I did mean in the context of the market in which a particular application resides, like the browser software itself in Microsoft's case, but you do bring up an interesting point, that Microsoft has softened its stance in recent years as well.

I've tried with rocks and sand, no effect. So the hardness is clearly higher than quartz. And once you're to that point, how much do you really need to go higher?

I just wish there was a better way to prevent breakage. :

It's not the ambient temperature of air that's key here, it's the ambient temperature of space, which is about 2,7K.

All objects are constantly radiating energy and receiving energy back from other things that are radiating. When two objects in radiative exchange are roughly the same temperature, this balances out. But when one is hotter than the other, the hotter one loses more energy than it takes in, and vice versa. And it's not just a little difference - radiative heat loss is proportional to the absolute temperature to the fourth power, that's a pretty big exponent. So when you're exchanging energy with space, which is so cold that it takes very sensitive instruments to be able to measure *anything*, well, that heat is simply lost.

You can see this effect for yourself by noting how cloudy nights are usually warmer than clear nights. Clouds are cold, but they're not as cold as space!

The effect of the combination of radiation, absorption, and reflection, with different band peaks for each phenomenon, manifests itself in atmospheres as a greenhouse effect (positive or negative) versus the radiative equilibrium temperature.

This "modulation" happens all the time, few things in this universe are true blackbodies, most prefer to radiate in specific bands. They're apparently using a material that tends to radiate only on one narrow band at regular earth temperatures.

Not sure how much benefit this provides to the building owner, to the point that they'd be willing to cover their building in hafnium-and-silver coated panels, rather than just white paint...

Under Jobs, Apple followed Jobs' vision. Without Jobs, Apple has no vision.

Probably they should have gone with JLG and BeOS instead.

We tended to scream because we were forced to pay for Microsoft's software when we bought computers, and despite non-Microsoft software being the preferred software for some types, Microsoft bundled their lesser-software with their OS and even when we changed to something else, made it prompt to try to become the preferred application again.

When I open my web browser, if it's Microsoft's, I default to Microsoft's Bing search engine. If I choose a different browser then I probably default to Google, but I can change it and it stays changed. I am also not required to use Google as my default start page, and I can visit any site on the Internet that I choose. I am not required to use a search engine if I know the URL that I want to go to, and even if I use Google to search for the name of another company that does something that Google also does, I get that company's result first, not after Google's own product. Funny enough, Bing's search for "maps" brings up Google's maps for me as the top link.

I don't think that Google takes away the consumer's choice in the way Microsoft's policies do. Microsoft doesn't provide links to competitors' software. Google may provide links to their own services first, but they don't provide only links to their own services.

Personally I think they'd have a much better argument, though still incomplete, arguing on Android instead in how it uses Google Mail and other Google services, but since Apple is so strong in phones and tablets that would be hard to support.

White steel roofs last 20 years without problems. Dont use this junk paint, get a standard white powdercoated steel roof and call it done. Plus you end up with a roof that will last over 2 decades and eliminate leaks, Ice buildup, etc....

and you nailed it. This "paint" is raging BS. simple latex white paint is exactly as effective as this paint is. so buy a $6.95 gallon of bright white latex and ignore this snake oil.

The input hopper is just where one places the ballot so that the machine pulls it in. It's not a multi-sheet hopper. One puts it in, hits the button on the machine, and watches it get drawn-in through the machine then deposited in the output hopper, which act as the ballot box.

The ballots are not printed on-site, they're printed in advance of the election. It's a lot less expensive to print en masse than to print in real-time, and so long as the polling place has enough ballots, it's not a problem.

The only way that I would think live-print would work is if the idea were made to revolutionize voting, in that when the voter arrives at any polling place in the state, scanning their voter ID would generate the appropriate ballot for their jurisdiction. This would allow voters to visit polling places that are near work or are not busy if their primary polling place is too busy or awkward to get to.

Unfortunately the current trend is to make it harder to vote, not easier, and even then, issuing voting credentials is already a problem in places that require some kinds of ID to vote, so for it to work, there'd have to be a public-interest push in getting ID to everyone that's registered, and in using the MVD process to also issue the voter ID cards to new registrants.

Oh, so nothing substantive then. Just as I believed.

Yes, that's quite common.

So you can agree that being raised by his own parents didn't work out so well, right? He destroyed his face out of low self-esteem in spite of being one of the best-loved entertainers in history, and died of a prescription drug overdose. Now, can you prove that being raised by someone else wouldn't have been better for him?

Does anyone actually have problems with scratching of the latest generations of gorilla glass? I've had my Xperia Z2 for over half a year and because it has a glass back as well as front it makes it less risky to try scratch tests, so I've done it a number of times and let other people try to scratch it, and nobody has ever succeeded. I'm sure if you put a diamond to it you'd scratch it, but short of that, I can't see why more scratch resistance is needed.

Now, *crack* resistance, they could use good improvements in that. : But from reports the sapphire wasn't that crack resistant.

The trust usually comes because the small company assumes the big one wants to make money by completing an actual product line and selling it - normally the way just about everybody thinks Capitalism works. The small company says to itself, well, they've got to have X (like Sapphire coatings for screens) to make money - they can't actively want us to fail and take steps to make us fail or they take a hit too. So what we have to do is deliver the component at the price where they still make money, and as long as we do that, we're on the same side. So the small company focuses on distrusting the contract clauses it thinks are rational to distrust, in ways that it thinks might allow abuses a rational but dishonest actor might try..
      It's like buying a car and thinking you can't trust the salesman to tell you the truth - only you should have somehow known the salseman wasn't the real salesman but a psycho-killer who had just slain the real salesman and the big thing he wanted wasn't to make too much money selling that car, it was your home address so he could pop by at 2 AM with his skinning knife collection. Most people don't go through life checking with NASA in case the persons they are dealing with are secretly space ailens.
            From the summary, Apple seems to have had control over the decision to install back up power supplies, and to have chosen to save money on them instead. That sounds like an Apple executive brought in a good quarterly bottom line and then got out before the product couldn't be made as specced, and to heck with whether Apple still looks good five years down the road. The big company takes a small hit, the little one goes bankrupt. Apple is by this definition exceptionally untrustworthy, just because they won't take as much damage as their smaller subcontractors, or individuals, but if that's true, then Capitalism is a system where the bigger a company gets, the less it should be trusted, just for sheer size, and smaller businesses and customers should rationally start distrusting sheer bigness. How about that, free-market types and Randroids, do we need stronger Anti-Trust laws? The other solution seems to be extreme paranoia. If great market share or rapid growth mean everyone should regard that company as exceptionally untrustworthy, they why doesn't it make sense for consumers to always pick a smaller competitor for everything?

Be sure to let us know about any actually good deals. Of course, by the time we read about them here, they'll be sold out. But you'll post 'em twice anyway.