That's only with 'Special Offers'. It's $10 more without (which would be a fair comparison to the Nook Touch)

"Amazon and Google Give Into Apple's Demands; Drop In-App Purchase Buttons"

MUDs... heck, I'm building one just for the nostalgia (because without the sound of the modem, using telnet just doesn't feel the same). Anyone remember playing MajorMud or TradeWars or other BBS games?

Not totally different. They do one overlapping thing: they issue statements to the public.

trust in a very generic way means our belief that they'll do their "given task"

I didn't say that. I didn't imply that. I was very specific in my definition of trust, and I think this definition is rather obviously gleaned from the survey, and, in fact, that the definition of trust as "reliably telling the truth" is actually used at least as frequently as "behave predictably in doing what they do," if not more so. It isn't terribly meaningful to survey people about whether or not they trust that they can predict the behavior of one group more than another (at least, not nearly so as the alternative). So...as I said, it is a bit obtuse to completely ignore the context and select the wrong definition of truth as the one that they mean. Perhaps I was wrong...you did get a lot of moderation there.

...and once again you drive home my other point. Living in a world where people don't know the difference between marketing (or, as the case may be, newspaper bias) and lying sucks. They aren't the same thing. Lying is much, much worse.

Keeping in mind what is possible through *freely available* VMs, and the programs that are available on any platform, if the skillset that you gain in high school computer usage is so specific that you *need* a windows machine to do your work, because it probably means that you need Windows 7, and won't even be flexible enough to handle Windows 8.

None of this stuff matters. I can go sit down at a Mac, PC, linux box, whatever. Tell me how to get to the word processor. Tell me how to get to the software that I use the most.

Do you think, from an administrative level, that it's ever been about that? That's just a symptom of the problem. The biggest security risk is stupid users, and nothing you do can stop them from getting their computers infected with something. The cure is having separation of security concerns to limit the damage, and it's still more of a (only a) problem for Windows than it is for anything else. If I was a computer administrator that had to support 1600 laptops that I didn't actually have control over, I would want something to make it easy to fix them and isolate problems.

From the perspective of the school, though, the things that they're going to worry about are the things that everybody has and that teachers are actively told to encourage the use of. And it's a lot easier to support 1600 identical machines than it is a huge number of completely different kind of machines.

In summary: the premise that a particular piece of software is necessary to gain an understanding of how computers, technology, or anything that one would learn in high school is ridiculous. Of course, if I ever have children, I'm sure that mine will be unbelievably competitive compared to yours if you teach 'em that full mastery of how to navigate windows and use office products will take them somewhere in life while I'm teaching them the underlying concepts that govern how all computers work. ;)

Well...the poll is clearly trusting its readers to be able to glean the rather obvious context of "trust" from the question.

We're asking how much we trust news outlets, google, apple, and Microsoft to tell us the truth.

And I have to say, the news seems to have done a fantastic job at indoctrinating us with their crap.
Looking through this thread, I don't see a single article that differentiates between "bias" and "lies."

If we're going to talk about semantics, that's a lot more important. There must be a line of trust beyond which any transgression makes me trust that you're trying to fool me into believing something that you don't believe.
And past that line we're not talking about bias.

This is why I don't trust MS as much as traditional media. I know that they will never tell me when their product isn't suitable to my needs (which usually happens because it isn't ready for market yet). They want to sell it to me, even if they have to lie to do so. With traditional media, truth sells...some of the time, anyway. If a paper always lies, they're not going to have as many sales. With corporations, they just call that marketing.

Sounds like there's a design flaw in the rubber that's being used...or in the ink that most everybody makes. I would much rather have a printer that makes due with any kind of ink over one that requires super-fancy-awesome ink.

Perhaps the flaw is using ink at all, rather than using heated powder?

In any case, I don't really care if they've solved the our-ink-doesn't-destroy-our-printers problem, because the actual problem that I want solved is "how do I convert this image on my computer into a printout?" If the tech that does this has a huge number of ancillary problems that come up because of it's weaknesses, then perhaps it isn't the best solution.

Perhaps we should be using laser. I've got a laserjet 5si that I've had for years. I use 30 pages per week. I get a new cartridge once every five years or so. The last one cost me $30. The printer cost me $100. When a part on the machine wears out, I buy a new one. This has happened once, and I paid $30.

We have no economic reason to buy into this game. Laser looks absolutely fantastic.

SEO. Exactly. I self-published a book on Lulu, made it available all over by purchasing an ISBN, and put up a website with samples, some SEO, and a completely free PDF version (Creative Commons). Searching for my book or parts of my book title lead you to... my book, then a few other places also hosting copies of the PDF and linking back to my site. So the answer is, do a better job of branding the book online. Period. For reference, it's a PHP Book: http://www.phpreferencebook.com/

Or you could just download books released under Creative Commons. Just sayin'. I always will release digital versions in PDF for free, and only charge for the Kindle version because they kinda make you (so it's really cheap). Maybe it's the wrong crowd, it is a PHP Book after all, but none-the-less, you wouldn't have bought it if it was for sales digitally, so might as well share it. http://www.phpreferencebook.com/

Or you could release a digital version of the book for free via Creative Commons, and only sell it in print (or special formats like Kindle). Nothing wrong with playing both sides. I did it with http://www.phpreferencebook.com/ and have no desire to ever change that.

You're saying that there's no such thing as table salt. This is obviously false.

Compounds with strong ionic bonds tend to disassociate completely in water forming the constituent ions (completely being as previously indicated - not really complete).

However, the moment that they leave the water, they're back to what they were - full molecules again.

You're welcome to take

I've only seen Victoria Beckham in one movie, but she played it well..

just aren't willing to fund the social programs and mental health infrastructure to take care of these people, so they end up in the streets. and not all cities with a homeless population have shelters

You seem like someone who has never spent any time with any crazy homeless people. Nearly all big cities do have shelters. All the ones I've visited and had the chance to look do (Orlando, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Indianapolis).

Those are generally *not* for the crazy homeless, though. They're for the temporarily homeless. If you really want to keep being homeless, and you refuse any medical treatment that will help you get better, you are allowed to remain homeless. You are not forced to change. I know that the primary city in which I've lived - Orlando - has *plenty* of ways of keeping people from being homeless and of giving the very, very poor homes and medical treatment - both through the government and through local philanthropic organizations.

little has been done about it

Thanks especially to this, we realized that "fixing" such people means that we're curtailing their freedom - freedom to be crazy, and freedom to make the choices that leave them homeless.

Let me have my own self-destructive vices; let the homeless have theirs. It is their right as human beings. Don't try to make decisions for them. I am proud that we live in a country were we don't lock up our crazy people like criminals just because we don't like the way that they think, and am glad that "little is being done about it."

Money is at the crux of this issue, in two ways:

I noticed in your sig that you are a consultant. I am as well...to government agencies. I convert gibberish into cash-flow...but it's not the gibberish I spew. Bear all that in mind when I bring up my other points, also related to money:

3) The *domain* in which an agency works determines what is optimal IT-wise for them to do their work. Some of that can, and should, be standardized way more. This is not always intuitive. (For example, a police department actually needs to spend much more on Geographical Information Services software than does a transit authority). Believing that a single man is going to know enough to actually make standardization of every kind of government agency is a recipe for disaster. IT improvement has to come from within the agencies themselves.

4) People with knowledge and vision to do Things the Right Way are almost never in a position to do so because experienced government work pays so badly compared to its industry counterparts. What you get, then is the people who either won't leave their government jobs because they don't have the motivation to do so (which means that they *naturally resist change*), or people who aren't competent enough to learn new things.

Part of that is knowing how to use the libraries that you need.

There is but a single construct within normal SQL that can't be represented in Hibernate - functions in subselects anywhere except the select subclause.

You can do absolutely everything else, and there's even a workaround for that - use functions only within the select subclause, or use formulas (same thing). My guess is that you didn't actually look into how HQL works.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that there are libraries for a single task, and libraries to make programming itself easier. You've chosen libraries that fall into the second category. If it's not making your life easier most of the time and at *every* level of scalability, you're probably using them wrong.

My general experience is that libraries that implement a lot of extra functionality that you don't need, but that you *have to use* in order to use them are generally more pain than they're worth. If you need to extend, you often have to implement lots of extra stuff that you're not using. Otherwise, the libraries give you a good starting place, if nothing else.