I'd fully support removing any barriers to that. They'll surely get charged out the nose, but it's a reasonable proposal. What's not reasonable is having regular drivers subsidize Uber drivers by letting Uber drivers do commercial work on non-commercial insurance.

Bell had talked to Watson on the first ever phone call, in Boston, just after Bell had patented the telephone.

really? He patented it before ever testing it? Same shit, different millennium, eh?

It's a good thing Americans don't have tails or they'd usually be seen with them tucked between their legs, anytime air security is involved.

So they're buying a GPL test case in order to try to invalidate it with their army of lawyers and lobbyists to scuttle the Android alliance so they can FUD their way in with WinPhone 10, all while looking like an OLAP services enhancement?

Haha, yeah, I remember back when all that was on fark.com was a picture of that squirrel with the oversized genitals. Heck, I knew him before Fark.com, when he was the wizard Cletus on the mud Three Kingdoms.

God I feel old...

"Surprises" get papers and Slashdot stories accepted. "We found some fish, pretty much as we expected" gets filed in the dustbin of history. Same scientific results either way.

You have the right to remain stupid.

Nothing new here. Move along please.

That falls into statistically normal usage. Being a commercial driver absolutely does not. Statistically, a commercial driver drives way more than a noncommercial driver, and they're much more likely to be sued, and for more money. It's absurd to argue that they should be able to drive on insurance rates calculated for statistical norms of noncommercial drivers. If you allow that sort of ignoring of statistics then you might as well get rid of all statistical tables period and charge every last person the same rate for all types of insurance.

Why, exactly, should Uber drivers get to drive passengers using regular non-commercial drivers' insurance? Commercial insurance costs more because people who drive people around for a living are much more likely to cost the insurance companies more money. If you're letting them drive on non-commercial licenses than that means that regular drivers are subsidizing Uber-drivers.

It is also nearly impossible for any equipment of any origin to deliver descent content given the crap that is the available content. We have an HD setup, but I do not recall watching any content in HD other than the demos, cos there is nothing we want to watch! We have just cancelled our Sky subscription cos we were not actually watching anything on Sky.

Some people just don't want to watch Hollywood stuff or the Bellisario family products, or sport. It seems there isn't much else, and if there is, its in plain old PAL anyway.

Well, not necessarily true. You are ignoring the costs to maintain the home, a myrid of utilities you have to pay every month that renters often don't, insurance, and property taxes. I'm a home owner but I don't think there is such a huge gap between owning and renting. A lot of older owners are faced with having to sell their homes after retirement and moving somewhere cheaper when they would rather stay where they are. It's more like a safety net and less like a nest-egg, frankly.

That said, I prefer to own.

-Matt

Mice are so mass-market these days that it is hard to find one that actually performs properly. I've gone through a lot of mice over the years, always preferring the hardwired mice over the wireless (dead battery == unhappy), but in the last round I simply couldn't find a wired mouse that worked well. Everything being sold was wireless.

Of late, many of the mice I've tried have simply been too big and bulky, stretching my fingers and generally uncomfortable.

I wound up going with a Microsoft Sculpt 1569 wireless mouse (w/ Nano Transceiver). The Logitech M325 wireless also works but its middle-button-scroll wheel isn't ratcheted. These small mice are nice, my thumb and two right fingers hang over the edge and stay relaxed.

Also I recommend buying a non-rechargable alkaline AA for it, which will last 6 months. The rechargable NiMH batteries usually only last 1-2 months before they have to be replaced/recharged due to nominal leakage, which is too annoying (though I suppose one could buy low-leakage NiMHs).

The middle button scroll wheel isn't a problem. Most of them can also be clicked left and right which IS a problem because it's trivial to accidently click left or click right when you are just trying to push down on it as a middle button. So I disable the mouse-wheel left/right action entirely via:

xinput set-button-map Mouse1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 0 0 10 11

For the transceiver I find that (obviously) the closer it is to the mouse the better. The best solution is to buy a keyboard that has a USB extension on its right or left side and plug the transceiver into that. Then the transceiver is right next to the mouse with no extra cabling. The Razer (mechanical) gaming keyboards are my favorite... very heavy so they don't move around and have the same feel as the old IBM mechnical keyboards had. 80 WPM is a breeze on them.

-Matt

Point of order, the annual average humidity is lower in Dallas than it is in LA.

A human adult with average vision can't distinguish anything much above current HD resolutions from normal TV viewing distances at typical physical TV screen dimensions either. This is one of the big problems all the businesses creating flashy new 4K TVs haven't quite worked out how to deal with yet.

Meanwhile, plenty of people still have DVD players rather than Blu-Ray, because even moving to HD doesn't make much difference for a lot of material in practice, and the old "get them to buy Star Wars for the seventeenth time two step" has run out of music.

Then you have to consider the rise of on-line sources and the generally poor experience of the physical disc systems. Most of that poor experience isn't actually because of swapping discs. It's because of all the other silly things that all legally manufactured players are required using tortured legal tricks to implement, preventing otherwise obvious improvements in competing devices such as skipping to the !~%# movie straight away.

So personally, I'm expecting 4K and other very high resolution formats to flop outside of niche markets, like say luxury home cinema systems with a projector and a screen several metres across. Even where they do get adopted, I'm expecting the market to demand less messy distribution, which would make any sort of disc-based successor to Blu-Ray even less likely to succeed.

The gag is that the seriously wealthy aren't worried about Obama's new tax policies, because they can afford a tax lawyer who can prove that they earn nothing.

If you haven't been paying attention for the past few millennia, the purpose of government is to transfer resources from the masses to the few. I know, they don't tell that to the masses in their indoctrination centers, but if you look at all available evidence, it's pretty clear.

Sure, they throw a few bones to the dogs to make sure they don't turn on their owners, but look at every available trend and analyze the data.