Letters to the Editor
J T
Published Letters: 283 Editor's Choice: 26
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How would I use this?
[Read the article: Meet Zonbu, the amazing $99 green PC]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]How would I use such a machine?
1. I suppose it could go down in the family room to allow internet access from there, but I've already got a Wii with an Opera based browser that lets me do just about anything I want on the internet, and displays it nicely on the decent sized television set I've already got. Granted, the input devices for the Wii are a bit lacking, but I can check email, read some news sites, that sort of thing. The laptop can go to the family room as well, if need be. So, no, I won't get it for that.
2. It could go in the guest room or a child's room. I don't have a child, and even if I did I'm not sure I'd want them to have a computer in their room anyway. As for a guest room computer, well, I don't get that many guests, so it doesn't make sense to be paying a monthly service for something that will be used sparingly. Nope, for that one too.
3. Travel. As far as I can tell, it doesn't have a screen, so while the box itself is portable, I've got to lug a screen along as well. Nope.
I don't see myself getting it. I could have recommended it to my grandparents a few years ago before they got a computer, since they mostly use it to read email and do a limited amount of internet browsing, but that would still require them to get a broadband connection as well as pay for monthly service. Right now they do so little with the computer that they get by with a very inexpensive dial-up connection. So it seems to fit in a small niche market, unless it can be made more flexible. If I could store files somewhere else on my LAN (on my NAS, or another machine), then maybe. And I'm still leery about putting my files out on some corporation's servers. Who knows what they're going to do with them.
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This new useless stat doesn't go far enough
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As far as useless stats go, TP is a great one. I don't think it goes far enough though. Take the following case.
Team A makes a single transaction on each of the following days of a given week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of a given week. Team B makes 3 transactions on Wednesday of that same week. Teams A and B both made 3 transactions in the week, but Team A will have a higher TP because they spread it out over 3 days, while Team B did all of their transactions on 1 day.
What is needed is some way that takes the number of transactions on a given day into account, sort of like how slugging percentage takes into account how many bases were obtained, weighting home runs, triples, and doubles higher than singles, while batting average counts them all equally.
Perhaps you could make a companion stat, average transactions per day (AT/D). But that alone wouldn't give you the whole story either, a case could be made that a team with higher AT/D but a low TP is perhaps making moves according to plan than a team with a low AT/D but a high TP. So combine the two (like OPS).
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Bonds and hitting advantages
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]One of the other sites I look at every so often pointed me to this article:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003621797
which makes a case that Bonds has a hitting advantage, not from anything he's ingested, but by the elbow armor he wears. It not only protects his elbow as he hangs it out over the plate, but this theory is that it also mechanically guides his arm as he swings.
Interesting theory.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of the body armor but I understand why they wear it. I think that players who wear it batting should be required to wear it running the bases (can't stand watching players stand in the batters box after a walk stripping it all off), and any pitch that hits the armor should not count as a hit by pitch. But that's just me.
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hypotheticals?
[Read the article: Piling on on Obama]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think Senator Clinton has been listening to far to many Supreme Court justice confirmation hearings. Why shouldn't presidential candidates engage in hypothetical situations? Heck, isn't the whole campaign a hypothetical "If I'm elected President I'll ..." situation? Questions about what a candidate would do in a given situation is one of the two ways we as voters have of gathering the information needed to decide who to vote for (the other being to look at their past history).
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Anonymous postings
[Read the article: America under surveillance]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Does anyone else find it odd that the previous Anonymous poster who claims he/she "...has nothing to hide" uses the Anonymous tag, effectively hiding the poster's identity? I think the "nothing to hide" claim is not exactly true.