Cleaning it will only be a problem if the product is soft. If it can support being hit with 90PSI air without bending at all it will be easy to clean. Depending on the type of copper used it should sustain 90PSI very easily.

The hardness of the structure can be many times lower than the hardness of the material when you're talking turning it into FOAM. Compare the hardness of steel wool and steel.

If this is anything like I'm envisioning, you could probably take a 3" block of the stuff and step on it and crush it down to about 1/4-1/8". And unlike traditional material foam, this stuff isn't going to spring back.

Even if it can survive the blast of air, it may just serve to drive the particles deeper into the block. A filter has to be thin or very porous to insure air pressure can drive most of the trapped materials out.

I'm betting the best way to deal with dust/dirt in this case is to simply filter the air very well. Very fine dust should be removable with air, but you don't want anything at or above large dust particle size getting into that foam or you'll never get it out.

The minimum wage around here nets you $1492 a month before tax and the average apartment costs nearly $1300

If you're making minimum wage and trying to live in your own apartment without roommates or gf/bf, you are an idiot. I can't even think of anyone I've known recently that's been naive enough to try to make that work. Two roommates and scratching for a job above minimum wage is the most common formula I see people use to build up momentum for independence. At that point even at minimum wage everyone can start accumulating some savings fairly quickly.

That usually evolves into just gf/bf small apartments for awhile, then on to a larger apartment, or renting/buying a starter house, as both find better jobs.

Also your 1300/mo apartment cost does vary from place to place, it's quite a bit cheaper here, $650 easily gets you 2 bedroom if you're not too picky, and minimum wage isn't lower here. If you're just getting started and on minimum wage, where the cost of living is high, roommates or moving to lower cost-of-living is essentail. None of this is difficult if you just use your head and don't get stupid or unreasonable.

They've been pursuing the dream of one windows to rule them all since the days when

No, not really. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

When you decide it's time to "unify" a single product, clearly you've made a serious, long-running mistake.

Having a dozen different versions of a single product is just a short-term way to milk a few more dimes out of your customers, and has a pretty severe long-term cost. It's most lucritive in software though, because it doesn't cost a penny more to manufacture the $300 version than the $100 version once you're finished with development. If it were a car for example, that leather interior is going to cost more to produce. But those "better bits" are free to produce. So it's creme, pure profit.

And eventually the customers get pissed. Which is OK if your'e not in it for the long haul. Which unfortunately is what Windows is. Bad match.

Raising the minimum wage doesn't cost jobs any more than inflation creates jobs.

It's a never-ending cat-and-mouse in a freemarket. Wherever they happen to be at this moment in the game, it reqiures the same people to play it.

Govt raises minimum wage. Consumer prices go up. Rinse, repeat, forever. Consumer prices are going to go up due to greed (as well as increases in minimum wage) so raising the minimum wage occasionally to offset it is necessary, even though it contributes to its own need.

Since the only way to offset inflation in a free market is to raise the minimum wage, it cannot be considered as a method to slow it. It's all just a shell game, aimed at trying to food the greedy into being less greedy, by doing things like lowering federal interest rates etc. They'll never stop it, all you can do is hope to keep its pace slow so you don't have runaway inflation. But it's a difficult act to balance, because retarding inflation tends to slow the economy.

Lower prices "leave a trail of blood in our balance sheet" according to Bernhard Guenther, CFO at RWE, Germany's biggest power producer

Sounds to me like "our production costs are so close to our competition's retail price, we're having trouble staying in business, pity us!"

No, this is not something for me to pity, and it most certainly isn't my problem to help you solve. You need to innovate and improve efficiency of your business, or close your doors. We don't do the "buggy whip" thing anymore. And your existence isn't critical enough to justufy subsdies/handouts. Innovate or die. (quietly if possible)

I don't think it's so much the "style" aspect as it is the "comfort zone". Particularly with less-adept users, once they fight their way through the frustration of learning a technology, they feel a lot more comfortable with it "now that I have it figured out". These people aren't going to be able to make anywhere near as fluid of a transition to any different interface, on or off their platform. Even if the interface is "better", it won't look that way to them unless they're forced to use it for awhile.

It's very frustrating for them to go from having some (hard-fought) understanding of tech to getting reset back to "I don't know how to do anything". Can't really blame them for their apprehension.

That's how I try to explain it to prospective switchers. "For the first two weeks, you're going to hate it". It just can't be avoided no matter what you're going from/to.

"While supplies last." That's the funniest thing I've heard all day.

Aren't the Zunes still waving that flag?

Note that they didn't even try to offer a trade-in of ipads for the surface, which would be a more reasonable comparison if the surface was successful as a tablet

if they tried to pull THAT, they would have a crapton of people with older ipads trading them in. They'd be buried alive. A lot of iPad2's are out of warranty, and that's about the time schools and others consider an upgrade.

They're MS... they're big, and could take the hit, but it definitely would sting.

The surface though is more of a laptop trying to also be a tablet, than a tablet trying to also be a laptop. (sort of the iPad's territory) So I don't agree that it'd be a trade within the same market. It makes more "sense" to go against the air, but not many are going to bite, because the air isn't trying to be a tablet, that's what the iPad is for. As someone else has said, Macintoshes have an amazing ability to retain their value for resale, and MS isn't offering as much as the machines could get you on craigslist. Trade-ins for the competition's gear are a "try to pull people off the fence onto your side" maneuver, but the problem is it's only going to attract people that have already decided they didn't like their new mac, so it won't really serve its intended purpose.

Looked at another way, they're trying to enter two different markets with one product, and neither is going to do a really good job as a result. The surface isnt' really a tablet, it's more of a laptop that has some of the features of one. They were wise to see they'd lost the straight-up tablet market before they'd started. Targeting the MBA is probably the smartest thing to do right now. (I just don't think this is a very smart approach they're taking)

They could have had a lot more fun with this, and generated an enormous amount of publicity by just taking it all the way. Don't "trade" it in. Bring in a WORKING air to their store, and you get to go into a box and smash it with a sledgehammer. And then collect your discount. That would be money well-spent on marketing, for less than the cost of a few commercial spots.

And we think that people should have that right. When other companies use the Ikea name for economic gain, it creates confusion and rights are lost.'

If they hadn't said "for economic gain", I'd consider their sincerity. But when you add that, it changes the last part to "it creates concern and money is lost". This is more a case of "someone's making money off our name and we didn't get a cut". It has nothing to do with the consumer.

there are no additional addresses available, Microsoft said in a blog post earlier this week. This requires the company to use the IPv4 address space available to it globally for new services,

OR they could migrate those services to IPv6??

Considering how much bashing MS gets for not being a leader, this would have made a really good opportunity for them.

(I hate it when people say they're doing something because they were "forced" or "had no choice", when in reality, they had aa choice, they made a choice, and now don't want to take ownership of the outcome)

Sorry, I have no pity for that. I've had it before, but it's no fault but my own, and I certainly don't expect anyone to make a law to help save me from myself. (on this, or anything else really, I'm adult, why can't the world treat me like one and let me hold responsibility for my actions?)

A buyer should have no more rights to reverse a sale than a seller. What if I have "seller's remorse", I really should have charged more for that, I want it back! yea, great idea! Make a law to voilate others' rights just to save me from my foolishness!

I see bad RAM cause two problems. First, when you are copying a file or editing it, and it gets saved, if the data was corrupted while it was in memory, it can become damaged when writing it. It doesn't have to affect the part of the file you were working with. If you were adding to the end of a long text document, page 2 could get damaged when you hit Save.

Second problem, more common in my experience, is directory corruption due to bad ram. When a machine would come in with a trashed directory, we used to just fix it and return it. But sometimes they'd come back again in a similar state. I'd run a memory test and find/replace a bad stick before repairing it again. Later I just got in the habit of running a short ram test anytime there was unusual directory damage. I found it in about 1 in 10 of the cases I checked. Those checks were only run in cases of severe or unusual damage though. Directory damage takes out files wholesale, and can affect data that never entered the computer, and not due to any hardware failure in the storage.

For the record, I manage over 20tb of data here, and to date I've lost two files. One was a blonde moment with RM on a file that wasn't backed up. (I had NO idea that RM followed symlinks!) The other was a failed slice in a mirror that cost me a singe document. That's over a span of over 20 years. If you've lost over 20 files in the last 10 years, you're doing something (or more probably several somethings) wrong.

Why is it not safe for them to drive to the airports,

It's not safe, ya sees, because Luigi here will have to come over and accidentally adjust your kneecaps if you interfere with this bizness opportunities in the Yellow Cab.

aww you beat me to it. *pouts*

Don't assume just because something is open source that it doesn't have backdoors. That is terrible logic.

I never spoke in such absolutes. It's been shown with great regularity however that open source products have far fewer security holes in them. The common phrase used is "many eyes make for shallow bugs". This is of course NOT always the case. The recent heartbleed bug is a good example of how a bug can remain hiding in plain sight for a long time. In instances like that, it's not a case of the code not getting audited, it's a case of the code being so old that it's expected to be bug-free simply due to the number of years it's been auditable.

But I'll take open-source security over closed-source any day. Back doors are very hard to disguise in open source. The best you can do is what the NSA did recently with getting those weak crypto methods put into a standard. And look how fast that got noticed. Or put in an exploitable bug (like heartbleed) that wasn't obvious, that didn't necessarily just give access away, but that made breaking it much easier to do. The real beauty of heartbleed is that attacks didn't get logged. Someone could beat on your server for weeks if necessary to get lucky and fish out something useful, and all the while nothing would show up on the logs. And if you found youd been hacked, you'd have nothing useful (from the initial compromise anyway) to help you.