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Comment Re:Still a niche company (Score 1) 111

Except I plug the car in every night and I'm generally good for the day. Range anxiety almost evaporated a couple weeks after owning the car. It totally evaporated once the NJ superchargers went online this summer.

I live in eastern PA and go to south Jersey and Long Island on a regular basis. Between the superchargers in NJ and Long Island, I'm perfectly good. I've even done trips to Washington D.C. and had no problem with range, even after some spontaneous detours to Annapolis and such.

Comment iMessage isn't bad... (Score 3, Interesting) 136

I actually like the idea behind iMessage: If you have internet access, sending a message via internet is potentially much cheaper than via SMS (unless you have an unlimited SMS plan). Even Apple's implementation of iMessage isn't too bad.

The problem is that it's lock-in to Apple devices, of course. If Apple could get their head out of the sand and create a unified protocol with Google and whoever is left in the smartphone OS field (BlackBerry?, Mozilla?), it would be fantastic. Especially if the protocol was expanded a bit. Imagine being able to share files like via dropbox, but seemlessly through an SMS app?

Comment Re:Still a niche company (Score 4, Informative) 111

As another Tesla owner (6 months for me), my previous car was a BMW 328 xDrive.

I drive my cars reasonably hard (~20k miles/year). Fuel savings alone is ~$2-3K/year. So you're not going to make the money back. Period.

But the drive is totally different from a BMW. Not necessarily better or worse. Definitely different. The Tesla acceleration is unreal but the cornering is so-so. The overall handling in rain is about the same or slightly better in the Tesla.

All together, I will never go back to the BMW. It's nice not having to worry about filling up my gas tank, and acceleration is more 'fun', and the information/entertainment system is out of this world.

Comment Re:Tourism (Score 1) 112

If you have money left enough to go into health care, I would definitely do that. Find a job working at a local hospital and save up to go to nursing school or PA school. If you go the nursing route you'll always find a job and work extra shifts pretty much as often as you want. PA route will get you better hours and potentially better pay but can limit you depending on which type of PA you want to be.

Work your way up and save more than you spend. Pay off debt going from highest interest payments to lowest until you are totally debt free. THEN put whatever savings you have into a low-cost index fund that either follows the total stock market or the S&P 500.

Comment Re:This is related (Score 3, Informative) 294

The science, so far, suggests that people aren't shedding virus (infective) until they start developing symptoms. Or is there other research stating that people are infective while asymptomatic? The science of the situation changes as the researchers are getting a better understanding of this particular infection. It's an exciting time (so long as you're not infected, of course).

As an aside, why is science in quotes? Are we supposed to exchange that word for mysticism?

Comment Re:People are the problem (Score 1) 82

I think what the GP is alluding to is the number of AEDs in the community to save a single life. It's got to be large, but I don't think we know the number.

Everyone remembers that one life saved, because it made the papers. But the question is, could the money placed in purchasing and maintaining those hundreds of AEDs been spent in a different way that could potentially save more lives?

In my community, a high school student had a sudden death due to a undiagnosed heart issue. The community is pushing to put AEDs everywhere and screen everyone for risks for sudden death. Meanwhile, the incidence of sudden death in school-aged individuals is ~1/100,000. The money could easily have been instead placed in public service reminders to not 'text and drive' and putting rumble strips at the sides of highways, almost certainly saving more lives.

Comment Re:People are the problem (Score 1) 82

I know where you're coming from and mostly agree with you.

But... As a society, we've decided that there is a certain amount we will pay to cover health care and the public good.

As a society, we're apparently willing to perform ~3500 mammograms to save one breast cancer. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22358016) (I recall that the public is willing to spend $1 million per life saved, which is in the same order of magnitude.) From that standpoint, putting one AED in high-traffic public areas where they can possibly save a life isn't too unreasonable, given the price drops in AEDs in the last 5-10 years.

I agree that people need to be trained in using them, as well as BLS training. But more groups are doing BLS training, and one BLS trained person per hundred population would do a world of good. Last year my wife performed BLS at a department store and stabilized someone until EMS arrived. (The store manager mailed her a thank you letter and gave her a gift certificate.) A couple years ago I performed BLS on the street when someone rang the door of the place I was visiting and said someone collapsed outside.

Comment Re:10M self-employed people beg to differ (Score 2) 262

If I'd been born to poor parents with little drive of their own, in public housing, with no internet or computers, no one helping me get and hold my first jobs... would I be where I am today?

I would like to think that if I had the drive I have now but been born to poor parents in the slums, I would work my way up to drug kingpin. But upon further reflection, I think I would likely have been killed in my late teens or early twenties.

Comment Re: Oh boy, another infection vector (Score 4, Interesting) 230

The problem with user controlled is that the user will add a repository and forget about it.

It happens on the Linux side as well. It just doesn't make news because there it's mostly white hats and not black hats.

Imagine this scenario: A website says it is packaging Windows10 versions of VLC with special added codecs to play stuff it otherwise doesn't play. People then add the repository and all is well. A year later, the repo gets hijacked by a virus and adds a version of GIMP v999 with the virus. Since it's a newer version of GIMP than what everyone has, they download it automatically and are infected en mass. People aren't looking for it since they already vetted the repo.

It happened with Ubuntu a while back, where some guy noticed his private repo was getting thousands of hits. So he put a new version of the default desktop background picture in it telling people to get off his repo.

Comment Re: I don't really see the point. (Score 1) 130

Remember people saying the same thing when I got my original iPad in late 2010. Four years later and it can't even run the latest iOS, let alone recent versions of most apps. (Even the apps that are compatible with it's iOS version number tend to run slowly or crash frequently.)

Comment Re:Phones getting too big .. (Score 1) 258

Agree over here. I'm not a particularly big guy. An iPhone 5/5S is fairly comfortable for me. The 6 just feels big and the 6+ is ridiculous.

I am interested in going with a stock Android phone, but it looks like Google stopped making the small size Nexus (the 5?).

Any thoughts of where to go for a powerful phone which runs stock Android?

Comment Re:Because wallpaper is what matters most (Score 2) 110

OSs should be about refinement, not about throwing everything out to get ready for the new release. Things should be fairly familiar, even if the last update was a year or so ago. So why bother changing the wallpaper, if it was 'good enough' last time. Spend the time adjusting the icons to make them look good at different screen sizes or something else that needs to be tweaked in the UI.

That being said, I'm skipping updating OSs for a bit. I'm on an LTE of a downstream OS and things are good enough that I'll stay where I am for a while. Got real work to do. ;-)

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