Yes I'm sure that it's irrelevant what 1.5 Billion directly involved people think... your opinion must be the correct one. lol!

Sigh... read what I wrote, they *both* make excellent optics. As for your characterization of Taiwan you should talk to some Chinese about that.

No intelligent person would accept that statement. They make very good optics (once upon a time not so but now very good) - go buy a good telescope in the USA - it is most likely made in Mainland China or Taiwan.

They make all sorts of good electronics, do circuit fab etc at very low prices.

Over the last month I ordered more than 100 different component assemblies from 100+ different suppliers for a little project of mine - so far it all works, seems well designed etc.

Bury your head in the sand if you want but if you do then hold on tight to your butt because it is going to get steamrollered.

As an undergraduate I too would frequently find that if, as I went to sleep, I concentrated on a problem I was having trouble solving that I would wake with the answer. This happened often enough that I began to rely on it.

Slightly strtanger was something that happened in high school. I was sitting in chemistry class looking straight ahead and day dreaming when suddenly I became aware of the teacher walking away from me. I asked the guy behind me what had happened and he told me the teacher had come up to me, asked me a question on what he had been lecturing (presumably to embarrass me for not paying attention) and that I had answered him, correctly. I was completely unaware of any of this transpiring. Similar sorts of things happened on a couple of other occasions.

One of my girlfriends would tell me that I had said such and such a thing to her first thing in the morning while we were still in bed... I'd have no recollection of these conversations and it turned out that we regularly had early morning conversations that, as far a I was concerned, had never occurred but that I knew, for various reasons, she wasn't just making up. I had to institute a "conversations don't count until I've had a cup of coffee rule" ;)

Your grandfather was absolutely right. Unfortunately many (most?) people do not get this. It is depressing how often I hear things like "Of course I support freedom of speech, but you have to have limits."

Yes there are problems created by that freedom but imho the cost of those problems is far less than the cost of not keeping this fundamental right protected.

The idea of freedom of speech being a fundamental right may be as important a development for humanity as the wheel but the last several decades have been filled with attempts to chip away at it.

Haven't composting toilets been around for quite a long time now?

I think you are being a bit literal.

I think the point was that if an Android tablet can be built and sold at a profit for $50 then it is likely that an Arduino board could be built and sold at a profit for less than the current price(s). I agree.

Your tinfoil hat has slipped off.

That's something that really needs more public scrutiny. My city is one giant blaze of light at 3am... nothing much is going on there but all the buildings are lit up. In my neighbourhood there is a street-light approximately every 100 ft, i.e. you're never more than about 50' from a street-light. I can stand on most corners and be within 100' of at least 6 street-lights. I can, and no exaggeration here, walk around my block in the middle of the night and read a book without it ever getting too dim too read - and my eyesight isn't the greatest or most sensitive.

" I wouldn't be caught dead buying filament bulbs because that's poor people budgeting "

That's a very sad way of thinking... maybe you should just get a tattoo on your forehead that says "I'm not poor!", then you could relax.

You've never met a woman have you? Sorry that was rhetorical - it is /. after all....

"Miss stop touching me, stop holding yourself so close, stop letting your hands roam all over my body..."

Been there brother! :)

A few things to point out (and maybe this has changed but it was accurate last I checked):

- the throughput numbers of SSD's are bogus since they are calculated using highly compressible data; HDD performance doesn't depend on compressing data and won't change just because you're writing out a binary file.

- SSD's on notebooks and smaller may make sense because of the lower power and shock resistance

- SSD's on desktops/workstations don't make nearly as much sense. I have an SSD in on of my machines. The machine also has 4 fairly old HDDs striped in RAID 0 (yes with frequent backups). The HDD's blow the socks off the SSD. If I put more modern drives in the RAID array the disparity would be even worse. Yes the HDD's use more power but the point of the desktop is performance.

- seems to me I remember that SSD's are not recommended for paging - although right now I can't remember why or where I read it so YMMV. And yes, many systems don't page.

- some people say it isn't throughput that counts it's IOP's - well again a good RAID system isn't too shabby at that either but even if SSD's were to always win out in IOP's the question of whether that matters really depends on what you are doing with your system. For example when I want that 2GBB stack of images to load I want it to load NOW and throughput is what matters. The same with compiling large sources, etc.

Somebody mod parent up!