Heh. I'm sure this recent incident didn't help either.

Where I live, short changing doesn't happen either way very often (or I just don't notice), but the times it does, I have actually seen it in both directions.

The funniest time was when we paid for some drinks, the owner thought/gave change as if we gave him a 50 when we actually paid with a 20. Got more money back than we paid in the first place. The place was OK so we did the nice thing and actually told him ;)

Speaking of Amazon though, this is why I will never buy DRM-encumbered anything. I have a Kindle and love it. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader how I obtain ebooks for it. I would gladly pay for them, if they did not come with DRM and where actually *cheaper* than the paperback editions. As it is, my bookshelf contains the paper edition, and I obtain the ebook for portable use by other means. A shame, really.

Of course they're not that dense.

This is all about getting the government to help you put your hand in the next guy's pocket.

Cynical people might say he did it to improve business, as apples are sour and contain a lot of sugar too, they are very bad for your teeth, even comparable to soft drinks.

They may be healthier to the rest of your body compared to candy and soft drinks, but for the teeth: not so much, apparently.

Over 45% is correct, likely it's even higher if you include VAT.

Where I live, current price is EUR 1.90/liter ($9.40 using the current exchange rate), of which 32% production costs, 9% in various margins (supplier, transport, gas station, etc.), the rest is taxes. So yep, the remaining 59% are specific taxes for fuel and "normal" VAT.

I cannot really imagine there are still that many (young) people who look at the keyboard while typing. Seriously? How do you see what you're typing, then?

You also don't really need the key labels (once you can touch type), just the small "braille"-like lines on the F and J keys to feel where the home keys are, IMO :)

Next up: vegetarians against using 0xdeadbeef to detect memory corruption? Well, Fuck me gently with a chainsaw!

More importantly, I don't get why anyone would advertise that 350M is being spent to create 20 "permanent" positions. That's 17.5M per fulltime job!

I'm sure they'll listen to Reason.

(sorry, couldn't resist)

I think Macs tend to make a rather poor budgeting choice.

Typing this message on my more than 4-year old $1000 (cheapest model) MacBook with 440 full battery cycles and still decent (2-3h) battery live, I disagree.

I would like to see how that sub-$500 laptop is doing after 4 years...my bet is you'd probably need to retrieve it from a landfill first.

Non-ironically, yes indeed. Get the cheapest macbook (without extended warranty), and be done with it.

I did this 4 years ago, so it's one of the plastic models, and still no problems whatsoever. I use it several hours daily, am using it to type this message. Even the battery is still good after 450 full cycles (the warranty is 80% capacity after 300 cycles). Not as good as new, but still lasts 2.5-3 hours during normal browsing/typing. The biggest problem is the backlight is getting less bright (this is normal but still annoying), which is starting to get noticeable in bright daylight (outside). It has not had any problem ever, hardware or software, and since I always just close the lid it has a 90 day uptime (most of which spent in sleep mode of course, but still). Hmm, I should probably install updates...

Performance is absolutely no problem for everyday use (not gaming), and we're talking an "ancient" Core 2 Duo model.

Basically it's hard not to come across as a fanboy after having used Dell and HP for years, but well..that's what it is.

Disturbing is very much the word you're looking for, indeed.

Some more choice quotes:

"Being a high energy oxidizer, dioxygen difluoride reacted vigorously with organic compounds, even at temperatures close to its melting point. It reacted instantaneously with solid ethyl alcohol, producing a blue flame and an explosion. When a drop of liquid 02F2 was added to liquid methane, cooled at 90K. , a white flame was produced instantaneously, which turned green upon further burning. When 0.2 (mL) of liquid 02F2 was added to 0.5 (mL) of liquid CH4 at 90K., a violent explosion occurred."

And he's just getting warmed up, if that's the right phrase to use for something that detonates things at -180C (that's -300 Fahrenheit, if you only have a kitchen thermometer). The great majority of Streng's reactions have surely never been run again. The paper goes on to react FOOF with everything else you wouldn't react it with: ammonia ("vigorous", this at 100K), water ice (explosion, natch), chlorine ("violent explosion", so he added it more slowly the second time) [..]

Or how about this one:

But today's compound makes no noise and leaves no wreckage. It merely stinks. But it does so relentlessly and unbearably. It makes innocent downwind pedestrians stagger, clutch their stomachs, and flee in terror. It reeks to a degree that makes people suspect evil supernatural forces. It is thioacetone.

No one's quite sure what the actual odorant is [..] And no one seems to have much desire to find out, either. There are sound historical reasons for this reluctance. The canonical example (Chemische Berichte 1889, 2593) is the early work in the German city of Freiburg in 1889 (see page 4 of this textbook), which quotes the first-hand report. This reaction produced"an offensive smell which spread rapidly over a great area of the town causing fainting, vomiting and a panic evacuation."

[..] They were dispersed with other observers around the laboratory, at distances up to a quarter of a mile , and one drop of either acetone gem-dithiol or the mother liquors from crude trithioacetone crystallisations were placed on a watch glass in a fume cupboard. The odour was detected downwind in seconds. "

My favorite source for actually scary chemicals is Things I won't work with, a chemists weblog detailing all sorts of stuff that, well, he won't work with. Random quote:

The experimental section of the paper enjoins the reader to wear a face shield, leather suit, and ear plugs, to work behind all sorts of blast shields, and to use Teflon and stainless steel apparatus so as to minimize shrapnel. Hmm. Ranking my equipment in terms of its shrapneliferousness is not something that's ever occurred to me, I have to say. It's safe to assume that any procedure which involves considering which parts of the apparatus I'd prefer to have flying past me will not get much business in my lab, no matter how dashing I might look in a leather suit.

So obviously you have something to hide. Doubleplusungood.

You're an exception. Many people just don't keep that thing organized. Even if you do, navigating it is cumbersome. Programs crap it up anyway, so in XP I basically launched applications in 2 ways:

1. Quickstart bar, for pretty much anything I use at least once a week - I think many people did/do this.
2. Win+R, which strictly speaking does not even show the menu - this shortcut I'm sure is only commonly used by geeks.

So I barely used the XP start menu (and to the extend that I did, had it set to classic Win95 style).

So, the very first thing I had to do in Win7 is figure out how to get the quickstart bar back (it's possible, but a bit annoying) and I actually really like the "Win-button type a few characters of the program name " style of starting applications. Everything else in there except for the shutdown button, I absolutely never touch.

I do exactly the same on Macs btw, use QuickSilver or Spotlight (whatever you prefer), Alt/Cmd-space, type some chars in the application name, go. Often used programs are in the dock. The way I start applications on both OS's is pretty much identical, then.