keyboard - it was one of the features that was cut, along with the sleep LED, the IR sensor, and the ambient light sensor. None of these things really bug me - I rarely use the Thinklight on my T400 anyway, since I know the keyboard layout by memory.

You just brought up another thing I hate about most Macs (and to be fair, most PCS) - the sleep light. The Air I had didn't have this issue, but a MacBook/MacBook Pro would - LED indicators should not pulsate or blink. Most of the time, I sleep in the same room as my laptop, which makes blinking (or pulsating) LEDs very annoying. I had to disconnect my (custom-built) desktop's power LED to fix this issue, but it's not quite as easy with a laptop. The T400 (as with every ThinkPad) uses a solid sleep LED, and it's not bright enough to be annoying.

I don't think the Air was an awful machine. It is the most computer you can get in under 3lbs, without question. But what frustrates me is that there are a lot of things that Apple gets wrong, and they have no excuses. $300 PC laptops need to be designed and built cheaply, so it's no wonder that design suffers. But there is so much margin in a Mac that they have to get it right. In a world where you can get a T410 with a 2.66GHz i5 for under $850, it's not enough that the $1600 MacBook Pro be as good as the ThinkPad - it has to be dramatically better. And at the end of the day I'm just more comfortable on the ThinkPad.

Some people have complained about quality in the ThinkPad lineup since Lenovo took over, but in my opinion it's better than ever. The mainstream (T-series) ThinkPad lineup just gets better and better with every release. And I'm not just talking about the usual improvements from better silicon.

Compared with my T61 widescreen, my T400 looks almost identical. It's the same shape and the same size. It has the same ports, in the same places. They use the same power adapters and the same docks.

Compared with the T61, the T400 is much cooler. It's quieter. It lasts much longer on a battery charge, partly because of Intel CPU improvements, but partly because you can switch off the ATI GPU and use the Intel GPU when you don't need it. It's also about a half-pound lighter. It has louder speakers (although they're still not great, at least you can hear them).

The T410 is even better. The 6-cell battery is now flush (the T400 could only take a 4-cell flush), and the 9-cell sticks out less. The keyboard is even better, with a larger ESC key and F-keys that are no longer shifted (which always bugged me on the T61/T400). It has more ports - including eSATA and DisplayPort. The dock will now run two 30" digital monitors if you want it to. The discrete GPU can now switch off automatically and transparently thanks to NVIDIA Optimus.

With Apple it seems to be two steps forward and one step back. We get better battery life but lose the ability to replace the battery. We get a bigger multi-touch trackpad but we lose the buttons. We get a lighter laptop but it doesn't have Ethernet. We get a MagSafe power connector that prevents accidents, but the power adapters cost $80.

The T-series has gotten lighter, stronger, cooler, and quieter. It has more ports than ever. It's easier to service than ever. And it costs less than it ever has before. When I buy my T420 (or whatever succeeds the T410), I want it to be better than my T400 in every way, just like my T400 was better than my T61 in every way.

If you are still not convinced, go down to your local OfficeMax and spend some time with a droid tablet or try to edit AVCHD Video on WIndows 7 PC.

This is just bullshit. Final Cut may be popular but it's not the only NLE product on the market. There's plenty of work done on Avid, Premiere, or even Vegas. All of which run fine on any mid-range to high-end PC laptop. There is no magic secret sauce that Apple products have here.

As for 'droid tablets' (presumably you mean 'Android tablets', since 'Droid' is a brand used only by Verizon for their Android products), there is no doubt that the $200 tablets on the market suck. Of course they suck. Google hasn't even released a tablet version of Android. The fact that some manufacturers have chosen to release products prematurely is no surprise.

I briefly owned a 11.6" MacBook Air, which I returned. It was a beautiful piece of hardware. But:

- I can't deal with clickpads. They make simple operations like dragging or right-clicking far more complex and error prone. Forget something like middle clicking unless you feel like doing some crazy multi-finger tap. It's also noisy, which can be annoying when you're trying to use it in class. My T400 has real buttons - left, right, and middle - with real tactile feel and quiet operation.
- The keyboard is annoying. With a T400 I get buttons like Page Up and Page Down, Home, End, and Delete. These work consistently and don't require FN shortcuts. On Mac laptops, Home and End are FN+Left Arrow and FN+Right Arrow. Unfortunately they aren't consistent at all. Sometimes they take you to the beginning or the end of the line, sometimes they take you to the beginning or end of a document. Sometimes you can use Command+Left Arrow/Right Arrow for cursor movement on the line, but then sometimes (e.g. the terminal) it doesn't work.
- Apple wants $80 for a MagSafe power adapter and sues anyone who tries to make a compatible adapter. You can get genuine ThinkPad power adapters for $30 or less on eBay, which means I can have 4 (couch, bedroom, desk, one for on the go) without breaking the bank. It's a hell of a lot more convenient to just plug in than it is to pull out and uncoil the adapter every time.
- Mouse acceleration is totally screwed up in Mac OS X. The curve is not really a curve - it starts out extremely slow and then abruptly jumps to very fast. This makes cursor control with a high-resolution mouse (like my Logitech G5) extremely difficult.
- X-buttons (back/forward) on a non-Apple mouse don't work. The only way to get them to work is to install third-party software, most of which costs money.
- Scroll wheel acceleration. I don't know who thought it was a good idea, but it seems to be impossible to disable.
- You can't make the machine stay awake with the lid closed without kernel extension hacks or plugging in a monitor.
- There's no full disk encryption. Home directory encryption is not the same thing.
- Window organization is annoying. There are no snaps (like in Windows 7 or KDE) and you can only resize windows from one corner. The zoom button is supposed to 'fit contents' or 'fit screen area', but in reality it seems to be completely arbitrary depending on the application. Maximize is useful and consistent.
- Lots of screen space is wasted. Panels (in GNOME or KDE) or the Taskbar are usable with under 30px of height. The Dock is useless at that size and realistically needs to be more like 50-60px. Most people get around this by hiding it, which drives me nuts because it's too easy to inadvertently activate and not there to notify you when you need it. Then there's the menu bar, which takes up more of your screen space, even in applications that don't need menus (like Google Chrome).
- You can hide a menu by clicking in it. There is 'dead space' between menu items that not only does nothing, it also closes the menu. This is another thing that makes absolutely no sense to me.
- OpenGL performance SUCKS. I know that Apple has been working on this, but as of 10.6.5 games ran at least 40% slower than they did in Windows.
- The default ZIP file code leaves "._MACOSX" and other garbage files in your archive. This is not so much of an issue for me (I can get another archiver) as it is when I get files from other people - I don't want to go through your archive and delete the junk before I add your files to source control (I work with scientists who don't/wont use source control).
- Despite the much vaunted 'super fast startup' for the MacBook Air, it's slower than my 18-month old Windows 7 ThinkPad T400 (which has an Intel x25-m) running Windows 7, and it's way faster than just about anything running Ubuntu.
- You need stupid dongles to connect to anything. Mini-DP to VGA for projectors, mini-DP to HDMI for TVs.
- Boot Camp requires an optical drive, despite the fact that Windows 7 installs fine on basically any PC from a USB drive, which you can make using a free Microsoft tool.
- You have to go through the registration procedure. You cannot use your Mac until you have given Apple your name, address, and phone number. No PC I have ever used has not allowed you to skip this.
- Keyboard shortcuts are inconsistent between different apps (like the back shortcut in Finder vs. Firefox).
- Switching between windows requires either multiple keyboard presses (Command+Tab and Command+~) or using Expose. Both of which are considerably harder than just pushing a button in the taskbar/panel.
- Spotlight search for the control panel is terrible. In Windows 7 you can usually search for something like 'wallpaper' and the first result (just press enter) will take you right to the page with the setting on it. There are a huge range of alternate terms so you don't have to be precise (e.g. 'desktop picture', 'wallpaper', and 'background' all work). Spotlight doesn't have nearly the same range of terms and it often doesn't take you right to where the setting is.
- Macs throttle. Before Intel's Thermal Monitor kicks in, before the CPU hits TJ Max. Combined with often-inadequate cooling, you're left with a machine that doesn't give you the performance you paid for. Maybe you get 70% of the max clock. Maybe you get 50%. It depends on the workload, on the temperature, and on the load of other components. My ThinkPad T400 will run at full clock, even with the ATI GPU running the 'power virus' FurMark, even running two instances of the FPU-busting Prime95 stress test.
- Sharp edges. Someone at Apple decided that the front of the machine should be sharp. It's pretty, but unfortunately it's also where my wrists go.
- Hard to access components. If I need my machine serviced (which I did when I spilled Diet Coke on my previous ThinkPad T61), I pull the disk. They don't need my password or my data. On the T61/T400 it requires one screw to do this. On a Mac it requires 10+, and on the Air you can't even do it without a Security Torx bit. This means that you need to image the machine off, wipe the disk, then image it back when you get the machine back. That's just annoying.

Ranting feels good. My ThinkPad T400 is not perfect but I certainly would take it over a Mac. Even if the Mac were cheaper, which it's not (a comparable Mac *today* is $200 more than my ThinkPad was 18 months ago).

If you're comparing the hardware in a $1800 MacBook Pro to a $500 Best Buy PC, well, the Mac is going to be better built. Duh. But you can get a ThinkPad T410 with a 2.66GHz i5 for under $1000. And I think you would find that the build quality is just as good on the T410 as it is on the MacBook Pro. It may not be as pretty, but it was designed for durability, servicability, and upgradability in a way that the Mac just wasn't. It will be cooler and quieter because the ThinkPad has visible vent holes rather than trying to hide them behind an air-blocking hinge. It will be more comfortable to type on because the palm rest will have a rounded front edge rather than a sharp aluminum edge.

Maybe most people don't care about any of this stuff. But I do. As a CS graduate student my laptop is my life. And I'm not willing to put up with designs that are sub-optimal from a usability standpoint, regardless of the reason.

Take a look at funnytranslator.com. After 30 online translations the phrase: "We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is at the end of its life cycle." becomes: "The Linux Caozuojitong what life in Russia, you know.

Your girlfriend should know better than to evaluate a translation system based on a series of repeated translations.

Translation, whether it is done by a human or a machine, always involves trade-offs. One of the most important trade-offs is between fluency and faithfulness. Fluency refers to how well the translation matches the conventions (syntactic and stylistic) of the destination language, whereas faithfulness refers to how precisely the translation matches the meaning of the original text. Because languages have idioms, and because often there are words in the source language that simply do not have a counterpart in the destination language, it is often necessary to simplify or modify the meaning to create a translation that is not awkward.

There is a constant balancing act - change too much and you end up with a translation that is misleading, change too little and you end up with a translation that's awkward and hard to understand. But the bottom line is that in ANY non-trivial translation, information is lost in the process. If you did the same experiment with human translators - and did it in a real sense, with different translators for each step in the cycle, you would end up with text that is perfectly readable but had very little in common with the source text.

I'm not saying that the translation in the article is 100% faithful to the original Russian. It's not. No real translation is. If the precise nature of the words is important, it's necessary to examine the implications of the Russian. You can't do that with a simple translation.

That's no longer the case - the Nokia N8 supports UMTS bands I, II, IV, V, and VIII so it will work with AT&T and T-Mobile in the US and with most other providers worldwide.

In theory, 1-4 of these modules connected thusly could give you performance up to that of an 8cy car, but use as few as two cylinders when the extra horse-power isn't necessary (by "turning on" extra modules as necessary, then turning them back off again when it isn't).

Yeah, it's called variable displacement. AKA MDS, Variable Cylinder Management, Active Fuel Management, etc. There are lots of GM, Chrysler, and Honda vehicles that have it right now.

StartCom offers free x.509 certificates, and their root is trusted by Windows/IE, Mozilla, and Mac OS / Safari.

I can't read anything that GC says.

This is the person that, as far as I can tell, single-handedly ruined WoW. I am not alone in this sentiment.

He's the person who brought us the hungry-hungry-hippos style button-mashing PvP in 3.0.
He's the person who brought us massive cleave teams.
He's the person who made mana to a large extent irrelevant.
He's the person who brought us Naxxramas (revisited) as "serious" raiding content.
He's the person who basically eliminated threat as a mechanic.
He's the person who wanted to make the game "less like Chess" and "more like Poker".

The problem with GC is that he likes to fuck with things. In major ways.

In PvP, this leads to 'flavor-of-the-month' classes/combos - who knows which one is going to be imba and at what time. In PvE, this leads to entire mechanics getting deprecated.

The problem is, many of us liked how the game played prior to GC. No, it wasn't perfect. Yes, there have been some improvements (like the queuing system for daily heroics).

You can't just go and upend everything whenever you feel like it. After a while players get tired of the change and decide, "screw it, I'm going to play something else".

That's what I did. After 5+ years of WoW, GC convinced me that it's not worth it anymore.

That's not true - Google released both 1.0 and 1.1 for the G1 before 1.5 (Cupcake) was released. Both were released more than 3 years after the Android acquisition in 2005.

There were no public releases from Android, Inc. And I can't find any reference to a release named "Bender", which would almost certainly run into trademark issues.

First, I'm 100% magnetic storage free for my PCs. My laptop has an Intel x25-m G2 160GB SSD, and I have a Corsair Nova 120GB SSD in my desktop.

But hard drives are not dead yet. It makes no sense to use an SSD in my DVR, in a backup device, or as a media storage drive. These are applications that do not require the kind of random-access performance you get with an SSD, but they do require decent sequential throughput (which hard drives deliver) and low cost per byte.

I think that laptop hard drives will die first. Low power usage and shock resistance are critical here, and notebook HDDs have even less performance and cost more per GB than desktop hard drives. Desktop hard drives will follow later. After that, hard drives will live on for years as backup and media storage devices.

Diesel contains significantly more energy per gallon than gasoline, so "MPG" comparisons to gasoline vehicles are totally useless.

Also, the UK fuel economy ratings are hopelessly optimistic, as are the Japanese tests.

The Third-Generation (ZVW30) Prius gets 59 MPUSG combined according to the UK tests, but 50 MPGUS according to the US tests. Anyone who actually drives their vehicle normally will tell you that the US tests are a lot closer to reality.

Whenever someone announces that a vehicle "beats" the Prius (or other hybrids) in fuel economy without a hybrid system, you have to look for one of several mistakes:

- Are they comparing diesel MPG (or L/100km) to gasoline? You can't do this because diesel contains more energy per unit volume.
- Are they comparing a small vehicle to a much larger hybrid? Yes, you can get good fuel economy in a Smart, but it also doesn't hold 4 people and is considerably less safe if you get in an accident with a larger vehicle.
- Are they comparing fuel economy ratings from different countries? Compared with the new EPA ratings (and reality), most ratings from other countries are hopelessly optimistic.
- Are they using a different sized gallon? The Imperial gallon is larger.

Often this is done implicitly - the poster won't even mention the hybrid in their comparison. That way when you look up (or remember) the fuel economy ratings of the hybrid, you're likely to use US-EPA sources.

Well, to be fair, the MacBook Air is less than half the weight of your U30Jc (2.3lbs vs 4.8lbs). The U30JC isn't really a "thin and light" notebook, it's actually decently close to my ThinkPad T400 in size and wieght. It's what used to be called a normal sized laptop, but laptops have gotten increasingly large.

The Toshiba R705 is a better comparison. Optical drive, 13" display, 2.4GHz Core i3 - all in a 3lb package. Unfortunately it also has overheating issues because of the full-voltage CPU (although it's entirely possible that the MacBook Air does too) and the graphics are the normal Intel trash.

I am disappointed at seeing a Core 2 Duo. I know why Apple made the choice, but honestly I think most people would prefer a Core i5 and Intel integrated graphics to the Core 2 Duo and NVIDIA graphics. The number of people who plan on running CUDA or playing 3D games on an 11.6" notebook is vanishingly small.

Oddly enough, I'm in that category. The new MacBook Air would be an ideal machine for me as of 6 months ago, when my game of choice was World of Warcraft. The problem is that now I'm in to StarCraft II, which requires some serious CPU horsepower. Even the 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo and Radeon 3470 on my ThinkPad is just adequate, when I clock it down to 1.6GHz (using EIST) the frame rate drops from the 60 to the 40s (with now action) and from the 40s to the 20s (when there's action on the screen). That's a big difference in playability.

Hopefully Sandy Bridge will fix this. It's a shame that Apple didn't wait 4 months for it.

Is the Air underpowered? Of course. But you find me an 11" form factor laptop that doesn't look like a giant brick and has a 2ghz+ i7. Not even the Dell Alienware M11x offers more than a 1.06ghz i7 or 1.3ghz Core 2.

http://www.amazon.com/Acer-TimelineX-AS1830T-68U118-11-6-Inch-Display/dp/B0042X8W0Q/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1287636352&sr=8-5

The Acer 1830 has an i7-680UM. It's not 2GHz base clock (it's 1.46GHz) but it does turbo to 2.53GHz. The reality is that you can't put a full-power Intel CPU in an 11.6" notebook today.

However, it's disappointing that Apple put a Penryn in the MacBook Air. Even a ULV i5 would run circles around the Core 2. The graphics argument is bogus, too - the i5 is an integrated CPU/northbridge (MCM), so it would in fact have fewer parts on the board. I think that most of the people who would buy an ultra-portable notebook would rather have a faster CPU and a slower GPU, since you're not going to do any sort of serious gaming on a 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo (and the Intel graphics are fine for desktop acceleration, HD video, and older games).

The real argument against this MacBook Air, though, is Zacata/Ontario and Sandy Bridge.

AMD Zacate will deliver similar CPU performance (compared with ULV Penryn - less IPC but higher clocks) with better GPU performance (Radeon 5400 class), using fewer chips and less power at a lower price. It arrives sometime early next year.

Sandy Bridge on the other hand will deliver similar GPU performance and vastly superior CPU performance with less power. It's probably going to be more expensive than Core 2, though. It also arrives early next year, although it's unclear when the ULV variants will ship.

The bottom line is that AMD and Intel are both working on major new architectures that are ideal for this application. Zacate/Ontario is all-new, and Sandy Bridge is Intel's biggest architecture change since Core 2. Launching at this point with a 2-year-old Intel platform just doesn't seem like the right timing.

Of course, they'll sell a bunch of them. Core 2 is still no slouch and the NVIDIA 320M graphics are the best integrated you can get right now. But if you can at all wait, do. Sandy Bridge and Zacate/Ontario are not the minor refreshes that we normally see from AMD/Intel, and they aren't years away - we're talking 4 months or less for Zacate/Ontario and 9 months or less for ULV Sandy Bridge.