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backslash

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  1. https://www.aei.org/publication/a-ceo-explains-why-ceos-make-so-much-money/ tl;dr: In America, companies have to disclose CEO pay, which is determined by the board. Boards with low-performing CEO's don't want it to look like they have low-performing CEO's, so they raise compensation to average. Then, for high performers to be paid well, their compensation has to be increased, thereby raising the average. Rinse, repeat.
  2. I tried Ubuntu for about five minutes but couldn't stand the Unity desktop. I've been using Mint for almost 2 years now and haven't had the desire to switch. Mint's also noob-friendly enough that I was able to throw it at my mother (>50) successfully.
  3. A few days into my one year of Vessel... I have no complaints! Keep up the great work!
  4. I'll just leave this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo#Sexual_social_behavior #Monkeysex
  5. Ooh, Musk is going to revolutionize the cake market? Yummy.
  6. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It's not a mystery per se has interesting mysteries for you to solve* and consists entirely of cleverness and plot twists. Fanfiction, but bears only passing semblance to canon, so there's no need to familiar with the source material. Also, I play a role in writing In Fire Forged, which isn't a mystery, but is clever and quite good (if I do say so myself). It, too, is a fanfiction, but is written to not require knowledge of the source material. *"Its mysteries are solvable, and meant to be solved." Also has a subreddit dedicated to trying to figure the mysteries.
  7. My days of not considering laptops are seriously coming to a middle. Once they make the keyboard wireless and detachable so my eyes don't have to be where my hands are, I'll get interested. Until then, I'll enjoy the 50cm of vertical space between the bottom of my monitor and the top of my keyboard. Keyboard goes in lap, person sits up straight, and the middle of the monitor level with the eyes. Given my body measurements and monitor size, this implies 50 cm. I can imagine laptops having as good an ergonomic setup, but only if they get used like I've literally never seen them used before, ever. I spend a lot of time at the computer, and the only reason my body hasn't destroyed itself is because I take ergonomics seriously, meaning I can't do mobile. This laptop looks to be the first step in changing that so, even though it looks like an eldritch horror, I'm 100% behind it.
  8. <Patent trolling> Patent trolls patent troll patent trolls. </Patent trolling> Edit (because the above is optimized for cleverness, not clarity) (source) My hope is that patent trolls sue other patent trolls, thereby making patent trolling no longer profitable. Thus, the legal system won't bear any patent trolls, since as soon as a patent troll becomes sufficiently high profile, a bunch of startup patent trolls patent troll it to death. Maybe the solution isn't to make patent trolling illegal, but just to allow patent trolls to patent troll other patent trolls.
  9. Why not Linux? -Mint is user-friendly enough that I just threw it at my mum (who has the tech level you expect mothers to have) and haven't had to run tech support. -Mint with Xfce is light enough that it runs comfortably quickly on her laptop (which was $250 1.5 years ago). This happened when Win7 made the laptop unusable; Mint gave it a second life. Since we're on the value-end of the spectrum, a light OS is more important than it would be otherwise, and it isn't Windows. -Your price point is below the price:perf sweet spot. $90 spent on hardware rather than software means 30-40% more money going towards hardware means better than 30-40% performance gains. Anyway, this is how I'd do it. Currently comes to $300. I'm assuming you're installing Mint via USB (which I'm assuming you have) and won't need an optical drive for anything else (if you do, make it $320).
  10. It's not important whether you learn 2.7 or 3.3; I learned 2.7 and took a class that used 3.3, and it was fine. At one point we discussed whether it was 'better' to learn 2.7 or 3.3, and the professor said something like 95% of everyone still uses 2.7. I'll second the recommendation of Lean Python the Hard Way. It's the best introduction to programming that I know of. Learning a natural language (eg. Latin), there's an initial hurdle to understanding your first sentence. You don't know what the words mean, you don't know the rules for how they're put together, or why they say what they say, and so on. After you can do one sentence, though, you can start adding words or grammatical constructs one at a time. A similar situation exists in programming: there's an initial hurdle to understanding your first program. You don't know what the words mean, you don't know the rules for how they're put together, or why they it does what it does. Reason I like Learn Python the Hard Way is that it does the best job of getting you over that initial hurdle. Also, check out the Janki Method, which is the absolute best way to effectively remember what you've learned.
  11. I'm looking to put together a very low power rig, but the lowest power psu that's 80plus platinum is 400 watts, which is a bit higher than I'd like. Does anyone know of a 250-350 watt psu that's 80 plus platinum?
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