I didn't mean to suggest that you are or would want to trick people into listening. I just meant, very seriously, that when a cliche is co-opted by one side of a factious argument or other, it becomes impossible to have an actual conversation using those cliches. To one side they're a rallying cry, and to the other side the words just embody everything they don't like about the first side. No information passes, except "I belong to group X."

How I read your comment:

You're half right.

It's not because Tea Party groups are fringe elements. It's because the average American is only outraged when they are told to be by the mainstream media blah blah blah blah

You may have had some good points. To get people to listen to you, though, you have to pull back from the rhetoric and dog-whistle words and phrases. My brain shuts off as soon as I hear a phrase like 'mainstream media' used unironically. It may have had some meaning, in the past, but now all it means is, in general, "everyone but Fox News." In some cases it may mean things like "Everyone but Drudge" or "Everyone but Beck" or maybe even occasionally "Everyone but Al-Jazeera" or "Everyone but MSNBC."

The 4th amendment applies to mail, and you can't get much more plaintext than that.

Look, there are armies of douche-Borgs walking around with bluetooth earpieces in, thinking not that they fall enough below some painful threshold of dorkiness while wearing them, but rather that they look cool doing so. These are the spinning hubcaps of phone accessories.

Might be a regional thing, but I haven't seen anyone wear a bluetooth earpiece in a couple of years. I figured the dorkiness finally overpowered utility.

These are rich people. It's green because they're at least not fueling the rockets with whale oil.

Have you never played a real-time strategy game? You always use the easily-obtained resources to finance the research/construction/expansion necessary to move on to something more permanent.

In the /. story where this was announced, I complained about how terrible a browser-based javascript-written pdf-viewer would be. And lo and behold! It is slow as hell. Ugh, painful.

I wonder if anyone means this for real. I don't know much about other countries' postal services, but I find the USPS to be pretty damn impressive. Less than $0.50 to send a physical object more than two thousand miles in two days. And I know it happens, but I've personally never had anything get lost or mangled in the process.

The T510 had the 'classic'-style Thinkpad keyboard. The T530s and W530s have the new chiclet keyboards. Was that 'T510' above a typo? (Though, I have a T61p and have thought of moving to a T520 or W520, and knowing that the keyboard didn't suck yet then is also good).

What's your opinion of the new keyboards? Are you upgrading from a previous Thinkpad? If so, any opinions as to changes in quality, keyboard or otherwise?

They're still one of the best places to go for things like TV reviews, for all of their faults.

I can not comprehend of anything worse than a PDF viewer written in javascript. The worst of both worlds, together in one package!

Ask and you shall receive. Hubble Deep Field in 3D

What he's saying is that webmail interfaces are painful and limiting to use.

Why are we comparing against antique Atom chips? Aren't AMD's Brazos 2.0 chips significantly faster at half the power draw?