I rip every DVD and Blu-Ray disk I buy, and I strip the DRM off any digital movie I buy, so I can have access to my media wherever I want... but the average consumer can't/won't go to the trouble to set up their own streaming setup. And much as I like Netflix, they're not a one-stop shop yet. The MPAA is missing a huge opportunity for a new profit-making business here.
Buying and riping doesn't do any good. You're just agreeing to all the bullshit the MPAA does.
When the price is right, I have no problem buying a Blu-Ray and re-encoding it to add to my media library. Even if there was no copy protection at all, I'd do exactly the same thing. I don't want the MPAA to provide a "media library" for me, because it'd be unlikely that I would own anything that way. I'd much rather own something that once I buy it, nothing can be done to make so that I can't play it. If I could stream a wide variety of movies in Blu-Ray quality video and audio for less than $10/month (no pay-per-view), and movies never became unavailable, I might use that to supplement my library, but Netflix/Amazon/iTunes show that I likely won't see that for quite a while.
And, I'm not sure what "riping" is, as everything I buy is ready to play and doesn't need to sit around for a while until it becomes more usable. Here's a hint...if you want to complain, try to not to sound like a 10-year-old when you're doing it.
It should also be illegal to install bloatware that is embedded to the point of not being removable (without at least rooting the device and perhaps voiding warranty).
The ICS upgrade to my HTC Thunderbolt allows me to disable any built-in app that isn't considered "critical". Surprisingly, their definition of "critical" isn't much different from mine. The only app I might want to disable that I cannot is a process that makes sure that you can't tether a device to the phone via WiFi, and I can understand the reasoning.
But Facebook, Verizon Navigator, and all the other bloatware are disabled and will not run. Not being able to remove the apps isn't really a big deal, as I have plenty of storage (2GB on the internal card and over 30GB on the microSD card).
Any excuse to limit the usage by high-bandwidth users.
I think the solution should be that we need call up Comcast, Verizon, etc., and find out the method to report someone as "infringing", post it here, and then everyone should just report a few dozen random IPs that are known to be in the US networks of these companies. There is no penalty for a false accusation, so let's just see what happens if they have to deal with 50-60 million reports in a month.
Okay, but those are not even close to the mass-market products I was referring to.
Most of the mass-market stuff is complete junk, anyway. Really good flashlights are a niche product.
AND they have a 10-year shelf life, so I can put a flashlight in my glove box and know it will work 2 years later.
The 18650 Li-Ion batteries have very little storage loss, and again the advantage of the Hexbright is that you will still get some light out of it, even though the brighter settings may be disabled. Someone measured the current drain on the Hexbright at 2A when it was turned off, which gives you years of storage time.
Yes, and despite him being able to Google, it doesn't change the fact that I am still "anonymous" according to the proposed law. Even if the information was part of my signature and appeared in every post, it still wouldn't be enough for the proposed law.
I also suspect that he might be seeing some "troll" mods for what most would consider a breach of etiquette.
And things like editing are not particularly hard to quantify. A manuscript of a particular length will require a general amount of hours put into it.
You'd think so, but it probably doesn't happen, based on the recent release fiction that I read.
A book from a major author that is going to sell close to a million units in hardcover shouldn't have spelling errors, repeated sentences, or text that runs off the bottom of the page. To see these sorts of errors, you'd think that I must read a lot of books, yet I've seen all that in just the last 5 books I've read.
That just covers the errors that are absolutely mistakes. Things like repeated use of the same modifying adjective outside of dialog could be intentional, but I sometimes feel like I'm back in grade school and listening to somebody stretch their paper to 500 words. At least the modifier of choice of the author/editor isn't "really". The sad part is that these are books that are generally pretty good, but obviously weren't edited as well as they could be.
Slashdot itself starts anonymous speech at a lower value than speech with an ID, a slight, but not subtle, nudge to get you to provide your information to the world.
The wording of this proposed law is such that almost every post on Slashdot and every other forum (even ones that supposedly require real names like Facebook) would be considered "anonymous".
Even though I am a registered user, Slashdot does not have my "legal name and home address" as required by this law. Almost no sites that I frequent have my "legal name", despite the fact that they might have what most people would consider is my "real name". And, pretty much the only sites that have my home address are stores that ship me stuff, but I know many people where even that isn't true, as they ship to their work and use a P.O. Box for their credit card billing address.
Take outdoor equipment for example. I've seen a lot of otherwise high-end flashlights and headlamps that use rechargeables... and I won't even look at them twice. If I'm out in the wilderness for 5 days, a regargeable is almost completely useless to me.
I'm not sure how many hours/day you'd need the light, but with this and a pair of these, I can get 80 hours of light without a recharge. You may not be able to find those exact batteries, but there are many available with the same specs.
In addition, if 50 lumens is more than you need for "just seeing a bit", you can reprogram the Hexbright for lower output. If you want to signal an airplane, the 500 lumens comes in handy. Last, if you can find the tiniest hint of civilization, the USB recharge allows you to use just about anything to get more time.
When did they start allowing the use of calculators during the SAT? I suppose about the same time that you could get a "perfect" score while still having some wrong or unanswered questions. OK...some Googling has shown my guess is correct, and also given me the conversions, so now I know what to tell young people if they ask what score I got.
Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., (said) the legislation is a "bipartisan, bicameral, common-sense solution that promotes states' rights and levels the playing field for our Main Street businesses."
This, folks, is a politician.
When he sees that local businesses are being heavily taxed, and some other business model comes into existence that evades that tax, his efforts are to ensure that other business is ALSO heavily taxed. Make sure the misery is spread equally, instead of (perhaps) asking if there's anything that can be done to reduce the misery generally.
And, he's one that is gonna be really surprised when people still buy at Amazon instead of the "Main Street" business, because Amazon will have same-day delivery to most people not long after this law is in effect. When Amazon has cheaper prices, better service, easier shopping, and the item in your hands just as quickly (and maybe even faster if you have to deal with traffic, crowds, etc.), who would buy at a "Main Street" store?
I seriously need to buy a lot of Amazon stock before this goes into law.
There is no sales tax on the things I spend the bulk of my income on: rent/real estate, investments, groceries, utilities, medical bills.
Although there is no "sales tax" on some of those things, there are other taxes that act just like a sales tax, and were often specifically created because these things weren't allowed to have a "sales tax".
Things like electricity and phone service have various fees and taxes that often are even more than sales tax (6% sales tax in my state, but my cell phone bill gets nearly 15% in taxes and fees). Some of these obviously aren't actual "end up in the government coffer" fees, but many are.
FAIL. Zip codes do not follow municipal boundaries. If you use zip code to determine what tax rate to apply, you will get it wrong a significant percentage of the time. Just because someone has a particular city zip code does not mean that where they live is subject to the tax rate of that city.
And, even with the full address, which address do you use...the delivery location or the one on the payment method?
Anybody who starts an answer with "that's easy..." just doesn't understand the issues at work. Any law made will have to specify the address to use, and states with lots of residents who spend lots of money will want it to be the billing address, even when that item is sent as a gift to some other address. Any smart legislator will see (I know, not likely to happen) that this will cause everyone to suddenly have all of their credit card bills delivered to mailboxes in Delaware (or New Hampshire, or parts of Oregon).
Using the delivery address creates a similar but not as widespread problem, as people find the addresses that have sales tax loopholes and open "receiving" locations for online purchasers. But, this does mean that wealthier people will be able to easily avoid these taxes if they want, as they could have everything delivered to a 0% sales tax location and then shipped onward to the final destination. Even for moderately large items, if you can save 10% on sales tax, you might be able to re-ship for less than that.
Amazon looks at this and says, if I'm going to be taxes as if I have a physical presence, then I might as well have a physical presence, and they have begun building "micro warehouses" in major cities across the country. Now, you will be able to order online, get the vastly superior inventory storage options that a warehouse provides, and get same-day shipping to the customer, so the customer can have the item in hand by the end of the business day.
Best Buy could have had the best of both worlds by setting up something like "BestBuyOnline.com" as a completely separate company, with no point of presence anywhere but states with no sales tax (Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon), and then have some sort of deal where the physical Best Buy stores act like Amazon's Locker so that you can still order online and pick up in store. Instead, they have chosen to keep doing business as usual with 20-50% higher prices on many items and hope that they can get back in the game when the less than 15% difference caused by sales tax is removed.
Failing to understand their customer will lead to their quicker downfall, as the one advantage the B&M had (instant gratification) will now be wiped out. So, will I buy from Amazon/Monoprice/Newegg even though I will pay 6% more than I do now? Absolutely, because I will still pay less than at most B&M stores, and will likely have the item in my hands almost as fast.
And, well, rich people have more money to spend and they do like to spend it to live well, so, we'd be getting them to "pay more of their fair share" as the Obama mantra seems to go these days....easy, voluntary way to do that, no?
Nope, because basic living costs are pretty much fixed, despite your claim that every person spends the same percentage of their income.
A person making $50K will spend a far higher percentage of their income just staying alive than a person who makes $10M. And, if you increase the cost of items, people might not buy them. Right now, there is no direct reason for a high income person not to spend their money, as they have already paid the majority of taxes on that money (despite some states having high sales taxes, they really aren't anything compared to income tax for high incomes).
In addition, there are very high income people who are "making money for retirement" in the form of athletes, movie stars, etc. These people already have an incentive to not spend money, as they know that once they get out of their "earning years" the flow will drop a lot more than the average person, so they have to save. Yes, these people still spend far more than I do per year, but it's still a much lower percentage of their income. With a national sales tax, many more people would put more of their money into savings. Savings are good, but only up to a limit. More than that, and you end up with some of the issues that made it harder to pull out of the Great Depression, and required the government to do things that kick-started the economy, but which much worse long-term impacts.
No one gets deductions for home mortgages, children, expenses, etc...nothing.
Simplify the tax code...you make $x this year...you pay 7% of that in. Simple.
If the tax rate was actually 7%, then this might work, but with a more likely 20-25% overall tax rate, removing things like breaks for home mortgage interest means that poor people could no longer afford to buy homes in many places, and thus would stay poor (in terms of assets/liabilities).
The solution for all these things is to cap the breaks at some reasonably high limit that takes into account that some people live in more expensive areas, and understand the difference between a family with a $250K income being part of the "1%" is not the same as one with a $10M income.
So, what you're saying is that unlike sales taxes, where there is no requirement for the seller to collect them without physical presences, and buyers were never presented with a bill for those taxes, your HOA didn't collect money that was required to be paid, and was on a bill that people received. And, because of that, you raised fees for everybody.
This sounds to me like you just gave up trying to be fair because you weren't competent and decided to just collect more money from the honest people. So, your example is a good one, as it mirrors the current sales tax issue, where states wouldn't have to worry about "losses" to Internet purchases if they had businesses in their state that people wanted to buy from. But, instead of trying to fix their state economy by telling businesses that they need to find a better business model, they just prop them up by screwing the general population. Note that this is also the proposed business model for the RIAA and MPAA.
You're only at 125mph for a fraction of a second after the engine stops burning fuel to keep things moving.
Although an automatic transmission takes a long time to slow down the car if you just take your foot off the gas, the fuel is still flowing. Stopping that flow will bring the speed down very quickly.
Press the clutch and your problem is solved. No electronics can fail because the clutch in a manual transmission car is controlled by you, with your foot, mechanically.
Modern cars with manual transmissions often have a drive-by-wire clutch, in the sense that the pedal is nothing more than a force-feedback joystick.
Try writing a replacement sometime from scratch, and see how hard it is.
It intelligently only averages cells that are filled with numeric values, allows easy input of multiple ranges of cells, allows direct input of numbers as function parameters, and has an easy to remember name.
If the built-in functions (which include some serious statistics and analysis functions) don't do the job, there are third-party add-ons that likely do. If you absolutely need something unique, then VBA is quite easy to use. The only real thing I don't like about Excel is the "error in a cell is propagated to all cells that reference it", with no way to disable it, and no formatting codes that hide errors. For example, there are a lot of times when I end up with divide by zero because a cell isn't filled in yet, but that's OK (like a table that calculates price/quantity, when a row hasn't been entered yet), and the only way around it is to use the "=IF(ISERROR(...))" construct. It would be much nicer if the existing "positive;negative;zero;text" custom formatting added ";error" to the end.
The problem is that the question is wrong. It's trivial to make a progress bar...just sum up all the things you have to do, and move the bar each time a "thing" is done, rounding to the nearest pixel. It doesn't matter if the "thing" is a byte to copy, a file to install, or any generic task. As long as you can add one to a counter each time you have done another "thing", you can then display it graphically.
The actual complaint is about displaying accurate time remaining to complete the task, which really has nothing to do with the display of the progress bar. Instead, it involves guessing about how long each remaining "thing" will take to complete, and then displaying that sum of those times. This is hard because no matter how accurate the data used to make the guess, something outside the control of the program can disrupt the processing.
I'm not fond of those bells and buzzers either, but I'm not so angry about them that I have to destroy things.
Instead, I just read the owner's manual and followed the instructions to disable them. What, you can't disable them on your car without the destruction, and you hate them that much, and yet you still bought that car? Why?
Sure, you can replace a PS or HD for less than the annual savings, but what if something bigger than that goes out?
I have run a lot of computers over the years, and pretty much the only thing that dies are hard drives and fans (the ones with moving parts, and that's not a coincidence). Yes, we've all had some other thing release the magic smoke, but I suspect that the vast majority were caused by some motor dying first (like a power supply or video card if the cooling fan seizes).
These days, you won't lose a whole motherboard or CPU because of a fan dying, and a good power supply will just shut down instead of burning up, so there really isn't anything "bigger" than $50 or so that you might have to replace.
My most expensive server, a dual dual-core Xeon with 16GB RAM, I picked up used for $200 and can expect it to last a minimum of 2 years, so let's round it up to another $10/mo. That's $30/mo to run a pretty beefy server for home use.
When did a dual-core Xeon become "beefy"? It's pretty easy (and not very expensive) to build a single-socket, quad-core Xeon server.
And, if you use something more modern than your dual-core, the electricity cost would be lower, as Intel processors have become much more efficient.
Sure, but this article was all about budgeting, and bandwidth wasn't even mentioned.
Probably because it isn't an issue until you start to want guaranteed 100Mbps or more.
Even though I have FiOS business at 35Mbps down/25Mbps up, I still went for a VPS to offload some serving that wanted about 40Mbps by itself, and my research showed that in the less than 30GB disk space range, you could get pretty much unlimited transfer at fairly decent speeds (25-50Mpbs) without spending more than $50/month. The problem with VPS is that as you increase any single need (disk, CPU, RAM, bandwidth) beyond the entry level, the price skyrockets because very few hosting companies offer a la carte systems. Instead, if you want 2TB of disk space, you also have to pay for 8 CPU cores and 24GB of RAM, even if all you want to do is have your own personal "Dropbox", which doesn't need anything but disk space and bandwidth.
Slashdot Mirror
I rip every DVD and Blu-Ray disk I buy, and I strip the DRM off any digital movie I buy, so I can have access to my media wherever I want... but the average consumer can't/won't go to the trouble to set up their own streaming setup. And much as I like Netflix, they're not a one-stop shop yet. The MPAA is missing a huge opportunity for a new profit-making business here.
Buying and riping doesn't do any good. You're just agreeing to all the bullshit the MPAA does.
When the price is right, I have no problem buying a Blu-Ray and re-encoding it to add to my media library. Even if there was no copy protection at all, I'd do exactly the same thing. I don't want the MPAA to provide a "media library" for me, because it'd be unlikely that I would own anything that way. I'd much rather own something that once I buy it, nothing can be done to make so that I can't play it. If I could stream a wide variety of movies in Blu-Ray quality video and audio for less than $10/month (no pay-per-view), and movies never became unavailable, I might use that to supplement my library, but Netflix/Amazon/iTunes show that I likely won't see that for quite a while.
And, I'm not sure what "riping" is, as everything I buy is ready to play and doesn't need to sit around for a while until it becomes more usable. Here's a hint...if you want to complain, try to not to sound like a 10-year-old when you're doing it.
It should also be illegal to install bloatware that is embedded to the point of not being removable (without at least rooting the device and perhaps voiding warranty).
The ICS upgrade to my HTC Thunderbolt allows me to disable any built-in app that isn't considered "critical". Surprisingly, their definition of "critical" isn't much different from mine. The only app I might want to disable that I cannot is a process that makes sure that you can't tether a device to the phone via WiFi, and I can understand the reasoning.
But Facebook, Verizon Navigator, and all the other bloatware are disabled and will not run. Not being able to remove the apps isn't really a big deal, as I have plenty of storage (2GB on the internal card and over 30GB on the microSD card).
Any excuse to limit the usage by high-bandwidth users.
I think the solution should be that we need call up Comcast, Verizon, etc., and find out the method to report someone as "infringing", post it here, and then everyone should just report a few dozen random IPs that are known to be in the US networks of these companies. There is no penalty for a false accusation, so let's just see what happens if they have to deal with 50-60 million reports in a month.
Okay, but those are not even close to the mass-market products I was referring to.
Most of the mass-market stuff is complete junk, anyway. Really good flashlights are a niche product.
AND they have a 10-year shelf life, so I can put a flashlight in my glove box and know it will work 2 years later.
The 18650 Li-Ion batteries have very little storage loss, and again the advantage of the Hexbright is that you will still get some light out of it, even though the brighter settings may be disabled. Someone measured the current drain on the Hexbright at 2A when it was turned off, which gives you years of storage time.
Yes, and despite him being able to Google, it doesn't change the fact that I am still "anonymous" according to the proposed law. Even if the information was part of my signature and appeared in every post, it still wouldn't be enough for the proposed law.
I also suspect that he might be seeing some "troll" mods for what most would consider a breach of etiquette.
And things like editing are not particularly hard to quantify. A manuscript of a particular length will require a general amount of hours put into it.
You'd think so, but it probably doesn't happen, based on the recent release fiction that I read.
A book from a major author that is going to sell close to a million units in hardcover shouldn't have spelling errors, repeated sentences, or text that runs off the bottom of the page. To see these sorts of errors, you'd think that I must read a lot of books, yet I've seen all that in just the last 5 books I've read.
That just covers the errors that are absolutely mistakes. Things like repeated use of the same modifying adjective outside of dialog could be intentional, but I sometimes feel like I'm back in grade school and listening to somebody stretch their paper to 500 words. At least the modifier of choice of the author/editor isn't "really". The sad part is that these are books that are generally pretty good, but obviously weren't edited as well as they could be.
Slashdot itself starts anonymous speech at a lower value than speech with an ID, a slight, but not subtle, nudge to get you to provide your information to the world.
The wording of this proposed law is such that almost every post on Slashdot and every other forum (even ones that supposedly require real names like Facebook) would be considered "anonymous".
Even though I am a registered user, Slashdot does not have my "legal name and home address" as required by this law. Almost no sites that I frequent have my "legal name", despite the fact that they might have what most people would consider is my "real name". And, pretty much the only sites that have my home address are stores that ship me stuff, but I know many people where even that isn't true, as they ship to their work and use a P.O. Box for their credit card billing address.
Take outdoor equipment for example. I've seen a lot of otherwise high-end flashlights and headlamps that use rechargeables... and I won't even look at them twice. If I'm out in the wilderness for 5 days, a regargeable is almost completely useless to me.
I'm not sure how many hours/day you'd need the light, but with this and a pair of these, I can get 80 hours of light without a recharge. You may not be able to find those exact batteries, but there are many available with the same specs.
In addition, if 50 lumens is more than you need for "just seeing a bit", you can reprogram the Hexbright for lower output. If you want to signal an airplane, the 500 lumens comes in handy. Last, if you can find the tiniest hint of civilization, the USB recharge allows you to use just about anything to get more time.
When did they start allowing the use of calculators during the SAT? I suppose about the same time that you could get a "perfect" score while still having some wrong or unanswered questions. OK...some Googling has shown my guess is correct, and also given me the conversions, so now I know what to tell young people if they ask what score I got.
Oblig: get off my lawn
Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., (said) the legislation is a "bipartisan, bicameral, common-sense solution that promotes states' rights and levels the playing field for our Main Street businesses."
This, folks, is a politician. When he sees that local businesses are being heavily taxed, and some other business model comes into existence that evades that tax, his efforts are to ensure that other business is ALSO heavily taxed. Make sure the misery is spread equally, instead of (perhaps) asking if there's anything that can be done to reduce the misery generally.
And, he's one that is gonna be really surprised when people still buy at Amazon instead of the "Main Street" business, because Amazon will have same-day delivery to most people not long after this law is in effect. When Amazon has cheaper prices, better service, easier shopping, and the item in your hands just as quickly (and maybe even faster if you have to deal with traffic, crowds, etc.), who would buy at a "Main Street" store?
I seriously need to buy a lot of Amazon stock before this goes into law.
There is no sales tax on the things I spend the bulk of my income on: rent/real estate, investments, groceries, utilities, medical bills.
Although there is no "sales tax" on some of those things, there are other taxes that act just like a sales tax, and were often specifically created because these things weren't allowed to have a "sales tax".
Things like electricity and phone service have various fees and taxes that often are even more than sales tax (6% sales tax in my state, but my cell phone bill gets nearly 15% in taxes and fees). Some of these obviously aren't actual "end up in the government coffer" fees, but many are.
FAIL. Zip codes do not follow municipal boundaries. If you use zip code to determine what tax rate to apply, you will get it wrong a significant percentage of the time. Just because someone has a particular city zip code does not mean that where they live is subject to the tax rate of that city.
And, even with the full address, which address do you use...the delivery location or the one on the payment method?
Anybody who starts an answer with "that's easy..." just doesn't understand the issues at work. Any law made will have to specify the address to use, and states with lots of residents who spend lots of money will want it to be the billing address, even when that item is sent as a gift to some other address. Any smart legislator will see (I know, not likely to happen) that this will cause everyone to suddenly have all of their credit card bills delivered to mailboxes in Delaware (or New Hampshire, or parts of Oregon).
Using the delivery address creates a similar but not as widespread problem, as people find the addresses that have sales tax loopholes and open "receiving" locations for online purchasers. But, this does mean that wealthier people will be able to easily avoid these taxes if they want, as they could have everything delivered to a 0% sales tax location and then shipped onward to the final destination. Even for moderately large items, if you can save 10% on sales tax, you might be able to re-ship for less than that.
Amazon looks at this and says, if I'm going to be taxes as if I have a physical presence, then I might as well have a physical presence, and they have begun building "micro warehouses" in major cities across the country. Now, you will be able to order online, get the vastly superior inventory storage options that a warehouse provides, and get same-day shipping to the customer, so the customer can have the item in hand by the end of the business day.
Best Buy could have had the best of both worlds by setting up something like "BestBuyOnline.com" as a completely separate company, with no point of presence anywhere but states with no sales tax (Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon), and then have some sort of deal where the physical Best Buy stores act like Amazon's Locker so that you can still order online and pick up in store. Instead, they have chosen to keep doing business as usual with 20-50% higher prices on many items and hope that they can get back in the game when the less than 15% difference caused by sales tax is removed.
Failing to understand their customer will lead to their quicker downfall, as the one advantage the B&M had (instant gratification) will now be wiped out. So, will I buy from Amazon/Monoprice/Newegg even though I will pay 6% more than I do now? Absolutely, because I will still pay less than at most B&M stores, and will likely have the item in my hands almost as fast.
And, well, rich people have more money to spend and they do like to spend it to live well, so, we'd be getting them to "pay more of their fair share" as the Obama mantra seems to go these days....easy, voluntary way to do that, no?
Nope, because basic living costs are pretty much fixed, despite your claim that every person spends the same percentage of their income.
A person making $50K will spend a far higher percentage of their income just staying alive than a person who makes $10M. And, if you increase the cost of items, people might not buy them. Right now, there is no direct reason for a high income person not to spend their money, as they have already paid the majority of taxes on that money (despite some states having high sales taxes, they really aren't anything compared to income tax for high incomes).
In addition, there are very high income people who are "making money for retirement" in the form of athletes, movie stars, etc. These people already have an incentive to not spend money, as they know that once they get out of their "earning years" the flow will drop a lot more than the average person, so they have to save. Yes, these people still spend far more than I do per year, but it's still a much lower percentage of their income. With a national sales tax, many more people would put more of their money into savings. Savings are good, but only up to a limit. More than that, and you end up with some of the issues that made it harder to pull out of the Great Depression, and required the government to do things that kick-started the economy, but which much worse long-term impacts.
No one gets deductions for home mortgages, children, expenses, etc...nothing.
Simplify the tax code...you make $x this year...you pay 7% of that in. Simple.
If the tax rate was actually 7%, then this might work, but with a more likely 20-25% overall tax rate, removing things like breaks for home mortgage interest means that poor people could no longer afford to buy homes in many places, and thus would stay poor (in terms of assets/liabilities).
The solution for all these things is to cap the breaks at some reasonably high limit that takes into account that some people live in more expensive areas, and understand the difference between a family with a $250K income being part of the "1%" is not the same as one with a $10M income.
many people did not pay their assessments
So, what you're saying is that unlike sales taxes, where there is no requirement for the seller to collect them without physical presences, and buyers were never presented with a bill for those taxes, your HOA didn't collect money that was required to be paid, and was on a bill that people received. And, because of that, you raised fees for everybody.
This sounds to me like you just gave up trying to be fair because you weren't competent and decided to just collect more money from the honest people. So, your example is a good one, as it mirrors the current sales tax issue, where states wouldn't have to worry about "losses" to Internet purchases if they had businesses in their state that people wanted to buy from. But, instead of trying to fix their state economy by telling businesses that they need to find a better business model, they just prop them up by screwing the general population. Note that this is also the proposed business model for the RIAA and MPAA.
"brief" is a long way down the road at 125mph.
You're only at 125mph for a fraction of a second after the engine stops burning fuel to keep things moving.
Although an automatic transmission takes a long time to slow down the car if you just take your foot off the gas, the fuel is still flowing. Stopping that flow will bring the speed down very quickly.
Press the clutch and your problem is solved. No electronics can fail because the clutch in a manual transmission car is controlled by you, with your foot, mechanically.
Modern cars with manual transmissions often have a drive-by-wire clutch, in the sense that the pedal is nothing more than a force-feedback joystick.
What, exactly is wrong with =AVERAGE()?
It's not too bad, but it's not too good either.
Try writing a replacement sometime from scratch, and see how hard it is.
It intelligently only averages cells that are filled with numeric values, allows easy input of multiple ranges of cells, allows direct input of numbers as function parameters, and has an easy to remember name.
If the built-in functions (which include some serious statistics and analysis functions) don't do the job, there are third-party add-ons that likely do. If you absolutely need something unique, then VBA is quite easy to use. The only real thing I don't like about Excel is the "error in a cell is propagated to all cells that reference it", with no way to disable it, and no formatting codes that hide errors. For example, there are a lot of times when I end up with divide by zero because a cell isn't filled in yet, but that's OK (like a table that calculates price/quantity, when a row hasn't been entered yet), and the only way around it is to use the "=IF(ISERROR(...))" construct. It would be much nicer if the existing "positive;negative;zero;text" custom formatting added ";error" to the end.
We all understand that Apple has convinced people they always have to have the most shiny new thing, and so batteries don't have time to wear out.
For the rest of us, though, many parts of devices need replaced (batteries, cables, cases, etc.) long before the useful life of the device is up.
Give this man some upward moderation.
The problem is that the question is wrong. It's trivial to make a progress bar...just sum up all the things you have to do, and move the bar each time a "thing" is done, rounding to the nearest pixel. It doesn't matter if the "thing" is a byte to copy, a file to install, or any generic task. As long as you can add one to a counter each time you have done another "thing", you can then display it graphically.
The actual complaint is about displaying accurate time remaining to complete the task, which really has nothing to do with the display of the progress bar. Instead, it involves guessing about how long each remaining "thing" will take to complete, and then displaying that sum of those times. This is hard because no matter how accurate the data used to make the guess, something outside the control of the program can disrupt the processing.
I'm not fond of those bells and buzzers either, but I'm not so angry about them that I have to destroy things.
Instead, I just read the owner's manual and followed the instructions to disable them. What, you can't disable them on your car without the destruction, and you hate them that much, and yet you still bought that car? Why?
Sure, you can replace a PS or HD for less than the annual savings, but what if something bigger than that goes out?
I have run a lot of computers over the years, and pretty much the only thing that dies are hard drives and fans (the ones with moving parts, and that's not a coincidence). Yes, we've all had some other thing release the magic smoke, but I suspect that the vast majority were caused by some motor dying first (like a power supply or video card if the cooling fan seizes).
These days, you won't lose a whole motherboard or CPU because of a fan dying, and a good power supply will just shut down instead of burning up, so there really isn't anything "bigger" than $50 or so that you might have to replace.
My most expensive server, a dual dual-core Xeon with 16GB RAM, I picked up used for $200 and can expect it to last a minimum of 2 years, so let's round it up to another $10/mo. That's $30/mo to run a pretty beefy server for home use.
When did a dual-core Xeon become "beefy"? It's pretty easy (and not very expensive) to build a single-socket, quad-core Xeon server.
And, if you use something more modern than your dual-core, the electricity cost would be lower, as Intel processors have become much more efficient.
Sure, but this article was all about budgeting, and bandwidth wasn't even mentioned.
Probably because it isn't an issue until you start to want guaranteed 100Mbps or more.
Even though I have FiOS business at 35Mbps down/25Mbps up, I still went for a VPS to offload some serving that wanted about 40Mbps by itself, and my research showed that in the less than 30GB disk space range, you could get pretty much unlimited transfer at fairly decent speeds (25-50Mpbs) without spending more than $50/month. The problem with VPS is that as you increase any single need (disk, CPU, RAM, bandwidth) beyond the entry level, the price skyrockets because very few hosting companies offer a la carte systems. Instead, if you want 2TB of disk space, you also have to pay for 8 CPU cores and 24GB of RAM, even if all you want to do is have your own personal "Dropbox", which doesn't need anything but disk space and bandwidth.