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Comment Comment by Moderator (Score 0) 14

Young adults have no interest in cars because they are not fun anymore. One reason they are not fun is because new cars are so expensive. Young adults cannot find jobs, and what little money they make goes towards electronics and rising education costs instead of car payment + insurance + rising gasoline costs. The other reason that cars are no longer fun is that everything even remotely affordable (read: under $35k) is going to be a shitty unibody front-wheel drive four cylinder car that handles like shit, accelerates like shit, and has so many proprietary components that you have to take to the dealer to get serviced (no more stereo upgrades, cannot tune the car for more HP, etc).

Submission + - Why are younger people losing interest in cars? (chicagotribune.com) 14

Strudelkugel writes: The average car on the road is 11.4 years old, according to Polk, a global automotive analysis firm, which reviewed 247 million light vehicles in the U.S. The age of cars has been gradually increasing since 2002, when the average car was 9.8 years old. Polk expects the trend to continue over the next five years. Automotive density is projected to decline to 77.5 cars per 100 people, down from 80 cars per 100 in 2007, according to Kelsey Mays of Cars.com.

Another study, from the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, analyzed the reason for the decline in young driver licensing. Of the 618 unlicensed respondents aged 18-39, 26.9 percent said the main reason they did not get a license was “too busy or not enough time to get a driver’s license.”

Comment Re:Screen size (Score 0) 359

I don't know about anyone else, but I think that the size of the Nexus 4 is too big at 4.7". I was hoping for a 4" to 4.3" screen, but Google have really pushed for that extra big handset.

Glad I'm not the only one.

To me it's just silly to call a 4.7" phone the Nexus 4. They should round to the closest whole number and call it the Nexus 5 instead.

It's called "Nexus 4" because it is the fourth Nexus phone (after Nexus One, Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus), not because of the size.

Comment Failed attempt. (Score 0) 262

The Thinkpad W700ds had two displays, and that ugly behemoth is no longer sold. The market for two monitors on a laptop can't be that large. I mean, given the proliferation of shitty laptop displays (16:9, glossy screens, etc), it seems that not many people care about their displays in the first place. Just get an external LCD monitor and run dual displays with your laptop being one screen.

Comment Sparkleshare (Score 5, Informative) 482

Sparkleshare is still under development, and it seems to have the most traction of any user-friendly project. When released, it will be the open-source Dropbox replacement.

I agree though, it's very hard to get rid of the convenience of Dropbox. Not just for saving files, but for syncing your configuration across machines (save your .dotFiles in ~/Dropbox and then symlink to ~/). But when they refuse to support the BSD's (2 out of the 4 machines I regularly work on), and their Linux implementation starting requiring disabling SELinux, they pretty much did it to themselves. Not to mention the whole thing where the Dropbox CTO admitted they could look at your files if they wanted.

Comment Re:Listening (Score 2, Interesting) 505

I had always heard that the real reason they make you turn off electronic devices is so that you listen fully to any instructions you are given. Why else would they make me turn off my wi-fi only Kindle?

Maybe. I think that the "cellphone interference" is just a blanket term they use whenever anything goes wrong. When I was flying from PSP to DFW a few months ago, the flight attendants had already given the "turn off all electronic devices" thing followed by the safety brief, yet we still hadn't moved onto the runway. Instead of telling us what the hold up was, the flight attendant got on the intercom and said, "We would be on the runway right now, but somebody left their cell phone on and it's interfering with our signals." Lo and behold, about half the passengers pulled out their cell phones and turned them off. This was reverse psychology, shifting the blame to the passengers for the delay. Sad thing is, it worked.

Comment AT&T (Score 2) 200

Hello,

Normally, I would recommend Simple Mobile which is contract-free using the T-Mobile network. $60 will get you unlimited everything. Since you have an iPhone though, and 3G is a must, you are probably stuck using AT&T's 3G network. That probably means getting a SIM card and then paying $75/mo for a whopping 200MB on the Pay as you Go plan. But hey, at least you will get 4G.

Welcome to America.

GNOME

Submission + - Gnome to become Linux-only? (omgubuntu.co.uk)

Moderator writes: Is Gnome about to drop support for non-Linux operating systems? That seems to be the consensus after a recent discussion on the Gnome mailing list. From TFA: "It is harmful to pretend that you are writing the OS core to work on any number of different kernels...the time has come for GNOME to embrace Linux a bit more boldly."

Comment Re:Addicted much? (Score 0) 208

I know I really do not understand the need to be using your smart phone that much. I see people sitting in hot tubes at my gym using them, and it's like do you really need to be connected so much you can't be away from your phone for 30 min?

I don't know what everybody else is doing, but I use my phone to keep track of my workout routine in between sets. I use the note-taking app on my Nokia to keep track of weights, sets, reps, exercises, etc. by day, and I can upload them to a spreadsheet when I get home.

Education

What Does IQ Really Measure? 488

sciencehabit writes "Kids who score higher on IQ tests will, on average, go on to do better in conventional measures of success in life: academic achievement, economic success, even greater health, and longevity. Is that because they are more intelligent? Not necessarily. New research concludes that IQ scores are partly a measure of how motivated a child is to do well on the test. And harnessing that motivation might be as important to later success as so-called native intelligence."

Comment If you ever wondered (Score 0) 160

If you ever wondered whatever happened to the kid who used to grease up the Nintendo controller every time you let him play, looks like he's reviewing Tablet devices at AndroidCentral.

Seriously, look at the photos of the screen and the keyboard trackpad. Did this guy just finish a bag of Frito Lays?

Comment Networks (Score 2, Insightful) 307

In my opinion, Facebook lost a lot of appeal when it opted to become network-transparent as opposed to a way to meet people who shared similar interests at your university / hometown. The selling point of Facebook over say, Myspace, was that Facebook was geared towards meeting new people at your school (and later in your city) who had similar interests. I met some of my best friends from the university through finding people with shared interests on Facebook six years ago. With my natural introversion, who knows if we would have ever met otherwise. That has been lost as Facebook expanded...now you will find people with similar interests ALL OVER THE WORLD and since there's virtually no chance that you'll ever meet any of these people, there's no reason to reach out to them. Thus it has become a tool for connecting to your own already existing friends-network as opposed to expanding it.

Even the movie pointed it out: the selling point over Friendster/Myspace was that it was based around your local network. That was thrown out the door a long time ago.

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