Windows 8.1 is actually quite decent.

Windows 7 is actually 6.1.

Windows 8 is 6.2 .

Go figure.

My observation has been that resort hotels (the ones with restaurants in them) charge an arm and a leg because they are targeting two type of customers:

1. Tourists/Vacationers
2. Convention/Conference goers

In the case of #1, you're probably not a repeat customer (or at least, repeat often enough for them to care). They want to wring every last dollar out of you while they can.

In the case of #2, you're a captive customer (the con is nearby or in this hotel, unless you have a car you're not going to wander far), and you might possibly be able to expense things.

If you were a high-roller that stayed regularly, I'll bet you they wouldn't nickle and dime you, not unless they were morons and wanted to drive you into the hands of the competition. The rest of us are just sheep to be fleeced.

For the lower cost hotels (like the Holiday Inn Expresses), where there is no built in restaurant, and they offer amenities like free wifi and free continental breakfast, they're targeting repeat business and price sensitive travelers. They often don't have the best location compared to the resort hotels (you *will* need a car), but as a consequence their expenses are probably lower. The more extreme version of this are the Extended Stay type hotels, which have kitchens and refrigerators.

The really dumpy hotels have no choice. Their plant is run down, and they may be a no-name. Unless they offer free amenities, nobody in their right mind is going to stay at their place (assuming similar nightly rents) unless there's no choice.

Some years ago after being laid off from one programming job, my old CS prof from college suggested I stop by to interview with the Epic recruiter who was visiting the campus. I was told to block out about four hours time, and that it would be a very in-depth technical interview. It turned out to be nothing of the sort: it was maybe ten minutes of talk with a human being, and hours and hours of filling out a badly-written "technical exam". Allegedly it involved seeing how well the taker could think about programming languages and programming language concepts by giving us a toy language to write a parser and compiler for, but ... holy toledo, was it a stinker.

First, the language was defined in plain English. There was no BNF. When ambiguities of English occurred (as they always do), the Epic rep was unable to give any resolution as to what the language was supposed to do. My protest of, "Well, if you don't know what it's supposed to do, how can you expect me to write a parser or compiler for it?" fell on deaf ears.

Second, certain mathematical operations were supposed to be supported ... but the language was vague: they were supposed to have their "conventional" meanings. But some mathematical operators are defined sort of vaguely: for instance, it's not really well-defined mathematically what the modulo of two negative numbers are. As a result, different programming languages tend to implement it differently. (For instance, C++03 says it's implementation-dependent, while C++11 has a strict policy on it.) How did they want the modulus operator implemented? They had no idea.

Ultimately, when it came to writing a parser and compiler for their toy language I decided to do it the right way as opposed to their way. Instead of having an ad-hoc thing, I turned the exam over and started writing a formal BNF and lex/yacc rules on the back of the pages. I took the full four hours to do the technical exam, turned it in, told them that my work was on the *back* of the exam and not the front, and walked out.

Six weeks later, not having heard a thing from Epic, I sent them a politely-worded email saying, "If I'm going to spend four hours on a Saturday on an interview for Epic, I would appreciate the courtesy of being told whether I would be receiving a job offer or not."

A week after that I received a one-line email: "We regret to say that we're going with other candidates."

Anyway. That's my experience with Epic. Take it for whatever it's worth. I didn't think much of their interview process, and they sure didn't think much of me.

Like all viruses, we will mutate as we infect different hosts.

Well just F up that planet too.

The concept of treating planets as disposable vessels for humans to be sucked dry and then we move on basically makes us a cancer.

It is simply so that they don't have to print two boxes, and they sell more TV's in the US.

Maybe it is just a supposition that closed minded persons generally don't come to the best/most appropriate conclusions.

What ever happened to the previous environmental scares used to try and drum up funding for your pseudo-science?

- We were told acid rain would destroy European forests. Hmm doesn't seem to have happened.

- We were told CFCs were destroying the ozone layer and causing wild animals to go blind. We banned CFCs and it has had no effect on the hole in the ozone layer and the claims of blindness have been proven to be lies.

- We were told that the Sahara desert was growing south: what actually happened was the area got greener!

Environmental scare stories, of which the impact of Climate Change is just the latest incarnation, has a long and dishonourable history of dishonesty.

Well, it is hard to say about that. Ship to ship combat in space would probably be carried out by drones. The fragile meat bags inside would never survive the acceleration.

I sat in a radar site in Hawaii at PMRF staring at a screen during the tests I supported. A target missile was launched from a pad a few miles away (you sure as hell could hear and feel THAT!) and the intercepting ship (as in a US Navy guided missile cruiser, not a space ship) was a couple of hundred miles away. The launches I witnessed... in under a second the target was through the clouds and five seconds later was gone leaving just a trail. The interceptor makes the target look like an old lady trying to out sprint Usain Bolt (I am told it would be supersonic before it leaves the launch tube on the ship... but I never saw a ship launch but every sailor I talked to who did said it was very impressive for the brief moment they got to experience it - from inside the ship.)

Other than that there was nothing to see. The intercept itself was over the horizon, so it had to be "viewed" from an aircraft.

Project Rho is a crap shoot for what it gets right and what it gets wrong.

...I can tell you another thing about space battles: you don't see anything aside from a few tracks on a computer screen. If you have a telescope pointed in the right direction at the exact right time you see a very unimpressive and quick flash.

The ranges, timing, and velocities involved are far too great for human perception.

What is the XBox 360 version written in?

Nobody ever called your parents realists.