You must work for very piss poor companies. Most of the companies that I have worked for make 400-500K per employee. Yes, at that level most of us can be paid enough to live on.
Burger flippers may only make 100K per employee - but then that is a minimum wage job that pulls down 20K a year, plus fees/expenses/overhead etc. no wonder they can't make it at 15 dollars an hour.
If you think your salary is the most important part of the equation - you are mistaken, COGS, buildings, benefits are a significant cost there. 100K per employee means 50K in profit per employee (If you have a 50% gross margin)... Think about that.

A lot of school districts in California either bought iPads or Chrome Books for every student. It's not a matter of money, it's a matter of weird priorities (and weird bureaucracy).

The issue is usually due to the source of the funding. These devices are purchased using one-time funds, often in the form of grants from the federal government. They either cannot be spent on teachers, or while allowed it would be silly to do so because you'd just have to fire that teacher next year.

Teachers and really big ticket items like buildings are recurring costs, and therefore need consistent funding. To get more of them you need similarly consistent funding and not one-off grants; not all money is equal.

The fight choreography is wonderfully deliberate and brutal. They ramped up the audible component of it as might befit a character with super-human hearing while eschewing the shaky-cam (e.g. Bourne Ultimatum) style and using the excuse of poor lighting. I got a sense that most of the people doing the fighting we actually reacting instead of responding in some programmatic fashion and I very much liked that evidence of injuries sustained remained, even several episodes later.

I did take exception to the idea that Daredevil said that he did not kill. I saw a lot of things that would result in pretty serious head trauma or internal injuries and I'm thinking not everybody made it to the nearest E.R.

reproduce that billion+ dollar facility in their production fabs around the world - Costa Rica, Philippines, Malaysia, etc

Quick point of clarification: there are no Intel fabs in any of those countries. All of Intel's leading-edge fabs are located in the US and Israel. There is a single fab in China, Fab 68, but it's purposely well behind the rest (currently at 65nm).

Costa Rica, Philippines, and Malaysia are all "Assembly Test" locations where finished wafers are sent for testing, packaging, and assembly into completed chips.

Otherwise you're spot on about how Intel replicates their new processes once they're up to production quality.

Very true.

When did our schools become police states. I don't ever remember even seeing a police officer at my high school /*mumble*/ years ago (Now get off my grass). Now the schools have police officers on the property as an assignment, and trivial things like this become fully punishable by the state. What is wrong with two weeks suspension (Which I still think is heavy for a simple student prank) without needing to get the police involved and the threat of being arrested and tried as an adult (at 14 - really?)

So yes, handle it as an internal school disciplinary issue, and don't have the police or local government get involved at all... There is no need to ruin children's lives at such a young age

Perhaps the advantage found in the garden with lower walls is the ability to do something outside the plans of the people in charge of the platform. One of my biggest turn-offs with iOS is its keyboard. The screen doesn't change to indicate upper or lower case characters. I have no idea who thinks that's a good idea, but on iOS there wasn't until very recently any ability to charge that. In the Android world, there are of great on screen keyboards. The idea that someone might want something else was simply outside Apple's vision.
There are all kinds of tools that exist on Android because the whole thing is open to development. There are plenty of things that can't be done on iOS and Windows Mobile because no one considered the possibility that someone might want to do them. I believe that Android is the primary place where innovation is occurring in mobile devices at this point and most of that is because everything is open to be changed.

Lastpass and Roboform both seem pretty straightforward to me. I'm not a daily user of either, but one or the other of them seem to solve problems for the people who couldn't remember more than one password unless they were tattooed on their forehead.

There's a Windows tool called adwcleaner that takes less than five minutes to run and does a marvelous job of cleaning crap out of browser installations. It's usually the first step I take in cleaning off a Windows machine, but it works beautifully for getting irritating but not genuinely malicious stuff out of the way.

I've actually made a document that I print out and hand to people whose machines I clean off. Probably 90% of the people I talk to have no idea that there's any such thing as a browser add-on or search extension.

I've found that configuring Adblock+ with a decent set of subscription lists and Spybot's Immunizations (basically hosts file entries) do more to stop problems than probably any other steps I could take to stop problems on Windows machines.

Still trying to say you're not a taxi service at this point is getting pretty ridiculous.

io9 is a Gawker blog. You shouldn't even have to click through to the site to know it's going to be shit.

2GB RAM on Windows 8 or 10 is completely usable for common computing tasks. Web browsing is tricky, particularly with Chrome, which at this point is pretty disrespectful of machines with limited amounts of RAM. Firefox and IE both do better. Some of the desktops I support are 2GB Windows 8 machines. For the most part, they're all subjectively identical to 4GB and 8GB machines until enough tabs or PDFs are open for Windows to start swapping.

There's still no working support for the Media Source Extensions, and as a result it has incomplete support for YouTube's HTML5 player. Lame.

I am required by the government, over penalty of a large fine to do business with corrupt insurance companies. I MUST purchase their product, that provides me nothing that I can't provide on my own. I like how now we equate having insurance with having access to health care. Currently I pay about 10,000 dollars a year for insurance that provides me about 5000 dollars in services a year. What could I do with that additional 5,000 dollars a year for the next 10-15 years that I am running a surplus to create a saving account that I can pay for services when I am older and running a deficit.

To make it more plain. On average the country pays more to insurance companies that they are provided in medical services... otherwise the insurance companies would go out of business.

So, yes currently the government compels me to do business with a company that I don't want to

> brutally hot summers in DC.

Coming from Texas, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH,

That's a pretty broad exclusion to be enforceable.