Chromebooks are the only laptop you can actually secure against kids who take them home. There is nothing else on the market. They are made for a market where they are given to kids who smash them for fun and they are only expected to function for a few years and barely function at that. They suck, but there are legitimate reasons they are the way they are and there aren't better options for what they are used for.

This is such a pervasive problem. Here we are years later and we have yet another scientist clinging to old data when they have been proven wrong.

I think part of early science education needs to be the concept that you can never prove theories right, only ever prove them wrong and that's it's ok that things are that way. People hate this concept, because they like building rigid belief systems where they know for sure the things they believe are right and never have to consider alternate possibilities. It's ok to do that, as long as you know how to spot cases when you are wrong and are willing to re-think things when they occur. Some people are unwilling to do even that.

The prime example of this should be Newtonian physics' most basic formula, Force = Mass * Acceleration. It's been tested and experimentally verified for hundreds of years by millions of people, and it's wrong. It always was, and always will be wrong. It is so close to right it is still used extensively, but only when we know the margin of error it introduces is negligible, and we know how to calculate that margin of error now so we know when it will be small enough to ignore and when it won't. There is no proving things right, there is only knowing that things have been right so far. The second the real world proves you wrong, you are wrong.

The ocean has uranium 235 spread all through it. It always has. It's fine in there. The best place for things that emit radiation is in water. It absorbs basically everything that can harm people. Fukushima is harmless compared to the massive devastation caused by Deepwater Horizon yet we keep talking about all these non-events and non danger situations as if they matter because "nuclear is scary". It's just not. The coal power plant down the road from me releases more radiation into the environment than Fukushima ever will.and you've never even heard of it.

Exactly. People do not look at the roads and think, man.. I don't need to go anywhere but the road isn't clogged so I guess I've gotta go hop in my car and drive around. People needing to get places causes traffic. People not wanting to deal with traffic pushes that usage back, and it's a bad thing.

The effect is called latent demand, it's well known and well understood and it does not mean increasing road capacity is impossible, futile or worthless. Latent demand is demand that exists but is suppressed by the inability of the system to handle it. Once additional capacity is added the demand materializes as actual usage.

Driving correctly should not be illegal.

This is one of the reasons I have been looking forward to AI driving. It forces us to have a real discussion about traffic laws that creates a motivation to fix lazy legislators leaving laws in place that people are forced to routinely break to make traffic work well. I'm tired of the speed limit being 10 MPH slower than the average speed of traffic, and I look forward to people finally standing up and demanding that speed limits be *higher* than the speed traffic naturally flows. Roads should have a recommended speed, that both AI and human drivers should aim for, and a legal limit that police can and should stop you if you exceed. We currently have de-facto versions of that with the recommended speed being the speed limit, and the legal limit being about 15 over, but in working that way, we're technically routinely breaking the law, and that's not how laws should work.

Android apps start fast and have a low memory footprint because they use shared memory to share code with the software that runs the phone. You can't do that unless the phone uses java for it's internal functionality, which Windows phones would not, so app's startup time and memory footprint would be much worse than on real Android.

Balmer understands markets, but he doesn't understand tech, or design. His reign at Microsoft showed a complete squandering of technical talent in a series of boondoggles that someone with better knowledge of the underlying technology would have foreseen, and this took Microsoft from a dominant position to near collapse. Satya Nadella has had little to praise or criticise, but so far I feel his steps have been more strategically sound. Balmer needs to remain silent, because all he's accomplishing now is removing all doubt.

Security is needed, but so is productivity. Neither is valuable without the other.

I worked for a company that got breached and had stuff stolen. Their security was overblown and cumbersome, and not layered properly. They tried to secure their entire network, instead of properly layering things, and thus a hack that should have been trivial was not. Had they properly layered their network so the general employee work could happen fluidly, and people could get their jobs done without giving away the keys to the kingdom they would have been much better off. After the breach came mandatory drive encryption (with no password) which brought their largely aging laptop population to its knees. So much wasted time and horrible frustration, all to implement basically worthless security policies.

> security is a huge threat to productivity.

Exactly this. I've seen so many companies waste time and money on ineffective overblown security measures that they should be spending actually getting the job done. Layer your security so that it stays out of the way as much as possible while still protecting what is actually important.

You say the goal is "to cut costs", but what costs?

If the cost-savings comes from undermining a union, they probably would have sued already, so I'm guessing it's not that.

This shouldn't be a tax dodge, because 1099s should end up paying roughly the same federal and state tax, so it must be a reduction in actual compensation. Assuming that's the case, those being harmed look to be the 1099 employees themselves. As such, it would seem like a class action suit would be the appropriate course of action. If the state itself isn't willing to abide by the rule, it shouldn't expect others to either. The state should either follow the rule or repeal it.

I used to load my machines up with RAM to speed them up. It's not useless, but it makes a tiny fraction of the difference an SSD makes. It simply isn't worth it. Window's caching is terrible, it tends to thrash your disks at inopportune times, and it's filesystems end up a slow tangled mess so quickly that without an SSD, it's just painful. Combine that with the high failure rate of spinning disks in a laptop, the extra-slow speed of laptop drives, and the reduced battery life from their high power usage and you'll be much happier with an SSD based laptop. When SSDs hit the $1/gig barrier it became time to start phasing spinning disks out of all but the lowest-performing laptops. Now that they're pushing down to about 1/3rd that, I'd avoid any laptop maker who doesn't, because they're not very good at what they do.

Windows machines in recent years have become extremely bottlenecked by drive performance, especially in the case of laptops which are so popular in companies. Laptop hard drives are slow, capable of only about 80 IOPS which is about the same speed they were 10 years ago, whereas mainstream SSDs by comparison, can typically deliver 80,000 IOPS. Since once you get Windows loaded up with all it's random messy software it's disk access ends up being tons of tiny reads, IOPS is a much more important number than transfer rate, and SSDs are literally 1000x faster. It can mean the difference between a 20 minute operation and one that takes a few seconds.

If you are in any way in control over your corporate purchases, never *ever* buy another laptop without a SSD. It's false efficiency, wasting very expensive time to save a relatively cheap expense. 256GB SSDs are under $100 and will handle most corporate work just fine. Up to 1TB, the expense is almost negligible and it will pay for itself almost immediately. Your IT department will be happier, your workers will be happier, your machines will be more secure because scanning them is a lot less intrusive and can happen more often. Your IT department should have a pile of SSDs ready to be deployed into any machine that needs to be re-imaged or where the user needs the speed. Not doing so is wasting money.

> I recently reinstalled Windows 7 Home on a laptop. A factory restore (minus the shovelware), all the Windows updates

No you didn't. You *thought* you installed all the updates because Windows lied to you and said you had. Windows Update has a horrible habit of checking to see what updates are available **for the state of your machine right now** and then telling you that it's done installing updates when those are installed, when in truth there are pending updates that required previous updates to be installed before they could subsequently be installed that Windows Update won't tell you about until you re-discover what updates are available. After an install, force re-scan after every reboot to see what new updates are now available and when you reboot and re-scan and it says you are done, you are actually done.

I feel like some wireless routers using openWRT might be useful here. Configure a few to nat the traffic from each port to a specific ip, then have that routed over the wireless. You could drop a wireless router in each island and update them all over wireless.

> Though NAT is included with almost all firewalls, it is not there to address security.

You missed my point. Firewalls are needed for security, and if you have a firewall, you can do NAT. Not needing NAT becomes a non-feature because it doesn't significantly impact complexity or cost.

Automatic address assignment: Useless. DHCP is better.

No more NAT: Useless. NAT is part of firewalls which are still needed. It's easy, and incredibly flexible.

Better multicast routing: Useless. Multicast is dead, and will remain so.

Simplified routing: Useless. This has been implemented outside IP

QOS: Useless. The IPv6 implementation is wrong for how QOS is used now.

Larger Address Space: The only useful feature in IPv6, but it was done wrong, and should be abandoned.

We need IPv8 that does things right for the internet we have *today* not the internet we thought we'd need in 1998.