They were boneshakers because they didn't have pneumatic tires. This is not true of a modern bicycle, and we also have far more understanding of mechanical systems and materials, including wood, now.

It is a widely perpetuated myth, mostly by bicycle frame makers who are attempting to get you to spend gobs of money on special designs, frame materials, etc that are "vertically stiff and horizontally compliant" (this phrase is now such marketing cliche it's mocked a lot)...that road bicycle suspension happens in the frame. It doesn't/shouldn't. It happens almost entirely in the tire/tube; when you go over a bump, the rest of the tube+tire stretches slightly to absorb the impact, and then contracts back. Some suspension also happens in the wheel; a wheel is quite strong in part because the spokes and rim both have some give to them.

Just as with cars, the most effective suspension is the one that has the least unsprung weight. So for example, high performance cars often have suspension and brake components made out of high-strength-for-weight materials, but in general, car manufacturers try to keep the weight of the suspension down.

On a bicycle with a properly sized and inflated tire for the rider's weight and road conditions, there is very little unsprung mass

http://shameproject.com/report...

Why did you, after college, attend the National Journalism Center, a corporate-funded program created to counter the mediaâ(TM)s alleged âoeanti-business biasâ?

Why, as someone who is half-Jamaican, have you repeatedly associated yourself (and apparently continue to do so) with the white supremacist organization EPPC, which fights activists for economic justice?

Why did you write for American Spectator, which churned out anti-Clinton conspiracy theories?

Why did you recycle tobacco industry propaganda and quote lobbyists for Washington Post articles you "wrote"? Why did Phillip Morris consider you, according to their internal documents, to be a "friend" who could be counted on for pro-tobacco-industry stories?

Why did you clearly promote drugs for treating ADHD in kids, in which you heavily quoted researchers who were paid heavily by the pharma industry?

Why did you cite a pharma-industry cited study and defend the industry when it was attacked for high drug costs?

Why did you blame the victims in the Enron collapse, defending executives who committed gross fraud?

They did, at WWDC 2013. More to the point, I wonder why the Trim Enabler dev isn't signing his kext? Are there legitimate reasons, like he needs a special kind of thing that can't be signed using the provided tools, or is it because he doesn't want to pay for a dev license to sign the software he's selling? In a vacuum of information, there's not much point in speculating.

Why? Is TRIM empirically faster on your drive, or is this something you think you need?

I'm wondering about that myself. Early benchmarks showed that the 840 EVO benefits from TRIM, but that drive also had wonky firmware that was causing read degradation. Could the old firmware have accounted for some of the benchmark problems?

Side note: I applied the firmware upgrade myself last week and it went through without a hitch. YMMV, but I had an easy time of it.

I don't work for Apple, but... Older MacBook Pros came with instructions for replacing the RAM and hard drive. This was considered a normal thing to do and didn't void warranties. For example, my 2011 MBP has normal Phillips screws on the bottom, and it takes me about two minutes to have the back panel off and the RAM and HDD snap right out.

SSDs have a history of notoriously horrible firmware. SandForce, anyone? Someone goes to Best Buy and comes home with a new SSD, pops it into their MBP, uses it for a month, and the thing asplodes and eats their data. They call Apple support to scream at them for writing a terrible OS that loses their data, and Apple loses money and reputation.

I can imagine perfectly non-nefarious reasons why Apple would disable TRIM by default and only enable it for drives that have been explicitly tested for compatibility. Even today, you can still turn TRIM on for yourself as you described, at the price of reverting to pre-Yosemite security. I haven't done so on the 840 EVO I swapped into my MBP because I've judged that it's not worth the tradeoff for me, but it's an option. Trim Enabler even has a GUI to do it for you.

I'd be hard pressed to come up with more of a manufactured controversy.

Apple has never enabled TRIM on non-OEM SSDs, which is probably the conservative and correct thing to do. If you're clever enough to install a new SSD, you're clever enough to enable it on your own (and presumably to know whether you should enable it, and whether it's even a benefit for your particular drive).

The current workaround involved a single software vendor who didn't sign their kexts. Apple's new security policy won't let you load random unsigned kernel modules unless you explicitly turn off the signature checking. While this is inconvenient for me personally - because I have a 3rd-party SSD and I used that software myself - on whole, I'd rather have a more secure OS than the dubious benefit of a possibly slightly faster SSD.

Pretty much everything on your list of stuff that got dropped was in the category of:
1) Very few people used it in the first place (Wave, Buzz, Orkut, Reader)
2) Was not really dropped but replaced with a similar service under a different name with a method of migration (Picasa got integrated into Drive for all practical purposes, and actually technically G+ replaced Buzz)

The only thing I'm not sure about is Google Health - although remnants of that have been getting integrated into Android lately.

"But at least the phone companies can know about it and mount a legal fight, if they so choose'

Really hard with current legislation.

Remember Lavabit? It's already been proven that the government has been using legal means to acquire the private keys of service providers for the purposes of MITM attacks just like this one.

Obviously not covered by the study but IMO important:

A major factor in "competence" is knowing your own limitations and being able to identify when you don't know something. So a boss that KNOWS their limitations and delegates those tasks is, IMO, a highly competent one.

RT Surfaces go up against cheap Android tablets, not iPads or good high-end Androids. $449 is way more expensive than the competition.

At $749, you get a bottom-end CPU and no keyboard, so you're not competing against laptops at all. It's also $150 more than an iPad Air 2 with the same amount of storage (although the iPad will have more available space after subtracting the OS install), so you're paying more for a tablet with less available tablet-centric software.

OP was right: Surface is a hybrid that does neither thing well.

While I don't disagree with your general point, theft rates started dropping as soon as Apple added Activation Lock to iOS 7. There's not a lot of street value in a device that can't be used, and they're not the thief magnet they were even a year ago.

...unlike natural, free-range grains that are invulnerable to pests and thrive under the gentle light of the waxing crescent moon. Sorry, but you lost me at "chemicals". Yes. They're matter-based lifeforms, and need a whole slew of chemicals to exist.

At mine, it was specifically allowed. You absolutely weren't allowed to share work unless explicitly told otherwise, but discussing your approach and debating the benefits was considered a legitimate learning method.