Yeah, it's everyone elses fault. You don't buy anything right? Something like 85% of all cargo moved around the US is done by truck because the rail system is shit and inefficient compared to the roadway system. So pretty much everything everyone buys, moves by truck.

When I look at fuel costs, the consumer at the pump is probably the bottom rung of ladder. Lower fuel brings construction costs down (what you think a loader, grader, excavator or a crane run on batteries?), and makes it cheaper to move bulk goods. Anyone saying this is all bad because the gas tax is not high enough already has problems. The gas tax has not changed, so right now it's generating more revenue because more fuel is being sold.

You want more cash into state and federal highway transportation taxes? Then stop wasting money with on bloated government and pork barrel spending. Any additional taxation is just going to either be mismanaged and diverted into non-essential service projects or to go into programs for people who are not putting anything back into the flow, latest one this month? Let's use blanket amnesty for illegals.

So build more Rail you say? Can't do that because even if you try to re-open an old rail spur that's already got track everyone freaks out because then there's going to be a train near them. So they'll bitch about the trains, they'll bitch about the traffic and meanwhile nothing changes.

You know how great the average person's perspective on taxes is? A town near me has a small auto mall. 3 dealerships. One of them (Nissan) went out of business 7 years ago. The building is zoned Auto-Dealer only. So for the last 7 years, no dealer has wanted to move into that space & the building has generated nothing but property taxes. There was a plan to change it to general commercial, it had to go to a general town vote. There were already new businesses lined up to use the space, (3-4 restaurants, office space etc). The town decided in the mid-term elections that they would rather leave 50k+ sq ft of Class-A office/retail space unused and hope that 'sometime' in the future a car dealer would move into it vs. actually having the space used and generating sales taxes etc. Except if that happens now there will probably be protests against it because since nothing else is in the parking lot for that space the building owner has turned the parking lot into boat and rv storage. So if anyone does try to move into it, the people in town are all going to be up in arms about how they have to find a new place to store their rv/boats whatever and how this is such a great travisty...
 

spf, dkim, dmarc, so many ways to try and accomplish the same thing and none of them work well because nobody trusts any of them fully and few people have them fully implemented... Obligatory xkcd

I've got a "smart" tv too, but it's not smart enough to count to 10 without skipping numbers. Volume control is hdmi-cec to a reciever, start from zero going up 1 increment at a time it's like 1,2,4,5,6,8,10 but the receiver can keep track of #'s...Goes like that all the way up.. by the time the receiver is at 30ish, the tv thinks it's at 50 something...

Should have been
          Stronger
          Lighter
Guess I'm tired.

The only thing it's hurting is the other people looking for sapphire display covers like was mentioned a couple months back.

Personally, I'm on the Gorilla Glass bandwagon.
It's:
          Stronger
          Stronger
          Cheaper & faster to produce

apple can pretty much do what it wants and they have plenty of money so it's not like it's a gamble at this point. $1bn is not going to dent their bank.

I own a couple of their devices, but I've personally relegated them down to be things I don't even carry around, and the interface always makes me feel like I'm using one of those kid's toy computers that has like 6 buttons with pictures on them (the cow says Mooooo).

You know this article has been posted on multiple news sites, and it continues to amaze me that it gets the amount of negative reaction that it does.

Breaking down this instance, and throwing out wrongful prosecution & 'they got the wrong guy' (in the case they had DNA evidence as well as admission), this is a person that raped a woman, then slit her throat and left her in the street. She was also pregnant at the time. I have zero sympathy for him. I would rather we shot him up with a sedative & od'd him on painkillers than the other options which are essentially (2):
      Let him sit in prison sponging off taxpayers for the rest of his natural life
    or
    Let him out because `can't you all understand that he just had a lapse in judgement and made a mistake? surely he needs another chance!`

honestly, to all the people crying about the barbarism of this situation, suppose the woman was someone that you knew, spouse, sister, mother etc. How would you feel about the situation then? How would you react to someone killing your wife and unborn child? What would you want to happen to that person?

Maybe we should offer all of the vocal proponents of this situation an option:
Adopt a death row inmate.

You can take a guy on death row home, we'll put a tag bracelet on his foot. You can care for him out of your own pocket, with no reimbursed expenses (no dependant tax write off either) and be responsible for him. If he leaves your house, you pay a fine, if he manages to damage anyone else's property, you're responsible. Any futher crime he commits, you're the liable party.

How about that, keeps the anti-death penalty people happy, keeps scumbags from sponging tax money...

Maybe we can use them to beta test the new obamacare website...

I could really care less about the interactions with other races. I mean, how may different noises can they possibly make when I've got my boot on their throat (or throats, aliens ya know) and they're trying to get me to stop genociding their species.

I kinda liked fleet combat in MoO, but I'd rather see a full modernized redo of that vs. something that's going to focus more on diplomacy, which is what I'd have to say this is going to be since they want to spend so much time on how the aliens communicate.

Yeah, personally I haven't done SMT rework in about 15 years, Aoyue sure has brought the price down on rework stations, that's less than I paid for my Metcal, and that's just a basic iron. I don't want to remember how much we paid for some of the larger Metcal & Pace hand rework systems back in the day.

SMT rework by hand isint rocket science, but takes more tools than the average garage has.

Desoldering you use a custom tip for that socket/package type (one tip per package & they're not cheap). It's essentially a metal ring that heats the solder on all the pins at once. In the center of the assembly is a vacuum probe. You heat all the pins, melting all the solder & hit the button on the handpiece to suction the chip up off the board. Then clean up the pads on the board. Careful with the heat because you dont want to lift pads off the board, if you do then you have to either fix them, or make a new pads. And then if you manage to trash a via (conductivity path to a different board layer), then you've got to drill out a new one and you have to use a esd safe conductive drill with a resistance cutoff. You put a clip from the drill in contact with the layer you're trying to get to, drill down and when the drill tip makes contact with that layer the drill turns off because the circuit is complete. But it still sucks and if you don't know how all the board layers are put together you may end up trashing a trace a couple layers into the board and wrecking the whole thing.

Soldering it down you do this. Align all the chip legs on the pads. Then you can either run a small bead of solder paste across all the pins or use a wave soldering tip (small cup, uses surface tension to hold the solder in place) and drag the tip over all the pins. Heat on the pin & pad draws the solder down into the joints. If you put too much solder you might have to vac it back up and redo it if you've made bridges etc. Alignment is key, and keeping the part in position is key. I used to try and avoid using glue underneath because that made it difficult to get it back off if you needed to down the road.

Doing hand rework on that kind of stuff the hardest thing for me was dealing with smt chip caps, little bastards will crack if you heat em to fast, so you have to get a temp regulated hot plate, heat em up slow, then pick and place em quick with tweezers/needlenose & solder em down quick.

Pretty similar but instead of reading the comments first, I RTFA. Then *maybe* I'll go back and read the comments, if I need a laugh or something to rage about.

I'd say out of 20 headlines, I'll read maybe 10 summaries, 2 of those maybe the article, 1 of those the comments. Actually comments probably less, but I already had to jump to 20 headlines because I didn't want to get into an 'I'll read 0.5 of the comments' and I'm not changing it again.

Funny part on the poll though, back just before the turn of the century, the first time I found /. was because of one of the polls linked from somewhere else. Started checking regularly for the polls, then reading articles.

Come to think of it, same thing happened to me with fark, first it was a photoshop contest, and even though those are mostly dead now, they're still one of my fav news aggregators.

Windows 8: We Blue it...

Seriously? Nobody takes a crack at marketing calling the new one blue? If you thought windows 8 was bad, the new version is guaranteed to leave you blue... or something?

/I am dissapoint

Started on Apple II, then a little Atari Os, Commodore (20/64/128) later w/Geos, short AmigaOS stint, then Dos later w/Windows, then OS2 with an AIX fork

AIX Fork branched to Solaris, HPUX, later HPUX dropped AIX & Solaris still moving forward with a fistful of linux distributions, Redhat, SuSE back in the day, Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, even a little Yellowdog and a few others of others on that branch and it's still moving forward. Managed to stay away from OS/400, MVS, IRIX, Had to touch DGUX a couple times. Never got to play with NeXT. Wanted to take a look at BE a couple times but never bothered. Dear god I almost forgot SCO. I hated SCO. Never spent a lot of time with the actual BSD trunk either.

OS2 Fork primarily went back to windows after Warp and NT4 came out, that fork continues on the windows track but refuses windows 8. Server 2013 has some decent features though.

Smartphone os's, once we actually got to the point where you could choose, It's been flatline Android. Apple IOS, not to be confused with Cisco IOS (Because Apple's so original....) can stay where it is, which is away from me. Should Palm os and early variants fall under Smartphones? Or Should smartphones now fall under PDA's? Palm was decent I guess, ran it on their hardware and handspring when they were shipping.

Primarily for daily stuff, it's windows desktop to Solaris/AIX/Linux boxen that do custom work while windows servers handle support workloads (AD, things like that) and android to keep me in touch. I've got an ESX box next to my desk that's got a few different distro's on it too, but those are mostly for testing.

Reality is OS's are tools, and as much as most of you guys thrash different platforms, they've all got strengths and weaknesses. You need to pick the right tool for the right job based on capability, cost and compatibility.

Same.. ~92-95ms.

Goes from down here to Palo Alto then the SF Saviis handoff, loops a bit locally there, then chicago, elk grove and done. 50-60ms average rtt for the SF/Chicago leg.