Well, considering just by how much the wage goes up (how much is it? Triple? Quadruple?)....
Raising the minimum wage to $15 three years from now would be about a 50% increase in the wage.
A $0.43 increase in the price of a Big Mac is around a 14% increase in non-premium areas (e.g., not Manhattan). I suspect the overall increase in McDonalds prices would be about 30%, since the Big Mac can't absorb as much increase as some other items. For example, the "premium" sandwiches might be able to move 20%, while lower-priced items might move 50%.
Taxes are taken out of paychecks, regardless of how much or how little you make. You might get a hefty chunk of it back when you file your taxes, but you didn't get that money when you got handed your paycheck.
If you were smart, you certainly would get that money when you were handed your paycheck.
If you don't owe any taxes, then not having any money withheld to pay taxes isn't a problem. When I was making very little, I regularly cranked up my "dependents" on my W4 so that I wouldn't end up with a large refund. Letting the government hold on to your money interest-free for an average of six months doesn't make good financial sense. My goal was to have to pay about $100 when I filed my taxes. That way, I get the use of some government money interest-free, but I also had no problem paying the balance due.
Consumer grade SSD not quite there, but 5 years at 40 GB per day is not too shabby. That is 40 GB writing. Spread that across 5 drives in a raid, and we have 160 GB writing per day, far beyond what most consumers need.
Although I agree that even consumer SSDs don't really have any issues with write endurance in the real world, any RAID level other than RAID-0 doesn't increase the overall endurance.
This is because all other RAID levels require every drive to be written whenever there is any write.
Unless the package is a rush delivery, is a recipient really going to notice that it took an extra couple hours or even an extra day to travel between Cisco's manufacturing or shipping location and their home or office?
An extra hour, no. An extra day, most definitely.
I get an e-mail the day before any UPS package is going to be delivered to my house. If it doesn't show up the next day, I want to know why. I'm just an individual, not a business. If you are a business, UPS offers a lot more features like that.
I wonder if they (private companies) secretly allowed it(NSA infiltration) to happen under fear of the NSA using whatever power they have to get the companies shut down if they didn't follow suit.
Companies like Microsoft have as much power over the US government as the government has over them.
Microsoft could firewall off access to Windows Update and Windows Activation servers for all US government IP addresses. I'm sure there is something in the Microsoft EULA that would allow them to do this legally. Sure, the government could work around the issue, but the reality is that it would be a lot less work just to drop whatever pressure they were putting on Microsoft.
Or, they could have received a National Security Letter which requires them to deny the existence of the letter and its contents.
I really want one of these companies to stand up and say "we got an NSL, so we can't tell you anything". Seriously, what would happen if Google did this? Does anybody really think that Larry Page would be sent to Gitmo?
As for expiring, the instructions recommend to make a snapshot once you're up and running, to be able to reset the expiration period when needed.
That won't help. The "start time" is stored in the snapshot, and once X number of days passes, you either activate or can't run arbitrary programs. It doesn't matter if the machine wasn't running during those days or not (which is what reverting to a snapshot would be like).
It's possible, though, that IE isn't excluded from being run if you aren't activated, because you might need to patch the system before you can activate.
But they also do have special skus created for them by large manufactorers of consumer goods. TV's, lawnmowers, grills and other small appliances
Pretty much every store that offers price match also does this. I could never get Best Buy to price match any TV they sold with any other store because they model number was always just a little bit different. The product might be identical, though.
I also know this is true for lawn mowers and water heaters (two recent purchases), as when I shopped for my last one, I found that Sears, Home Depot, and Loews don't sell the same model number as any of the other stores.
Odd, I read a lot of non-Amazon content on my Kindle. Must be using it wrong...
Which third-party (i.e., non-Amazon) software do you use to convert the content into something that the Kindle can read? Based on the people I've talked to who have Kindles (bright, very computer literate people), software like Calibre isn't something they have even heard of...they just buy books from Amazon, or borrow books from their public library (which uses Amazon DRM to allow them to loan to Kindle users).
And, once you have Calibre, you can convert any content to anything you want, but ePub is still the best final format. I have a lot of eBooks I have purchased from Amazon, but don't own any Kindle. I have an Onyx Boox, because I wanted an e-reader with good PDF support, and had to have something that handled ePub natively.
There are a few multiplayer games (I think Dungeon Defenders) that will straight up end your game if the steam servers go offline, and they seem to go offline at least once a week and usually at evening hours in the U.S.
Are you sure the servers that are "offline" are really the "Steam servers", or are they servers/software that the game developer runs and controls, possibly in the steampowered.com domain, but otherwise completely independent of "Steam"?
Lowering the quality of goods is just as bad as raising the prices to me.
Except that it's easy to find items in WalMart that aren't exclusive to WalMart.
For example, I purchase my major label (not naming names because I don't want this devolve into "well, that's crap, anyway" sort of thing) peanut butter at WalMart because a jar is 20-30% cheaper than at grocery stores less than a mile away. If I wanted WalMart's brand of peanut butter, I could save even more, but there are a lot more options available (at least 3 other major label brands). On the other hand, I purchased a jar of WalMart-branded salsa because it was about 50% the price of name brands, and at less than $2, I felt I could waste the money once if it sucked. Surprisingly, it was pretty good (again, this is in comparison to a bottled salsa, not something made fresh). OTOH, at the same time I also bought another "off brand" (not WalMart, but not a big name) salsa that was in-between price from the other two, and it wasn't good at all...I threw out half the jar.
I think most people who complain about how goods at WalMart are so cheaply made haven't ever been in a WalMart to do real comparison shopping with identically branded and sized items from other stores, and maybe haven't really tried the "generic" version that WalMart sells.
However, it turns out that these huge discounts have a snowball effect towards the authors: they now typically get lower royalties per book, sometimes much lower. I had this confirmed by a few authors I know.
Then the publishers or Amazon are making a whole lot more per book than they used to, at least in the case of best sellers.
It's not uncommon to be able to buy new fiction hardbacks for around $15, while the eBook is around $10. It's pretty easy to see how actually printing and proofing a physical book (no automated spell check, no way to verify that text from the original source wasn't changed other than reading, and you need to do spot checks on a few books from the print run) and then shipping it somewhere could easily cost $2-3 dollars. Since a physical book can be re-sold at least once (easily, many more if gently read), that cuts into original sales. So, with eBooks, two copies are sold (because you can't re-sell them, and assume only one re-sale of the physical book) at a gross of $20 at retail. With the physical book, one copy gets sold for $15, and there are easily $3 more costs for the publisher, thus only $12 really counts for that sale (as far as profit for various entities is concerned). Although the eBook also has production costs, all of them are shared with the physical book.
So, if an author really gets less money from $20 at retail than $12 at retail, then the middlemen get at least $8 more, which is 40% of the possible profit. That's a frightening amount.
Calibre's conversion to.mobi or.azw3 leaves a lot to be desired. It basically re-formats the entire book so it's completely generic...every book looks the same. Part of this is due to the horrid older.mobi format that Amazon used (among other things, no support for discrete font sizes, only old-style HTML font sizing), but part of it is Calibre.
It's also a pain if you have multiple Kindles of different ages, as you would need to convert multiple times unless you want to live with only that really bad old.mobi format. ePub is a much richer, open format, and the Kindle needs to support it directly.
I hate it because I hate all DRM, but let's not pretend that Steam is any better. Steam was just early to the game and now people take it for granted.
I'm one of those people who have had a Steam account for pretty much the entire time you could (9 years according to my Steam profile), and I have never had a "Steam DRM" issue. Some games I have had problems playing because the game had bugs, or my video card drivers needed updating, but not once have I failed to be able to play the game because a Steam server wasn't available, or it believed that I wasn't authorized. I have games I have purchased on Steam, physical purchases that I could also unlock on Steam, and purchases through third parties like Humble Bundle that unlock on Steam. All work fine, every time.
Although Steam has had its issues, none of them compare to the constant complaints about every other DRM system, both on disk (like SecureROM) or Internet activated (like Uplay). Since Steam has now added a "buy once, play on any supported platform" rule, I absolutely can't think of any "fair use" that Steam DRM doesn't let me do.
So YouTube is just a collection of pointers to data held on non-Google servers?
Then, too, there's Google's cache of web crawling, which has sometimes allowed me to access something when the site is down for whatever reason, including a DMCA-style takedown. Google hosts a lot of content, and a lot of it is infringing. Google has had lawsuits claiming that their search crawler is copyright infringement by itself, even if results aren't returned for that site.
You'd have to be a complete idiot to think that the users actually want those cat pictures rather than the copyright infringing files.
Those cat pictures are also very likely copyrighted, and might even be infringing themselves.
Seriously, don't people understand that essentially everything returned from a search is copyrighted, and there is absolutely no way to know for sure if similar content at one link is infringing while another link is not. For a good example, look at all the bogus DMCA takedown requests based on simple keyword searches. Many times the content isn't infringing, and in some cases takedown requests have been issued by big media for sites they directly control.
Yes, if you search long and hard enough you might even find some legitimately freely distributable content.
Until Google caved to big media, adding "filetype:torrent" to your Google search gave you pretty much the same results at Torrentz gave. There is no difference between Google and Torrentz except that Torrentz specializes in searching for.torrent files.
I expect that Google will shortly have to cave about image searches, since basically everything returned from a Google image search is not freely distributable, and much of it is already infringing. As an example, I use Google image search to find better cover images for my eBooks, and the vast majority of results are from sites who copied the original image without permission. Personally, I don't have a problem with this, but don't indict Torrentz for doing exactly the same thing that you seem to think "real search engines" don't do.
VT50 here, and until OLED becomes affordable, I can't see a reason to upgrade. Even if 4K content starts to become very common, I don't know if I could stand LCD black levels. The problem isn't that LCDs are bad at displaying black...it's that they are bad at displaying black and some other color near each other.
I actually thought my plasma was broken because on some content, I wasn't getting smooth blacks. It turns out the plasma was perfect...it was the source that had bits of grey mixed in what every other display showed as the same color as "black".
Paypal now holds onto your funds for weeks if you haven't sold anything recently and your feedback score or number of auctions makes no difference.
There must be something that makes a difference, as I hadn't sold anything in years, but recently sold over $1000 of server hardware and the money was available to me immediately. I have perfect feedback, and used to sell a lot, when eBay was mostly private individuals.
As a buyer you won't find any auction deals.
I still buy sometimes, if I know exactly what I want (searching without the right keywords can lead to lots of useless results). I have found some great deals, again mostly on server hardware, but often on "accessories" for other items that are the standard high markup items (batteries, cables, etc.). eBay isn't perfect by any means, but it still has a place in my online shopping world.
I used to be able to run a phone on full batteries for 2 days without a recharge.
I have an LG G2 and always get at least 50 hours before I hit 10% remaining on my battery. I have gone as much as 79 hours before getting down that low.
If my phone is idle, it uses around 1% per hour. Running most apps, I don't use more than 3% per hour, unless I run something that really uses the CPU or GPU. E-mail, web, light games, etc., all are easy on my battery.
That's on a phone with a quad-core processor, 1920x1080 screen, 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of flash storage.
I beg to differ, you have to go for high end pro, not low end consumer.
The model you referenced is no where near "high end pro" for Panasonic. It's not even the better than their best consumer model (which does have "smart" features).
The "business" displays offered by Panasonic are three model years behind their consumer models as far as picture quality is concerned. Unfortunately, now that 4K TV is taking over, we may never see another truly reference display as far as contrast, black level, and color reproduction are concerned, since those are the three things that LCD TVs don't do very well with compared to plasma.
The exception to this is if you install when you are running in "Big Picture" mode. In that case, the game always gets installed in the default Steam library.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, considering just by how much the wage goes up (how much is it? Triple? Quadruple?)....
Raising the minimum wage to $15 three years from now would be about a 50% increase in the wage.
A $0.43 increase in the price of a Big Mac is around a 14% increase in non-premium areas (e.g., not Manhattan). I suspect the overall increase in McDonalds prices would be about 30%, since the Big Mac can't absorb as much increase as some other items. For example, the "premium" sandwiches might be able to move 20%, while lower-priced items might move 50%.
Taxes are taken out of paychecks, regardless of how much or how little you make. You might get a hefty chunk of it back when you file your taxes, but you didn't get that money when you got handed your paycheck.
If you were smart, you certainly would get that money when you were handed your paycheck.
If you don't owe any taxes, then not having any money withheld to pay taxes isn't a problem. When I was making very little, I regularly cranked up my "dependents" on my W4 so that I wouldn't end up with a large refund. Letting the government hold on to your money interest-free for an average of six months doesn't make good financial sense. My goal was to have to pay about $100 when I filed my taxes. That way, I get the use of some government money interest-free, but I also had no problem paying the balance due.
Consumer grade SSD not quite there, but 5 years at 40 GB per day is not too shabby. That is 40 GB writing. Spread that across 5 drives in a raid, and we have 160 GB writing per day, far beyond what most consumers need.
Although I agree that even consumer SSDs don't really have any issues with write endurance in the real world, any RAID level other than RAID-0 doesn't increase the overall endurance.
This is because all other RAID levels require every drive to be written whenever there is any write.
More often than not, the answer is movies: War Games, Hackers, The Matrix, and so on.
More often than not, she was talking to someone who thinks a hacker is what you see in movies, and not actual hackers then.
And, she's obviously talking to young people.
I started "hacking" by helping a friend put together and program a Heathkit computer in the 70s. I was also into phone phreaking.
Unless the package is a rush delivery, is a recipient really going to notice that it took an extra couple hours or even an extra day to travel between Cisco's manufacturing or shipping location and their home or office?
An extra hour, no. An extra day, most definitely.
I get an e-mail the day before any UPS package is going to be delivered to my house. If it doesn't show up the next day, I want to know why. I'm just an individual, not a business. If you are a business, UPS offers a lot more features like that.
I wonder if they (private companies) secretly allowed it(NSA infiltration) to happen under fear of the NSA using whatever power they have to get the companies shut down if they didn't follow suit.
Companies like Microsoft have as much power over the US government as the government has over them.
Microsoft could firewall off access to Windows Update and Windows Activation servers for all US government IP addresses. I'm sure there is something in the Microsoft EULA that would allow them to do this legally. Sure, the government could work around the issue, but the reality is that it would be a lot less work just to drop whatever pressure they were putting on Microsoft.
Or, they could have received a National Security Letter which requires them to deny the existence of the letter and its contents.
I really want one of these companies to stand up and say "we got an NSL, so we can't tell you anything". Seriously, what would happen if Google did this? Does anybody really think that Larry Page would be sent to Gitmo?
As for expiring, the instructions recommend to make a snapshot once you're up and running, to be able to reset the expiration period when needed.
That won't help. The "start time" is stored in the snapshot, and once X number of days passes, you either activate or can't run arbitrary programs. It doesn't matter if the machine wasn't running during those days or not (which is what reverting to a snapshot would be like).
It's possible, though, that IE isn't excluded from being run if you aren't activated, because you might need to patch the system before you can activate.
But they also do have special skus created for them by large manufactorers of consumer goods. TV's, lawnmowers, grills and other small appliances
Pretty much every store that offers price match also does this. I could never get Best Buy to price match any TV they sold with any other store because they model number was always just a little bit different. The product might be identical, though.
I also know this is true for lawn mowers and water heaters (two recent purchases), as when I shopped for my last one, I found that Sears, Home Depot, and Loews don't sell the same model number as any of the other stores.
Odd, I read a lot of non-Amazon content on my Kindle. Must be using it wrong...
Which third-party (i.e., non-Amazon) software do you use to convert the content into something that the Kindle can read? Based on the people I've talked to who have Kindles (bright, very computer literate people), software like Calibre isn't something they have even heard of...they just buy books from Amazon, or borrow books from their public library (which uses Amazon DRM to allow them to loan to Kindle users).
And, once you have Calibre, you can convert any content to anything you want, but ePub is still the best final format. I have a lot of eBooks I have purchased from Amazon, but don't own any Kindle. I have an Onyx Boox, because I wanted an e-reader with good PDF support, and had to have something that handled ePub natively.
There are a few multiplayer games (I think Dungeon Defenders) that will straight up end your game if the steam servers go offline, and they seem to go offline at least once a week and usually at evening hours in the U.S.
Are you sure the servers that are "offline" are really the "Steam servers", or are they servers/software that the game developer runs and controls, possibly in the steampowered.com domain, but otherwise completely independent of "Steam"?
Lowering the quality of goods is just as bad as raising the prices to me.
Except that it's easy to find items in WalMart that aren't exclusive to WalMart.
For example, I purchase my major label (not naming names because I don't want this devolve into "well, that's crap, anyway" sort of thing) peanut butter at WalMart because a jar is 20-30% cheaper than at grocery stores less than a mile away. If I wanted WalMart's brand of peanut butter, I could save even more, but there are a lot more options available (at least 3 other major label brands). On the other hand, I purchased a jar of WalMart-branded salsa because it was about 50% the price of name brands, and at less than $2, I felt I could waste the money once if it sucked. Surprisingly, it was pretty good (again, this is in comparison to a bottled salsa, not something made fresh). OTOH, at the same time I also bought another "off brand" (not WalMart, but not a big name) salsa that was in-between price from the other two, and it wasn't good at all...I threw out half the jar.
I think most people who complain about how goods at WalMart are so cheaply made haven't ever been in a WalMart to do real comparison shopping with identically branded and sized items from other stores, and maybe haven't really tried the "generic" version that WalMart sells.
However, it turns out that these huge discounts have a snowball effect towards the authors: they now typically get lower royalties per book, sometimes much lower. I had this confirmed by a few authors I know.
Then the publishers or Amazon are making a whole lot more per book than they used to, at least in the case of best sellers.
It's not uncommon to be able to buy new fiction hardbacks for around $15, while the eBook is around $10. It's pretty easy to see how actually printing and proofing a physical book (no automated spell check, no way to verify that text from the original source wasn't changed other than reading, and you need to do spot checks on a few books from the print run) and then shipping it somewhere could easily cost $2-3 dollars. Since a physical book can be re-sold at least once (easily, many more if gently read), that cuts into original sales. So, with eBooks, two copies are sold (because you can't re-sell them, and assume only one re-sale of the physical book) at a gross of $20 at retail. With the physical book, one copy gets sold for $15, and there are easily $3 more costs for the publisher, thus only $12 really counts for that sale (as far as profit for various entities is concerned). Although the eBook also has production costs, all of them are shared with the physical book.
So, if an author really gets less money from $20 at retail than $12 at retail, then the middlemen get at least $8 more, which is 40% of the possible profit. That's a frightening amount.
Check out Calibre one of these days.
Calibre's conversion to .mobi or .azw3 leaves a lot to be desired. It basically re-formats the entire book so it's completely generic...every book looks the same. Part of this is due to the horrid older .mobi format that Amazon used (among other things, no support for discrete font sizes, only old-style HTML font sizing), but part of it is Calibre.
It's also a pain if you have multiple Kindles of different ages, as you would need to convert multiple times unless you want to live with only that really bad old .mobi format. ePub is a much richer, open format, and the Kindle needs to support it directly.
I believe that the Kindle is an excellent device primarily because it does one thing - its an eReader.
If it supported ePub natively, the Kindle would be a real eReader.
In reality, it's a device for consuming Amazon content.
I hate it because I hate all DRM, but let's not pretend that Steam is any better. Steam was just early to the game and now people take it for granted.
I'm one of those people who have had a Steam account for pretty much the entire time you could (9 years according to my Steam profile), and I have never had a "Steam DRM" issue. Some games I have had problems playing because the game had bugs, or my video card drivers needed updating, but not once have I failed to be able to play the game because a Steam server wasn't available, or it believed that I wasn't authorized. I have games I have purchased on Steam, physical purchases that I could also unlock on Steam, and purchases through third parties like Humble Bundle that unlock on Steam. All work fine, every time.
Although Steam has had its issues, none of them compare to the constant complaints about every other DRM system, both on disk (like SecureROM) or Internet activated (like Uplay). Since Steam has now added a "buy once, play on any supported platform" rule, I absolutely can't think of any "fair use" that Steam DRM doesn't let me do.
Google does not host the content either.
So YouTube is just a collection of pointers to data held on non-Google servers?
Then, too, there's Google's cache of web crawling, which has sometimes allowed me to access something when the site is down for whatever reason, including a DMCA-style takedown. Google hosts a lot of content, and a lot of it is infringing. Google has had lawsuits claiming that their search crawler is copyright infringement by itself, even if results aren't returned for that site.
You'd have to be a complete idiot to think that the users actually want those cat pictures rather than the copyright infringing files.
Those cat pictures are also very likely copyrighted, and might even be infringing themselves.
Seriously, don't people understand that essentially everything returned from a search is copyrighted, and there is absolutely no way to know for sure if similar content at one link is infringing while another link is not. For a good example, look at all the bogus DMCA takedown requests based on simple keyword searches. Many times the content isn't infringing, and in some cases takedown requests have been issued by big media for sites they directly control.
Yes, if you search long and hard enough you might even find some legitimately freely distributable content.
Until Google caved to big media, adding "filetype:torrent" to your Google search gave you pretty much the same results at Torrentz gave. There is no difference between Google and Torrentz except that Torrentz specializes in searching for .torrent files.
I expect that Google will shortly have to cave about image searches, since basically everything returned from a Google image search is not freely distributable, and much of it is already infringing. As an example, I use Google image search to find better cover images for my eBooks, and the vast majority of results are from sites who copied the original image without permission. Personally, I don't have a problem with this, but don't indict Torrentz for doing exactly the same thing that you seem to think "real search engines" don't do.
(Arstechnica wants GPS in a tablet?
It's useful when you are sitting at a coffee shop in a strange town and want to be able to find some other business nearby.
Google can pull some tricks with WiFi to help locate you, but it's not universal.
Note: I have the Panny 60" VT60 and love it.
VT50 here, and until OLED becomes affordable, I can't see a reason to upgrade. Even if 4K content starts to become very common, I don't know if I could stand LCD black levels. The problem isn't that LCDs are bad at displaying black...it's that they are bad at displaying black and some other color near each other.
I actually thought my plasma was broken because on some content, I wasn't getting smooth blacks. It turns out the plasma was perfect...it was the source that had bits of grey mixed in what every other display showed as the same color as "black".
Paypal now holds onto your funds for weeks if you haven't sold anything recently and your feedback score or number of auctions makes no difference.
There must be something that makes a difference, as I hadn't sold anything in years, but recently sold over $1000 of server hardware and the money was available to me immediately. I have perfect feedback, and used to sell a lot, when eBay was mostly private individuals.
As a buyer you won't find any auction deals.
I still buy sometimes, if I know exactly what I want (searching without the right keywords can lead to lots of useless results). I have found some great deals, again mostly on server hardware, but often on "accessories" for other items that are the standard high markup items (batteries, cables, etc.). eBay isn't perfect by any means, but it still has a place in my online shopping world.
I used to be able to run a phone on full batteries for 2 days without a recharge.
I have an LG G2 and always get at least 50 hours before I hit 10% remaining on my battery. I have gone as much as 79 hours before getting down that low.
If my phone is idle, it uses around 1% per hour. Running most apps, I don't use more than 3% per hour, unless I run something that really uses the CPU or GPU. E-mail, web, light games, etc., all are easy on my battery.
That's on a phone with a quad-core processor, 1920x1080 screen, 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of flash storage.
I beg to differ, you have to go for high end pro, not low end consumer.
The model you referenced is no where near "high end pro" for Panasonic. It's not even the better than their best consumer model (which does have "smart" features).
The "business" displays offered by Panasonic are three model years behind their consumer models as far as picture quality is concerned. Unfortunately, now that 4K TV is taking over, we may never see another truly reference display as far as contrast, black level, and color reproduction are concerned, since those are the three things that LCD TVs don't do very well with compared to plasma.
The exception to this is if you install when you are running in "Big Picture" mode. In that case, the game always gets installed in the default Steam library.