You know you're a clueless fuck, right?

The real lesson is to keep as much out of government hands as possible.

Whenever anyone tells me how great that President Obama is doing such-and-so in some devious manner because the Republicans have forced his hand by their recalcitrance, I ask how they'd feel if President Cruz or President Paul were to use the same devious methods because of recalcitrant Democrats. Crickets.

Same thing during the Bush and Clinton eras. Always crickets.

Same thing here. Did you object when the Dems push GMO labeling against all scientific consensus, or did you scream the consensus was wrong?

Crickets.

IMO, Microsoft has a big hit on their hands with Windows 10, from the looks of the developer preview. If it continues as planned, it should be the upgrade all of the Windows 7 holdouts have been waiting for. It has package management from the command line (a real plus for I.T. folks supporting these systems on a network), and native support for the latest hardware technologies like USB 3. The problems with the Metro UI in Windows 8 should hopefully be worked out, too.

But Windows Mobile for phones? They've tried and tried again and it's pretty much a non-starter. People simply aren't that interested in a Windows UI on a cellphone. IMO, they need to cut their losses and quit trying to have Microsoft everywhere. Focus on what works and build on that. EG. Move forward with such things as Office for iOS, because that's being smart. (It costs too much to try to convince everyone to ditch an iPad and buy a Surface tablet instead. Make your money off selling apps for iOS instead.)

I dislike the malls too, but truthfully - I consider the Apple retail stores a net positive, and another reason to keep buying Macs instead of something else.

If I don't want to visit a "Genius Bar", I don't have to, and neither do you. Apple has a toll free number you can call for service and support, which I've used several times before. They'll even overnight you a postage paid return mailer box to pack up your machine in, to go back to them for service, if needed. (This is identical to the service procedure I've gone through in the past with Toshiba -- except Apple is much quicker to answer their phone, vs. leaving you on hold for 45 minutes first.)

The GPU problem you're complaining about on your 2011 model of Macbook? That was a WELL known issue, across the board, with just about ALL notebook manufacturers who used those GPUs. So it's not even fair to use that as a reason you feel Macs lack quality or reliability. By contrast, I've got a 17" Macbook Pro that's from early 2010 which I leave on 24 hours/7 days (typically in a Henge dock on my office desk these days) and it's never needed service at all. It's my main work computer, and with a 512GB SSD I put in it a while back, it still feels pretty fast too. 5 years of daily use isn't bad at all for a portable, no matter what the brand.

I agree that Dell, arguably, does Apple one better in the area of service by sending out on-site technicians. BUT, I've worked for years in places that used exclusively Dell so I'm very familiar with that whole process too. Especially in more recent years, those techs are notorious for not showing up when they're scheduled, or bringing out an incorrect repair part, causing you the inconvenience of waiting around for them to show a second time.

For what it's worth, too.... Apple does have a couple of different programs you can join if you're a business user of their machines, to make the repair process a lot easier. They don't advertise these as well as I think they should, but they do exist. With one of them, you can get your own employees certified as Apple technicians so they can troubleshoot problems themselves and call Apple to get repair pairs overnighted to them under the warranty.

Just to play devil's advocate here.... The newer wireless access point products on the market like the Cisco Meraki gear encourage this sort of behavior, with their "Air Marshal" capabilities. They're designed so you can actively DoS wi-fi routers that appear on your network, "unauthorized".

They even have an extra radio integrated in them for this functionality, separate from the ones handling the rest of the wireless traffic.

So arguably, the I.T. folks who set this whole thing up for the hotels might have done so with intentions of preserving the integrity of the paid hotel wi-fi network, and not because "they mistakenly thought they owned all of the airwaves inside the hotel building". It's still an asshole move to set something like this up, IMO ... but a hotel chain that charges for its wi-fi could reasonably argue that it's in its best interests to ensure its paying customers get a good, reliable signal with it. That could be compromised with hundreds of guests setting up their own APs in their rooms.

Our workplace made a decision a while back to stay on Windows 7 Professional as the "standard" for our Windows users. (We also support a number of Macs.)
In general, I think many corporate I.T. departments have a policy of upgrading every OTHER release of Windows. (For example, they stayed on XP and skipped Vista. Upgraded to 7 and will now wait for Windows 10.)

Even if you go back as far as Windows '98, it turned out to be wise to stay put on '98 (upgrading it to second edition where possible) and skipping Windows ME.

IMO, there's just no benefit to a Windows 8 migration. The arguments like "no new Direct X support for 7" is meaningless when the users just use 2D apps like MS Office and a bunch of web based apps. The new "tile" interface means more training is required, which is a real problem for us, with so many mobile workers scattered all over the country.

Meanwhile, Windows 10 is the one really bringing the "added value" we're after, with such things as an upgraded Windows "PowerShell" that will finally support software upgrades from packages (similar to Linux distros) from the command line.

Fact is, at least in the U.S. -- the whole cellular market is designed around a 2 year device rotation as "standard".
This is due to the popularity of the 2 year contract that includes a heavily subsidized handset at signing or renewal time.

The industry figures that unless you're one of the less desirable customers who gets a pay as you go phone due to problems passing a credit check, you're going to keep paying $60-100 per month or so for the length of time you want to use a phone, and you're going to expect a shiny new model every couple of years as part of that arrangement.

I do think this might SLOWLY be changing a bit, largely thanks to T-Mobile trying to act as the rebellious upstart of the industry and encouraging people to rethink traditional contracts. (Additionally, the companies like "Net 10" who act as wholesalers of minutes of service and kilobytes of data from the major carriers help fuel interest in buying higher-end handsets straight out and using them without contracts.)

But no - there really is the expectation that a couple of years of support is all that's necessary on a cellphone. And tablets are sort of falling into that same category by default - simply because they run the same OS's as the cellphones do.

I don't really expect voters to be "experts" on the topics they're voting for. And at least in my own case, I often feel I'm vastly under-informed on what I'm about to vote on. (In reality, some of the people I'm asked to vote for haven't made any effort to publicize their views at all. This tends to happen with judges or folks in charge of treasuries or school-related positions pretty often. You'll often find someone standing near the polling place handing out a list of recommendations of who to vote for, for these things -- but that just tells you who wants to give the most money to the school or organization who made the flier.)

Regardless, I usually feel relatively informed on at least a few of the issues up for vote that I'm most interested in. Therefore, I go to cast votes on those issues, and I may just skip over the ones I have no real opinion on.

The problem I have is with apathetic voters who vote simply due to peer pressure. You can say all you want about them cancelling each other out (thanks to equal numbers voting for both sides of an issue) -- but I feel that every vote counted acts as evidence an individual supports the candidate the vote was cast for. When all of the candidates are lackluster or even guilty of previous corruption - I'd rather see them get very few votes on either side, then large numbers from all the disinterested and uninformed who just "pick one" at the polls.

I absolutely agree!

This is the single biggest issue I have with all of the ad campaigns trying to convince people to get out and vote. The result is, you get a bunch of uninformed people who really don't care enough to cast an educated vote - but they go so they can get the free "I voted!" sticker, feel good about themselves and fit in with what's perceived as "right" or "cool" (a la MTV's "Rock the Vote" advertising, years ago).

If all of the options available to vote for are so unappealing, many people can't even bring themselves to cast a vote one way or another? That says something too. Those are the elections that SHOULD be showing really low voter turnout.

Well, the Cadillac ELR got the styling thing down, arguably (by recycling the award winning "edgy" styling of their CTS Coupe). Yet it, too, is doing horrible in sales numbers. (I believe only 1,200 or so sold for all of 2014!?)

Look at the insane price though and it's no wonder... I hear they're discounting them by about $20,000 to try to get them off dealer lots now, and people STILL think it's too high. I mean, the bottom line is -- if you have the money for a "high end electric" car, you want Tesla, not Cadillac wrapping their modern idea of a luxury car around some Chevy Volt technology.

Yeah, ANYTHING is possible given enough talent, dedication and funding.

In reality though, even these multi-year, multi-phase implementations tend to go way over budget and fail to yield everything promised.

I've seen it happen, first-hand, when a company I worked for decided to implement a new ERP system and phase out a number of other applications and processes. They DID shell out the money to get the analysis done properly, but the problem really came in with ability for the new software to perform as intended. Bugs were found during the roll-out, but the team doing the implementation had too many layers internally to get those bugs corrected in a reasonable and timely manner. (EG. They'd have guys flown out and paid by the hour to give employee training on the new software and how to do something with it. During that process, they might run into a glitch -- but as trainers, they weren't really capable of fixing it or even having a direct contact with someone who could. They'd just gloss it over and move on, promising to "make a note of it".) If they even remembered to pass the note along about the bug, chances are it went to some team responsible for collecting the reports from other people on staff with the company. So now the bug was perhaps poorly or incompletely documented in some kind of bug tracking database. When will the actual developers get to addressing that bug? Hard to say. As likely as anything, they might claim it wasn't reproducible with their environment, or ask for more information. But since our people didn't have access to the database directly, we'd never be able to directly reply with that additional info or help finding the bug.

There were times my boss fixed problems in their system himself, because he knew more than the average person about the back end database it used. When that happened, I remember him telling their people about the fix and it was pretty much ignored, as in "Well, that's great then! Our team should eventually figure it out too and roll it into a version upgrade...."

For millions of dollars spent, I don't think you should have to work late nights finding your own fixes for their defective code ... but that's how it went down.

Atheism is what you call someone with no belief in a higher power,god. etc

By definition atheism is not a belief. Stop trying to turn it into one.

"Science is self correcting, meaning it is flawed. "
no. that's why it isn't flawed. Science is self correcting based on new data. A scientific field isn't complete, but science as a field and method isn't flawed. It would be flawed if it didn't change based on new information.

haha. no, read the references. They are pretty much excuse making and cheery picking to confirm their belief.

" And wouldn't the existence, and even the sometimes contradictory accounts of the Gnostic gospels, provide a more evidence of an actual historic figure whose image was "stomped over", rather than one made up out of whole cloth?"
No, why would you think that?