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Comment I love my convertable (Score 1) 143

Use, but not over use. This is what a lot of hardware manufacturers do not comprehend. Tablets are great for a certain, limited set of tasks. Mice are great, keyboards are greatâ¦but also only for limited things. Having a fusion of them all is liberating and very functional.

When I taught, a convertible tablet + OneNote + a wireless projector was AMAZING. It 100% replaces paper and the blackboard. It decimates a smartboard. I could walk around anywhere in my room, using it as a tablet, making notes for my students. Notes were forever saved and searchable and editable. But, handwriting can never, ever, hope to replace the functionality and efficiency of typing for anything that consists mostly of words. So, when I needed to put down some serious text, or write a test - boom - I had a laptop. Need to Google something for class - boom - keyboard. On screen keyboards may as well be a death sentence and handwriting is way slower even for the worst typist. However, if you need to write an equation, Windows has a math input screen. You handwrite the equation and it converts it to a typed equation. You cannot type an equation that fast even if you knew every keyboard shortcut.

The convertible allows you to pick the tools for the job, so you don't have to hammer in screws. Sure, you can hammer in screws in a pinch, but who wants to do that? Use, but not overuse.

You might say, "just get two machines". That is inconvenient. Should I have a desktop everywhere I might work? Should I sync all my documents to the cloud so I can always have them? Should I sync my bookmarks also?

I cannot wait for apple to make a convertible. That way the popular opinion will change and everyone can appreciate how sweet these computers are.

Comment Re:Due Process (Score 3, Insightful) 1737

Pretty much. I don't particularly think Zimmerman's innocent, but I do think there is a pretty good case that there's reasonable doubt as to whether he's guilty. I mean, come on. Does anyone seriously think O. J. Simpson didn't kill those people? Nah. But the prosecution failed to prove their case, so he was "not guilty".

Comment Re:What about asking for help? (Score 1) 90

Couple things:
1. They may not know. I know it sounds weird, but students don't always know when they don't know what's going on.
2. I have known a fair number of people whose parents or teachers taught them not to "make waves" -- say, asking for help. They just freeze up and quietly fail. Yeah, they can get better from that, but getting better requires, in part, getting at least some help they need but can't ask for.

Comment Re:I thought it was a toy store (Score 1) 330

Agree. Their music section just duplicated what I could get at WalMart or Target for a lot less; I'm not interested in pop music. Classical content was laughable. Although some of the toys were fun, we don't have children to buy for any more. So that was just more space taken away from their primary mission of selling books. Borders offered a wider selection of books (in its prime). When we had both stores available to us, I'd go to the local B&N for browsing, and Borders (further away) when trying to find something obscure.

Amazon scratches the 'obscure' itch much better than Borders, but doesn't offer the same browsing experience.

Comment Barnes & Noble closed the profitable store her (Score 4, Interesting) 330

(Reston VA), In part due to contract dispute with the mall owner. But they could have moved into a nice Borders store location about 5 miles away in Sterling VA. Instead, they pointed me to their store in Tyson's Corner, which costs me $5 in tolls and puts me in the middle of a traffic mess. I felt sorry for the Reston store employees and the managers who did a good job with our local store, handing one my B&N Readers Card. I said, "Send this to Corporate. Tell them to look up how much I've spent -in this store- over the last 15 years. Tell them that 95% of that business is going to Amazon, because I will not drive to Tysons and B&N offers me no alternative."

I really miss browsing in a paper bookstore, Amazon does not offer the same experience (their suggestions aren't as useful for me as they think they are...) The loss of B&N will be significant for consumers, I think. But I'm mostly through the 5 stages of mourning for them.

Comment Re:Don't jump to conclusions! Hear BOTH sides! (Score 0) 666

How many exactly is "way too many"? Would that be "at least one, ever, that you can prove"?

Because I've never yet seen a single demonstrable case of a false rape accusation, but I know at least half a dozen people, probably more, who have definitely been raped. At least three of them by family members when they were kids.

And the thing about "innocent until proven guilty" is: That's criminal law. That's not a moral standard, it's not a logical standard of claims to accept. Legally, O.J. Simpson is innocent of murder of the people he killed. But that doesn't mean he didn't kill them, it just means that the jury didn't feel that the prosecution had shown it beyond a reasonable doubt.

Comment Anything can be used to justify violence... (Score 1) 470

Sure religion can, but what about economics or evolution? Just a little bit of thought applied to those and you can justify whatever violence you want. The REAL point is that there are evil people. They can and will use any philosophy, science, religion or technology to do bad things.

It saddens me greatly too see people on the internet blindly jumping on the 'religion is the problem' bandwagon. It's just as bad as any of the 'videogames, guns, books, dancing...etc' is the problem thinking.

Can we just accept there are bad people and bad people do bad things with anything? Can we jail just those people without the need to take away everyone else's freedoms?

Comment Safari doesn't cache at all (Score 4, Informative) 118

From the securityevaluators.com document (2nd reference in the base article): Safari. Apple Safari does not cache HTTPS-delivered content to disk, regardless of any headers sent by the server. ISE tested the mobile version of Safari on an iPad 2, and the HTTPS caching behavior was identical to the desktop version.

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