Parking meters still impose a cost on the preexisting residents...

Not all pre-existing residents. Just those who choose to use a taxpayer-owned resource to store their personal belongings. As a taxpayer, parking meters make perfect sense to me because they give me a return on my investment.

Even better would be to not waste so much land on streets wide enough for street parking where it isn't needed. There's no reason why the street couldn't be narrowed and the excess land sold to the adjacent property owners. This would also neatly solve the problem of business customers parking in residential neighborhoods without the need for parking meters or enforcement.

"Lost Coast" is a tech demo for HDR lighting, not an expansion. I'm pretty sure you don't have to own HL2 to play it.

Parking meters still impose a cost on the preexisting residents and are not a wholly entrepreneurial solution since they require cooperation from the city.

Parking permits could work if they are granted in perpetuity to whoever currently resides in the preexisting residences, but a) somebody still has to pay for enforcement, b) I've never heard of a parking permit system that actually worked that way, and c) it is also a government, rather than entrepreneurial, solution.

Besides, why solve the problem in a way that must be managed in perpetuity when you can solve it once and for all by just making the developer build enough parking in the first place?

(By the way, I'd like you to know that I'm not making these arguments because I'm a fan of automobile-centric development -- quite the contrary! Rather, I merely take issue with the idea of letting the developer do whatever is "fiscally optimal" for himself without considering the rest of the community that would be impacted by the result.)

Microsoft seems to have taken the other track now. They are still bringing the Windows experience to the tablet, but they've revamped the windows experience to be the kind that works well on touchscreens, some say to the detriment of the mouse and keyboard crowd.

What's annoying is the perception that salad is the only kind of food that qualifies as healthy.

At McDonalds, this is probably an accurate perception, and only if you skip (or go very light on) the dressing. Even their yoghurt is questionable.

Investing in a good S&P500 index fund which will return about 10%. In 18 years, you will be a millionaire.

It's closer to 7%, so you'll be a millionaire in 22 years. You can bring this down to 19 years by contributing the maximum into your 401(k) ($17,500/year), your IRA ($5,500/year), and an HSA ($3,300/year for individuals).

Growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, I saw Tablet Computer prototypes come up every couple of years. Sometimes they would even make it to market, where they hit with a resounding thud thanks to their horrible clunky OS choices, lack of applications, and hardware limitations. Apple tinkered with the iPad for years before finally releasing it, waiting until the infrastructure grew up to make the device practical. They actually worked on the iPad before the iPhone.

Technologies that had to mature before the tablet computers became practical:

• Wifi networking.
• Capacitive Touchscreens -- Most early designs used a stylus, which sucks, and had poor resolution to boot
• Low power but still acceptably fast processors -- A huge sticking point, lots of early tablets had extremely poor battery life on top of being slow
• A touch enabled OS -- WinCE is terrible to use with a finger, and really pretty bad with a stylus. Symbian was never great. PalmOS was too narrowly focused on Palm pilots
• Battery capacity -- Battery technology has come a long way in the past 15 years. Early attempts would use NiCad batteries, which just aren't good enough, especially with the relatively high energy consumption figures from the old chips.

Apple didn't have a smash hit with the iPad because they were the first to the market. They won because they tinkered and waited until the technology was ready, then came out with a solid finished well integrated product instead of some halfassed "laptop without a keyboard running a cut down version of Windows".

So say we can double that. That makes the fuel 40% efficient as we use some of the heat towards efficiency. That will double the gas mileage. However if you need a smaller engine, then it will be producing less heat. That is good if it is 1 for 1. However if their needs to be a particular heat starting limit then it may cause an issue. Unless you go with a bigger car.

The idea as the engine gets more efficient people buy bigger cars, is economically sound and proven. A large truck today can do about the same as a station wagon 30 years ago. But what happened is more people started buying trucks.

Why can't the neighborhood set up parking meters or parking permits?

they put all their offices in the middle of major urban areas

It's not even just that! I'd happily commute to Google's office in the middle of the major urban area I already live in, but (as far as I can tell) their office here does only operations, not development.

They become old and bitter, just like those mainframe guys. Everything comes with a trade-off. When we went from the mainframe to PC's, software for a little while had to take a step back so it will work on systems with less power. The same thing is happening now with mobile devices. Software is taking a step back so they can operate on their mobile devices, where speed was sacrificed for weight and power usage. However, the fact we have smaller lighter carry anywhere technology, allows us to be more connected and less reliant on paper.

Trade-offs, they happen. Just like the mainframes, the PC will move more towards business only usages, while home stuff will go to mobile devices, as well as those light end business apps.

The Mainframe isn't dead yet, neither will the PC go away any time soon. However they will get more specialized for particular work.

For one, Slashdot has a bunch of anti-social jerks that like to post, who have an inability to empathize with anyone else. So no surprise they think something like that is a good idea, because they they aren't very reasonable people.

However others have pointed out, accurately I think, that something like this can well be a cause for it. The thing is that if you push someone in to a corner and give them what seems to be no way out, no way to fight back, they may go nuts. Happens with other animals, not just humans. So if you have a kid that is continually picked on, who tries to stand up for themselves, but is then picked on even worse, this time by law enforcement, well then they may well take drastic measures because they feel like there's no option, no hope.

I think there is some real merit to this. Not merit as in saying it is good that kids do it, but that it is correct that actions like this can lead to kids doing it. If they feel they have nothing to lose and nowhere to turn, then a completely crazy overreaction may be the only option they feel they have.

I mean here you have a case of a kid who did everything right, and got increasingly screwed: He never fought back or defended himself, which schools do not allow (you can argue if they should, but they don't, it is against the rules). He got no help or support from the school, I mean it was allowed to happen IN CLASS in front of a teacher. He told his parents, they were skeptical, he produced evidence. He was then threatened by the police, ordered to delete it (illegally), drug to court, etc, etc. So what has he got now? He's been effectively told the bullies are allowed to do as they wish and if you attempt to stop them the police and courts will punish you.

So what's he to do? You can see how a drastic, illogical, action might be what he thinks is his only option. Remember that he doesn't have the perspective of age, he can't look on high school and say "Ya that's a real short time in your life and it gets WAY better once you are out and an adult." To him, this is his whole world. And for that matter, the adult world has stepped in and told him he;s wrong to try and make things better for himself.

As such you can see why people are saying it can lead to something like a school shooting. It is something that administrators need to consider: Dealing with bullying isn't something to do just because it is the right thing (which would be a good enough reason) but it is a safety issue as well.

What nonsense. The Constitution does not legitimize sedition.

Bullshit. Laws which prohibit sedition are unconstitutional. Wikipedia quotes several Supreme Court cases:

In the seminal free speech case of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the Court declared, "Although the Sedition Act was never tested in this Court, the attack upon its validity has carried the day in the court of history." 376 U.S. 254, 276 (1964). In a concurring opinion in Watts v. United States, which involved an alleged threat against President Lyndon Johnson, William O. Douglas noted, "The Alien and Sedition Laws constituted one of our sorriest chapters; and I had thought we had done with them forever ... Suppression of speech as an effective police measure is an old, old device, outlawed by our Constitution."

Ubuntu's Debian-based - how much work will it take to migrate this to Ubuntu?

One of the problems with advanced weapons systems is they require a bunch of effort and facilities to produce, maintain, and use. So while they are fearsome, they are vulnerable to a large force that takes over their support structures.

For example while the US's combat planes are the most amazing the world has ever known, they only work when they have secure airfields to operate from. If those get taken over, they are in a world of shit. Which is why they have security but that security is men with guns. The planes can't defend their own airfields, for many reasons.

If you want to see it on a small scale, well ask yourself why the US has been unable to secure Afghanistan or Iraq. They had considerably more forces than your silly "1 aircraft carrier" scenario, it was hardly the whole population fighting, yet after years and years, they have been unable to secure the countries.

Lots of people with small arms are a force all of their own.