At some point your old car is worth less than the minimum trade in price they will give you. The trick is to time it just right so that you roll on to the forecourt just as the engine chokes on the last drop of gas, and conclude the sale a few minutes before the wheels fall off.

The problem is that productivity is much harder to quantify than $/sqft. Most people who want to or succeed in forcing these open floor plans on others prefer to take easy numbers, like that $/sqft, or lines of code/hr, as estimates for what things and people are worth over things like code quality or worker productivity and morale.

Keep in mind they didn't decide the case, they just threw it back for a retrial. So it may still turn out what he did was illegal under current laws. Maybe hold off the champaign for a bit.

The more I think about your post here, the more wrong it sounds to me. The only way to conclude that an object has passed the event horizon would be to observe the absence of radiation from that object. And that definitely occurs in finite time, since photons are discrete. See here, which offers the following explanation:

I think the boycott and the appearance of Soylent News really did it. They say what would happen, and changed course. Well done for doing that.

The problem is you're having this argument while not taking into account the problems with discussing "simultaneity" in general relativity. One might argue, by this logic, that black holes never really exist (even though we seem to observe them, or at least clear evidence of their effects), or that they could never grow (even though we could see them getting bigger in finite time).

While some people are happy to just argue for those things, e.g., that black holes never really exist, it gets at a deeper epistemological question of what sort of observation is necessary to prove something "exists." We infer the existence of a lot of things by their effects, even if we can't observe them directly. For very long periods of time, black holes do exist according to that latter definition.

That's true in the sense that there is no visible event of an object crossing the event horizon in finite time.

But, on the other hand, we can also observe changes in the black hole occurring in finite time (formation, growth, evaporation), which seems to imply actual travel across the event horizon. It's complicated to explain why both such things are possible, though this answer seems to get at some of the problems.

That's somewhat true, but it's a somewhat different question to determine what it means for a distant observer to judge "whether something is inside the event horizon." Do we mean:

(1) "I visually saw that thing go inside the event horizon" (false -- obviously, since the definitely of "event horizon" precludes observation of such a thing)

Or

(2) "That black hole appears bigger than it did a billion years ago, so it must have absorbed mass from that thing" (could be true)

Personally, I think (2) would count as "data collected from Earth [that] correspond[s] to a reality in which the object has passed the event horizon."

Be warned though, the new Microsoft Minesweeper is a POS. It only runs full screen, so you can't have a sly game while pretending to work. It's no replacement for the classic.

Personally I'll keep a Windows 7 VM around just for Minesweeper.

They will get something in return. Windows has an app store now. Like mobile operating systems that are generally free, they can monetize it other ways.

Microsoft already gives Windows away for free. OEMs making devices with screens under 13" can get a free copy of Windows 8. That's the only reason you can get a cheap Windows 8 tablet now, otherwise it would still be a 100% Android market.

You get a .iso that you can install again as many times as you like, indefinitely. You also get a license code that you can use, according to Microsoft, for the lifetime of Windows 10.

$149 for OEM Pro is the standard price that Windows has been forever. The only people who get it cheaper are OEMs with special deals. Anyone selling it cheaper has bankrupt stock or something like that.

I was actually quite surprised at how responsive the owners have been on those two issues. They clearly invested a lot of money and time into beta, and I dread to think what kind of favours Bennet was offering, but in the end they listened to us. I really didn't think it would happen, I expected beta to become the only option and my beloved (in an abusive partner kind of way) Slashdot die a slow and painful death.

So kudos for listening. And yeah, I can buy the weekend excuse. Come on, this is Slashdot, the "editors" seem barely literate at times and can't remember posting the same story a mere 24 hours previously. Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence.

Media Centre is gone, it sucked anyway. I suggest XMBC as a replacement.

I absolutely agree that GP's comment is a bit of hyperbole. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have something of a point.

I'm okay with nice visuals if they're advertised and discussed clearly. They're not here.

Except that's not what the title or TFS implies. They ask "Do black holes have a shape?" And the answer is clearly simple -- spherical or nearly so.

Done.

Posing that question to anyone who knows anything about science probably would cause a reader to wonder -- "Hmm, are there more exotic shapes to black holes I haven't thought of? Why would those exist?"

But TFA is not about that -- in fact, it's about basic phenomena that anyone who knows anything about black holes would already be familiar with, like accretion disks and the fact that light gets distorted around black holes.

TFA is not actually about the shape of black holes themselves. It's about the shape of other phenomena that occur around black holes, or the temporary shifts in such phenomena when black holes merge or whatever. And while it has pretty pictures, nobody who has even read one book on pop science astronomy will learn any new facts from it.

(And, oddly, TFA isn't aimed at a new audience either, since it doesn't really explain basic facts like why we see the accretion disk but not the black hole or anything basic like that.)

NO -- THEY ARE NOT "DANGEROUS."

You must be one of those people who think of black holes as some sort of giant vacuum cleaner going around and sucking up stuff around the universe. Sorry -- they don't work that way. They have gravity which works just like any other star or other large mass. You could have a stable orbit around them, for example (obviously at a safe distance).

They're only "dangerous" if you went inside one. But if that's your criteria, so are stars. So is the planet earth with its molten rock interior.

Your post is spreading the exact kind of ignorance that Slashdot should be committed to stomping out.

If TFA were an article that served as an intro to black holes and actually addressed some of that BS you're spouting about how "disturbed" everyone must be about things that are supposedly "dangerous," I'd be fine with that. But it's not. If TFA were an article that actually had some interesting noteworthy science about black holes, I'd be fine with that. But it's not.

And if TFA is just an article about pretty pictures (which it is), then just advertise it as such. And make the title accurate -- something like "What do we see when we look toward a black hole?"

TL;DR: THAT'S why GP is right to be upset -- not because the article is light on facts, but because it's misleading about the fact that it is uninformative (and only about pretty pictures), and it presents itself as tackling questions which it does not.

No -- most people just keep clicking "OK" until the install is finished. Just like most people keep signing pages or initialing forms when presented with a bunch of paperwork... they stop reading the details.

The number of people who actually stop and read everything they sign is similar to the number that consider all the options during install scripts -- and that number is VERY SMALL.

(Small anecdote -- quite a few years ago I signed the rental agreement for my first apartment. I was told to initial each of the 10 pages or so and sign the final page. I stopped and read the thing before doing so. My landlord -- who managed something like 40 apartments and had been doing so for a couple decades -- said he could only recall one other person who read the whole rental agreement before signing. And I actually discovered some really interesting rental policies while doing so.)

Also, more on point -- there's the rather obvious evidence that companies wouldn't bother bundling adware if no one ever installed it.

And I even know many young people who don't seem to pay any attention while installing and end up with all sorts of weird "add-ons" and don't know how they got there. What's your point?