I thought a long time ago that a prime target would be a stadium. Say load up the Goodyear blimp with grenades and drop a couple dozen into the crowd at the Superbowl. Probably more casualties in the stampede than the explosion. 5lb bomb might get a stampede going though I suppose especially if the skies are already filled with other (non-armed) drones. People won't know that the other 100 in the air overhead have cameras or bombs.

Anyways, terrorism has an asymmetrical effect. For example 9/11 while tragic resulted in more US deaths in the resulting wars and the money spent could have prevented far more deaths than the attack caused (ex: I bet $6T in spending would yield a crapload of cancer and heart disease treatments). Did the resulting paranoia/military actions prevent further problems? Perhaps. But hard to prove a negative I guess. But (estimates are around 5000-20000 Taliban fighters) $6T is a lot to spend on a very few number of shitheads.

Kind of odd you compare one of the lowest population states but then compare it to the largest city in the US, though I guess 1/2 Alaska and only 7 times the population wouldn't work well ;)

BC has better roads that Alaska. Plus over half the provinces population is in the Vancouver metropolitan area. The thing is for the out of the way places: unless we have serious advances in battery/engines drones are a really bad idea they either are doing long flights from a more populated area or an expensive piece of equipment is being tied up for a small number of people (effectively the same thing they either spend a lot of time flying between deliveries or spend it waiting on something to deliver). Either way drones make more sense in dense areas but dense areas are likely the place where people aren't going to want them because of lack of landing space/hazards.

I think drones are the modern day helicopter useful for a very few things and for the masses we'll use something else.

Better they swarm the bastards in cars that toss the junk out in the first place.

Flying is way less energy efficient than ground transport. Probably cheaper for small packages. But I don't think drones will ever replace restocking the grocery store, bars etc.

The latest broadwells coming out that it seems like HP has replaced their whole consumer laptop line are at most (with a ~350 upgrade to the i7 version) still 20% slower than my late 2009 iMac. Yeah I know desktop vs laptop but still 6 years later and still slower. Pathetic. Anyways a lot of people are fine with it I guess as long as it can decode 1080p fast enough for smooth playback. Not me but probably the mass of the market :(

I was hoping for a pro version of the Surface pro :( maybe in 6 months. I'd like 16GB ram, 512GB SSD and a i7 CPU (and not a crappy two core U version broadwell)). 8 GB just won't cut it for me as a desktop/laptop replacement. I already have an iPad so ... little reason to buy the MS product.

Brought to you by the guys that sold you scratch tickets in exchange for your welfare checque.

Yeah I'd say bad implementation. They could have some performance improvement depending on timings and such though. Messing around in memory + one fairly large (only 1MB so not really but lets say for arguments sake) vs many smaller writes depending on how the OS handles the write requests you might end up hitting the disk cache and then doing work while the disk is busy spinning and actually writing out your changes. With one big write you might end up hitting some limit that makes the thing not fully buffered in cache and have to wait for the disk to actually complete the write.

Not perfect but I go by gut literally. I know when I've had a big meal or not. I also tend to eat fairly lean though. Anyways, if I feel that I've eaten a bit much lately then I exercise a bit more if not then whatever I feel like. I'm big to begin with but I've lost 15 pounds and probably put on 20lbs muscle in the process (245lb bodybuilder frame with a bit of a beer belly). Working my way through the beer belly. But getting stronger in the process (benching 350, shoulder press 270). And no it isn't genetics that got me to put on the muscle/strength: I was 170lb at 6'3" till 2nd year of university (so naturally a fairly small frame) and put on all the way up to 260 and started at 125lb press, all the extra weight was pretty much fat before hitting the weights again.

Anyways I don't worry too much about weighing my food. I guess it depends how hard at time you have losing/maintaining while gaining muscle. If after two weeks MY weight isn't going in the right direction I mix it up: extra 30 min of cardio, cut the beer out for the week etc.Makes life a hell of a lot easier not having to weigh everything I eat and I'm single/cooking for one. I can't imagine having to try to weight things out then account for stupid things like my spouse eat mostly turnip but I ate mostly the sweet potato or whatever.

Oh and another thing that helps, I guess roughly weighing but not getting all heil Hitler with it: get a favorite couple pieces of tupperware and pack your lunches in that. You can tell when your lunch bag is a bit heavy versus yesterday and plan your day accordingly, in my case since I workout 3-5 days a week that usually translates into working out that day even if I don't feel like it or got up a bit late. Even if that means only doing 3 sets of a couple exercises just to get the blood flowing it helps.

? What's not to like? Start menu takes all of 10 min to replace. After that it might as well be win 7 except with a slightly improved explorer and task manager and support for a better version of .Net (which I use in my work).

The POS part was that out of the box you see the start menu and you either like it or not. Those that aren't very technical pretty much just say: "why can't I just get it with the thing I know already?" and the stores for the most part have said: "okay". Heck my 60 year old tenant got a Win 8 laptop and was worried he wouldn't be able to figure it out. A day later is was saying that it was fine/he had no problems. It is the need for getting the device off the store shelves and people playing with it for a day or two that killed the sales of Win 8. People fear change and your Best Buy minimum wage sales guy isn't going to know/be bothered educating customers that they can get they system back to what they want with less effort than they use to get a cup of coffee.

I agree with the aero. Never had a lesser version of Win 7 but my understanding was that the versions that didn't support aero you also didn't get aero snap: that is the only bit I care about. Glass interface was pretty I suppose but it was really the half screen left, half screen right etc that made my day when I switched. You get that in Win 8+ + a better task manager, better windows explorer the option (not for me but some like it) for metro apps etc. The only complaint as someone that didn't like metro was that I had to spend 20 min online searching for the start menu replacement tool I liked the best.

As for color schemes: you don't have to use the stock ones you can customize to your hearts content. There are third party tools to bring back most of the ui all the way back to win 98 style if you want. Would have been nice if MS had given the "classic mode" option out of the box like they have done with every version since 98 but ... oh well we aren't in the 90's any more I don't miss the suspenders and striped Erkle shirts.

They are trying drastic things but I don't know if people care enough to notice. For example upgrades from 7-> will be free for the first year win 10 is out. Not sure how they are going to map which version you can go to from which version of the predecessor but still that is pretty sweet. At least according to what I heard on Windows Weekly they aren't even going to check if your version of windows is legitimate before allowing the upgrade. Meaning should you care to get a pirated version of windows 7 Ultimate and upgrade all the way up to whatever the equivalent ends up being for win 10 and the win 10 version will be legitimate ie no Win Genuine advantage complaints or whatever. I think MS has realized that people get windows with their computers and those that pirate aren't going to pay you so you might as well give away the software and get the whole ecosystem up to the latest and greatest (and use that to sell the idea of building stuff for the Windows store/hopefully at least get a few dollars from them when they buy a game or something) rather than allowing the latest and greatest look like a failure because people aren't replacing computers every 3 years like they used to.

Next up is they are integrating app stores and XBox with the PC. Only a part of the market I suppose but if you have a decent computer that means if you feel like getting a XBox game but can't be bothered dropping a few hundred on the device for the few games you want to play you'll still be able to get them on the PC (how that plays out in the market we'll see but could be fun). Probably not a huge deal for people that are big into gaming because they probably have a console vs PC preference but for the casual gamer that wants to be able to drop $30 on a game and play with a friend who is playing on their Xbox: not a problem.

I don't touch metro apps myself but Win 8.1 is still a nice, albeit smallish, upgrade vs win 7. As a .Net developer for a starters .Net 4.5 and in win 10 time frame C# 6 are huge improvements for my work. But also just simple things like task manager having more and better displays of what is doing what on the system. I used to have to open up process explorer once a week or so to track stuff down. Now I can do most of that right in task man. Similarly: perhaps a sign of my neurosis but I like progress bars, getting them for file copies and the pausing and restarting functionality is nice.

Anyways, back when Win 8 came out I think I paid about $29 for the upgrade so I could go to a hackaton that was using it which I think is all it was really worth. Now MS has gone to free upgrade model they are essentially going through the pattern that Apple did 3-5 years ago: get the initial sale then keep the customer happy with free upgrades till they decide to replace their machine.

My understanding is it isn't the hardware: Bootcamp has crappy drivers for windows side of things and things that would make sense like having the fan slow down under light load and such only work when running OSX. Apple then gets to claim 10hr battery life and when people complain about 3-4 hour battery life in windows Apple gets another chance to say why they are better.

Another example (might be MSs fault, Apple's, graphics card maker (ATI for this version?)) but the retina iMac 5k but only in OSX. There still isn't native res support on the Windows side from what I heard. So you've paid effectively a $500 premium for the retina screen over last years model and when using windows you get either a blurry 4k monitor (because of odd partial pixel scaling) or got to drop back down to 1440p like the old one was.

Anyways if you are looking for something like the Air on the windows side I suggest the new XPS 13: better res screen, better CPU, you get your windows license with it (don't have to pirate it or claim your mixed use computer is dev only if you have MSDN), your USB 3 ports have power share, it is actually thinner (though a bit heavier) than the air etc. The only thing is the macs have thunderbolt (if you are one of the 1% of people that actually have a peripheral that uses it and don't need it already as your mini-displayport connection for an external monitor) and the SSD is probably a bit faster I think they use PCIe in all their systems vs SATA3.

My understanding is some of the problems people have is that macs often have customized hardware. It might be a Nivida X card but with their own special crap added to support a non-standard connector say. Anyways the bootcamp version does a bunch of crap that makes windows suck more than it needs to on a mac. Ex from what I heard: fans in mac book pros often run full speed all the time in windows but proper power management happens when running OSX. They also do things that are kind of arbitrary like only support target display mode when running OSX on the target. Sure there'd be some work to port the functionality to windows but IMO if you buy an expensive computer and part of the selling point is that it can run windows too then features that require you to attach a cable to the system should work regardless of the OS. I can see not having iChat in windows land but features like target disk, target display, power management etc: fundamental features of the hardware IMO.

A lot of premium "high end" laptops still max out at 16: Alienware (pretty sure), HP Origin gaming system, Macbook Pros etc. Dropping 2k+ on a laptop I'd expect more but nope. 8GB is decent for a mid level machine. + the system has a o hum CPU so the users it is targeted for are probably not doing anything that requires > 8GB ram (watching videos, surfing, maybe in this posters case some sysadmin or dev work on relatively light weight editors/IDEs). My home computer just has 4GB which I can live with for those uses and then VPN into my work where I have a reasonably powerful beast (XPS 8700 special edition, i7-4770k with 32GB ram, 256SSD, 4TB HDD).

16 Is my problem thinking about a new laptop for personal use but also to do dev work on during my commute. I routinely use 15-16GB of ram and I'm pretty sure I peak over that by a bunch when debugging and what not. It pretty much removes all mainstream laptops from consideration. I instead need one of those ugly 7lb square beasts. Pay a $1000 premium for say a W541 but then have to pay more to get > 1080p screen that I would have gotten in say a Y50-70, have a much lower performance GPU etc. Pretty much all you get for the premium price is the expandablity, support for a docking station and conformance to a "professional" design you'd see in a corporate space versus a pretty "toy" design that the mainstream gets.

I hope by Skylark timeframe 32GB of ram becomes the new preimium non-workstation replacement tank standard.