Well, I can't speak for the failure rate but my iPhone 4 is now 3.5 years old and during Easter I used it a lot, even after a day of heavy use I still had 20% battery left. Today it's at 67% after a 2 hours of GPS tracking. For daily use it's still fine and I'm guessing will be fine for years to come. For weekends and vacations away from a charger I'm considering getting a battery pack - compared to the original 1420 mAh battery you can get a 7000-10000 mAh external charger for cheap. You put it in your backpack or luggage, plug it in where you sleep at night even if that's a remote cabin or a tent in the wilds. Or for that matter just turn off the "smart", if I kill data traffic it'll last very long as a dumb phone as I've done that abroad due to cost. Basically as long as the battery works it's not really a problem.

Astroturfing Microsoft on websites, duh...

Well the cops did get a tip of one reckless maneuver that allegedly forced the tipper off the road. They tailed the truck for five minutes, saw no traffic violations or poor driving to collaborate the story. Then they pulled the truck over instead of being on their way. I'd agree with the dissenters, there's no reasonable suspicion of an ongoing crime - that is, drunk driving - and they pulled him over on a fishing expedition. One incident, observed by nobody but an anonymous tipper who may or may not have called it in just to be mean - I mean it's quite impressive to get a full license plate down while you're really being run off the road so some generous exaggeration may have happened. She didn't even accuse them of driving drunk, that's the court's argument that maybe they were while completely ignoring that the officers saw no sign of it.

Or maybe you just have a pack rat obsession with owning things while the rest of us as just looking to get some entertainment. I "buy" a non-transferrable license to a DRM-locked online-tied sandbox, even a DVD which also has DRM is more liberal as I can sell, lend, play anywhere without anyone's approval or activation but even that one I can't back up or format shift legally as I expect to do with my own property. None of that is an absolute necessity though, what matters if if the value (utility, desire) exceeds the costs (money, inconvenience) and if I am confident that I'll get my money's worth from it before Steam goes under and the service disappears in a puff of smoke I come out ahead. If I desperately want to play it 10+ years down the line I suspect it will be available somehow on GOG (legally), TPB (not so legally) or whatever so it's not a "now or never" situation.

Yes, I get pretty pissed when you abuse DRM to deliver use control like unskippable commercials and region locks, crap that acts more like malware (hello StarForce) and such things but ultimately I am looking to get entertained, it's in the same class as Netflix (subscription), Spotify (subscription) not about having my documents and data trapped in proprietary products with lock-in. Realistically if Steam said all games are now a 5 year lease it'd probably not change my habits at all. If they start acting like asses I always have the option to say here are the letters F and U, I'll be sourcing my entertainment elsewhere from now on. It's not like there's a shortage or anything, particularly since it won't cost me a moral fiber to download games I used to have on Steam off TPB should that ever become necessary.

Well, if we do an experiment on gravity we determine it only in a point location at a given time, the rest is extrapolation/intrapolation that gravity remains constant between locations and across time. Take two sections of forest, build greenhouses around them and pump more CO2 into one and you have a pretty good scientific experiment. Yes, putting the pieces correctly together is complicated but as long as you accept that things obey the laws of physics and chemistry and don't magically become different at a macro scale you can build bigger and bigger pieces of the puzzle from small blocks. There's no "irreducable complexity" here as the relgious like to trot out when they don't like the science.

To quote AMD (pdf) in their 2014 Q1 earnings, a couple days ago:

In short, they're transforming away from their "traditional" business and of the PC market graphics revenue is going to be significant. AMDs x86 CPUs/APUs are going to be a small part of their business, there's a reason Intel is aiming all the big guns at ARM because AMD has already in their strategy decided to get out of the head-to-head competition with Intel. If you don't believe that, read the above lines again. They couldn't compete with Intel when they bet everything on one horse, now they're riding five others as well? That's a slow exit strategy, milking the CPU/APU revenue to execute their transformation. The FX line is probably already dead, Kaveri/Beema/Mullins will keep AMD present in the consumer market a while longer but the revenue is funneled into all those other key areas.

False dichotomy, it's not one or the other.

Time and material contracts basically means renting consultants by the hour, short of outright criminal behavior there's no promised time frames, deliverables or guarantees of functionality or quality. The upside is the lack of formalism, I've developed many reports on a T&M basis and basically if you want a filter here and a total there and to add one more column and add a traffic light here and a drill down there just say it and I'll keep working on it until you're happy. Heck, I've taken "requirements" from a single yellow post-it note, as long as the client is happy and the invoices get paid it's a win-win for everyone compared to bids and change orders.

The problem begins if you need anything other than yes-men because basically you're going to lead these people and point them to tasks that need doing and make sure it all comes together to a working solution. Consider it a bit like building a house where every contractor assumes that the rest of the work to bring it up to code will be done by somebody else, you tell the plumber to put a pipe here, the electrician a wire there and the carpenter to board up that wall and they do it, but they don't take any responsibility on whether it's done to code or the overall result. My guess is that Oracle have their asses well covered legally, but often they have to play the scapegoat when the client has been incompetent. Usually they don't want to throw eggs in the face of the manager who hired them, unless it becomes an even bigger PR problem not to.

Which is why this is a never-ending competition, one thing is size but what about mass/gravity? Does it have a magnetic field? Does it have a Jupiter to clear the solar system of debris? Does it have a moon to produce tidal forces? Still, we know there's some slack in that life is almost everywhere on this planet from Sahara to the Arctic.

The flip side of that is that Canonical has been pretty clear that they're not building this for their existing users but rather to get new users on phones, tablets, phablets, convertibles, touchscreen laptops, TVs and whatnot other household devices. To trot out the old Henry Ford quote, if I asked my users what they'd wanted they'd say a faster horse. Well that's you, you want a better "classic" desktop the way it's been for the last 20 years or so but the users they have is 1% of a declining PC market that's being swarmed by other non-PC devices. That's why they won't listen when you complain that they're trying to put a steering wheel and pedals on your horse cart, they're trying to build a car and going back on that is clearly a step backwards compared to their goals.

Yes, he's trying to be Steve Jobs just like Google is, just like Microsoft is and when giants like that throw their weight around it's easy to get flung into irrelevance which is why the new business isn't exactly rolling in and the old business is cranky. Particularly now when Android has rolled in almost everywhere he wanted Ubuntu to be. He could just tuck his tail between his legs, admit defeat and say we'll be building a desktop of the geeks, by the geeks, for the geeks and that's that. Or at least aim the sights back to Microsoft, the old archenemy even though Ubuntu never managed to get very far there. But my impression is that he's too ambitious and stubborn to do that, besides "We're making this new Unity thing that no one wants and we'll force it on our users before its ready" sounds like GNOME 3, KDE 4 and a bunch of other projects so he fits right in.

If you look at Microsoft's pricing, it's fairly obvious why. If you're first getting Outlook for 135 euro then another 135 euro to get everything else is an easy sell-up, particularly since I'm guessing the sales reps will give you a volume rebate on the Office suite but never on Outlook alone. For at least a decade I've heard product after product being called "Outlook killer" but they all seem to fizzle and my impression mostly because they focus on being POP/IMAP clients. Calendaring is probably more essential to an organization, and I don't mean the simple one-off meeting.

When are people available and what meeting rooms are available. Setting up recurring meetings (like say a weekly staff meeting) that lets you easily modify single instances (because this week is easter), calendar sharing, forwarding events with proper notification to the meeting owner, overviews of who will/will not attend or haven't answered, including the agenda or attachments, corporate directories, personal directories, all that practical stuff like that if I start writing a mail to someone in-house it warns me right away they're going to send an away message instead of waiting for me to send it, get the auto-reply, realize what I just send won't work, then another email to say forget that, let's do something else when you're back on Monday.

Geeks hate meetings and scheduling, every one of them myself included. Good calendar software which makes it easy to drown people in meetings is just begging to be swamped with them so it's not exactly an itch we'd like to scratch. We're very busy trying to invent and push non-meeting solutions like email or IM and claim we're solving it better. I'm not going to fire up debate, but the fact of the matter is that getting all of the people involved in the same room at the same time to discuss/decide matters is still a very popular idea. And if you want to get rid of Office, you need to get rid of Outlook and if you want to get rid of Outlook you must handle this well. I'm sure there's lots of people who'd like to drop Exchange and the CALs, using non-MS products despite still sending around MS documents so it should be easier than taking down all of MS Office at once.

We already have almost every version of this, hybrid drives for laptops, software techniques that mimic this but they're all fairly stupid and unpredictable, training it to cache the right things take time and suddenly what used to have SSD performance might have been evicted. If you're the kind of user who needs >100GB you probably know what it is taking space. Put your big media (video, photos, music) on D:, everything else like applications and documents stay on C:. The only really tough call is games which often have a huge install size but also app code that benefits from being on an SSD, Steam lets you define multiple library folders so you can have one on C:, one on D: but no easy way to swap them in and out, for now the only supported way is uninstall and reinstall on the other. There are workarounds for that though.

Here in Norway I have the impression that it's only two main groups. One is Romani that arrive through the EU agreement, basically the kind who come with no rights, no education, no work history, no nothing and the only thing they're here for is to beg, steal and live off various programs that provide shelter and food for the homeless while leaving a trail of littering and vandalism in their wake. And yes, I don't mind stigmatizing the whole group because 68 of 69 beggars in a random sweep of beggars had a criminal record. And despite a million attempts to integrate them, they have no intention of ever becoming productive members of society and raise their children just like them to embrace their nomadic and parasitic lifestyle. Many of the children aren't enrolled in primary/secondary education at all and the few who are absent more than 1/3rd of the time. They also have more than a few cultural issues with suckers who work all day for an honest wage, why anyone would give them money is incomprehensible to me.

The other big, big group is drug/alcohol addicts, but there are hospices and such that will give them shelter and food if they don't show up high as a kite. The truly homeless are the ones who can't keep their drug use outside the shelter, but even those get winter sleeping bags so they don't freeze to death on the streets. They're not trying to hustle you for money in order to eat or drink or put clothes on their backs or a roof over their heads, it's to feed their habit. It's almost a protection racket, we're addicts and we will find the money to get our kick so you can either throw a few bucks in our cup or we'll get desperate and you really don't want us to get desperate. If you give them anything nice they'll probably sell it for the money anyway, you can give them money but it's not going to lead to anything positive. The rest are mostly taken care of, if you just have mental or money problems you won't be the streets and you won't have to beg for a living.

Well, he said "potentially liquid" not "liquid", like if you decided to become a Buddhist monk and give away everything you own selling your house, car and so on could you liquidate your 401(k)? From what it looks like you must pay a 10% early withdrawal fee and income tax, so it's a lot less worth to have $1 in a 401(k) than in a regular bank account. On the other hand should you include things like sales commission on the house? I don't know, but in an informal sense I'd say that you're only a millionaire if you could literally gather a million dollars in cash if you wanted to.

When you see how far they've stretched the "interstate commerce" clause, I think your proposal would only lead to a greater mess. Besides, people want laws that create simple rules like when can I carry this gun? Who, when, what, how, where are easy and categorical, why is often vaguely defined in someone's mind. For example if you say the "mission" is for self-defense then anyone caught with a gun can always claim that, even when it seems extremely unlikely.

I'd just start throwing lots of question at that definition until you got it narrowed down.

Who are "the people"? Is it the same "people" who have the right to a fair trial? Because I'm pretty sure that includes everyone, not just citizens or residents but that illegal immigrant crossing over from Mexico too. Does he have a right to "keep and bear arms"? Does anyone not connected to any milita? Even back then the militia was all "able bodied men", is a woman or a cripple protected? What about minors? The mentally ill? Felons? They all have the right to a fair trial, no ifs or buts about that. Can you condition this right on a license or registration or test? Can you deny anyone to buy a gun or place restrictions on those selling guns like mandatory waiting periods or is that denying them the right to have a gun like right now? Can you regulate how it's stored without violating the right to keep it, like keeping it dismantled, unloaded, ammo separate from gun, in a gun locker etc. because really you could demand it be encased in three feet of cement. What does it mean to bear arms, does it mean openly or concealed, can you have it in the glove box or under your seat? Can you carry it on private property, public property, in public buildings, on other people's private property that's open to the general public? What exactly does "arms" means, is it the right to have cannons and nukes or small arms? Poisoned darts, is that arms? What about knives or tazers or and any other non-gun "arms"?

Those are just off the top of my head, it wouldn't be that hard to make a law that actually answers all of these questions and it would lay most the issues at rest without ever going into the tricky question of why you might want to have a gun.