You obviously don't work for the company that I do. The meatloaf-peeler vendors have persuaded our management that meatloaf peeling is an important capability these days, and any company that hasn't adopted this new approach to meatloaf consumption is doomed to quick obsolescence. So, whether our jobs need it or not, we are all being supplied with the top-selling meatloaf peeler, and other brands are banned from our desks.

But don't worry, your bosses will see the light soon, and a new MS meatloaf peeler will be installed on your desk, too.

And next we'll read of publishers suing Amazon to the their "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought ..." lists. This is just encouraging customers to ask for a package that contains books from different authors or different publishers. (But they do also use it to suggest other works by the same author.)

The most rational response to such perversions might be to simply eliminate the copyright laws. The primary function of such laws is for blocking useful things like we're discussing here.

Seriously? How much "diversity" and "innovation" do you need in terms of a charger?

It's not about the charger, it's about what the charger plugs into. Now, under this new regulation, all devices must accept the same input charge - regardless of whether or not a different charging system would be beneficial to the design. It's kind like specifying that all motor vehicles (from scooters up to eighteen wheelers) must use the same air filter. It'll be too big for some devices, too small for others, and lock designs ten years down the road to a standard written today.

Or, to put it another way, yes - charger designs evolve just the same as the equipment they're attached to. (Though chargers get far less attention because they aren't very sexy.)

It will also provide a wider window for cheap Chinese knock offs - and if you recall the debacle over counterfeit Apple chargers last year, you'll see why this can be a bad thing.

The problem with these morons is that they're endangering innocents, and not just their own kids. Your liberty ends where the life of someone else is being threatened, don't you agree?

It's not an argument when it's bullshit top to bottom. An argument requires some kind of logical chain. What religious and other faith-based nutjobs spout forth is statements, but not arguments.

Because the water is in a closed loop system, very little of it is lost

But, being a closed loop system, any contaminants (such as nitrites, which is toxic to plants) produced are retained and tend to build up in the system. And ask anyone who keeps fish tanks how much work it is to keep a fish tank clean and balanced, even if you have a well established bacteria and plant system.
 

Done rightly, this system can shake up food supply as surely as 3D printers are going to shake up industry.

That's the claim, but there's been a lot of claims (running back to the 60's) out of the alternative farming community of things like this that would "surely shake up the food supply". They've pretty much all turned out to be unsustainable, or expensive, or fail to scale beyond the homestead/DIY level, or some combination of the three. The jury is still out on aquaponics.

Which is why I pre-ordered the book, to get it while it's still good.

I love the early Mythbusters, compared to them the recent ones are lame. Everything has its time and when it's done, then it's done.

We don't need to "get through to them" any more than we run advertisement campaigns to convince rapists and murderers to please behave, thank you.

These people are endangering lives of other people, first their children and second everyone else (see "herd immunity"). It's time to stop playing nice. Throw them in jail, vaccinate their kids while they're behind bars, let them go after a week with a heavy fine to pay for all the bullshit.

There's a time for being nice and cooperative and friendly, and there's a time for drawing a line in the sand and shooting everyone who crosses it. Everyone with a child knows that you can't yield all the time. Everyone who's ever been in negotiations knows that the right balance between cooperation and shows of strengths gets you the best results. There's even a program by the UN that educated diplomats that incorporates this simple strategy. And if you want to waste an hour of your time, google "Tit for tat", a simple algorithm that is proven to be the optimal strategy in iterated prisoners dilemma and works exactly this way: Reward cooperation with cooperation, punish betrayl, forgive after you've done that.

These people aren't cooperating. Time to stop cooperating with them.

I'm throwing the flag, bullshit on the field. Windows 8 works IF and ONLY IF you do everything the "Metro Way" which is so obviously designed for tablets and tweeting twits and social shits it fucking hurts.

With XP didn't want the Fisher price? Took all of 2 seconds to switch to classic and you would NEVER see it again, or you could use one of dozens of themes released the first 6 months that would make it look like anything you wanted. With Metro even if you use third party tools its damned near impossible to 100% kill that fucking Metro and if you are one of the millions that have a laptop that the generic synaptics touchpad drivers won't work on? Either buy a mouse and carry it with your laptop forever or throw the laptop in the trash because you will NEVER EVER get rid of the fucking Charms bar! And once you look down for a second and when you look up find you've been "charmed" and have lost the last 3 - 5 seconds of work thanks to Charms stealing focus and it does that over and over AND OVER throughout the day? You'll find out why so many have a seething hatred for that fucking OS.

What all those Win 8 lovers is simply gonna have to face is THE ENTIRE PREMISE IS STUPID and I can prove this, ready? Where does Windows 8 work best? Tablets and touchscreens, don't take my word for it, just count how many times Sinofsky said touch during the win 8 reveal, it was like 30 times in a 10 minute presentation. Fine but why do people buy Windows? What makes you pick Windows over say Android or iOS? Windows programs which aren't touch enabled and which make no fucking sense and are painful on a fucking tablet!....Argh!

The sad part is that is true even here, just look at how quickly the "truther" slur is trotted out whenever anybody asks why anything better than the frankly piss poor at best investigation wasn't done for the 9/11 attacks, like the government has never lied to us.....except for that "pesky" Gulf Of Tonkin thing that left 50,000 Americans and probably a couple million Asians dead....oops.

If there is one thing Wikileaks and Snowden should have taught us its that the MSM of pretty much every country is nothing but the puppet of the state and is about as truthful as Soviet Pravda.

Thanks. If you want dirt cheap media tanks check out Amazon as you can find ones like this all the time and unlike a used laptop not only does it look nice but you can easily add anything you want, BR drive,SSD, plenty of RAM and HDD, and its easy to add.

I've used the E350 a LOT at the shop and was impressed enough I sold my full size lappy for an E350, its THAT nice. HD videos, office work, hell I've played Torchlight and Portal on 'em and they are great little chips, all while just using 20w full load and 9w for most tasks. A word of advice though and this goes for ANY APU system...ALWAYS get the faster RAM, in fact if it comes down to 4Gb of faster or 8Gb of slower take the 4Gb because that AMD APUs really need decent RAM to shine. Nothing crazy, no need to OC the RAM, 1333 or better will do nicely. One of the barebone systems I picked up came with 4Gb of 1066, I did benches before and after I switched it for 1333 and depending on the tasks I got as much as 35% more performance simply by having the faster RAM, its THAT noticeable.

Sure when you show me a box that is an actual PC and not a thin client for that price, otherwise the comparison is moot as the Chrome isn't a PC, its a thin client. Here is a mini with SATA and wireless for $159, just add a RAM stick and unlike ChromeOS you aren't giving a corporation every single thing you do online...yay!

I'd be more worried about a bio-bomb as that would be the perfect carrier, hell you could infect the passengers and use them as the "payload" and then fly it over a large heavily populated city and blow it up at 10,000 feet, voila! the diseased body parts would be spread over a large area and cause maximum damage. To hamper cleanup you could always mix enough uranium to make the whole thing "dirty" enough to cause a panic and slow the responders to a crawl.

In any case I think there is more than a simple hijack and crash going on, too many conflicting stories to be that simple.

No, by starting something good, you can still lead the way.

For example, yes, build a Thorium reactor. If it happens to be cheaper than coal, and you don't put silly export controls on it, India and China might just go with that instead of coal. China, meanwhile, is also deploying massive amounts of solar as we speak, because Europe and the US lead the way, did the research and then outsourced production to... China.

Air pollution and CO2 emissions are not the same thing. For one, CO2 happens to be invisible to the naked eye...