Abolish the IRS. I think Steve Forbes has a great plan for fixing government income
Agreed, there is no reason a flat tax shouldn't work.
Social Security and Medicare stop.
Stopping Social Security is something I can get behind. I'm 28 and I know I'll never see a dime of anything I'm paying into. I think personal 401k accounts are a better route. Medicare I'm not so sure about, there are a lot of folks out there that need this money for medication. I think the issue is really universal healthcare, and the fact that we're one of the few modern Western nations that don't have it.
Cable lines are nationalized. Comcast et al can lease them from the government. Heck, you can use them for free. We need competition.
I agree that we need competition, but I can see the entire cable industry exploding over this one. They've paid to lay down the lines, and I can't see any of them being happy about the government stepping in and seizing what is essentially private property, and then making them pay to use said property again.
Net neutrality is mandatory. If you degrade someone else's service because it competes with your own, you get fined BIG.
Here here!
Drivers licenses get harder to get and keep. Too many morons on cell phones that need to learn it's not a right.
I don't know about that. There are millions of safe drivers in the US, I don't see a need to make it more difficult to get a driver's license. I do think there should be heavier fines for accidents caused by using a Cellphone (without a hands-free set).
You can't get divorced without 6 months of good marriage counseling, preferable faith-based (you choose the faith, obviously). The one exception is abuse. If there is abuse, you can leave today. We'll help. But if you accuse abuse and it is proven that you lied, you're locked up.
Also on the marriage front, you can't get married without at least a few sessions of marriage counseling. Talk about kids, values, in-laws, sex, where you want to live, religion, and everything else. The divorce rate is too high, and I see it as causing too many problems. These last two are designed to help lower that and improve things.
OK, I really disagree with these, especially the faith-based bit. Marriage and divorce are certainly serious issues, but they're no one's business but the couple's.
If you don't like high school, that's OK, you can quit. As soon as you hit... let's say 10th grade... you can choose. You can continue on college prep (which is what most high schools are at this point) or you can go to a trade school. It's your choice. If you change your mind you can always get your GED later.
Sorry, I disagree again. Children (and that's what they are until they turn 18) are not capable of making rational decisions on their own. Like it or not their parents are responsible for their actions, and there are all too many teens out there that would think it's much better to quit school than to actually educate themselves. The way the world is today, if you don't even have a GED you'll never do more than be a fry cook at some grease-pit fast food joint. It would be irresponsible to allow high school students the choice to quit high school.
it isn't about you paying more. it's about google, vonage, et all paying verizon more.
Aaah, but it's even worse than that. Any extra costs that a company has to pay will almost certainly be passed on to the consumer in one way or another.
With all due respect, you're comparing apples to oranges here. When all those defense industry programmers started looking for work they were still only competing with each other, rather than having to compete with someone who doesn't even live on the same continent and is willing to do the same job for a half to a quarter of what the job would pay here. Another point worth mentioning here is that when all of those defense industry programmers were looking for work again they weren't considered entry level anymore. I'm sure you had your work cut out for you during that time, and I can respect the fact that you've gone through hard times and you've earned the rights and responsibilities that experience brings, but there are market forces in effect today that simply did not exist during that period.
That's crap. That's what they tell you to keep you at shit jobs.
It's not crap, it's called the current job market. I'm pretty sure the IT job market in 1988 was a much different beast than what it is right now. Seriously, we're talking pre-"World Wide Web" days here. The fact that you have at least 10 years of experience under your belt tells me that you obviously haven't had to worry about finding an entry level position in quite a while, and if you are talking about more than 10 years ago that would've been right around the.com bubble period, when there certainly wasn't a shortage of developer jobs.Have you looked at the job listings lately? It's not like entry level positions are rusting on the vine.
I agree with the rest of the points you made, however, especially regarding making yourself unemployable, and employers who give crap raises and promotions.
It just takes the courage to try.
I get that, and it's not like I've given up, I'm just saying that finding a job in today's market is a whole new ballgame for entry level workers than it was 10+ years ago.
Nothing's changed. Employers pay crap wages at the entry level, and treat young kids like crap. Said young kids then hop jobs until they find something better.
Except that there is a difference, there are a lot fewer entry level positions available to job hop to. Job hopping your way out of an entry level position nowadays is just about the same as shooting yourself in the foot.
and the most depressing thing about entering the workforce for me is how hard it is to get your foot in the door anywhere. I have absolutely no problems starting at the bottom and working my way up, but there doesn't seem to be many places out there that are willing to hire straight out of the gate. Go do a search on Monster or Dice in any major metropolitan area (or anywhere else for that matter) for entry-level positions and I guarantee you won't find more than one to two positions, if that.
...22% said they struggle to find new qualified candidates.
I can certainly understand that, considering that the vast majority job postings consist of "Must have 5+ years of exp. with (extremely specific) technologies A, B, & C" as well as a wide swath of skills that are generally only picked up on the job. The companies that complain about not being able to find qualified candidates are often the same companies that outsource all of the entry-level jobs to India.
What we first need to do is change the FCC so that it's not headed by appointed officials, but rather by elected representatives.
That's an interesting idea, but I can see a big problem with it. As it stands now a large portion of the population does not make educated decisions on other major issues (Social Security, abortion, immigration, etc), so how can we expect them to make educated voting decisions regarding technology and communications? As technical individuals we've all seen what comes from talking about technical topics with non-technical individuals; most people simply don't know enough about technology to have an opinion regarding the matter, or even worse, they simply don't care until it affects them directly. Ma and Pa Kettle are probably still using a 56k dial-up connection, and could care less whether or not Time Warner or Verizon might have a monopoly in their area. For that plan to work there would need to be a massive campaign to educate voters on technology and communication and how they affect their daily lives.
You're missing the point, which is that there is absolutely no reason why you should have to tell your boss how you voted. You don't have to lie, you don't have to give them a random number, you don't have to tell them anything at all about how you voted. It is quite literally none of their business.
This one has been talked about for a while. Didn't Yahoo shoot this idea down pretty quickly last year? What has changed to make it any more likely? The only reasons I can think of for this to occur are
MS would get the advantage of a search engine on par with Google.
MS would also get the advertising revenue that Yahoo brings in.
Yahoo could gain access to MS Office Live, allowing them to compete with Google in online document creation and collaboration.
Both companies offer very similar services (as far as online portals are concerned), and it doesn't seem like there would be many other advantages to a buyout.
Uuuuhhhh, yes, it does say that. Did you bother to read both articles? From the article:
As many as three American Airlines passenger jets will be outfitted this spring with laser technology intended to protect planes from missile attacks.
Officials said yesterday that the anti-missile system would not be tested on flights that carry passengers. The tests, which could involve more than 1,000 flights, will determine how the technology holds up under the rigors of flight, they said.
So yes, they are actually outfitting the planes with these systems, whether the tests are for fuel burn, aerodynamic drag, etc or others. My point would still be valid even if they weren't testing for the above, it's not as if they would have passengers on the plane during a live test anyway.
A shame nobody bothered to inform the manufacturers and proponents of this system about this particular wisdom.
I'm betting they're already well aware, they just don't care. It's awfully hard to sell multi-million dollar systems if no one thinks there is a reason for them.
I don't know, they DO have Street Fighter 2, how do you pass that up? I'm pretty addicted to Lumines and Carcassone as well. There were a lot of games from the 80's and early 90's that had gameplay that blows many current games out of the water. I think that game publishers need to go back to their roots, and they need to realize that more pixels != better games.
The service itself really isn't that bad, when it's working, and really it was only the last couple of weeks of December that XBL was having issues. I like the fact that you can shell out a few bucks and get access to arcade and boardgame style games. Granted that those bucks are translated into Live points (read: M$ bucks), and there are some obvious issues if the network goes down. As far as giving out a free game for the network issues, why not? I'd be happier if they fixed the service, but hey, they want to issue a free game, that's fine with me. My life certainly doesn't revolve XBL.
Ok, I can understand that, but why would admin access be required by default for a home installation? Access could easily be set using a group policy. I'm sorry, but for a home installation admin access for defrag is overkill.
I think this is a trend we can expect to continue, for better or worse. On the one hand it means that people are buying the music they want to listen to, on the other hand they are potentially missing out on some great songs that didn't get all the attention that the hits got. There are a lot of great songs in my (admittedly aging) collection of CDs that I would never have known about if I simply purchased singles instead of the album. Of course, we all know there are a crapton of CDs with two good songs and the rest are filler.
Are there any restrictions on what languages/tools/etc they can use aside from the kit of parts provided? The article doesn't mention anything about it, and searching USFirst's website (which seems to be getting hammered right now) doesn't turn up anything either.
Hmmmm, you could be right. Still, Vista takes forever to calculate how long a copy operation will take, and much, much longer to actually perform the copy than it would to perform the same operation on an XP machine with the same hardware specs. Vista isn't entirely bad, but there are very few features on it that are an actual improvement on XP. I do like the new explorer interface (drop down paths, which I've been told is similar to KDE) though, and program specific controls for sound are nice.
I don't really have any experience as an admin with Vista, but I've had to troubleshoot it plenty of times in tech support. I always groaned on the inside whenever a customer called in with issues with their Vista machine.
even though they're issues which shouldn't have been issues to begin with. I mean, come on!:
(From the list of changes):
Allows users and administrators to control which volumes the disk defragmenter runs on.
and
Improves the copy progress estimation when copying files within Windows Explorer to about two seconds.
Why in the world was defrag set to not give the user a choice on what drive it ran on? Also, why should defrag take an admin password to run??? And why the hell did it ever take longer than 2 seconds to estimate how long it would take to copy files? These are the kind of things that should never have been problems to begin with, and they're indicative of so much of what's wrong with Vista. I got Vista Home Premium with my new PC just to check it out and see what I thought, and I've seriously considered wiping it and installing XP several times. I'll probably wait for SP1 though, which I guess makes me a masochist at this point.
I think you're missing the point. A candidate's stance on games may not be the only issue, but it could be indicative of where they stand regarding censorship and parent-child responsibility. As far as their particular choice for supporting/opposing a candidate is concerned I would say that it is entirely up to them what factors are considered. You may have your reasons, and they'll certainly have theirs. Why should yours count for more than theirs?
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Ok, I'll bite.
Abolish the IRS. I think Steve Forbes has a great plan for fixing government income
Agreed, there is no reason a flat tax shouldn't work.
Social Security and Medicare stop.
Stopping Social Security is something I can get behind. I'm 28 and I know I'll never see a dime of anything I'm paying into. I think personal 401k accounts are a better route. Medicare I'm not so sure about, there are a lot of folks out there that need this money for medication. I think the issue is really universal healthcare, and the fact that we're one of the few modern Western nations that don't have it.
Cable lines are nationalized. Comcast et al can lease them from the government. Heck, you can use them for free. We need competition.
I agree that we need competition, but I can see the entire cable industry exploding over this one. They've paid to lay down the lines, and I can't see any of them being happy about the government stepping in and seizing what is essentially private property, and then making them pay to use said property again.
Net neutrality is mandatory. If you degrade someone else's service because it competes with your own, you get fined BIG.
Here here!
Drivers licenses get harder to get and keep. Too many morons on cell phones that need to learn it's not a right.
I don't know about that. There are millions of safe drivers in the US, I don't see a need to make it more difficult to get a driver's license. I do think there should be heavier fines for accidents caused by using a Cellphone (without a hands-free set).
You can't get divorced without 6 months of good marriage counseling, preferable faith-based (you choose the faith, obviously). The one exception is abuse. If there is abuse, you can leave today. We'll help. But if you accuse abuse and it is proven that you lied, you're locked up.
Also on the marriage front, you can't get married without at least a few sessions of marriage counseling. Talk about kids, values, in-laws, sex, where you want to live, religion, and everything else. The divorce rate is too high, and I see it as causing too many problems. These last two are designed to help lower that and improve things.
OK, I really disagree with these, especially the faith-based bit. Marriage and divorce are certainly serious issues, but they're no one's business but the couple's.
If you don't like high school, that's OK, you can quit. As soon as you hit... let's say 10th grade... you can choose. You can continue on college prep (which is what most high schools are at this point) or you can go to a trade school. It's your choice. If you change your mind you can always get your GED later.
Sorry, I disagree again. Children (and that's what they are until they turn 18) are not capable of making rational decisions on their own. Like it or not their parents are responsible for their actions, and there are all too many teens out there that would think it's much better to quit school than to actually educate themselves. The way the world is today, if you don't even have a GED you'll never do more than be a fry cook at some grease-pit fast food joint. It would be irresponsible to allow high school students the choice to quit high school.
it isn't about you paying more. it's about google, vonage, et all paying verizon more.
Aaah, but it's even worse than that. Any extra costs that a company has to pay will almost certainly be passed on to the consumer in one way or another.
With all due respect, you're comparing apples to oranges here. When all those defense industry programmers started looking for work they were still only competing with each other, rather than having to compete with someone who doesn't even live on the same continent and is willing to do the same job for a half to a quarter of what the job would pay here. Another point worth mentioning here is that when all of those defense industry programmers were looking for work again they weren't considered entry level anymore. I'm sure you had your work cut out for you during that time, and I can respect the fact that you've gone through hard times and you've earned the rights and responsibilities that experience brings, but there are market forces in effect today that simply did not exist during that period.
That's crap. That's what they tell you to keep you at shit jobs.
It's not crap, it's called the current job market. I'm pretty sure the IT job market in 1988 was a much different beast than what it is right now. Seriously, we're talking pre-"World Wide Web" days here. The fact that you have at least 10 years of experience under your belt tells me that you obviously haven't had to worry about finding an entry level position in quite a while, and if you are talking about more than 10 years ago that would've been right around the .com bubble period, when there certainly wasn't a shortage of developer jobs.Have you looked at the job listings lately? It's not like entry level positions are rusting on the vine.
I agree with the rest of the points you made, however, especially regarding making yourself unemployable, and employers who give crap raises and promotions.
It just takes the courage to try.
I get that, and it's not like I've given up, I'm just saying that finding a job in today's market is a whole new ballgame for entry level workers than it was 10+ years ago.
Nothing's changed. Employers pay crap wages at the entry level, and treat young kids like crap. Said young kids then hop jobs until they find something better.
Except that there is a difference, there are a lot fewer entry level positions available to job hop to. Job hopping your way out of an entry level position nowadays is just about the same as shooting yourself in the foot.
and the most depressing thing about entering the workforce for me is how hard it is to get your foot in the door anywhere. I have absolutely no problems starting at the bottom and working my way up, but there doesn't seem to be many places out there that are willing to hire straight out of the gate. Go do a search on Monster or Dice in any major metropolitan area (or anywhere else for that matter) for entry-level positions and I guarantee you won't find more than one to two positions, if that.
I can certainly understand that, considering that the vast majority job postings consist of "Must have 5+ years of exp. with (extremely specific) technologies A, B, & C" as well as a wide swath of skills that are generally only picked up on the job. The companies that complain about not being able to find qualified candidates are often the same companies that outsource all of the entry-level jobs to India.
What we first need to do is change the FCC so that it's not headed by appointed officials, but rather by elected representatives.
That's an interesting idea, but I can see a big problem with it. As it stands now a large portion of the population does not make educated decisions on other major issues (Social Security, abortion, immigration, etc), so how can we expect them to make educated voting decisions regarding technology and communications? As technical individuals we've all seen what comes from talking about technical topics with non-technical individuals; most people simply don't know enough about technology to have an opinion regarding the matter, or even worse, they simply don't care until it affects them directly. Ma and Pa Kettle are probably still using a 56k dial-up connection, and could care less whether or not Time Warner or Verizon might have a monopoly in their area. For that plan to work there would need to be a massive campaign to educate voters on technology and communication and how they affect their daily lives.
You're missing the point, which is that there is absolutely no reason why you should have to tell your boss how you voted. You don't have to lie, you don't have to give them a random number, you don't have to tell them anything at all about how you voted. It is quite literally none of their business.
Or rather who says you have to tell them your serial number in the first place?
This one has been talked about for a while. Didn't Yahoo shoot this idea down pretty quickly last year? What has changed to make it any more likely? The only reasons I can think of for this to occur are
- MS would get the advantage of a search engine on par with Google.
- MS would also get the advertising revenue that Yahoo brings in.
- Yahoo could gain access to MS Office Live, allowing them to compete with Google in online document creation and collaboration.
Both companies offer very similar services (as far as online portals are concerned), and it doesn't seem like there would be many other advantages to a buyout.Uuuuhhhh, yes, it does say that. Did you bother to read both articles? From the article:
So yes, they are actually outfitting the planes with these systems, whether the tests are for fuel burn, aerodynamic drag, etc or others. My point would still be valid even if they weren't testing for the above, it's not as if they would have passengers on the plane during a live test anyway.
Ah, nevermind, I see that was posted in response to another comment, my bad.....
Wow. Ok, look, I feel I need to help you out here.
- Go get an X-Ray done.
- Locate your funny bone on the X-Ray.
- Check funny bone for fractures, major or minor.
It was a joke, learn to take one. I have a 360, I just finished playing a couple of rounds of Halo 3, and I love the system as whole.Sheesh...
A shame nobody bothered to inform the manufacturers and proponents of this system about this particular wisdom.
I'm betting they're already well aware, they just don't care. It's awfully hard to sell multi-million dollar systems if no one thinks there is a reason for them.
I know you're just joking, but the article actually points out that testing will occur only on flights with no passengers.
I don't know, they DO have Street Fighter 2, how do you pass that up? I'm pretty addicted to Lumines and Carcassone as well. There were a lot of games from the 80's and early 90's that had gameplay that blows many current games out of the water. I think that game publishers need to go back to their roots, and they need to realize that more pixels != better games.
The service itself really isn't that bad, when it's working, and really it was only the last couple of weeks of December that XBL was having issues. I like the fact that you can shell out a few bucks and get access to arcade and boardgame style games. Granted that those bucks are translated into Live points (read: M$ bucks), and there are some obvious issues if the network goes down. As far as giving out a free game for the network issues, why not? I'd be happier if they fixed the service, but hey, they want to issue a free game, that's fine with me. My life certainly doesn't revolve XBL.
I'm guessing the free game is going to Pong Advanced.
Ok, I can understand that, but why would admin access be required by default for a home installation? Access could easily be set using a group policy. I'm sorry, but for a home installation admin access for defrag is overkill.
I think this is a trend we can expect to continue, for better or worse. On the one hand it means that people are buying the music they want to listen to, on the other hand they are potentially missing out on some great songs that didn't get all the attention that the hits got. There are a lot of great songs in my (admittedly aging) collection of CDs that I would never have known about if I simply purchased singles instead of the album. Of course, we all know there are a crapton of CDs with two good songs and the rest are filler.
Of course, there are plenty of other uses for robots besides war machines and bar disarmament.
What was your experience with the contest like? It seems like an interesting project, even if you're not a high schooler.
Are there any restrictions on what languages/tools/etc they can use aside from the kit of parts provided? The article doesn't mention anything about it, and searching USFirst's website (which seems to be getting hammered right now) doesn't turn up anything either.
Hmmmm, you could be right. Still, Vista takes forever to calculate how long a copy operation will take, and much, much longer to actually perform the copy than it would to perform the same operation on an XP machine with the same hardware specs. Vista isn't entirely bad, but there are very few features on it that are an actual improvement on XP. I do like the new explorer interface (drop down paths, which I've been told is similar to KDE) though, and program specific controls for sound are nice.
I don't really have any experience as an admin with Vista, but I've had to troubleshoot it plenty of times in tech support. I always groaned on the inside whenever a customer called in with issues with their Vista machine.
even though they're issues which shouldn't have been issues to begin with. I mean, come on!:
(From the list of changes):
and Why in the world was defrag set to not give the user a choice on what drive it ran on? Also, why should defrag take an admin password to run??? And why the hell did it ever take longer than 2 seconds to estimate how long it would take to copy files? These are the kind of things that should never have been problems to begin with, and they're indicative of so much of what's wrong with Vista. I got Vista Home Premium with my new PC just to check it out and see what I thought, and I've seriously considered wiping it and installing XP several times. I'll probably wait for SP1 though, which I guess makes me a masochist at this point.I think you're missing the point. A candidate's stance on games may not be the only issue, but it could be indicative of where they stand regarding censorship and parent-child responsibility. As far as their particular choice for supporting/opposing a candidate is concerned I would say that it is entirely up to them what factors are considered. You may have your reasons, and they'll certainly have theirs. Why should yours count for more than theirs?