I cannot agree with you more. The post you responded to definitely has a narrow view of the world.

How about a sad story: A professional woman who ran a sales organization has a great career with good money and a husband who works as well. Nice home and is raising 6 children with good moral character even though one has a learning disability and another some anger management issues.

Fast forward 6 years: After two bouts with cancer and some chronic pain after surgery this woman is now on permanent disability. You know how much that pays a month? Not much. Husband and other men in her life are gone because men suck at living up to responsibility and she's stuck with no insurance, house is gone, and kids still need to eat. Thank god for government programs (which her taxes helped fund for years) so she might be able to afford food and medical care.

I am sure she's very sorry to be an undeserving leech, "welfare" mother in an otherwise perfect world the poster lives in.

How do I know all this? Well, she's my fiance and I'm looking forward to spending my life with her. Hey, that's good news...one less undeserving welfare mom for us to cover. You want to discuss fixing fraud, negative incentives for working, mismanagement of government programs, have at it, but let those deserving of some help out of it.

From the fine article:

So the beef is that Tesla isn't being clear about everything and that upsets the dealers. hmm..

In my local paper, the dealers have ads in every Sunday that advertise a low price. As it was a few weeks ago, I was looking to buy a minivan for the family (I'm not completely domesticate, I still have my convertible). Great price of $22k for a Town and Country...pretty amazing actually. Way at the bottom of the ad were the caveats--includes first car buyer discount, veteran discount, bonus trade-in amount, etc.

Looking at the discounts there was no way you could be eligible for all of them at the same time. In my case, none of them. Yeah, those Tesla guys are devious and misleading.

I saw an interesting show on how Russia is slowly dismantling the nuclear submarine fleet (Discovery's "Submarine: Hidden Hunters Collection"). They showed how a team of contractors and experts from former East Germany were helping decommission the fleet. There were over 200 nuclear power plants, with more still coming, sealed in part of the sub's pressure hull and being stored on cement slabs until the radioactivity had decreased enough for a later generation to tackle.

Failed super power or not, it does show how massive the military buildup between the Soviet Union and United States was during the Cold War. If the US is still sustaining that level of commitment (and number of subs as part of it), it would take quite some time for anyone (including China) to be in a position to completely wipe out our naval capability.

Just an opinion that let me mention a very interesting set of shows on subs. So yes, I had an ulterior motive to post!

When I read this in a story about UK, reminded me of the simple question. Have you tried turning it off and on?

I'm not sure I fully agree. If their product came damaged because of cheap packaging, the world would be up in arms about a $500+ device being damaged during shipping.

Also, Apple packaging is mostly just cardboard which is easy to recycle. Most of the other products I buy have packaging loaded with cardboard, Styrofoam (or press paper forms), plastic bags around everything, and plastic or wire cable ties. Apple has a screen protector, tiny plastic band around cables, and some cardboard.

My girlfriend would text me often when I was on the road, so I looked forward to Siri's integrated voice system so I could hear the message while driving. Overall it works well but does become more distracting than a simple phone call in some cases.

So here I am driving and get a text message: First, I need to ask Siri (I'm sure there's similar issues across platforms) to read message and HOPE it can pronounce everything right or there's a temptation to read it on the screen. Then, I wait for the question if I want to respond. I say "yes" and wait for Siri to ask for my message. All this time, I'm concentrating on hearing the prompts.

Next, I dictate my message and HOPE it understood what I was saying. (Note: I do have a bluetooth handsfree built into the car so at least I'm not holding it in one hand up to my face while driving. Although, this probably doesn't work as well as speaking directly in phone). If it repeats wrong, then I have to say "cancel" or "change it" and then wait for the prompt again. This time I concentrate more on how I pronounce everything. If all goes well, then I finally can say "send it".

So something that could be handled in a 10 second phone call now took 30+ seconds of dictating and concentrating on what the phone is saying to me. I can see how this could be just as bad.

I've been collecting interesting 8-bit waste computers and historic machines for a long time. I give them a home before someone throws them out (no need to buy) and think someday it will be cool to look back at them. I actually have had a chance to bring a bunch of my dinosaurs and discuss the history of computing with my daughter's tech club at school. This included a demonstration of an ENIAC simulator too!!

Many of these machines are in original boxes. As I was a Commodore guy in the past I have C64, C128, Plus4, Vic20, Amiga 500 and 2000. Also have the great pleasure of having Apple Mac 512, variety of Apple IIe's with accessories, and Apple IIgs. I have a few miscellaneous including an Atari 400, 800XL, and have a 3rd revision CoCo. My crown of the collection is an Osborne Executive...not too many of those laying around.

The only disappointment is the lack of time to fire them up and make sure everything keeps working. I'm sure the capacitors, floppies disks, and TV modulators/monitors will all be flaky if I ever get a chance to start actually playing with them.

I stopped reading comments after a while. Nothing but suggestions on security, windows jokes, and shotguns. I probably missed some good comments but let me add my own.

Personally, the first thing I would do is pick the "ecosystem" you want to play in. You a Google, Apple, MS person? For all the convergence devices, this is important to decide right away. I'm personally an Apple guy and like how all the devices sync up and it works for me...but the price is I bought in and know the limitations (For example, If I want Amazon prime on my Apple TV, I'm out of luck).

One of the nice thing is you can start standardizing on a brand for TV's and other audio/visual electronics. Most of the brands have some sort of link (proprietary?) that allows their TVs, receivers, players to work together fairly well without using universal remotes. Unfortunately, I bought most of my gear over time and many brands and only a few things are happy working together :(

Sorry that I can just suggest "the" brand to go with. I've had a robbery before and it sucks to have to rebuild. My own funny little story: I had a robbery in 1991 that told me that albums were going to die at the hands of CDs. The thief took my receiver, tape deck, 6 CD player and the heavy speakers....but left the turn table.

I think this is a great idea. It is simple to understand the requirements (most FMEA or risk management is based on scores and a simple calculation) and has some interesting reports you could generate such as the risk waterfall by time. Most people use spreadsheets in someway which limits ability of everyone on the team to update or add status.

To build on your point, I think looking at the sales numbers (if such can be found) on the iWorks applications from Apple would at least give a better baseline than the guess they are making. If you could make a reasonable assumption on business's adoption of Office instead, then you would have a guess based more on facts.

I have an iPad I use at work every day. I use iWorks to review documents sent to me and it does an OK job as long as long as the documents are fairly standard. Unfortunately, the default MS fonts and our business's custom one cause Keynote to render PowerPoint files fairly poorly when it tries to find a font close enough.

Moral of the story: I would gladly download a copy of Office for iPad

See that's the thing telecommuters forget. You are still AT work, just in your home. The kids should have still been in daycare and she still could be doing business just fine. She could enjoy the coffee being two feet away, listening to the radio without headphones, etc... and still got things done.

At my company we have a very liberal work at home when needed policy. Most of the time it is due to family or other needs to be home (e.g. deliveries, repairs) so a drop in output is expected a little. However, people also use it to get stuff done without distractions of fellow employees (the curse of subject matter experts) which is a bonus to us. For my team who is permanently remote, I have to work much harder to ensure they are being successful. Touching base often, making sure we connect at a more personal level, having times they do come in the office for events, and never, ever canceling one-on-one meetings. You never get that back and don't have the luxury of catching them in the hall.

I find that if I don't have specific things to do, then I'm less productive at home. It is too easy to get distracted by other things like putting the dishes away. I'm a manager now, but I think that's why software people do succeed more at telecommuting. They can be hyper-focused on specific things, they have tangible deliverables to get done and don't let go of a problem until they solve it. I love software developers!

I like the philosophy. She obviously knows that dad/mom will not come down hard unless something really bad happens and would probably feel terrible if she went beyond the "norm" for behavior. Good parenting isn't always correcting mistakes and keeping them in a gilded cage.

I'm curious why you don't have a talk with her and say something like, "I know studying can be taxing and if you need a little break head on over to the mall" without letting her know you are already aware this happens. Would probably take some stress off her about sneaking around and, if you did call her, feeling pressure to lie to you...which then does start eroding trust.

You'll be fine as long as you keep listening to Manna's instructions or enjoy the good life in the Terrafoam housing.