They will need radiation shielding on Mars too.

In a talk on current measurements for radiation levels on Mars I attended, the scientists responsible for the radiation measurement instrumentation said the rough dose you would get per year is around 100 x-rays worth. That's quite a lot, but not going to kill you anytime soon.

That was with little solar activity, but you could provide a shielded area to retreat to if something happened to hit while the sun was up.

You can model this behavior because the participants are not self aware.

With humans, if behavior can be modeled then one or more of the participants can discern that model, and take actions to disrupt it (for profit).

So from the outside a real market with humans in involved is pretty much always going to be an unpredictable chaotic system.

So if you drag left or right witihin some predefined angle, it shall be considered a horizontal swipe rather than a 2D arbitrary angle swipe. And nobody ever did this before?

This one actually seems valid, I don't know of any touch screens before that even could detect angle of input much less adjusted for it in this way. Before hand most input did not really factor in angle of input at all.

Apple has not dodged a cent of tax. They have paid more tax than just about all of the other corporations combined - six *billion* dollars just in 2012!

Apple pays what it owes - in the U.S.. Just as it pays the taxes it owes in OTHER countries.

Some people like you get upset because Apple does not bring the money back to the U.S. to be taxed a second time. Well, why would or should they? They are even willing to for a reasonable fee, but the U.S. does not have corporate tax rates anywhere near reasonable - they are higher than any country on earth.

It is a crazy statement, the only thing I can think is that the journalist messed up what is actually being done... perhaps there is also encryption happening on the server in addition to SSL, though if you break into the server decrypting the messages on the fly it seems a short skip to get the content anyway... but at least they can't just copy a database file. They have to copy the database file AND a private key that was stored on the same server. :-)

You can do something though! Do you refuse to do anything to help even one person with disease because it won't fix the entire problem?

I do when I know nothing of what I contribute will go to help the one person with disease (or other problems).

The government obey the law

No they don't, they have taken to just ignoring the law, using it primarily these days as a tool only against those they disagree with or for partisan attack.

Correct me if I'm wrong

Ok, you're 100% wrong.

A Gauss gun involves no explodes, or cartridges. The projectile is propelled only by magnetic force.

This is exactly why people should play Car Wars at some point, to understand better all varieties of weaponry possible.

My phone was on DND. Didn't help. Still sounded like my house was on fire.

That seems like a really bad idea, DND is there for a reason and pretty much for sure indicates you are not in a position to do anything (on the other hand, it should not block out the weather alerts I guess). If the alert overrides DND I can see a ton of people turning it off.

If you look into it at *all*, AMBER alerts have been even less useful

I would submit they have been less useful because they were not in the past going to individuals on such a wide scale - it's easy to miss a billboard and by the time you are past to forget what it said. To me it seems pretty obvious alerts would be noticed by a lot more people going to individual cell phones and actually make it quite likely someone would see and report the car if the search radius is large enough. Also it may well have an impact of forcing the kidnapper to release the child once they realize many people will be looking for them... "security theater" is accidentally an excellent term because sometimes it has a very real psychological effect on a criminal beyond the actual effect, but the impact and benefits are not zero.

Normally I am not a "think of the children" kind of person, no. But in this one case the threshold of annoyance is so low and the potential/upside to helping so great that I can see it makes a lot of sense to have a system like this in place.

it's that it's in fact extremely rare

Which is why I find an alert acceptable because it will not happen often. If it were not rare an alert of this kind would not be acceptable.

the "solution" spends an absurd amount of time, money, and attention

Once the system is in place there is hardly any money involved in sending out an alert. The attention is minimal and the system can be used in other very obviously useful ways like very localized flooding alerts (which I've gotten).

And the implementation was so bad it managed to piss off people instead of encourage them to help.

That's the only part that needs some fixing, but I would warrant even a lot of pissed off people were still looking for that car.

On the other hand, some of us have decided not to live our lives as totally selfish assholes.

It does no good whatsoever to send out the alerts unless you push them out to a meaningful radius. Yes the chance that YOU may see something is slim, but the chance SOMEONE will see something goes up dramatically with a wide enough search radius. It would literally do zero good whatsoever to send the alert to a 10 mile radius because in pretty much every case of child kidnapping ever the person is far away from that zone.

Happily you can simply turn off the alert on your phone and remove any random chance you might save someones life, so can can avoid a slightly annoying buzzing that lasts for a few seconds.

Did you get the message on your phone? I did. It was just a plain bad experience for most people. Scared the crap out of me, it vibrated and made a crazy loud noise I'd never heard before even though my phone was in my pocket and supposedly on mute.

No, but I've gotten similar severe weather alerts. It's not supposed to be buckets of fun, it's supposed to alert a whole lot of people to look out for a car with a kidnapped child.

The first thing I did was disable all future amber alerts

Another option is to use the DND (do not disturb) feature which I believe overrides the national alerts and prevents a 2am wakeup call when you can't help.

Disabling an important warning system that could save children seems kind of... selfish.

The radius needs to be quite wide, because a person can travel a great distance in a car in a short period of time. 800 miles would not be unreasonable depending on when the missing child was reported.

Abducted children are often taken quite far away.

The fact it was an Amber alert tells you a child is involved, and the alert had all other information needed to report something, basically the plates and make/model of the car.

I guess the different times of reception are an issue but something is better than nothing, and it takes time to work through a list of many cell phone numbers to send out an alert... obviously they do need to improve on the speed of that, and try to remove duplicates.

Just how long do you think it takes to drive 300 miles in a CAR which can travel at over 60MPH? Why would someone who kidnapped a child stay in the same area anyway? 300 miles is peanuts for that kind of alert, it should really be more like the possible distance travelled in a generous window since the disappearance was reported, not just five hours...

The whole point of the thing is to alert people in a huge radius to be on the lookout for the car. The alert had just the information needed - if you saw that car you could just call 911.

Really? Aside from one fan to cool everything (which is a potential advantage) I can't see anything particularly good about it.

A central heat sync is an amazingly good idea that should help keep the whole system much cooler.

The memory and storage speed are also fantastic.

Removal of front ports is a terrible idea

It's so small, and it rotates, that I really don't see that as a problem. It's meant to be up on a desk, not hiding under it where ports have been hard to get to.

inability to upgrade things like graphics card

It comes with two already, but you can also add more for computation via Thunderbolt.

Sure it's smaller, but it's a desktop so who the hell cares about that?

I care if it doesn't sacrifice power for size, which it doesn't. Most desktops are large to accommodate airflow, but with a better design there's no reason to be.

It offers a ton of performance in a quieter, more compact and easily externally expandable package... I had no interest in a desktop before the Mac Pro, but now I'm thinking I may get one for primary computing at home and possibly even some work at client sites as it's portable enough. There's a lot to be said for a very powerful and portable desktop that doesn't have a screen attached, because lots of places have extra screens now...