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Comment Re:EULAs (Score 2) 384

And, IIRC, didn't the Supreme Court recently rule that an AT&T provision in their contracts did not violate the law? If you are an AT&T customer, your lack of right to sue them (for any reason, no less) has apparently been upheld by the courts. Your sole method of redress is binding arbitration with, as I recall, some sort of liability cap.

Comment A lot o otherwise normal objects are dangerous (Score 1) 284

If kids eat them. It sounds like the issue here is not that the magnets are particularly dangerous (i never ate any pennies, and I doubt most kids do)--but rather that parents don't perceive/anticipate the danger and seek medical help before a situation forms. If your kid drank a cup of bleach, you would, I hope, immediately take him to the hospital. People just need to understand the same mindset applies to small powerful magnets.

And, just as you would bleach, don't put them where a small child may get to them. It's really a pretty simple fix.

Comment Re:nope. (Score 1) 353

Hard drives fail. A lot. At about 3% per year according to one study. They're one of the, if not the, most likely to fail components. Given the moving parts and speeds they move, that's not completely unexpected. In fact, if you count heat issues caused by broken fans, I'll bet you could trace a *majority* of hardware issues to moving parts.

You may have been lucky lately, but that's all it is. You're a statistical outlier. Hard drives are just not very reliable at the best of times, no matter the brand.

Comment Re:Seagate can die and the world would be better (Score 1) 353

I realize everyone's piling on to you for using RAID 0, but they're absolutely right. Think of this way: Hard drives are one of the most common failure points for any PC. This shouldn't be surprising--moving parts bring into play all sorts of wear and tear issues that simply cannot be avoided in the long-enough term future. But when you set up a RAID array, you're courting trouble because each drive significantly increases your potential points of failure. If you have 6 drives, and each one has a 90% chance to be functioning properly at the 3 year mark, that's 47% chance that at least *one* will fail in that time frame. And with a non-parity raid setup, all it takes is one failure to cost you everything. Striped raid is great for increasing your speed and storage, but it comes at a huge reliability cost. Next time, assign one drive to parity and you'll be much, much safer. Even if one 1 failing is a likely event, 2 failing simultaneously will be very unlikely.

Comment Re:4 inch is a piker...try the (Score 4, Interesting) 330

I suppose anytime you want to write something in your own handwriting or create some kind of art you do it by fingerpainting. After all, big fat sausage fingers are all you really need, right? Of course if you're like me, you get tired of washing paint off your fingers all day long and listening to bank tellers complain that they can't read the amount on your checks. That's why some crazy people are of the opinion that perhaps there are occasions when fingers aren't ideally suited to all the sorts of tasks you might want to perform on a piece of paper and/or a hand-held computing device based on a paper metaphor.

Old devices had styli because the screens were resistive and needed pressure to register touches. Since pressure is a function of force per area, a smaller area (tip of the stylus vs tip of the finger) needs less force applied in order to register touches. It was a necessity that capacitive screens did away with by making fingertips practical.

But just because they are no longer a necessity, doesn't mean they aren't actually still useful for some tasks. If you want to do artwork and or handwriting on a tablet, a stylus is still the best way to go. Just because a screen is capacitive like your iOS devices screen doesn't mean you can't use a stylus if and when it's the right tool for the job--you just need a capacitive stylus.

If you weren't of a mind to do any handwriting/art on your tablet/phone whatever, then simply don't ever use the stylus. Continue using your fingers and you'll enjoy the same user experience you would with any other device. Having the extra choice won't hurt you.

Comment Re:Hitachi Makes a Touch Screen That's Pressure Se (Score 1) 330

You can buy a capacitive stylus and it will work just fine if all you want it for is *note taking*. The only reason you need true pressure sensitivity is for art purposes--where you can control the thickness of a line, for instance, by how hard you press. There are any number of companies who are currently extremely eager to sell you a stylus for an iPad or iPad 2--just look for them and you'll find them.

Comment IGZO doesn't sound very impressive to me (Score 4, Interesting) 330

""The IGZO technology is perfect in that it offers near-OLED power consumption while having a lower cost and thinness that is only 25% greater than OLED, based on our checks," said Jeffries analyst Peter Misek."

So let me get this right. It's 25% thicker than OLED and uses MORE power, but it costs less to make. On the face of it, that doesn't seem like a very Appley component choice. On the other hand, getting high quality (Super) AMOLED screens means dealing with Samsung, something which Apple doesn't seem to want to do at the moment for silly grudge purposes. So the question becomes, "Does Apple want to sacrifice product quality in exchange for a small savings and sticking it to Samsung?"

If Steve Jobs were still around, I'd say "Yes."--he had a well noted penchant for carrying a grudge to extremes. I'd like a bigger screen as much, or more than the next guy, but I'm not 100% sure how plausible this whole story seems to me in a post-Steve Apple era. On the other, other hand, it might have more to do with the fact that Samsung is too big to bully, and Apple likes to have total control over it's supply chains.

Comment Re:Seems fair... (Score 1) 680

On the subject of freedom of religion, Thomas Jefferson once said "But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

I've always thought that was a pretty good quote--that it more or less summarized what the Libertarian view *ought* to be. People should be free to do what they wish, so long as it neither breaks my back nor picks my pocket. But the fact is, the people who call themselves Libertarians these days are generally whiny self-entitled jerks who don't seem to have any understanding larger than themselves. Basically, they're still stuck with the same petulant mentality the rest of us had as teenagers, but thankfully grew out of.

Under that Jeffersonian maxim, your rights end when your actions have consequences for other people. When you don't get vaccinated, you put yourself at risk. Just like driving without a seat-belt. So far, no problems. But you also put other people at risk. Organ transplant recipients and AIDS patients who are immunosuppressed and people with allergies (usually egg allergies) who can't get vaccinated depend on the herd immunity provided by having the rest of us vaccinated. As long as everyone else is immune, there's no one to spread diseases to them.

If you choose not to vaccinate yourself or your child, you don't just put yourself or your child at risk, you put all those other people at risk too. It's only a small amount of risk, but in the aggregate it matters. It's just like driving drunk--everyone else on the road is a little less safe because of your actions. Maybe it'll amount to nothing, but those risks weren't yours to take. You don't have that right and it's the governments job, on behalf of the rest of us, to make damn sure you know it.

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