I know most people don't realize it, but a weaker dollar would HELP the U.S. The whole reason we're in an economic mess in the first place is because the U.S. corporations have shipped a lot of the U.S. manufacturing overseas. China selling off their U.S. debt would appreciate the renminbi & depreciate the dollar, thus making U.S. manufacturing more attractive and providing much needed jobs. Of course, none of this benefits you if you are a rentier making profits on the backs of high U.S. unemployment & cheap labor in China, & those people have convinced the largely ignorant populace to support a strong dollar against their best interest.

No, I am je ne sais quoi. His comment had none of me, I assure you.

I was thinking this bill could actually much worse than just wishing for a scientific process that doesn't exist: there is a large and gaping flaw in its logic. Much of our regulations are issued because of large-scale damage to the ecosystem that costs much more to deal with its consequences than prevent (e.g., the added health costs of air pollution). However, in large systems, especially those involving human beings and livelihood, it is utterly impossible to reproduce something, like the climate change over the entire Earth,. According to the logic, to regulate dumping chemicals in a lake, you'd have to show that not dumping chemicals in the same lake under the same conditions doesn't result in mass fish die offs, increased risk of cancer for local inhabitants, etc. Since regulations are issued only after something becomes a problem, you can't ever reproduce the pristine conditions. How do you know it was chemicals and wasn't the weather that killed all those fish? You didn't reproduce the experiment.

As for the EPA using secret science, this is an utter load of bull-shit. All of EPA's studies are on-line and publically available. Here is a link to the searchable database containing the superfund site Records of Decision: http://www.epa.gov/superfund/c...

This is another manufactured crisis like the "war" on Christmas attempting to make people on the left (or anyone who doesn't agree with them) into demons. Assholes.

10% of the market?

I concur. Last quarter MS said Surface sales doubled, but they haven't given any solid numbers and last quarter they had a $0.9 billion write-off in order to dump their old inventory. One estimate suggests that sales can't be more than 1 million at best, more likely something like 850k. Now, compare that to Apple's 14.1 million units over the same quarter and that Apple is something like 30% of the tablet market, you realize that any projections of MS Surface capturing any substantial part of the market are just silly.

On the bright side, I did just see my first Surface being used in the wild recently. Granted, we didn't actually use it for anything, but I finally did meet someone who bought one. Maybe MS can do what they did with Xbox and just continue dumping money into it until they out-subidize their competitors (a.k.a. stereotypical monopolist behavior).

A gps software from Microsoft once attempted to get my Dad to drive along what we think was a power line to the top of the tallest peak in Virginia. Pretty interesting stuff, not only was there no road there, it was far too steep for a vehicle anyway. Fortunately we were able to find a hiking trailhead through other means (reading signs instead of listening to a robot....maybe what these people should have done too.)

Exactly. You can make your phone the most secure thing in the world, requiring a randomized string of alphanumerics umpteen characters long that you recite from memory, but you've also made it utterly impractical to use.

One thing I noticed about this method is that they didn't get their fingerprints from the iphone itself, on the site they got them from a glass bottle. There's a lot of residue from fingerprints on my screen and a lot of potential fingerprints, but some of them are smudged from where I moved my finger, but I'd like to see if someone can use prints from an actual phone, everything else requires that the attacker have physical access to places you've been, but by far the most likely scenario where this will be useful will be to keep people out if I leave my phone somewhere unintentionally.

Shoot, I couldn't care less about blocking other people's texting, what I want is to block texting to my own phone selectively. If they aren't in my contacts list, I don't want their text message. This is mostly, but not entirely due to AT&T's (and everyone else's) abusive pricing strategy for texts. What I would call fair is rates for text messages that are charged the same as the equivalent amount of voice data. As it is, Apple never did a better thing by creating Messages for iOS and imessage.app for OS X. It's a pity they don't open their standard so that android devices or linux computers can use the same protocol and I would never have to pay for another text message.

The new mac pro is likely to be very quiet. I know, this isn't something we think about as much as the specs., but as someone who has their home/media/gaming rig humming behind them, quiet is good. Same goes for work, if I'm running all the cores 100% and can still have a conversation in my office or listen to classical music without headphone or annoying my neighbor, that's a good thing. I've considered buying an apple tv or mac mini for media, but I have enough computers around already (probably too many) and if I can have my cake and eat it too with media and high framerate gaming on a single machine, I'm all for it. So the mac pro is innovative, despite your assertion, it just doesn't innovate in a way you would want.

I couldn't care less about expandability, long ago I figured out that rather than upgrade my machines later in life, I just "upgrade" them when purchasing them and then don't worry about it for five years or so until the purchase (incidentally, is it just me or is lifetime of PCs getting longer?).

Whoops, I forgot to add, that it also looks like the Surface Pro is a little too expensive to be pick up a big section of the market. People who want to drop $1000 might just be buy a laptop instead. It's too expensive for a glorified e-book reader, but my guess is it isn't also a complete replacement for a work laptop.

Full disclosure: as a long time Apple and Linux user, I'm completely new to the whole Surface thing. I don't think I've ever even seen one, Pro or RT. But I too have also read that the Surface Pro seems like a nice little machine, and can do things the ipad can't do as easily because of the I/O and display ports, whereas the ipad can give you cellular data if you need that and the resolution on the display is higher. In fact, the two machines seem to be broadly comparable:

http://ipad.about.com/od/ipad_competition/a/Microsoft-Surface-Pro-Vs-Ipad-4-Comparison-Chart.htm

So why the abysmal sales of the Surface Pro? My guess would also be the price point, Apple has a low price point ($499 for retina display, but the ipad 2 is only $399) that you can expand the storage in it to get high storage (up to 128 Gb at $799 with cellular is $929) or the cellular stuff. MS put out the RT at a low price point too ($349) with the Pro as its higher end model (64 Gb for $899, 128 Gb for $999). So the MS low end is lower than the ipad and the high end is higher.

Could it be that the RT is too limited in terms of what you can do with it, and that Apple got people to buy ipads because they made all their apps for the iphone immediately available on the ipad, so people knew what they were getting?

Do you realize that you just spent your whole post describing the detail of what you hate about metro, but never actually mentioned what it is you like about 2012 and the "nice new stuff"? As an OS X/linux user who has not yet even seen Win8, I was all ready to hear about what is nice & new in it, but I never found out. This isn't a criticism, just an observation: an uninformed reader might take away that your emphasis on what is wrong with Windows 8 drowns out any benefit.

It all depends on how the acts are portrayed. When they blew up Alderaan, all the characters were horrified, except for the evil people we the audience were supposed to see as evil. As TFA points out, when they dismember or mutilate a droid, everyone, even people we the audience are supposed to interpret as the good guys, sometimes laugh or make light of it. See the difference? If they showed someone having remorse for the number of deactivated droids in the droid wars, it wouldn't be a problem. The author's point is also that the droids do suffer when bad things happen to them, they're not necessarily the unfeeling machines of today. In fairness to Lucas, in ROTJ at one point he does show some droids being tortured, but it was being done by people we were supposed to see as evil (Jabba and his henchmen).

. Dude, whatever. You keep you glasses and your kinect, I'll take the new mac pro and we'll see who gets more accomplished. The inventions you are describing are very innovative and clever, but they are not a phone or tablet that will end up in every home, they are not a device that will replace computers. They are in essence toys with a limited marketshare.

You seemed to have missed the part where I wrote: "I try to get out of the left lane as soon as I can..."

What part of "I try to get out of the left lane as soon as I can..." did you not understand?