I'm not sure why ignorance about computers is acceptable when ignorance about other matters in life is not.

When you buy a car you're expected to know what the options are for, and if you don't you're expected to figure it out, not just say "ok" to everything the dealer offers.

When you order dinner at a restaurant you're expected to know what you're ordering or ask if you don't.

The same goes for cable service, telephone service, clothing, and every other product you acquire in life.

Why is it only IT companies are expected to assume their users are completely ignorant and must be handheld through everything?

Now, I'm not saying at all that I agree with the practice of selecting unneeded software packages by default, but that doesn't change the fact that users should be *expected* to figure out what something is before they click on it. The problem isn't that companies offer things that users don't need, the problem is that society accepts and even encourages ignorance in IT matters.

I think you mean the Kindle isn't suitable for you. Why do you generalize from your experience to all people?

I looked at iRex's offerings before deciding to get a Kindle DX. iRex's definite strength is the Wacom pen input. If that's a necessity for you, then they are pretty much your only option. Not all of us need to write all over everything we read, though.

iRex's products are also expensive! $699 for the iLiad, which has a smaller screen than the DX and isn't in stock, and $859 for the DR-1000... ouch. The "book edition", still smaller than the DX, is $599, more than $100 more expensive than the DX. Granted you get more features, but again, it depends on what you want or need. When I was considering an iRex, reading through their forum made me nervous, too. There were lots of complaints about battery life on the DR-1000.

In any case, I don't know what you mean by "correct" pdf rendering, since pretty much every PDF I've loaded on to the DX has been displaced without issue.

control + esc does the same thing as the windows key so no functionality is lost. Lets just call it a physical remap. ;)

Not so much "when" but "where". IT was very glorious in the good old days when there was no "Internet" to speak of, just a bunch of Unis networked together, UNIX was king, and if you wanted a home computer, you used a Mac, Trash-80 or similar.

There are some major differences, most importantly distance. Syria is pretty close to Israel. Iran is relatively far away. Depending on where you're flying to in Iran, one-way distance is somewhere in the 700-1400 mile range.

Israel's bomber force largely consists of F-15Es and F-16s, mostly the latter.

F-15E has a max combat radius (get there and back) of about 800 miles. The ferry range (how far you can go if you replace all the weapons with fuel tanks is about 2700-3500 miles depending on whether you use conformal fuel tanks). The former is not really sufficient to strike targets in Iran in a reasonable way. Not sure how far you can get if you don't go the full way with fuel tanks...

F16 has a combat radius of 800 miles or so with some external tanks and a reduced ammunition load (with fewer tanks and bigger bombs you can get to 400 miles), and a ferry range of 2300 miles or so. It's probably not realistically capable of executing a strike against Iranian targets; the attack on the Iraqi Osirak reactor was already a stretch.

All this is easy to forget when thinking about air force deployments if you're the US, because we have these nifty aircraft carrier things that let us get our planes pretty close to the targets...

Of course another reason the distance matters here is that the US controls the airspace over direct approaches to Iran, and indirect ones would be even longer. So Israel needs US cooperation (even if only limited to not attacking the strike force en route) to carry out an attack on Iran, as things stand... and even then could only use a small fraction of its air force for the task. It might be enough. It might not. Hard to tell from my armchair.

How about phone banking then?

Obviously they just need to hold a contest to find the best way to judge the contest for a contest idea, but then they'll have to properly judge the contest for judging a contest contest.

I believe you got it wrong. You are not saving money because you are not paying the license anymore. You are saving money because the openness of the code make it more reusable and more efficient.

You may think you're being funny by saying that, but really it's just foolish.

Apple doesn't sell OSX. You cannot buy OSX. Apple sells hardware, which comes with permission to run OSX. When you go to an Apple store and buy an OSX disk you're just buying an upgrade to the software whose license came with your hardware. Therefore it has no price that they could refund you.

There's haven't been any reasonable discussions on the Internet since September (or so I'm told, I was 3 years too late).

+5, Awesome usenet reference.