No, it's not obvious. These days the video card takes care of all that. And whether the alpha channel is 0 or 255 the value is going to be read anyway. The performance hit is nil.

Clarification: Most video cards run at 32-bits (4 bytes) per pixel. Because that's a nice round 2^n number which is actually easier for computers to process than the old 24-bits (3 bytes) per pixel.

32-bpp graphics has 256 values (1 byte) for R, G, and B just like 24-bpp graphics. The extra byte in 32-bpp is used to store the alpha channel (transparency). So you're getting it for free anyway, and the video card is using it even with these new "modern" icons (it allows the background to bleed through on parts that are covered by the icon's 32x32 pixel rectangle, but aren't covered by the icon's artwork). Since it's being used anyway, you might as well use it to enhance visibility of borders, edges, and control surfaces.

Just to clarify, some of the Pentium and Celeron CPUs are based on Haswell. Some are based on Bay Trail (Atom). As someone who helps recommend low-end laptops to friends and clients trying to get the best deal for a budget, it's become a hassle having to look up every model number of Pentium or Celeron to verify which type it is.

Your math is comparing apples to oranges.
Specifically you are comparing the cost to apprehend PLUS all the fixed costs of the agency vs the cost to apprehend with a drone.

That's actually exactly how the drone costs were calculated. They took the cost to operate the drones, then added all the fixed costs of the personnel, equipment, and miscellaneous agency overhead. That inflated the drone costs from $2,468 per hour to $12,255 per hour. It's actually your deportation cost which is missing some of the costs they attributed to the drones.

So OP's math was (inadvertently) in fact apples to apples.

That's what I was thinking. Equipping every border patrol unit with a commercial version of the ubiquitous quad-copter

For a given payload, rotary-wing aircraft consume about 2-4x as much fuel as fixed-wing aircraft. The quad-copter is actually an even bigger disadvantage since it's got 4 engines vs 1 on the Predator. (Fewer engines = more efficient. It's why airlines have been transitioning to twin-engine airliners.)

Also, if you read some of the linked docs in TFA, the $28,000 per arrest figure is the cost of the drone + personnel + equipment + overhead. The operating cost of just the drones themselves is about 1/5th that ( $2,468 per flight hour vs $12,255 per flight hour). So since the bulk of the cost is in the support personnel and equipment, changing the type of drone won't alter the cost per arrest much. The vast majority of the cost is still agents and their equipment - whether they be flying a Predator, a quad-copter, or have boots on the ground in the desert border.

Err, wut?

I manage around 150 Win7 machines at work, and have 4 of them at home, and never once seen the behavior you are describing.

Are you sure there isn't more involved with recreating that? Have you seen this on more than one Win7 computer?

When I use explorer to delete a file, it is removed from the file list and placed in the recycle bin folder for that drive, just as has been the case for some time now.

If explorer is open to a remote file server it still removes the file from the list when deleted, just skipping the recycle bin part of things.
(Not to mention my complaint about a confirmation prompt being there when the recycle bin is used and so recovery is possible, and NO confirmation when deleting on a file share despite no recovery of the file being possible by default, which always seemed bas-ackward to me)
But you didn't mention browsing to a remote file share, the default explorer will open to your homedir or drive root typically on your system drive.

Well to be completely fair, there are a TON of very nice features being put in Win10, on top of a ton of things fixed that they broke in Win8.

No GUI requirement similar to the choice of installing xorg (I believe introduced in server 2012?), a powershell version of apt-get using the windows tailored chocolatey package format, fixed the stupidest of GUI changes from Win8 such as no desktop by default and whatever they call the app tiles thing, improved filesystem and network file sharing (the latter bringing a HUGE speed boost, both being more parallelized), etc.

They are trying out a different (and IMHO better) upgrade path, and hopefully all that is claimed about the new IE will come true which will finally begin closing the huge gap between it and pretty much any other browser.

Sure there is still plenty of time between now and release day to drop the ball on for anything above, but I dare say direction under their new CEO has been pretty damn positive so far, and leaps and bounds better than when under Balmer (though I admit that is a pretty low bar anyway)

As someone who hates Windows mainly due to being forced to support it and its bullshit for the past 20 years, even I am quite impressed with the changes between Win7 and Win10, and don't have much to complain about. We will see if that still holds true after release of course.

But I can't help but agree, a lot of the serious problems are being or have been addressed.

We only complain about the icons and lack of theme support to fix them because Microsoft asked us, petty as that may seem.

Except even in GEoS from the seventies with a not-quite-8-bit color pallet was still capable of showing the differences between each type of GUI widget, and between widget and non-widget.

Win8/10 (and iOS7+, and Unity) fail to differentiate buttons from drop-down menus from checkboxes from radio buttons from text input fields.
You can only tell widget from non-widget by the different square of color, which can and does happen frequently between different areas in a non-widget background image as well.

It more reminds me of those "item hide and seek" point-and-click games where you mainly just click on everything in the image until the game tells you everything has been found.

Even over here in the wild west, plumbers, electricians, doctors, nannies and nurses all need to be licensed.
Lawyers do too.
Only painters and interior decorators on GPs list don't need licenses here.

Perhaps by "nanny" they meant "babysitter"? Baby sitters need no license, and many do call baby sitters a "nanny" despite the medical qualifications needed for the official title.
Not that such a mistake would make the GP any more correct of course.

Please to be explaining how a United States Citizen is classified as "foreign entities" in your mind?

Gunnery Sergeant Hartman: Jesus H. Christ! Private Pyle, why is your footlocker unlocked?
Private Gomer Pyle: Sir, I don't know, sir!
Sergeant: Private Pyle, if there is one thing in this world that I hate, it is an unlocked footlocker! You know that, don't you?
Private: Sir, yes, sir!
Sergeant: If it wasn't for dickheads like you, there wouldn't be any thievery in this world, would there?

The moral of the story - Always encrypt and lock everything, or gunnery sergeant hartman will find your jelly doughnut and you'll get beaten in your sleep by everyone with soap in socks.

You good people are about 5 years behind the times. WTF happened?

Same thing that happens to all early adopters. Earlier technology becomes entrenched, and it's more difficult for newer, better technology to displace it because the old stuff "mostly works good enough." It's why the ratio of wireless to wired phones is higher in Africa than in Europe.

Anyone herd of shrapnel? frag granades ? anti personnel mines ( which are now a days killing kids ) the most strange part is this sentence "could cause more suffering than the regular kind"

The preferred goal of a weapon of war is to wound. A dead enemy soldier just gets left there on the ground. A wounded soldier diverts combat personnel to drag/evac him back from the front lines, then ties up medical staff and incurs care and treatment costs. So a wounded enemy costs the enemy more resources, and is a much more preferable result than a dead enemy not just from a humanitarian perspective, but from a strategic perspective. That's part of the reason why NATO moved to the smaller 5.62mm bullets - being able to kill an enemy with a single shot wasn't one of the primary selection criteria.

So it becomes a balancing act between wounding enough (on average) to incapacitate the enemy to remove him from the immediate battlefield and tie up enemy resources in the short-term, but not wounding enough to severely incapacitate him for the remainder of his life. i.e. Long after the war is over and the previously-enemy combatants now fall under the jurisdiction and care of the victor in the war. Even if the victor uses the vanquished as slaves, capable slaves are preferable to crippled ones.

Exploding bullets makes it nearly impossible to remove all fragments from the body. Shrapnel and frag grenades in contrast fragment before entering in the body, and each piece that embeds in the body tends to have a clear entry wound making it easier to locate and extract. So exploding bullets have a much greater negative impact on wounded soldiers long after the war is over. Likewise, blindness lasts long after the war is over. And land mines continue to explode long after the war is over. That's what it means by "could cause more suffering than the regular kind."

If it isn't a big deal, does that mean you will import my certificate authority public key as fully trusted into your computer and point your DNS client to my servers?

No?

Well now you might see why it is a big deal after all.

Microsoft needs to grow a pair and lay down the law to any company that wants to be an OEM for their products. Apple wouldn't let the carriers pull this stunt on their phones.

I think Apple prohibiting carriers from doing this sort of stuff is more about keeping competitors under their thumb, not about protecting users. They're not above pulling this crap themselves at their users' expense. They surreptitiously slurped up users' location and wifi SSID data to build their own wifi map (the following year, they dumped the company they'd been paying to lease such a map). You know, the same thing Google got in trouble for because they went to the trouble to try to do it the right way, and had their own employees drive around doing the data gathering (not their Android users), then found out later they'd recorded a lot more than SSID.

Ah, a fellow rationalist. Wanna know a little secret? There's this whole big secret world out there not governed by strict and unbreakable laws like science. It's based on ephemeral qualities like popularity, beauty, fashion, trendiness, gossip, hearsay, social status, and celebrity. It leads to irrational things like printed cardboard skyrocketing in value because they include the magic word "Pokemon" (and actual laws being passed to prevent anyone other than the "owner" of that word from printing it on other cardboard), or shoes selling for $150 more because they're named after a famous basketball player, or a product selling out because a certain popular TV show host says she likes it, or a semi-popular cartoonist getting lots of people to pay in advance for a game they've never heard of before which doesn't sound all that fun to play. I hear this stuff can even influence whether or not you can land a job, or get a date, if you can believe that!