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Comment Re:I've never understood this... (Score 1) 981

They don't want the kids to learn science or even mention things like evolution... Is their religion on such shaky grounds that it can't stand up to some critical thinking?

Actually, most religions claim there's an abundance of ways to fall for temptation and sin while the path to God is straight and narrow. You make it sound like making it a challenge and pointing out all the alternatives and benefits would be a good thing, while the religious consider it trying to lead the children astray and trying to put a wedge between them and God. Like say their interpretation of the Bible means sex belongs only in the marriage - bear with me on this one - then pointing out that "if you're going to have sex anyway, use a condom" is kinda upselling a sin. It leaves the impression they don't really think you'll stick with plan A anyway. So a lot of parent don't want their children to know there even is a choice. You think in terms of pros and cons, they think it's one good choice and a lot of bad alternatives they don't need to know about..

Comment Re:they will defeat themselves (Score 5, Insightful) 981

I think you need to distinguish between terrorism and reign of terror. Hit-and-run bombings like the IRA or ETA rarely succeed in people giving in to terror. Taking actual control of areas, waving the flags and killing off all that oppose you has a much better historical record, ask anyone from Pol Pot to Hitler and Lenin and Mao. In case you haven't noticed, they're using their brutal savagery primarily to quell resistance and internal dissent. The story they're selling is that they're too fucking crazy to pick a fight with and so far they seem more than willing to put that reputation to the test and post it on YouTube.

I mean, would you like to be in a resistance movement inside IS territory? Do they care that they can't find you? Heck no, they'll just round up a few civilians and shoot them in retaliation for your sabotage/assassination/sedition. Far more civilized occupants have used that tactic, all those millions of people they control are in practice hostages. You're fighting an enemy willing to overreact to any provocation, give them a push and you won't get a shove back they'll beat you to a bloody pulp. And given their history so far, I don't think they have a problem with human shields. You can not excise them without massive civilian casualties. Sadly I give them much better odds than you predict.

Comment Re:they will defeat themselves (Score 2) 981

if NK ever managed to actually detonate a nuclear bomb even China wouldn't hestitate to march in and take over. I think they'd be glad of the excuse, really.

FYI, North Korea has made three underground nuclear detonations in 2006, 2009 and 2013. Very few doubt that they now got a few nukes in the kiloton range - basically 1940s tech - and the means to deliver them to Seoul - a mere 35 miles away from the NK border. China doesn't care. They got a loyal ally, they could crush him at any moment and it'd only create hostility between Koreans and Chinese. And the country is not worth the trouble. I guess if China ever went on the offensive they'd gobble up NK - and probably SK too - but only if they're on the warpath anyway.

Comment Re:Virtual Desktops (Workspaces) (Score 1) 545

It is a matter of taste; but the proliferation of 'widescreen' has really made multiple orientation setups more attractive. In particular, the ubiquitous 1920x1080 is cheap as dirt and nice and wide; but actually throws fewer vertical pixels than a nasty old 1280x1024 17' from about 2001. If you read or write a lot of text, or code with reasonably short lines, taking a cheapo 1920x1080 and rotating it gives you a 1080x1920: this is handy because it's still wider than 1024(so even old and horrible programs/layouts generally won't break, since anything that old and horrible probably expects 768 or 1024 pixel wide screens); but provides more vertical resolution than even substantially more expensive monitors in their native orientation.

I prefer my 'primary' monitor to be unrotated; but the amount of vertical resolution you can get for the money, without totally sacrificing width, from a rotated secondary monitor is pretty compelling.

Comment Re:Natural immunity (Score 1) 122

In this case, you might want to go after the vets before the doctors...

It's not an accident that they were looking at agricultural workers (rather than, say, elementary school teachers, who would be seeing the worst of it from antibiotics-for-the-sniffles patients), nor is it an accident that there are 'livestock-associated' drug resistant strains.

Comment Re:KDE will fork (Score 1) 33

And? Part of being a cross-platform toolkit is that you must keep up with the underlying platforms, if you start failing to look native or behave native or integrate nicely or lack interfaces to new functionality you'll quickly cease to be useful for that. It'll still function as a toolkit for building KDE though since they define their own native, but then it will gravitate back towards being a Linux-only thing.

P.S. Despite Qt being cross-platform, most KDE SC applications don't seem to be. There's been an ongoing project to make them cross-platform for years, but many still have trouble compiling or working correctly.

Comment Re:Virtual Desktops (Workspaces) (Score 2) 545

Aside from price, which makes accepting multiple monitors rather compelling(you can get physically big ones for relatively small amounts of money, because of TVs; but if you want resolution the cost goes up fast and things really start to misbehave if you go high enough that DP MST or the like is required to drive the thing), it mostly comes down to how good your windowing system is at tiling and how well applications that expect 'full screen' can handle playing with others.

A good window manager makes carving up a single large monitor into chunks suitably sized for your various programs easy and painless. If you are enduring a less obliging one, it can be a fairly ugly business, actually less pleasant than getting some help from multiple physical displays, which are more widely respected even by poorly behaved programs.

That said, the 'two side by side, giant bezel in the middle' configuration is not my favorite. A larger primary screen, with ancillary screens on one or both sides gives you plenty of room for assorted lesser windows; but also avoids annoying bezels in the center of your field of view.

Comment Re:Virtual Desktops (Workspaces) (Score 4, Insightful) 545

You don't choose between workspaces and physical screens, you just have multiple physical screens so that each workspace can be even larger and more pleasant to use...

You do eventually run into diminishing returns; but being able to display more than one monitor worth of stuff simultaneously definitely has its uses, and is something that being able to switch between workspaces, be the transition ever so elegant, cannot replace.

Comment Re:The real test? (Score 1) 545

Given that 8 was the "Just because it's called 'Windows' doesn't mean it needs a functional windowing system!" release, It's pretty hard to argue with them.

Maybe some of that works on touchscreen laptops; but 'metro' is a tragicomedy on any monitor configuration worth using.

Comment Re:Mixed units (Score 2) 66

Well, you must also know the HTML entities, even in plain text mode... writing æøå doesn't work, but æøå works. In this case µ doesn't work though. And I think all languages have Unicode support good enough to strip control characters and shit if you're not lazy. My impression was that it was more to sabotage the ASCII "art" than anything else.

Comment Re: Lifetime at 16nm? (Score 3, Informative) 66

Well, sometimes they make convenient little assumptions about the write amplification and other things in coming up with that number. Also it's the number they use for warranty claims, so it may not reflect the kind of endurance you'd normally expect. The latest trick is to basically use part of your drive as a semi-permanent SLC cache and only write it to MLC/TLC NAND later, if ever so what you actually get will depend on your usage pattern. If you just keep on rewriting a small file it'll probably not leave SLC at all, while if you use it as a scratch disk filling it up with large files and emptying it you'll hit the MLC/TLC hard. The rating is just to give consumers who don't want an in-depth look something to relate to.

Personally my first idea was, if they can deliver us a MLC drive at 45 cents/GB doesn't that mean they should be able to deliver us a SLC drive at 90 cents/GB? That's not disturbingly much, considerably faster and should have all the endurance you'll ever need. That said, TechReport got 3 (out of 6) consumer drives they've written >1 PB to, so I'm guessing most drives fail from something else than NAND exhaustion. And I don't reinstall my OS disk every day.... I just checked and I've used up 50 of my 3000 P/E cycles after 150 days of 24x7 running so at this rate it should take 25 years.

I know people who turn on their computer maybe 2-3 hours a day on average, just streaming no heavy media usage. Any SSD will last them forever, it's all about $/GB. Now if you want a guess they said 5000 P/E -> 3000 P/E (60%) for 25nm -> 20nm MLC, so I'm guessing 3000 * 0.6 = 1800 P/E for 16nm. And TLC is probably like 500 P/E, though this drive doesn't use that.

Comment Re:What for? (Score 1) 183

How is this an advantage to anyone who plans ahead? I suppose if you wrote your original application in Objective-C and weren't thinking about cross platform support, then fine. But if you're planning on supporting both platforms why don't you just go completely cross platform and use C?

Because C.

Comment Re: Car Dealers should ask why they're being bypas (Score 1) 155

In addition, Tesla(whether or not you see this as an improvement is a distinct issue, it simply is so) sells cars much more like an enterprise IT hardware vendor sells hardware: at least within the warranty period, there is very much an ongoing interaction between the hardware and the vendor. System health information gets sent directly back, on site techs with specialized parts and firmware get sent out and so on. More traditional car companies are closer to buying a PC: the dealer will offer (often absurdly priced; but available) maintenance; and the vendor may become involved with certain warranty or recall cases; but they are otherwise largely out of the loop, with third parties handling the ongoing interaction with the hardware.

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