Note that the NewEgg's refusal is based on the original OS being missing rather than a new OS being installed according to that email. My guess is that the user formatted the HD before installing Linux. Most OEM PCs now come with a recovery partition which is used to perform a factory reset. If the user erased this partition, then NewEgg would be unable to reset the device to its initial state for testing. It would be similar to the user returning the device by not returning important CDs.
This appears to be another reactionless drive [1] that sci-fi authors and crackpots come up with every few years. There are many variants of these designs [2] and a drive based on the Casimir effect is just one of them. However, they all tend to violate a critical law of physics or depend on a custom theory of physics [3]
There's also some variants that do work, or at least could work in theory, which turn out to simply be highly inefficient photon drives. For instance, one recurring one that seems to get reinvented every few years is one where you put two electromagnets some distance from each other, and use the speed of light delay and some moderately clever polarity flipping to make it so the magnets always attract or repel each other in one direction, providing thrust. There's no reason why this won't work... except that also shoots huge amounts of defocused radio waves out the back, which is where the equal & opposite momentum is "coming from", and it's wildly less efficient in every conceivable way than simply shooting a conventional laser in the opposite of the direction you want to thrust. (And there's some other caveats too when you really get down to the engineering task of trying to flip the polarity of really powerful magnets at the necessary rate of speed. But it is conceivable that using real physics, you might be able to build something with this principle that could generate vanishing fractions of a Newton without necessarily blowing up....)
Based on the link you provide, and guessing what the QM equivalent of the differential sail (this thing, I think: [1]) would be, it seems to me this could fall into either class, something that simply won't work or something that will turn out to be another variant of inefficient electromagnetic radiation drive, once the full set of interactions is taken into account. (It's pretty easy to miss some of the more subtle ways of creating electromagnetic waves.)
Actually the appstore itself is not "open", as in Google Play is proprietary. Unless by open you mean anyone can submit an app. But parent said "how open the software is".
Customers not on a contract and willing to avoid AT&T, Verizon and Sprint can avoid quite a bit of fees. E.g. T-mobile has a $30 plan for 100 minutes, 5GB of 3G (and EDGE after that), and unlimited SMSs. The 100 minutes is problematic, but I use Google Voice so I can just use my computer for phone calls at home. And at $0.10 per minute overages, it's still cheaper than any of the contract plans.
There are also other carriers in the US with cheap plans if you're willing to shop around.
This by itself would now be difficult for me. I have an unlimited (grandfathered) data plan from Verizon with 4G. I know several people who have it now, and they would never go back to 3G. Any MVNO that Google creates is going to have to support the latest technology.
There have been rumors of Apple creating their own cellular company - now would be the right time. Create a 4G-only cellular company that provides unlimited (HD) voice, texts, and data for one flat rate, Apple-style, with no contracts.
It's actually T-Mobile's HSPA+ network, which is somewhere between 3G and 4G. In theory, it should go up to 45Mbit down -- I've never gotten more than 10, but that's still plenty for my usage.
They haven't adjusted these to be true colours - the article says the rust colour is an artefact from combining images from the infra-red and the other colour cameras.
>Women's life experiences are thus characterized by a constant and unending fear of sexual assault.
>When you ask men the same question---to list what they do to protect themselves in their daily life... --> the answer is just about nothing.
Why is this fear a bad thing for women? Interesting fact: men are more likely to be victims of violent crime[1] and this has been pretty much true throughout history[2] though it is getting better. That fear is probably quite useful in keeping them alive since women are only half as likely to be victims of assaults by strangers[3]
I have worked in emergency medicine, dealing with all types of assault, and females are rarely assaulted compared to men. When they are it is often by someone they know and usually another female.
Random assault on a female is front page news, for a male its socially acceptable!
This is excellent advice -- for women roaming free on our ancestral savanna.
For those of us, though, who are collaborating on this whole civilization thing, high levels of fear are bad. Especially well-justified fears that keep people from participating fully in society.
The problem being pointed out is exactly that the fear is justified. It is fucked up beyond belief that half of our population has, as the parent post puts it, "a constant and unending fear of sexual assault."
While the fear may mean better survival skills its important to be cognizant of this significant difference between men's and women's life experiences if we're to grok their lives better. This is especially important for big guys (>6') to remember: that their daily experience is nothing like women.
Windows does a good job of abstracting the hardware away and preventing the OEMs from tweaking the APIs so this isn't an issue in most cases. The major exception is for the large game developers who have to buy tons of various configurations of GPUs and motherboards in order to test various configurations. Basic hardware accelerated graphics works well across platforms but AAA games use complex shaders and heavy optimizations which are based on the incomplete and broken implementations of GPU vendors.
> The major exception is for the large game developers who have to buy tons of various configurations of GPUs
The same is also true for Android. Most (all?) of the valid complaint about how hard it is to target different Android devices comes from game developers struggling to get which version of OpenGL to use, which OpenGL API calls are bugged on which devices, how to circumvent low level GPU limitations on this or that device, etc. And afaik, those are usually based on incomplete and broken implementations by GPU vendors as well. Same as with windows.
Most of the regular utility app, which use normal Android layout and API instead of OpenGL, are doing fine just testing their app in different AVDs (instances of the emulator) just to make sure they're compatible with different devices.
(then of course, there's a few newbies who didn't spend 10 minutes reading the guide for running on different devices on d.android.com, then whine their app's font looks different on a friend's phone. But I'm counting those out)
Why not? 'This' is just like 'me too' or '+1'. By itself, it's a waste of a comment, but since harlanlewis elaborated, the "This." was just a prologue to the rest of the comment.
If the number of votes for a comment were visible people probably wouldn't feel the need to annotate their comments with "this" or "++1". So blame the commenting economy of HN. Or just accept it.
>if you lived at the right point in time and weren't a slave
You've just excluded the majority of Athenians[1]. If you generalize "slave" to "bottom Nth percentile of the population, the conditions are much better now than they were before. While someone low on the social pyramid in ancient Greece probably had no chance of contacting someone like Plato, many more people in modern times would be able to write a letter (or email, tweet, forum post, etc) to someone famous and actually receive a response.
[1] "According to the Ancient Greek historian Thucydides, the Athenian citizens at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War (5th century BC) numbered 40,000, making with their families a total of 140,000 people in all. The metics, i.e. those who did not have citizen rights and paid for the right to reside in Athens, numbered a further 70,000, whilst slaves were estimated at between 150,000 to 400,000.[7] Hence, approximately a tenth of the population were adult male citizens, eligible to meet and vote in the Assembly and be elected to office." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Athens#Geographical_...
>The contentious question is: for every Aristotle in the top 10%, how many were in the bottom 90% that were denied that possible future by force?
And the even more contentious question is: how many are in the same place today? Lack of money when growing up and circumstance can be equally as brute as force to deny someone his "possible future" as anything else. How many readers does HN have that are San Francisco natives and how many that are, say, from Mississippi or Alabama combined?
With ~2 million people in jail, some million homeless and several tens of millions eating with coups and soul kitchens, one of basic differences now is that we have the luxury (hypocrisy?) to blame them instead of some institution like slavery.
