> research-based approach ... they've just lost half the country.

Good point. But that really is a very tiny slice of the SJW pie. The term SWERF is generally a pejorative in SJW circles.

It is actually considered a "major world city" by this UK data center. And this list from a Japanese site. And even this GitHub project.

Tell me about it. I probably parked in San Francisco 50 times over the decade I lived in the area, and had my car broken into twice. I've also live in South Africa for a few years, parked hundreds of times in Durban and other "dangerous" towns and never had a break-in. Or any problems at all. Saw a guy get stabbed at Mission and 16th BART station, though.

but there's nothing you can do with my TV that concerns me

what if it has a microphone?

There's a few things wrong with JPEG that are covered above and below, but the truth of the matter is this: practically speaking, it's plenty good enough and plenty ubiquitous enough to secure it's place for the foreseeable future.

Text and logos are already handled better by PNG and SVG. But for photos? A high quality JPEG will look perfect to nearly everyone, and just about nobody cares if they can save 15% on a still image when they're slinging tons more data watching HD videos. Especially when that file size saving comes at the expense of guaranteed support on every platform, application, and device made in the modern computing age.

At least as an end-user format, JPEG won't be replaced anytime in the near future regardless of it's fairly minor deficiencies.

I think the Pentium M, spinning HD, and shorter battery life kept it from being as much of a love affair as the MacBook Air (at least the rev I got). You're right that there wasn't any huge technology advancement, but sometimes you have to hit a certain sweet spot. I just remember this thing felt faster than any laptop I'd used before (primarily from the SSD subsystem), and the battery lasted so long I literally never had to think about it any more. I fell in love. It still feels like fast modern laptop all this time later.

You really can't compare desktop longevity with laptop longevity.

Totally agree - this is sad. I am primarily an iPhone user, and have experience with Android tablets, but I had to use the Windows phone for a while and I ended up liking it better than either. The UI is far less intrusive and needlessly complicated: it just works, to coin a phrase. When my Dad wanted a smartphone, despite his fears of being overwhelmed, I got him a Windows Phone and he had no problems at all. Even he was surprised at how easy it was to use. It was easier than the Jitterbug he replaced. Yet as a power user I didn't come across anything I couldn't do - and do easier - than on my iPhone.

I think the tiles setup allows *much* better customization than the wall of icons approach that both Apple and Google went with.

Seems like an example of the market not rewarding a good product, I guess.

then take it to the logical conclusion and disconnect from the entire country

i'm not really sure what benefit there is to having anything to do with russia electronically nowadays

Why do we level the playing field between rural and urban, but not along any other axes? There are plenty of demographics that are disenfranchised by their relative size, and they would gain important safeguards against oppression by having a louder voice. But we don't, for example, count black people's votes eight times to put them on a level playing field with whites. The electoral college doesn't make the whole system more fair, it just tips the scale in one particular direction.

Also, the idea that if you don't like a state you can just move is meaningless in this case -- we're talking about the results of a federal election. You can't move anywhere to escape those, so that suggestion doesn't weigh on electoral college considerations.

Yes, the goal of the electoral college was to make sure that sparse rural areas weren't disenfranchised. However, if we really wanted to follow that logic through then we'd have to re-enfranchise other minorities that might get overrun in a pure one-person-one-vote democracy: why don't we count each black vote as eight, for example? That seems another important safeguard. The answer seems to be that we're not seeking to equalize the playing field, but to tip it in a particular direction. I think we'd be better off with a straight popular vote.

For my dollars, I'd much rather work directly with people who are a committed part of a team. It's tough enough to achieve that with direct hires; I don't think you can do it with outsourcing.

I think part of this relates to the nature of software. People always talk about writing software - but that's the easy part. The hard part is *expanding* and *maintaining* software. And generally speaking people who have a history with the code are going to do a better job of it: faster, and more precise. You can also have a much tighter development loop between developers, testers, and users if you have them all in-house. I used to have my developers spend some time using the tools they built with the people who actually used them for the job (I did this myself as well). You learn practical details that are hard to communicate any other way. And speaking of communication: I had a few outsourced workers (forced on me by upper management) and communication was always inferior.

I'm not saying that there's no use for outsourcing, or that it's always the wrong choice. But my experience is that proximity matters. And history matters. And personal familiarity matters. So one needs to factor all that in when making the choice. And yeah, I think I got about 4x the quality and productivity out of my in-house people as my outsourced people.

Wow, thanks so much for mentioning RACHEL and World Possible. I've been working with them for a several years as a volunteer and recently joined as VP of Tech. It's such a satisfying project -- to see the stuff we put together being used in classrooms around the world a few weeks later -- and the Pi makes it all possible. Thanks for making such an amazing and useful piece of hardware :)