So I'm 37 with three young kids (oldest is 5yrs), and yet I still find time to play multiplayer video games. Granted my time is limited to after 9pm at night when all the kids go to sleep, but my friends are scattered around the country and if we didn't play video games together we wouldn't really talk (because guys don't tend to pick up the phone and call each other to just shoot the shit).
Out of the poeple I game with, I have two friends in Seattle, one near Washington DC, one in LA, and I'm in SF bay area. We talk several times a week and only because we play games online together. It's a great way to keep in touch with friends from high school, college, and former co-workers when you're no longer geographically connected. Yeah, my free time is very limited with three kids, so instead of watching TV I do something cooperatively with my friends, that's social, constructive, and mentally challenging. I know most people don't have a social group like mine, but I've found online gaming it to be a great way to keep friendships alive.
Then you're missing out. IMHO, the real special thing about SC2 has been the online multiplayer (both coop and vs random internet folks). The single player game was fun and all, but only barely worth the price of admission, but when you look internet play alone I'm down to under a buck an hour of fantastically fun game play. Getting together with friends online, joining with them to play some good 3v3's, 4v4's, etc is where it's at. Simply waiting until the game is on sale means you're waiting for everyone to get bored and move on to another game before you get all excited about it yourself. Totally not worth it for a online multiplayer game.
A games social value is very time specific and by waiting you're missing out.
If you don't mind, I'll ask a few questions and try to flush out a few more bad assumptions I've made:
What is the advantage of multi-mode then? (why allow multi-mode at all?) In electrical signals, the larger the transmission line the more modes can creep into the signal. Is this the same with fiber? Are you basically able to use a larger diameter fiber for multi-mode and therefore push more signal energy into larger diameter fiber thus allowing for a lower loss channel?
I work in this field so let me see what I can do to translate what's happening and which parts are actually interesting. I dont' know the details of the experiment I'm only going off the article's summary and assuming they're correct. (BTW, while I"m an expert in a tiny slice of this field, my "expert" level knowledge doesn't extend to the whole pie. So some things I say may be assumptions I've made and can be wrong. If you see a mis-statement please correct me.)
First off, we do fiber optics all day long for internet backbone communications. We even do "multi-mode" optical (different color/wavelength lasers) all day long but only for short cable lengths. Neither of which is article worthy. This thing called a "fast Fourier transform" is just math that is taught in school and is nothing even close to revolutionary, it is simply a fundamental mathematical tool of everything in this field.
First off let me give you the basic framework. When you're talking about sending data at these speeds and over these lengths, you can forget the idea that you're sending lots of data down the line in nice waveforms. The data is so distorted that significant energy is put into compensating and un-distorting the waveforms. Fiber optics at these speeds just doesn't work at all without heavy duty data recovery techniques. So we send down the line data, get back garbled gibberish, apply techniques for removing errors and you can recover your data stream.
So typically when we do "long haul" fiber (> 1k or so) we do single mode fiber, this means a single frequency or color (remember your physics, each color is a different frequency of light). This is because different frequencies of light travel at very slightly different speeds down the fiber and if you have long enough fiber this difference in speeds becomes significant and starts to harm your ability to regenerate the information. Additionally one frequency can cause noise in another frequency band so keeping things to a single frequency makes things more stable at long haul lengths. This is why "traditional methods to separate the different colours will not work".
So Professor Freude and the article: There are two steps forward here:
1. He's using a single laser to create different frequencies of light. I don't know if this is a common technique or not. I've typically hear of different colors of light being generated by different lasers but I am not an optics guy so I'm not sure.
2. He's using an optical method in place of a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) instead of silicon that somehow helps him decode the data. An FFT mathematically converts from frequency domain to time domain so maybe he's just using a prism or something to separate the different frequencies as a pre-processor step and then pumping this into his processor, but I can't tell.
So Professor Freude and team and working on making "multi-mode" work at long haul. This is typically not done today so that's the step forward and since you can pack more information into your data stream if you include multiple frequencies, that's a nice win. but of course research success does not necessarily equal a marketable product.
(Again, I am not a guru here, so if you are, please politely correct any mis-statements I've made.)
I've got access and use regularly our 3D printer at work, and the one thing I've come away with is that it just wouldn't be as useful at home as you'd think. Don't get me wrong, I love the machine for work purposes... it's soooo much faster and easier than sending a prototype part out to a machine shop, but but it just wouldn't be worth it for home use.
Dishwasher track wheels: Yes, you could do it. this might be feasible. I don't know how well the material would hold up under constant thermal cycles and lots of water, but it seems pretty tough. This may work.
Analog button for thermostat: This is a bit harder, but only because you have to build the mechanical model in some cad tool. But perfectly do-able.
New gas cap for car: No way. Buy a new gas cap from an auto-parts store.
Cheap toys for kids: This is like saying that once you own an inkjet printer you'll never buy a book again because you'll just print them out. While you can make books for kids using your ink jet printer, you never do. The raw material isn't cheap and it's slow, and the end result isn't as good.
Yes you can make something custom and that's cool, but if you're just thinking you'll just print out legos, you wont. It's also a bit more brittle than most molded plastic I've seen (especially the stuff they're using in toys these days), and the raw material is expensive. In addition you have to clean each part when you're done.
I think having one at home is awesome in concept, but just not as useful as you imagine.
What? Best in class photovoltaic solar cells, in university settings under optimal conditions are around 43%-44%. That's the top efficiency of some very complex structures that are not mass producible using a light source that's 80x normal. 80% is unheard of. In fact, as I was thought in school 15 years ago, the theoretical maximum efficiency of the transistor solar cell method is 50%, thus the reason that 43% is considered really damn good. 80% is god-like.
But you just shot this argument down in it's entirety and then you keep arguing it. Look, if the damage is the fourth power of axle load then cars are doing effectively no damage to the road and all the tax should be on the large trucks, period.
A quick search on the internet says that a single axle truck can haul 23,000 lbs. Now lets assume half of that is held by the semi truck it self (say 13,000lbs), and the other half rests on the back axle (10,000lbs). So, semi truck up to 10,000lbs per axle.
So the largest SUVs tend to be somewhere around 6,000lbs roughly with that weight split between two axles. So if you do the math, the truck is doing 125x more damage to the road than the biggest SUV. If you compare it to a small car of say 3000 lbs, the truck is doing 2000x more damage to the road!!!
Basically you've proven that we should not look at cars in any way for damage to our roads and all the tax penalties we should impose should be on large trucks.
The original question I was responding to was a question of is the power used to create the solar cells is made up during the life of the panel. The different question you seem to be asking is a question of break even costs. That's a longer time as profit and non-energy costs are also part of that equation.
"Crystalline silicon PV systems presently have energy pay-back times of 1.5-2 years for South-European locations and 2.7-3.5 years for Middle-European locations. The U.S. is less than 1.5 years currently."
"two years for a PV system with monocrystalline solar cells"
And the final one I looked at said 2-4 years with 10-30% of that coming from the energy it takes to make the FRAME you're using to mount the solar cells.
So it takes years yes, but decades? That's not even close to reality. Please try to look stuff up instead of blindly repeating memes.
Don't be an idiot. You are not legally responsible for someone using your wireless router in an illegal fashion. You can not be convicted of a crime for leaving your wireless router open, no matter if Osama Bin Laden himself comes and personally uses a stolen credit card to download child porn and stream some hollywood movies. Nor are you civilly responsible. The problem is that illegal or infringing activity on your router is that the police get a search warrant for your house based upon this evidence or a court may grant order you to hand over your computer equipment so a hollywood movie PI can search through your stuff looking for the infringing material. Once it's shown you have none and that there isn't anything in your house, it's done, your free to go and all your stuff will be returned.
The problem is, this is a big headache and you might have some downloaded movies or music that they can find. This is the reason I don't leave my router open. If I had nothing to fear, I would leave a bandwidth limited router open for anyone to use, but I don't want someone else's misdeeds to give someone the ability to go through my stuff. (I also don't live in an area with a high enough population density to make it very interesting as only my two adjacent neighbors would be able to take advantage of this.)
Frankly I hate this big brother/copyright/child porn paranoia and the moves that certain people are making it so you must allow yourself to be tracked on the internet and I will fight it whenever I can. Unfortunately in this case, I don't live up to my convictions because I feel I have too much risk exposure for the benefit I would/could provide.
But my point is: you are NOT legally "responsible for what happens behind **your** router."
Wow, I actually like this. It seems like it's very well done.
I like the keyboard attachment, I really like that the keyboard got it's own battery and that you can decide if you want to use this as a tablet or as a laptop. Long term battery life, a good form factor, and it's not apple. I'm sure there will be lots of bugs to work out, but it sounds pretty cool to me so far. Oh, and the price is quite good. (Remember the price listed is the starting price... and it goes down from there.) We may get down to $300 for a non-crappy tablet by Christmas if the market can put out a few more of these types of products. At that price point, I'd pick one up, and I'm not really in the market!
Yeah, once I analyzed these numbers I started powering down my computer a lot more. Fortunatly with the SSD, my boot up time is somewhere between 15 and 20 seconds. Pre-SSD and with an OS loaded down with two years of crap, my boot up time was 2-3 minutes easy. SSD's rock.
Ok, actual numbers since I've got a "Kill-A-Watt" power monitor hooked up to my computer recently. I'm a gamer so this includes a high end graphics card, a not very efficient quad core CPU, 4 GB mem, 1 SSD, 1 HDD, a 24" LCD.
Playing a game: 360 W (SC2 if you must know...) Normal Desktop use: 260-290W Sleep Mode: 120 W Power Off: 15W (From 5.1 speakers and monitor standby I believe)
What surprised me the most was how inefficient sleep mode was.
Let me rephrase what you said in a way that fits my view.
Microsoft missed the mark because they tried to make a tablet a laptop light instead of a fundamentally different beast. They didn't redesign the UI to work better with a finger based input. Instead they put a layer on top of a keyboard/mouse based OS and made you move a mouse around with your finger, thus making it cumbersome and lame./rephrasing
What gets me though is how much people fail to realize the simple truth of a tablet, namely that a tablet's killer app is the internet. If you want to do real work, play games, type something, you want a laptop/desktop. If you're watching TV or movie, you want a TV. If you want to use the internet, something that is heavy on reading, watching and clicking but very light on typing, it's perfect for a tablet. I think MS made a big mistake in not also recognizing this and building their UI and OS around this fact.
"similar size and weight". So why treat a 6000lbs SUV the same as a 2500 lbs car? How about we base the tax on vehicle weight? That would encourage smaller lighter and therefore more fuel efficient cars.
Inflation has NOT been going crazy. We've just come out of the first year in the past 50 where we had deflation! And from 2000 to present our inflation numbers have not been high by any means (averaging about 3%).
Opinions are fine, but try to ground them in reality.
I don't really like the GDP part because it puts a lot of weight on the boom bust cycle of the economy. But you said you want to do this because of inflation. That's fair, so I found the annual inflation rate and added it to the calculations. (This is a particularly valid point because inflation was very high the first few year or two of Reagan's term so it has a strong affect on the numbers.) Now I'm subtracting the annual inflation rate from the percentage change in the country's budget. Here are the new numbers:
Ford (4 years) 2.6% average 10.4% total Carter (4 years) 3.6% average 14.5% total Reagan (8 yrs) 2.5% average 24.4% total Bush 1 (4 yrs) 2.4% average 9.5% total Clinton (8 yrs) 0.7% average 5.5% total Bush 2 (8 yrs) 3.8% average 30.2% total (The NEW winner!)
So you're right, the high inflation rate at the beginning of Reagan's term really hurt him and his numbers dropped. He no longer holds the record of "expanded the federal government the most of all the recent presidents", that title now belongs to Bush 2! (with Reagan coming in a close second)
(Those are still some staggering differences between the republicans and the democrats. Bush 1 at least made a good showing.)
Ok, as I start writing this I don't know the answer, so let's figure this out together.
Your reply doesn't smell right because the national debt increased so dramatically under Reagan so how does it make sense that spending decreased. The obvious explanation is the last part "vs GDP" is skewing things. The grandparent's statement had nothing to do with "as a percentage of GDP", he/she simply stated that Reagan grew the government, so let's look at the raw numbers of increased spending in their raw form and examine the person's original premise. (You can find a link on the page you referenced to the data used for the charts shown. That's where I'm getting all my data since it's coming from the CBO that's about as good a reference as you'll get.)
How much did the government grow under each president?
Here's the raw data: (Government spending for the last year of the previous president's budget year vs last year of this president's spending. So for example, Bush1 is "Outlays:2005/Outlays:2001 - 1")
Ford: 61% increase (4 years) Carter: 59% increase (4 years) Reagan: 93% increase in federal spending (THE WINNER!) Bush 1: 29.8% increase (4 years) Clinton: 29% increase Bush 2: 66% increase
So, the grandparent's statement is correct Mr "I'm done with this guy".
In fact, looking at these numbers, if you're a small government loving conservative, Clinton is your hero. He grew the federal government by far the least of any president in recent history!
However i'm a liberal and I believe in being fair, it behooves me to point out that both Carter and Ford grew the federal government at a faster rate than Reagan, but since they were in office for only 4 years their overall growth is less than Reagan. Reagan did indeed grow the federal government the most of any president in recent history.
The rich are richer now than ever before in our history since right before the great depression. The super rich have a jaw dropping staggering portion of our society's wealth. The rich have gotten where they are sometimes through hard work, sometimes through luck, sometimes through inheritance. If you look at the numbers the top 1% have barely been hurt by this recession while the rest of us have taken a cold shower, but now when it comes time to pay for the lost revenue they're coming after the middle class and poor. Fuck that.
To somehow claim that the super rich have been 100,000 more productive than some blue collar worker is stupid. They've gotten where they are by utilizing the United States and everything that brings with it. From roads to education to educated workers, etc. They didn't get there in a vacuum. Many of them have the right to make more than the rest of us because of chances they took, the ideas they had, or the luck they found themselves blessed with. I'm not saying they should make the same amount of money as a laborer, what I am saying is that the difference shouldn't be as high as it is. That much money should not be concentrated in the hands of so few. We are not a banana republic.
Wealth itself is not the problem, massive uneven distribution of wealth is. The class warfare has been going on a long time and the poor and middle class have been getting their asses kicked.
BTW, if you're threatening that the super-rich may up and leave us, then great, let them go. I don't think we'd miss them in any negative way. They are not that special and they can be easily replaced.
Can you explain what "corrupt objectives" these exposed? There have been very few bombshells that have come out of the leaks that I'm aware of and nothing I'm aware of that indicates corruption... at least of the US government... there were plenty of talking about foreign governments...
Do you know what you're talking about or are you just repeating lines you heard in a movie?
As an American, I can say I find it useful when the walls public and private information are torn down briefly so we can see what things the government are spinning, hiding, or just plain lying about. A free and democratic government should be open and transparent. There are of course things that should be hidden and kept secret, the diplomatic cables for example, but our government under bush and obama and the over hyped terror boogieman have pull way too much a cloak of national security. As a participant in the American democratic system, I see plenty of benefit to Manning's actions and I wish this type of thing would happen more often.
There are of course many many things I don't want to see leaked, such as military secrets, military assets, etc, but so far I haven't seen any harm from Manning's actions and I've seen lots of benefit. Perhaps we will learn of the harm later and I'll change my mind on the whole issue, but right now I only see the benefit. The benefit however is that it allows us to better understand the difference between the face our government shows the public and what it says behind the scenes, it allows us to see the true status of the war in Afghanistan, and it allows us to see better what's really happening in other countries (through the diplomatic cables). Some of that information is just interesting, while some of it is very important if you want a government that is controlled by the people rather than a population that is controlled by the government.
I actually think it's the opposite. You don't stop corruption in the police department by lowering salaries, the same is true for politicians.
The real problem is not, however, in politician's personal financial welfare but from campaign finance problems. If the politicians are constantly asking for money for their campaigns then they will be beholden to whoever pays their bills. Whoever pays their bills is who the politician works for. Is that you? Is that me? Fuck no. We *want* it to be and they pretend that we are, but we're not.
As distasteful as it is at first, the real way to fend off corruption in our government is public financing political campaigns to the point where they don't need to kiss up to rich contributors. Either that stop the rich and the corporations and unions from pumping money into our political system through laws... however the 2nd point has already been ruled unconstitutional by the supreme court because after all, a corporation is a person too.
Now, before people get all bent out of shape, think of a way to make it work rather than why this is distasteful. For example, create a system where each voter is given $100 of monopoly money that they can "give" to politicians to support their campaigns, or give to a political party, or give it to whoever. What they can't do it spend it on anything but contributing to the political process. Or they can also not spend it and the money is re-absorbed back into the government. While this process costs more to the tax payer in the short run, a few non-corrupt decisions would easily make up the cost difference. I want the politicians working for us people again instead of the super rich or organizations.
Slashdot Mirror
So I'm 37 with three young kids (oldest is 5yrs), and yet I still find time to play multiplayer video games. Granted my time is limited to after 9pm at night when all the kids go to sleep, but my friends are scattered around the country and if we didn't play video games together we wouldn't really talk (because guys don't tend to pick up the phone and call each other to just shoot the shit).
Out of the poeple I game with, I have two friends in Seattle, one near Washington DC, one in LA, and I'm in SF bay area. We talk several times a week and only because we play games online together. It's a great way to keep in touch with friends from high school, college, and former co-workers when you're no longer geographically connected. Yeah, my free time is very limited with three kids, so instead of watching TV I do something cooperatively with my friends, that's social, constructive, and mentally challenging. I know most people don't have a social group like mine, but I've found online gaming it to be a great way to keep friendships alive.
d
Then you're missing out. IMHO, the real special thing about SC2 has been the online multiplayer (both coop and vs random internet folks). The single player game was fun and all, but only barely worth the price of admission, but when you look internet play alone I'm down to under a buck an hour of fantastically fun game play. Getting together with friends online, joining with them to play some good 3v3's, 4v4's, etc is where it's at. Simply waiting until the game is on sale means you're waiting for everyone to get bored and move on to another game before you get all excited about it yourself. Totally not worth it for a online multiplayer game.
A games social value is very time specific and by waiting you're missing out.
d
The names taken... and not just in the video game.
http://www.bei.org/projects/pipeline/2008/20080382.htm
Thank you for the correction.
If you don't mind, I'll ask a few questions and try to flush out a few more bad assumptions I've made:
What is the advantage of multi-mode then? (why allow multi-mode at all?) In electrical signals, the larger the transmission line the more modes can creep into the signal. Is this the same with fiber? Are you basically able to use a larger diameter fiber for multi-mode and therefore push more signal energy into larger diameter fiber thus allowing for a lower loss channel?
d
I work in this field so let me see what I can do to translate what's happening and which parts are actually interesting. I dont' know the details of the experiment I'm only going off the article's summary and assuming they're correct. (BTW, while I"m an expert in a tiny slice of this field, my "expert" level knowledge doesn't extend to the whole pie. So some things I say may be assumptions I've made and can be wrong. If you see a mis-statement please correct me.)
First off, we do fiber optics all day long for internet backbone communications. We even do "multi-mode" optical (different color/wavelength lasers) all day long but only for short cable lengths. Neither of which is article worthy. This thing called a "fast Fourier transform" is just math that is taught in school and is nothing even close to revolutionary, it is simply a fundamental mathematical tool of everything in this field.
First off let me give you the basic framework. When you're talking about sending data at these speeds and over these lengths, you can forget the idea that you're sending lots of data down the line in nice waveforms. The data is so distorted that significant energy is put into compensating and un-distorting the waveforms. Fiber optics at these speeds just doesn't work at all without heavy duty data recovery techniques. So we send down the line data, get back garbled gibberish, apply techniques for removing errors and you can recover your data stream.
So typically when we do "long haul" fiber (> 1k or so) we do single mode fiber, this means a single frequency or color (remember your physics, each color is a different frequency of light). This is because different frequencies of light travel at very slightly different speeds down the fiber and if you have long enough fiber this difference in speeds becomes significant and starts to harm your ability to regenerate the information. Additionally one frequency can cause noise in another frequency band so keeping things to a single frequency makes things more stable at long haul lengths. This is why "traditional methods to separate the different colours will not work".
So Professor Freude and the article:
There are two steps forward here:
1. He's using a single laser to create different frequencies of light. I don't know if this is a common technique or not. I've typically hear of different colors of light being generated by different lasers but I am not an optics guy so I'm not sure.
2. He's using an optical method in place of a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) instead of silicon that somehow helps him decode the data. An FFT mathematically converts from frequency domain to time domain so maybe he's just using a prism or something to separate the different frequencies as a pre-processor step and then pumping this into his processor, but I can't tell.
So Professor Freude and team and working on making "multi-mode" work at long haul. This is typically not done today so that's the step forward and since you can pack more information into your data stream if you include multiple frequencies, that's a nice win. but of course research success does not necessarily equal a marketable product.
(Again, I am not a guru here, so if you are, please politely correct any mis-statements I've made.)
d
I've got access and use regularly our 3D printer at work, and the one thing I've come away with is that it just wouldn't be as useful at home as you'd think. Don't get me wrong, I love the machine for work purposes... it's soooo much faster and easier than sending a prototype part out to a machine shop, but but it just wouldn't be worth it for home use.
Dishwasher track wheels: Yes, you could do it. this might be feasible. I don't know how well the material would hold up under constant thermal cycles and lots of water, but it seems pretty tough. This may work.
Analog button for thermostat: This is a bit harder, but only because you have to build the mechanical model in some cad tool. But perfectly do-able.
New gas cap for car: No way. Buy a new gas cap from an auto-parts store.
Cheap toys for kids: This is like saying that once you own an inkjet printer you'll never buy a book again because you'll just print them out. While you can make books for kids using your ink jet printer, you never do. The raw material isn't cheap and it's slow, and the end result isn't as good.
Yes you can make something custom and that's cool, but if you're just thinking you'll just print out legos, you wont. It's also a bit more brittle than most molded plastic I've seen (especially the stuff they're using in toys these days), and the raw material is expensive. In addition you have to clean each part when you're done.
I think having one at home is awesome in concept, but just not as useful as you imagine.
d
What? Best in class photovoltaic solar cells, in university settings under optimal conditions are around 43%-44%. That's the top efficiency of some very complex structures that are not mass producible using a light source that's 80x normal. 80% is unheard of. In fact, as I was thought in school 15 years ago, the theoretical maximum efficiency of the transistor solar cell method is 50%, thus the reason that 43% is considered really damn good. 80% is god-like.
d
But you just shot this argument down in it's entirety and then you keep arguing it. Look, if the damage is the fourth power of axle load then cars are doing effectively no damage to the road and all the tax should be on the large trucks, period.
A quick search on the internet says that a single axle truck can haul 23,000 lbs. Now lets assume half of that is held by the semi truck it self (say 13,000lbs), and the other half rests on the back axle (10,000lbs). So, semi truck up to 10,000lbs per axle.
So the largest SUVs tend to be somewhere around 6,000lbs roughly with that weight split between two axles. So if you do the math, the truck is doing 125x more damage to the road than the biggest SUV. If you compare it to a small car of say 3000 lbs, the truck is doing 2000x more damage to the road!!!
Basically you've proven that we should not look at cars in any way for damage to our roads and all the tax penalties we should impose should be on large trucks.
d
The original question I was responding to was a question of is the power used to create the solar cells is made up during the life of the panel. The different question you seem to be asking is a question of break even costs. That's a longer time as profit and non-energy costs are also part of that equation.
d
Sorry, let me also add this as a reference:
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf
It's the one I felt was most unbiased (not done by a solar cell manufacturer for example.) It's done by the US department of energy.
d
*Citation needed*
After a quick google search:
"Crystalline silicon PV systems presently have energy pay-back times of 1.5-2 years for South-European locations and 2.7-3.5 years for Middle-European locations. The U.S. is less than 1.5 years currently."
"two years for a PV system with monocrystalline solar cells"
And the final one I looked at said 2-4 years with 10-30% of that coming from the energy it takes to make the FRAME you're using to mount the solar cells.
So it takes years yes, but decades? That's not even close to reality. Please try to look stuff up instead of blindly repeating memes.
d
Don't be an idiot. You are not legally responsible for someone using your wireless router in an illegal fashion. You can not be convicted of a crime for leaving your wireless router open, no matter if Osama Bin Laden himself comes and personally uses a stolen credit card to download child porn and stream some hollywood movies. Nor are you civilly responsible. The problem is that illegal or infringing activity on your router is that the police get a search warrant for your house based upon this evidence or a court may grant order you to hand over your computer equipment so a hollywood movie PI can search through your stuff looking for the infringing material. Once it's shown you have none and that there isn't anything in your house, it's done, your free to go and all your stuff will be returned.
The problem is, this is a big headache and you might have some downloaded movies or music that they can find. This is the reason I don't leave my router open. If I had nothing to fear, I would leave a bandwidth limited router open for anyone to use, but I don't want someone else's misdeeds to give someone the ability to go through my stuff. (I also don't live in an area with a high enough population density to make it very interesting as only my two adjacent neighbors would be able to take advantage of this.)
Frankly I hate this big brother/copyright/child porn paranoia and the moves that certain people are making it so you must allow yourself to be tracked on the internet and I will fight it whenever I can. Unfortunately in this case, I don't live up to my convictions because I feel I have too much risk exposure for the benefit I would/could provide.
But my point is: you are NOT legally "responsible for what happens behind **your** router."
d
Wow, I actually like this. It seems like it's very well done.
I like the keyboard attachment, I really like that the keyboard got it's own battery and that you can decide if you want to use this as a tablet or as a laptop. Long term battery life, a good form factor, and it's not apple. I'm sure there will be lots of bugs to work out, but it sounds pretty cool to me so far. Oh, and the price is quite good. (Remember the price listed is the starting price... and it goes down from there.) We may get down to $300 for a non-crappy tablet by Christmas if the market can put out a few more of these types of products. At that price point, I'd pick one up, and I'm not really in the market!
d
Yeah, once I analyzed these numbers I started powering down my computer a lot more. Fortunatly with the SSD, my boot up time is somewhere between 15 and 20 seconds. Pre-SSD and with an OS loaded down with two years of crap, my boot up time was 2-3 minutes easy. SSD's rock.
d
Ok, actual numbers since I've got a "Kill-A-Watt" power monitor hooked up to my computer recently. I'm a gamer so this includes a high end graphics card, a not very efficient quad core CPU, 4 GB mem, 1 SSD, 1 HDD, a 24" LCD.
Playing a game: 360 W (SC2 if you must know...)
Normal Desktop use: 260-290W
Sleep Mode: 120 W
Power Off: 15W (From 5.1 speakers and monitor standby I believe)
What surprised me the most was how inefficient sleep mode was.
d
If you're shocked by this then you're in for a bumpy ride!
d
Let me rephrase what you said in a way that fits my view.
Microsoft missed the mark because they tried to make a tablet a laptop light instead of a fundamentally different beast. They didn't redesign the UI to work better with a finger based input. Instead they put a layer on top of a keyboard/mouse based OS and made you move a mouse around with your finger, thus making it cumbersome and lame. /rephrasing
What gets me though is how much people fail to realize the simple truth of a tablet, namely that a tablet's killer app is the internet. If you want to do real work, play games, type something, you want a laptop/desktop. If you're watching TV or movie, you want a TV. If you want to use the internet, something that is heavy on reading, watching and clicking but very light on typing, it's perfect for a tablet. I think MS made a big mistake in not also recognizing this and building their UI and OS around this fact.
d
"similar size and weight". So why treat a 6000lbs SUV the same as a 2500 lbs car? How about we base the tax on vehicle weight? That would encourage smaller lighter and therefore more fuel efficient cars.
d
Inflation has NOT been going crazy. We've just come out of the first year in the past 50 where we had deflation! And from 2000 to present our inflation numbers have not been high by any means (averaging about 3%).
Opinions are fine, but try to ground them in reality.
http://inflationdata.com/inflation/Inflation_Rate/HistoricalInflation.aspx?dsInflation_currentPage=0
d
Ok, data analysis, round 2.
I don't really like the GDP part because it puts a lot of weight on the boom bust cycle of the economy. But you said you want to do this because of inflation. That's fair, so I found the annual inflation rate and added it to the calculations. (This is a particularly valid point because inflation was very high the first few year or two of Reagan's term so it has a strong affect on the numbers.) Now I'm subtracting the annual inflation rate from the percentage change in the country's budget. Here are the new numbers:
Ford (4 years) 2.6% average 10.4% total
Carter (4 years) 3.6% average 14.5% total
Reagan (8 yrs) 2.5% average 24.4% total
Bush 1 (4 yrs) 2.4% average 9.5% total
Clinton (8 yrs) 0.7% average 5.5% total
Bush 2 (8 yrs) 3.8% average 30.2% total (The NEW winner!)
So you're right, the high inflation rate at the beginning of Reagan's term really hurt him and his numbers dropped. He no longer holds the record of "expanded the federal government the most of all the recent presidents", that title now belongs to Bush 2! (with Reagan coming in a close second)
(Those are still some staggering differences between the republicans and the democrats. Bush 1 at least made a good showing.)
Inflation rate chart: http://www.miseryindex.us/irbyyear.asp
d
Ok, as I start writing this I don't know the answer, so let's figure this out together.
Your reply doesn't smell right because the national debt increased so dramatically under Reagan so how does it make sense that spending decreased. The obvious explanation is the last part "vs GDP" is skewing things. The grandparent's statement had nothing to do with "as a percentage of GDP", he/she simply stated that Reagan grew the government, so let's look at the raw numbers of increased spending in their raw form and examine the person's original premise. (You can find a link on the page you referenced to the data used for the charts shown. That's where I'm getting all my data since it's coming from the CBO that's about as good a reference as you'll get.)
How much did the government grow under each president?
Here's the raw data: (Government spending for the last year of the previous president's budget year vs last year of this president's spending. So for example, Bush1 is "Outlays:2005/Outlays:2001 - 1")
Ford: 61% increase (4 years)
Carter: 59% increase (4 years)
Reagan: 93% increase in federal spending (THE WINNER!)
Bush 1: 29.8% increase (4 years)
Clinton: 29% increase
Bush 2: 66% increase
So, the grandparent's statement is correct Mr "I'm done with this guy".
In fact, looking at these numbers, if you're a small government loving conservative, Clinton is your hero. He grew the federal government by far the least of any president in recent history!
However i'm a liberal and I believe in being fair, it behooves me to point out that both Carter and Ford grew the federal government at a faster rate than Reagan, but since they were in office for only 4 years their overall growth is less than Reagan. Reagan did indeed grow the federal government the most of any president in recent history.
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/108xx/doc10871/historicaltables.pdf
d
The rich are richer now than ever before in our history since right before the great depression. The super rich have a jaw dropping staggering portion of our society's wealth. The rich have gotten where they are sometimes through hard work, sometimes through luck, sometimes through inheritance. If you look at the numbers the top 1% have barely been hurt by this recession while the rest of us have taken a cold shower, but now when it comes time to pay for the lost revenue they're coming after the middle class and poor. Fuck that.
To somehow claim that the super rich have been 100,000 more productive than some blue collar worker is stupid. They've gotten where they are by utilizing the United States and everything that brings with it. From roads to education to educated workers, etc. They didn't get there in a vacuum. Many of them have the right to make more than the rest of us because of chances they took, the ideas they had, or the luck they found themselves blessed with. I'm not saying they should make the same amount of money as a laborer, what I am saying is that the difference shouldn't be as high as it is. That much money should not be concentrated in the hands of so few. We are not a banana republic.
Wealth itself is not the problem, massive uneven distribution of wealth is. The class warfare has been going on a long time and the poor and middle class have been getting their asses kicked.
BTW, if you're threatening that the super-rich may up and leave us, then great, let them go. I don't think we'd miss them in any negative way. They are not that special and they can be easily replaced.
d
Can you explain what "corrupt objectives" these exposed? There have been very few bombshells that have come out of the leaks that I'm aware of and nothing I'm aware of that indicates corruption... at least of the US government... there were plenty of talking about foreign governments...
Do you know what you're talking about or are you just repeating lines you heard in a movie?
d
As an American, I can say I find it useful when the walls public and private information are torn down briefly so we can see what things the government are spinning, hiding, or just plain lying about. A free and democratic government should be open and transparent. There are of course things that should be hidden and kept secret, the diplomatic cables for example, but our government under bush and obama and the over hyped terror boogieman have pull way too much a cloak of national security. As a participant in the American democratic system, I see plenty of benefit to Manning's actions and I wish this type of thing would happen more often.
There are of course many many things I don't want to see leaked, such as military secrets, military assets, etc, but so far I haven't seen any harm from Manning's actions and I've seen lots of benefit. Perhaps we will learn of the harm later and I'll change my mind on the whole issue, but right now I only see the benefit. The benefit however is that it allows us to better understand the difference between the face our government shows the public and what it says behind the scenes, it allows us to see the true status of the war in Afghanistan, and it allows us to see better what's really happening in other countries (through the diplomatic cables). Some of that information is just interesting, while some of it is very important if you want a government that is controlled by the people rather than a population that is controlled by the government.
d
I actually think it's the opposite. You don't stop corruption in the police department by lowering salaries, the same is true for politicians.
The real problem is not, however, in politician's personal financial welfare but from campaign finance problems. If the politicians are constantly asking for money for their campaigns then they will be beholden to whoever pays their bills. Whoever pays their bills is who the politician works for. Is that you? Is that me? Fuck no. We *want* it to be and they pretend that we are, but we're not.
As distasteful as it is at first, the real way to fend off corruption in our government is public financing political campaigns to the point where they don't need to kiss up to rich contributors. Either that stop the rich and the corporations and unions from pumping money into our political system through laws... however the 2nd point has already been ruled unconstitutional by the supreme court because after all, a corporation is a person too.
Now, before people get all bent out of shape, think of a way to make it work rather than why this is distasteful. For example, create a system where each voter is given $100 of monopoly money that they can "give" to politicians to support their campaigns, or give to a political party, or give it to whoever. What they can't do it spend it on anything but contributing to the political process. Or they can also not spend it and the money is re-absorbed back into the government. While this process costs more to the tax payer in the short run, a few non-corrupt decisions would easily make up the cost difference. I want the politicians working for us people again instead of the super rich or organizations.
d