Or, what if, hear me out now, what if colleges stopped the campus beautification arms race, and quit spending hundreds of millions of dollars on new buildings, and then passed the cost savings on to students?

I think Salk's polio vaccine was easily worth many times this amount. Of course, he refused to patent it, so that it could get out to do the greatest good as quickly as possible.

Well, I guess I'm part of the idiocy then, I just bought one. I also owned the original surface book. I'm a greybeard, been doing this since TRS-80. Was linux guy for a long time till OSX was a better linux, then did macs. I only say all this to provide some context, I'm really far from being a ms fanboi.

The Surface Book devices are hands down the best computing devices I've ever owned. Not even close to anything else. And yes, I've owned and still own top-end Macs, top-end System 76 Linux boxes, etc...

Windows 10 is a delight. With WSL enabled, I have everything I want and need immediately available. The precision touchpad on the surface book is the only one I've ever used that's comparable to a mac, and works amazingly well. I set up three or for different desktops and four-finger brush between them, and three finger brush between apps in a desktop. This is better than the OSX experience.

The battery drain issue is overblown imho and experience. I played Divinity 2 dialed all the way up for hours and the battery charged, albeit slowly.

Additionally, even if you're getting a drain, it's not like it's going to ruin your day. We're talking about like 5-10% per hour or something, plugged in. I mean, you can game for a really long time at max-awesome without any problem. And guess what. When you take a break to eat lunch, the laptop will be fully charged again when you're ready.

I had the same concern before I bought it, and then realized that basically this is a non-issue for real, practical purposes. This laptop is lightweight, has amazing engineering and unique features, a detachable tablet, and can play modern games without really working hard.

Hell, I played Divinity 2 on battery *alone* for almost three hours. I've never seen a laptop that can do that. Ever.

Considering that I spend 10-14 hours a day on my laptop, the $3k I paid for this one is well worth it.

Microsoft, on the other hand, DO have infinite money, and they continue to demonstrate why rewriting large, business critical software isn't just a bad idea, it's great for shareholders.

I mean, on paper the specs are great, but I've actually done projects with these things and they're seriously junk. They burn out if you look at them wrong. Additionally, they have a 1.8v gpio level, so there's basically zero chance that you can use any other peripheral without level shifting.

I've talked to a lot of other folks about them as well, they have a terrible reputation in the maker community.

And they're expensive.

So yeah, I'm not surprised. I abandoned them after a single project, like most other folks I know.

No, no. You're missing the point. Apple sales and revenues are in decline. They need to innovate, but they don't have Steve.

Conversation goes something like this:

"Crap. We're dying here. We need new ideas!"
"Sorry sir, we don't have any."
"Well, shit."
"Wait, I have an idea - what if we take away all the really useful parts of a laptop..."
"What the fuck? Are you stupid?"
"No, no hear me out. Then, Mac Book Pro 2017 will have a brand new super functional multipurpose button that let's you communicate to a running process that you want to exit out of the current activity... we'll call it, the iEsc - and run marketing ads with beaches... The All New Mac Book 2017 - Escape The Norm"
"I like where you're going with this..."

In 1995, a kid in my dorm showed me this new OS called Be. Running on a PowerMac 603 with a single cpu and 16mb of ram, he showed me how Be could play 6 video files simultaneously. Mapped to 6 faces of a cube. And you could spin the cube around via the mouse while all 6 videos were playing. Never any input lag, or dropped frames. It was a thing of beauty.

I for one can't wait to ruin Microsoft by settling for a coupon for $10 off Windows 11.

Why don't they build the ENTIRE PLANE out of USB drives?

Microsoft have been wantonly abusing their customers with these non-consentual updates to Windows 10. This should not stand. There needs to be strong legal action against this sort of thing. Let's start by calling it what it is: #WindowsUpdateRape.

I didn't consent to the upgrade, I repeatedly said no, Microsoft repeatedly re-pushed the same upgrader and nagware to my machine. The best way to describe this behavior is "update rape".

OK but they're not daddies.

I think browser developers could all have gone a little bit further and not enabled their proprietary CSS prefixes in production releases by default. Maybe push those into a "developers only" mode, or an extension, but keep it out of production.

The prefixed CSS rules were supposed to be for not-yet finalized pre-standards versions of stuff the W3C hadn't yet finalized, to give web developers a chance to play with them, test them, and provide feedback so that when W3C finalized their recommendation, they were well tested in the real world and good.

By making them available to everyone early, it incentivized web developers who wanted their websites to look "cutting edge" to make use of the unofficial properties before they were ready. Also, the slowness with which W3C has historically acted to finalize their recommendations exacerbates this incentive. If a web developer waits for the W3C to finalize and only uses W3C recommendations, they're left hoplelessly behind the state of the art.

From that point, it was only a matter of time before a dominant browser emerged with its proprietary prefixes became de facto standards adopted by web developers before W3C was ready to finalize their own version of them. What else could they do?

So, blame W3C for not being faster, but mainly blame browser developers for tacitly allowing and encouraging developers to make use of the experimental CSS properties ahead of itme for production sites.

I may disagree with the whole premise of this. I also don't discount the possibility that I'm easily duped or have poor cognitive abilities and am a sucker.

It's common practice for artists to generate random words in different configurations in order to draw new insights, inspiration and ideas.

Also, just because something is randomly generated, doesn't mean it's not insightful. How it is possible to objectively judge?

FTFA: "Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena". Even though I was told that this phrase was nonsense and randomly generated, I decided to think about it a bit to see if there was an insight I can draw.

Here's one:
In our lives, we're constantly flooded with external stimuli. Text messages, advertisements, flashing lights, warnings, political messages, friends in crisis, problems at work, deadlines, all stridently competing for our attention (infinite phenomena). Personality flaws and weaknesses allow some of these to catch us and drive us in unhealthy directions. If we can work to fix our flaws (wholeness) we can have more effective defenses against the infinite flood of events pushing us and driving us to action (buy this, sell that, believe this, become outraged, donate, think this way, etc...). Becoming a healthy, mature, thoughtful person helps reduce or eliminate the effect that these external driving forces have on us (quiets). Ergo, Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena.

I don't know. BS? Maybe. Possibly. But also thought provoking. I think I like the random phrases.

Maybe people who are planning to commit acts of terror are very likely to study engineering, so that they'll have the sort of knowledge that will be useful in destroying things that engineers design and build?