This one actually had a lot of input from the market it is aiming for.

Since when does hardware aimed at hardcore gamers rarely end well? Razer does alright at that. I would not like using a Razer Naga Epic here at work, but I don't want anything else for an MMO at home.

This has some features not available in any other form, and for that reason I think it could sell. A full PC in a tablet size that has several input configurations (making it like a laptop, a tablet, or a gameboy-style device) and two different ways to hang on an additional, removable battery. It's pretty nice for the market and the purpose it was designed.

If you aren't a hardcore gamer, why would you think you would like it, if it was being made for you to play your basic tablet touch-based games?

Regarding herd immunity; Herd immunity works great if the entire population has a perfect immunity. the more varied (trending downward) the immunity levels of the populous, the greater likelihood you have actually helped spread the virus.

I like your argument for the sake of the general population. Americans overuse antibiotics and generally ignore the beneficial impacts of occasionally getting sick and exposed to a wide variety of viruses, illnesses, etc.

However, that doesn't hold true for healthcare workers. Some hospitals that might not be as clean have less MRSA, but it doesn't mean they have less bacteria. People might still get infections in those hospitals, it's just easier to treat.

The flu, on the other hand, is okay for some, bad for others, and terminal for some. Nurses might interact with elderly cancer patients, immuno-compromised children, and very sick, homeless, drug-addicts - all in the same day. Every effort should be made to keep what is afflicting patient A from affecting patient B. Hand-sanitizers are by every door in a hospital not so the patients can sanitize their hands but so their handlers can.

They regularly put themselves in high-risk situations and should make every effort to minimize risk. If they aren't alright with that, they should find a different place to work. Not every nurse has to get a flu shot at all establishments, but it is becoming more popular - just as hand-sanitizing and gloves have in the past couple decades.

Of all the things that money is completely wasted on, this doesn't seem like one of them.

Sure, it might not be necessary, but it could be useful. If roads are being rebuilt anyway, the cost can't be that much greater given the size and scope of building roads. It seems like this would be useful when going around curves and helping to see where the road is when it is not directly in front of you, as would already be illuminated by your headlights.

I've always wished that they would spend a little money on developing some of these technologies. With little incremental cost we could do some cool things when rebuilding roads, like experimenting with power distribution, conduits for fiber runs, etc. It never makes sense to redo roads to put these in, and it's too expensive to build test roads, but if the cost isn't that great we could do a lot of experimenting when we're making new ones.

The president doesn't make these decisions. You might think he's supposed to lead by telling congress what to spend money on, but you would be just another person enabling congress to continue to suck. The president is designed to hold back congress from doing crazy stuff. That's why he has the veto power - and nothing more. Congress sets the budget and congress fails when the budget is wrong. There are 535 people with their own leadership structure. When they fail it's not the presidents' fault, no matter who it is.

Blaming the president for Congress' failing through lack of leadership just enables the executive branch to assume more power and the legislative to point more fingers.

With only linux laptops?

I buy a lot of dell machines, and I can tell you today what I pay for one, and you will go search for it, and find a different price. Navigating the dell website for a deal is like throwing darts in the dark. It depends on what links you click on, which base model you chose, which "store" you are in, and what software is on it.

Right now you can look at the Dell "Home" store and see Windows 7 clearance machines. These machines are about $50 more than the same machines with Windows 8 in the Cyber Week deals. Both places are cheaper than if you go through the "non-deal" links and build the exact same system on your own.

Anyone who thinks that Dell will sell a machine for exactly $50 difference hasn't purchased many Dell machines. It might be $50 today, for a base with an i5 and an SSD. It might be $200 difference if you start with a base machine that you have to upgrade to an i5 and an SSD.

Last time I wrote my senator (Dan Coats) it was to express my disapproval in what he was doing and how he was acting on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

I got a letter back in the mail, which started out "Thank you for your letter supporting me in my disapproval of how the Obama administration is handling the Bengazi incident. As you may or may not be aware, I sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee..."

You can write, call, speak, campaign, but it doesn't really matter. Everyone that gets elected seem to think they have a "mandate" and do whatever they want until someone else gets elected and continues on in the same manner.

Competition is nice, but I don't live in Seattle or Kansas City, so it probably won't affect me. ATT will probably just come up with a new plan where my family can share just a little bit less data for a little bit more money than I'm already paying.

Good data? Additional data for sure, but probably only good data to the person who is using the laptop. I have this problem with people saving things to their local drives. I refuse to backup those personal folders. If they put it on the server it's backed up and managed correctly, but even if it hurts the business if their local data is lost, it's a good teaching tool to get people to save data where it should go. Local information is no good to the organization that cannot access it.

I don't know, it seems about right. $500 for an "illegal" 190kb text, and $750,000 for an "illegal" 3mb song...

Spamming people on their cell phones is illegal. Firing people based on their political beliefs might not be illegal, but firing them because they are hispanic and probably voted for Obama might be (as one Papa John's franchisors might have done.)

People are probably going to buy less pizza under Obama's next four years, at least from the big pizza chains. (http://www.qsrmagazine.com/competition/fall-pizza) They probably would have under Romney as well. Big pizza has been declining over the past decade, and all signs point to that continuing, but not because of the economy. Small pizza restaurants are doing great, as are small breweries. In a time when the rest of the big pizza industry was declining, Papa John's took a gamble and tried to massively expand. They are facing competition from healthier eating, as well as faster, cheaper, and/or different chains that have grown lately, like Panera, Chipotle, and Jimmy Johns. I imagine they will contract over the next few years, but it's BS to say it's because of the requirement of healthcare. It's a small percentage of costs, and it's something all of the competition has to deal with as well.

You can say Romney would have improved investment and created expansion through less perceived uncertainty, but I completely disagree. I believe he would have created a tidal-wave of uncertainty, with an unknown tax plan, an unknown relationship with congress, and a huge question mark with healthcare. I believe we are more comfortable than we were before, having essentially four years of history with this president and with (essentially) this congress.

No, but the lead times are terrible. If this is successful, you could

A) Order a baby, and if you don't care about it having your genes, get one tomorrow.

or B)Special order one of your own and wait 9 months without the hassle in-between.

Really, with places like Amazon having a very good handle on expected demand and logistics, we could see babies available via Prime shipping by 2050.

When I was in college and wifi routers were just getting to the point where they were affordable enough for a regular person to buy, whole dorms would go out when people switched the WAN/LAN connections. Campus didn't have wireless yet, and the IT guys would get all upset and start going from room to room trying to find who had the mis-installed routers. Happened after every break.

If you follow the news during any one of the big disasters in the past few years, it seems that Hams are the only ones that consistently are organized, prepared, and react immediately.

They isolate any rogue gamma radiation or radioactive decay and line up the charges so I only receive the purest electrons...

I don't think it would matter what they were billing for, as long as they tell you what you are buying.

He wasn't contesting the charges, he just wanted to know how to measure his own usage. They responded "It's a secret, but you can trust us."