Yes, because we understand a few things you obviously do not.
1. Our problem is spending. Our percentage of GDP that government at all levels is spending is up near WWII levels. If the economy could be restarted that would improve slightly but still remain at historic highs. So the problem is spending, giving Washington more revenue would simple cause them to do what they have done in the past each and every time a grand compromise mixing cuts and revenue was made. The revenue increases (taxes) go in instantly and the cuts are promised for the 'out years' and never actually happen. You guys only get to pull that Lucy & the Football crap so many time before we wise up. We ain't Charlie Brown. So here is a grand bargain I'd make. Offer up three hundred billion of real cuts to NEXT YEAR's budget and I'd support raising taxes a hundred billion NEXT YEAR. And anyway, any time Washington talks about 'cuts' they are anything but. Something called 'baseline budgeting' says they 'assume' about 8% annual growth in each and every program and then when they only grow one 5% it is a 'drastic cut.'
2. It wouldn't work: Laffer Curve. We are on the wrong side of it where tax cuts increase GDP and thus revenue and tax increases tend to depress GDP and thus revenue. Please blather on about taxing the rich for purposes of 'social justice' if it makes you feel better but STFU about increasing taxes to raise revenue. But if you have the balls (like Obama in one of the debates) to publicly state that you favor raising taxes anyway, knowing it will deepen the recession, we will feel free to laugh in your face, even it it hurts yer widdle self esteem.
>You can buy a $99 tablet at Walgreens. Of course, it's a piece of shit compared to the iPad..
Well yes, $99 is pushing the envelope a little. But seriously, why can't hardware on par with an iPad or more important a Xoom be sold for $199-$250? For $250 you can buy a new, not discontinued, netbook. It has a 10" display, an expensive, battery sucking Intel CPU, a Windows license and a more complex housing including a pointer and keyboard. Compare to a tablet that replaces the Intel Inside with what is supposed to be a cheaper ARM based SoC solution, replaces Windows with Android and a tablet with an Arm uses smaller (and cheaper) LiPo slabs for batteries. On the plus side it adds a touchscreen and accelerometer and if it has 3G you usually get GPS as part of the phone plan. Why does the tablet cost so much more? A lot of people who aren't able to run the bill of materials just look at the two and know one is jacked up beyond what it should be; they are right.
Thus the only ones buying are the ones immune from price effects, or more bluntly, the iDrones. And everyone else is left wondering why they can't move product as fast as China can deliver it and make insanely great margins too. Guys, you can't, get over it and compete the only way anyone has ever competed with Apple, sell at price points they refuse to compete with and drive the bastards back into their single digit boutique niche.
> You have any idea how much that costs in a bureaucracy? You could buy 20 of these > boards for one laptop.
If that is the problem spring $25 for a USB based AVR programmer. I was simply making the point that for the same $25 they are hoping to sell this vaporware at (expect $50) you can buy, right now, everything you need to get an AVR up and blinking some leds so long as you can get yerself a parallel port for the really cheap interface to plug into.
> Raising the debt limit has never been a "to the wire" affair.
Actually if you bother to read a little, previous debt limit votes have been contentious and demands have been made. This time we carried it closer to the brink than before because the spending and dept problem is now more acute than ever before. The Tea Party didn't cause the downgrade, they just rang the alarm bells about a problem that has festered for decades. What happened was the worst of both worlds, the Rs made a big stink about it and then caved without solving a problem they had succeeded in putting front and center in front of everyone and getting consensus that it really is a problem. Had we actually got a deal to cap spending or a BBA we would have kept the AAA rating.
Use yer brain. People respond to incentives and punishment. When we want normal folk to put out extra effort we reward them with overtime. Most new jobs are created by small business. An expanding small business is typified by the small business owner working hundred hour weeks, chugging maalox and chasing a dream of becoming a medium or large business. So his reward for extra effort is to keep a smaller share of any additional income? You really believe smart, motivated folk won't respond to incentives and punishments in the tax code?
It is documented fact that in the bad old days when we had 90% marginal tax rates Hollywood types would work until they hit that bracket and then coast until Jan 1. Who in their right mind will work for ten cents on the dollar? And in England it was 95%, see the Beatles' Tax Man. So if we can agree that 90 or 95% taxes kill the motivation for any work, and would certainly stop people from making the sort of extreme efforts that would create jobs, we are left with the Laffer Curve and the eternal arguments over where the peak is for various taxation schemes. I'd assert that 50% is danger territory and we are there now.
Simple question for those who talk about fairness. Riddle me this: Elin could only take half of Tiger Wood's stash, but that was after tax loot of course. So what share of Tiger's income stream do unwed mothers in housing projects who didn't have to screw Tiger deserve to rake off the top before Elin can take her half of what is left? If over half, please explain.
> We've simply got to cut how much money we're spending and not do it by 1% over 10 years.
Actually that is all it would really take. Seriously. Really cutting 1%, not Washington DC NewSpeak cutting 1% from a baseline set to grow 8% annually but setting Y+1 spending at the level of year Y minus 1% would do the trick. According to the bizarro world math they use in DC if we just froze spending at current levels for a decade the CBO would score that as a nine trillion dollar cut from the current baseline. That would get us close to balance even with the static scoring CBO uses. Throw in the 1% cut and you are inside the margin of error for balance. In a dynamic model that assumes the economy would react very favorably to the knowledge that we had taken firm action to reign in the monster and that no new taxes were going to be coming at them it is highly probable that the recession could be over before election day.
Yes, if the Dems could put self preservation ahead of ideology they could still save their Sun God and their own sorry asses. But they won't and whatever squish republican they help the Rs nominate (since Obama has no primary challenger) won't have the balls to do anything constructive either, we slide into history.
Sad really. Are you stockpiling Gold, Guns and Granola? Why not, you can see what is coming just like they can and bitchin that THEY aren't doing anything.
Sorry to be an Eyore here but I'm not seeing the point. The stated goal is improving the future crop of CS students but by giving them what is essentially a small PC with HDMI and Linux you aren't going to get that. They will approach it like a PC and quickly all development will be very high level languages, LAMP stacks, etc. While they admit that it CAN be used for robotics, even though they don't expose any embedded interfaces, that doesn't seem to be their focus since it is aimed to be operated via the USB port from a 'real PC' or hung from (and powered from?) the HDMI port on a flat panel display.
If you want kids exploring hardware give em a board with USB on one end and hardware interfaces on the other. Then they can hook it up to a PC or smartphone and get busy. Oh wait, that already exists. And if they show aptitude introduce them to Arduino or real AVR programming. If you can get a machine that still has a parallel port you can buy an AVR programmer for $5 and have a simple AVR based circuit up and going on a breadboard for $25, cost of breadboard, programmer, everything included. Yes, for $25 per kid total bill of materials you can put kids in front of an embedded programming environment except for an old laptop with a parallel port. Who can't find somebody with a stack of old laptops willing to donate? Windows 95/98 machines are overkill for running an AVR development environment.
> If you think the government is competent enough to pull off any kind of serious > conspiracy, you've obviously never worked with any government organization...
Yea, that is my problem with conspiracy theories. The military can't stop the New York TImes from printing classified material on a regular basis. War secrets from a war that is still hot, that almost certainly get soldiers KIAed. Neither can the State Dept. keep it's secret cables secret from the nefarious NYT. The White House and the Congress leak like sieves to everyone. But the government has kept that dead alien and the ship he rode in on hidden away in Area 51 for decades. The Truthers all believe that President Bush was a retard and at the same time pulled off the most insanely bold black op in history and has managed to keep it a total secret... well except from the smart people who see right through it to the "Truth." Yea, the Truth is out there. Way out there.
Even though the government did keep the Manhattan Project off the pages of the NYT (only because they weren't OPENLY treasonous back then, it would have been both bad for business and life expectancy) it is now well known that the Soviets were deeply infiltrated and thus following progress in almost real time. I wouldn't bet much that the Germans weren't also aware of at least the existence of it and of the general progress. And while they weren't printing anything, anyone want to bet somebody at the Times didn't know about it?
And yes the NYT is treasonous. A moonbat could have at least argued the published leaks before Jan '09 were some misguided effort to thwart the Evil Bush the fact they continued with the practice after their preferred candidate won shows they are not simply misguided patriots but on the other f*cking side. Sorry, when you lend aid and comfort to an enemy during time of hostilities you are a traitor. Period. It is a sign of the loss of confidence in our own civilization that we don't have the moral clarity to put Pinch up against a wall. (After a fair trial of course.... exhibit A, a copy of the NYT, the prosecution rests. Verdict GUILTY. Sentence: Death. total time 1 hour.)
> Network Manager for Gnome works perfectly in XFCE.
Yup, that works quite nicely. However, at least on F15 be sure to manually force remove gnome-power-manager. If you don't you get both it and the xfce one and you lose. Of course the xfce power manager is also broken in F15 so you lose anyway.
The gnome power manager insists on suspending if you close the lid, even when connected to AC so that is right out. On the other hand xfce power manager will suspend if you close the lid while on battery but won't suspend if AC disappears while the lid is already closed so I have to open the lid before yanking the plug which is almost as bad.
> While I mostly agree - why hasn't anyone just forked Gnome2 and run with it - it is under > the GPL isn't it?
Someone started that, releasing a complete set of packages for Fedora 15 to put GNOME2 back. But quickly realized that was a dead end. Instead the new idea seems to be to port gnome-panel, metacity, compiz and the other useful bits of GNOME2 that were abandoned to the newer Gtk3 and GNOME3 libraries. Not an expert myself but haven't heard the first bad word about the work on the libraries for GNOME3 so why wouldn't we want everyone to migrate to them? This will permit the eventual creation of a GNOME3 tech desktop able to run the new applications linked to the GNOME3 libs but with a usable desktop environment. Then a distribution could package both desktop environments (GNOME Classic and GNOME Shell) without maintaining two whole sets of everything. I'd suggest for names GNOME Desktop and GNOME Tablet/Touch/Phone whatever the hell it is intended for.:)
> The ideal system would be a system which works exactly the way I like it, out of the > box. However, unfortunately this most likely won't happen, ever. Therefore it is > important that I can customize the system, so that I'm not stuck more than necessary > with decisions made by others.
And that is why thee and me had to leave GNOME. They are on record stating that the attitude you just expressed is wrong. They assert that it is all about a few really clever folk doing 'usability studies' to discover the one 'right' way and enforcing that so that there isn't evil 'variability' in the user experience. Because they claim that when potential users see your customized desktop vs another user's customized desktop it will confuse and frighten them. That when they see all this chaos they won't convert and the 'Year of Linux on the Desktop^WTablet' won't happen.
It is a wicked impulse at heart, one that drove most of the history of the 20th Century. The belief that a technocratic elite could and should rule the masses, bringing stability and order to society. If I have to give you the names of the various flavors this basic idea took you weren't paying attention in history class. But it is clear the GNOMEs are infected, Steve Jobs has always had the will to power, RMS certainly believes himself fit to command others and given half a chance I suspect the disease is already sleeping the the hearts of many at Google. The fight to keep our computing Free has never been more important, now we have Free Software (from the GNU project itself... remember what the G in GNOME stands for) that wants to command and control us. Bleh.
> Them - "So what, do you think you are smarter than me or something?"
Or another non-offensive yet correct answer would be:
"Ubuntu makes a good desktop but a lousy server. Since I wrangle servers a lot I prefer to run the exact same environment so I don't have to remember the small differences. And they both follow the same basic path anyway, just a matter of when each will end up with a new feature."
> The Angry Birds get paid, the small local guy does not.
Of course. Amazon needs Angry Birds to draw people to the Amazon store. But they also need an app a day to keep em coming back and paying for A list titles to give away is expensive. So they also promote smaller apps that need the exposure Amazon can give them more than Amazon needs that particular app. It makes perfect economic sense once you examine who is gaining more from the transaction and notice that end is making more money up front. But nobody enters into voluntary trade unless they believe they are benefiting from it. The idea is the other side is gaining longer term. Amazon pays to give away Angry Birds in the hope it will drive enough traffic long term to repay their expense exactly like a small developer lets Amazon give their app away for free in the hope the exposure leads to follow on sales on the title given away plus future add-ons and their next title by making their brand more desirable.
If one developer doesn't want to be App of the Day there are a dozen others competing for the honor. It is like The Tonight Show. As best as I can tell nobody who appears on the show as a guest gets paid but there is a long line of publicists trying to get their clients booked on the show anyway. Why? Because almost every guest is pitching something, the new season of their TV show about to start, a new movie just hit the multiplex, a new album out, a new book, something. So everybody wins, Jay gets almost all of the budget for the show instead of paying guests, the guests obviously believe doing the show pushes product and the network gets a pretty cheap show to push their own adverts into and the ratings are good enough the affiliates are happy.
Nope, because of Microsoft's monopoly everyone buys a Windows license when they buy a new PC. And since there is zero chance of that changing the economy can fall off a cliff and Linux adoption on the desktop won't budge from the ~1% of people cluefull enough to install it themselves and annoyed enough with Windows infestations and other breakage to go to the bother of being an outcast.
> gift those natives with blankets full of cooties.
I just love how progressive politics causes people to divorce from reality. Go look up the dates on a couple of events. Date #1, when these blankets (with cooties) were supposedly being given to the Indians/Native Americans to cause a plague to descend upon them and Date #2 is the date when the germ theory of disease became accepted science. The rest is an exercise for the non-progressive student. (Progressive students tending to be immune to fact based arguments.)
> The sort of "idiot" that is told that the recruitment agency they are going through..
In which case it probably doesn't matter much how much time you spend carefully formatting it. They will be doing the final editing so write it in whatever you want, with as little formatting as possible and export. They will be doing the final polish anyway, probably by just jerking your text into one of their carefully built up templates.
Don't think you are exactly a troll or fool, just really ignorant and your kung-fu is really weak That said, what sort of idjit sends out a resume in Word these days? Half the time a Word doc won't render correctly on another copy of the same version.release of Word itself. On the other hand if it looks good in your copy of Adobe Reader it will almost certainly look the same in their copy of Adobe Reader or when printed on their printer. So that takes care of your concerns about brochures and your resume.
That leaves the possible problem of colaborating with someone who only uses Office AND creates such complex documents that translating between another product causes issues. In the real world there aren't many of those. Lets face it, 90% of users use almost no features in Word or OO.o. And of the 10% of power users you can probably work out an interop plan, since such people have learned, at a minimum, to deal with differing versions of Word since the PC and Mac versions don't release at the same time and that 10% is almost always an early adopter.
> manually typing in CSS and HTML does not show me what it looks like.
It does if you keep one or more browsers open on the document under construction. You will see EXACTLY what it will look like and even be able to see it in as many browsers as you need to support. And by running a local webserver and pointing the browsers at that you even see PHP, perl, whatever you are scripting your pages with. Just a question of whether you are a true webmaster or just another shlub using a GUI crutch. Hint: real Masters of HTML are worth a lot more. Break free of the cruches, kick your skills up to the next level and increase your worth.
> The Gimp creates visual distortions as the algorithms are not well done like Photoshop's.
Whatever. I certainly haven't seen anything like that. If you are airbrushing a supermodel's cleavage for the cover of Vogue you might actually need PhotoShop. If you are creating art for web pages you just need to invest some time in retraining in GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus and OO.o.
> Audicity is a joke for those who do professional audio editing, etc.
You do know Audacity is a great tool for it's intended audience, the podcaster and occasional audio editing user, right? It is apparently even popular on Windows. It makes no pretense of being the core of a digital audio workstation. There are of course other programs which do make those claims. There are even companies who sell laptops preloaded with Linux and a lot of audio creation software installed and integrated and sold as a digital audio workstation. I don't do that sort of work so can't tell you if it is on par with popular mainstream PC/Mac workstations. Hint: if it uses PulseAudio it ain't pro; if it isn't using JACK it ain't worth jack.
In the end, and to get back on topic, you have to run the calculus of whether the costs of closed software, which include the risk of being driven out of business by the BSA and the (perhaps zero for you) cost in loss of Freedom (RMS sense) are outweighed by a greater increase in productivity.
That is probably what Contessa Brewer thought when she got all snarky with Congressman Brooks with her "and just where did you get your economics degree" line. She obviously hadn't done any opposition research on her guest because she certainly wasn't ready for his answer.:)
Since the courts are insane beyond recall there is only one option left. Congress needs to pass a law. Throw the creationists a bone to get them on board. Mandate the Patent Office to assume the design of every existing natural creature was patented by God with the issue date in 4000BC. And to stop the next step direct the Library of Congress to assume He filed a copyright on the full genome of every creature on the same date. Then direct them to assume any gene sequence derived from a naturally occurring creature is a derived work so that only the new material is eligible for a new copyright if it is different enough and separate enough from the original work.
1. A 10K solar system is pretty puny. If you really are paying less than $100/mo it might be able to do what you are hoping and supply half you energy needs though. But for most people a $10K solar buy would be farting into the wind.
2. You are hoping for 500/yr on a 10K investment. That is pretty pitiful since the principle is going to be lost to depreciation in ten years. And you WILL be sinking at least one battery replacement into the system in a ten year run. Treasury bills are paying 3% right now, that would give you $300/yr and at the end of the ten years you still have the principle. (assuming we aren't in a Max Max post kaboom world by then) If you are figuring on inflation buy a few ounces of gold with that 10K to hedge.
> I quoted the Apollo program as a good example of a government program that created > jobs (through gov. contracts as well as in NASA), innovated technologies and even > created new technologies.
Wrong way to look at it, cherrypicking one part of the dataset. Throw in the shuttle era and recalculate the cost/benefit. Remember that government programs are immortal, sure they might do some useful things at first but you have to carry their dead weight forever. And in another fifty years how much money will NASA piss away?
> That's a total right wing lie. Our government is 'broke' because we're not charging > the taxes necessary to pay for the services we provide.
Sorry, it is now a pretty widely accepted truth that attempts to extract more than about 18.5% of US GDP in taxes doesn't succeed more than a couple of years, until people change their behavior to avoid confiscatory taxation. We are spending on the order of 25% of GDP currently. So beyond the folly of trying to raise tax rates in the middle of a recession/depression there is the hard reality that it just wouldn't raise much revenue while almost certainly lowering GDP. Remember that even Obama was admitting that raising tax rates was a bad idea in this economy as recently as December. The Laffer Curve is math, you can't argue against math. Well you can try to argue we are on the 'good' side of the curve but anyone who has looked at a plot of the numbers will point at you and laugh.
So we either scale back the spending or find some way to get the economy growing enough that rising GDP means tax revenues rise enough to balance the budget or some combination of the two. And if the economic growth actually employs a few people they switch from takers to makers and pay taxes instead of being a drain, that is a twofer in balancing the budget.
> And with the interest rate on Treasury bonds hovering at 3%, it seems like now would > be an ideal time to go into more debt to build the infrastructure that we'll be needing soon.
One small problem. Interest rates are still that low for one reason. As boned as we are the rest of the world is worse right now so money keeps sloshing into Treasury Notes. How much longer can that continue? Better question: How much longer would that continue if instead of the current debate about reigning in spending we instead went hog wild borrowing even more insane amounts of money to piss away. Our debt load is getting really close to the debt to GDP levels that signal a crisis. See the PIIGS for examples of what happens next. Riots, mass hysteria, cats and dogs sleeping together.
> Strawman. Wise technological progress has always consisted of replacing > one set of problems with a hopefully smaller set.
We understand that. Greens don't. They really believe there is power in unicorn farts or something that has no bad side effects. Of course the cynical believe they (or at least the leaders) too understand the truth... but that by making every large scale energy choice impractical by litigation and protests they will eventually get what really want, a return to a low energy low population world. Humans are the problem in their worldview and modern civilization takes humans from a problem for the Earth to a disease to be exterminated at all cost.
> Bird kills are a concern, but they're greatly exaggerated.
Of course they are. But the pushback begins on every 'alternative' energy the second it starts looking like it might someday be practical. Practical meaning economically practical without massive government subsidy and kickbacks to green groups.
> The Audubon Society is fully behind wind power. That should tell you something.
Yes, it tells me something. They are, like most 'green' groups more a political organization than anything else. But trust me on this, just like the 180 the usual suspects pulled the second He Who Must Not Be Named (for fear of Godwin's Law) went from OK guy to enemy #1 the second he invaded Russia the Audubon Society will turn on wind the second it isn't another green slush fund of free government money going to the 'right people.'
> And the amount of land required may be overstated.
Won't matter, the arguments used against it are strawmen anyway, ignite one another pops up to take it's place. Every. TIme. Google a bit and you can get ahead of the curve. Extracting large amounts of energy from the wind might lead to Global Climate Change, dontchaknow. And for a few billion in grant money they will be certain to provide ample peer reviewed evidence, complete with computer models. Then we can have global wind credit exchanges to go with our carbon indulgences.
> If you covered all man made structures with solar PV, you would have more than enough power to run our society.
I know the green propaganda makes that claim but a few moments of thought dispels that myth. If covering all of our structures with PV could power our society that would imply that on average most buildings receive enough light to power them with enough left over for the really large energy hogs like data centers, smelters, etc. And that just ain't close to being true, it is the rare building that can collect enough power for its own climate control, to say nothing of the entire energy needs. When you drill into the claims you learn that it is only true if we redesign our entire civilization to require less energy. A LOT less. As in energy efficiency that makes no economic sense unless you have the government making energy cost insane amounts to drive it. Translation, tear down our high energy using civilization and replace it with one 'more in tune with the Earth.' Translation of that: "1/10 of current population living a third world lifestyle except with lots of Internet bandwidth."
Remember that we are also hellbent on replacing dinosaur based fuel in our transportation with electric so factor that huge future need into plans for the grid.
> There is also lots of land that is already pretty wasted. For example, you could put solar farms on old mountain top removal mines.
Except those aren't the best spots from an availability of sunlight or wind basis. Deserts are where the sun shines all day. Which is also why photovoltaics on buildings are a bad idea in most of the areas people actually live.
> Yeah, really. Once the subsidies get killed off like they did in the late 1970's, > solar will once again be put back on the shelf and all those workers will be out of a job.
And the subsidies will get killed off. Because we are broke. We will either end the foolishness now while we still have a choice or we will keep denying the math until the kaboom. But one way or another it ends soon. But that really doesn't matter anyway because solar is just alike all other green / alternative energy, a chimera.
Green energy is energy without consequences and that just doesn't exist. On a small scale while there are ample government subsidies and the externalities can be ignored a lot of stuff looks great. But put one into large scale production and each and every one ends up with horrible side effects... as bad as or worse than dead dinosaur based energy. And then the same greens who preened when they were putting government subsidied solar panels installed on the roof of their yuppie dream home suddenly realize that making photovoltaic solar panels is a very nasty industrial process that consumes almost as much energy in producing a panel as it produces, that large scale solar farms destroy the fragile desert ecology, etc. Already happening, useful scale solar projects have a hard time getting past the environmental impact study phase now; it only gets worse as the scale ramps up. See hydroelectric, the last generation's free green energy dream become nightmare.
Wind is just as bad. Sounds wonderful until you imagine a few hundred square miles of endless windmills making mincemeat out of the bird population and the huge transmission lines to bring the power from the uninhabited barren wastelands that tend to have reliable wind to the coastal hives where people live.
> The timing of recent events was in my view largely down to News Intl's BSkyB takeover bid.
That is a common theory, but would only explain the story in England. The wall to wall coverage here requires a larger explanation. And isn't it just a hoot that the NYT is all over this story? If true it is a tale of sleezy journalism going under even the low bar for British tabloid journalism. But the NYT commits treason on a regular basis, it is the rare state secret that they don't consider part of 'all the news thats fit to print.' Sure they hated BushHitler but they have continued splashing secrets into print years after he left office. What sort of fudged up moral compass puts traitors who get their oen country's soldiers killed in a position to pontificate on the moral transgressions of their felllow journalists?
We already are discovering that the practice of cracking voicemail boxes of fools (who never set a pin or set a totally lame one) was a widespread practive in the british tabloid press, yet the official investigation has not opened up to question others. And we are expected to believe Rupert himself was aware of and approved of shady practices at a sleezy tabloid, or at least Jr. did? Like they wouldn't practice plausable deniability in industry the same as they do in politics, the military and elsewhere? And finally, we here in America are expected to give a crap about a scandal about tabloids in England when our own tabloids are just as awful?
No, this story and the timing is aimed at, if not forcing Murdoch out completely, at least putting Holder on his ass hard enough that Fox News over here shuts up through the '12 election cycle. A unified press singing the praises of the LightWorker is about the only realistic chance the idiot has of being releected and so that is what they intend to have happen. Chicago style if needed.
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> ...but only half of them refuse to tax the rich.
Yes, because we understand a few things you obviously do not.
1. Our problem is spending. Our percentage of GDP that government at all levels is spending is up near WWII levels. If the economy could be restarted that would improve slightly but still remain at historic highs. So the problem is spending, giving Washington more revenue would simple cause them to do what they have done in the past each and every time a grand compromise mixing cuts and revenue was made. The revenue increases (taxes) go in instantly and the cuts are promised for the 'out years' and never actually happen. You guys only get to pull that Lucy & the Football crap so many time before we wise up. We ain't Charlie Brown. So here is a grand bargain I'd make. Offer up three hundred billion of real cuts to NEXT YEAR's budget and I'd support raising taxes a hundred billion NEXT YEAR. And anyway, any time Washington talks about 'cuts' they are anything but. Something called 'baseline budgeting' says they 'assume' about 8% annual growth in each and every program and then when they only grow one 5% it is a 'drastic cut.'
2. It wouldn't work: Laffer Curve. We are on the wrong side of it where tax cuts increase GDP and thus revenue and tax increases tend to depress GDP and thus revenue. Please blather on about taxing the rich for purposes of 'social justice' if it makes you feel better but STFU about increasing taxes to raise revenue. But if you have the balls (like Obama in one of the debates) to publicly state that you favor raising taxes anyway, knowing it will deepen the recession, we will feel free to laugh in your face, even it it hurts yer widdle self esteem.
>You can buy a $99 tablet at Walgreens. Of course, it's a piece of shit compared to the iPad..
Well yes, $99 is pushing the envelope a little. But seriously, why can't hardware on par with an iPad or more important a Xoom be sold for $199-$250? For $250 you can buy a new, not discontinued, netbook. It has a 10" display, an expensive, battery sucking Intel CPU, a Windows license and a more complex housing including a pointer and keyboard. Compare to a tablet that replaces the Intel Inside with what is supposed to be a cheaper ARM based SoC solution, replaces Windows with Android and a tablet with an Arm uses smaller (and cheaper) LiPo slabs for batteries. On the plus side it adds a touchscreen and accelerometer and if it has 3G you usually get GPS as part of the phone plan. Why does the tablet cost so much more? A lot of people who aren't able to run the bill of materials just look at the two and know one is jacked up beyond what it should be; they are right.
Thus the only ones buying are the ones immune from price effects, or more bluntly, the iDrones. And everyone else is left wondering why they can't move product as fast as China can deliver it and make insanely great margins too. Guys, you can't, get over it and compete the only way anyone has ever competed with Apple, sell at price points they refuse to compete with and drive the bastards back into their single digit boutique niche.
> You have any idea how much that costs in a bureaucracy? You could buy 20 of these
> boards for one laptop.
If that is the problem spring $25 for a USB based AVR programmer. I was simply making the point that for the same $25 they are hoping to sell this vaporware at (expect $50) you can buy, right now, everything you need to get an AVR up and blinking some leds so long as you can get yerself a parallel port for the really cheap interface to plug into.
> Raising the debt limit has never been a "to the wire" affair.
Actually if you bother to read a little, previous debt limit votes have been contentious and demands have been made. This time we carried it closer to the brink than before because the spending and dept problem is now more acute than ever before. The Tea Party didn't cause the downgrade, they just rang the alarm bells about a problem that has festered for decades. What happened was the worst of both worlds, the Rs made a big stink about it and then caved without solving a problem they had succeeded in putting front and center in front of everyone and getting consensus that it really is a problem. Had we actually got a deal to cap spending or a BBA we would have kept the AAA rating.
Use yer brain. People respond to incentives and punishment. When we want normal folk to put out extra effort we reward them with overtime. Most new jobs are created by small business. An expanding small business is typified by the small business owner working hundred hour weeks, chugging maalox and chasing a dream of becoming a medium or large business. So his reward for extra effort is to keep a smaller share of any additional income? You really believe smart, motivated folk won't respond to incentives and punishments in the tax code?
It is documented fact that in the bad old days when we had 90% marginal tax rates Hollywood types would work until they hit that bracket and then coast until Jan 1. Who in their right mind will work for ten cents on the dollar? And in England it was 95%, see the Beatles' Tax Man. So if we can agree that 90 or 95% taxes kill the motivation for any work, and would certainly stop people from making the sort of extreme efforts that would create jobs, we are left with the Laffer Curve and the eternal arguments over where the peak is for various taxation schemes. I'd assert that 50% is danger territory and we are there now.
Simple question for those who talk about fairness. Riddle me this: Elin could only take half of Tiger Wood's stash, but that was after tax loot of course. So what share of Tiger's income stream do unwed mothers in housing projects who didn't have to screw Tiger deserve to rake off the top before Elin can take her half of what is left? If over half, please explain.
> We've simply got to cut how much money we're spending and not do it by 1% over 10 years.
Actually that is all it would really take. Seriously. Really cutting 1%, not Washington DC NewSpeak cutting 1% from a baseline set to grow 8% annually but setting Y+1 spending at the level of year Y minus 1% would do the trick. According to the bizarro world math they use in DC if we just froze spending at current levels for a decade the CBO would score that as a nine trillion dollar cut from the current baseline. That would get us close to balance even with the static scoring CBO uses. Throw in the 1% cut and you are inside the margin of error for balance. In a dynamic model that assumes the economy would react very favorably to the knowledge that we had taken firm action to reign in the monster and that no new taxes were going to be coming at them it is highly probable that the recession could be over before election day.
Yes, if the Dems could put self preservation ahead of ideology they could still save their Sun God and their own sorry asses. But they won't and whatever squish republican they help the Rs nominate (since Obama has no primary challenger) won't have the balls to do anything constructive either, we slide into history.
Sad really. Are you stockpiling Gold, Guns and Granola? Why not, you can see what is coming just like they can and bitchin that THEY aren't doing anything.
Sorry to be an Eyore here but I'm not seeing the point. The stated goal is improving the future crop of CS students but by giving them what is essentially a small PC with HDMI and Linux you aren't going to get that. They will approach it like a PC and quickly all development will be very high level languages, LAMP stacks, etc. While they admit that it CAN be used for robotics, even though they don't expose any embedded interfaces, that doesn't seem to be their focus since it is aimed to be operated via the USB port from a 'real PC' or hung from (and powered from?) the HDMI port on a flat panel display.
If you want kids exploring hardware give em a board with USB on one end and hardware interfaces on the other. Then they can hook it up to a PC or smartphone and get busy. Oh wait, that already exists. And if they show aptitude introduce them to Arduino or real AVR programming. If you can get a machine that still has a parallel port you can buy an AVR programmer for $5 and have a simple AVR based circuit up and going on a breadboard for $25, cost of breadboard, programmer, everything included. Yes, for $25 per kid total bill of materials you can put kids in front of an embedded programming environment except for an old laptop with a parallel port. Who can't find somebody with a stack of old laptops willing to donate? Windows 95/98 machines are overkill for running an AVR development environment.
> If you think the government is competent enough to pull off any kind of serious ...
> conspiracy, you've obviously never worked with any government organization
Yea, that is my problem with conspiracy theories. The military can't stop the New York TImes from printing classified material on a regular basis. War secrets from a war that is still hot, that almost certainly get soldiers KIAed. Neither can the State Dept. keep it's secret cables secret from the nefarious NYT. The White House and the Congress leak like sieves to everyone. But the government has kept that dead alien and the ship he rode in on hidden away in Area 51 for decades. The Truthers all believe that President Bush was a retard and at the same time pulled off the most insanely bold black op in history and has managed to keep it a total secret... well except from the smart people who see right through it to the "Truth." Yea, the Truth is out there. Way out there.
Even though the government did keep the Manhattan Project off the pages of the NYT (only because they weren't OPENLY treasonous back then, it would have been both bad for business and life expectancy) it is now well known that the Soviets were deeply infiltrated and thus following progress in almost real time. I wouldn't bet much that the Germans weren't also aware of at least the existence of it and of the general progress. And while they weren't printing anything, anyone want to bet somebody at the Times didn't know about it?
And yes the NYT is treasonous. A moonbat could have at least argued the published leaks before Jan '09 were some misguided effort to thwart the Evil Bush the fact they continued with the practice after their preferred candidate won shows they are not simply misguided patriots but on the other f*cking side. Sorry, when you lend aid and comfort to an enemy during time of hostilities you are a traitor. Period. It is a sign of the loss of confidence in our own civilization that we don't have the moral clarity to put Pinch up against a wall. (After a fair trial of course.... exhibit A, a copy of the NYT, the prosecution rests. Verdict GUILTY. Sentence: Death. total time 1 hour.)
> Network Manager for Gnome works perfectly in XFCE.
Yup, that works quite nicely. However, at least on F15 be sure to manually force remove gnome-power-manager. If you don't you get both it and the xfce one and you lose. Of course the xfce power manager is also broken in F15 so you lose anyway.
The gnome power manager insists on suspending if you close the lid, even when connected to AC so that is right out. On the other hand xfce power manager will suspend if you close the lid while on battery but won't suspend if AC disappears while the lid is already closed so I have to open the lid before yanking the plug which is almost as bad.
> While I mostly agree - why hasn't anyone just forked Gnome2 and run with it - it is under
> the GPL isn't it?
Someone started that, releasing a complete set of packages for Fedora 15 to put GNOME2 back. But quickly realized that was a dead end. Instead the new idea seems to be to port gnome-panel, metacity, compiz and the other useful bits of GNOME2 that were abandoned to the newer Gtk3 and GNOME3 libraries. Not an expert myself but haven't heard the first bad word about the work on the libraries for GNOME3 so why wouldn't we want everyone to migrate to them? This will permit the eventual creation of a GNOME3 tech desktop able to run the new applications linked to the GNOME3 libs but with a usable desktop environment. Then a distribution could package both desktop environments (GNOME Classic and GNOME Shell) without maintaining two whole sets of everything. I'd suggest for names GNOME Desktop and GNOME Tablet/Touch/Phone whatever the hell it is intended for. :)
> The ideal system would be a system which works exactly the way I like it, out of the
> box. However, unfortunately this most likely won't happen, ever. Therefore it is
> important that I can customize the system, so that I'm not stuck more than necessary
> with decisions made by others.
And that is why thee and me had to leave GNOME. They are on record stating that the attitude you just expressed is wrong. They assert that it is all about a few really clever folk doing 'usability studies' to discover the one 'right' way and enforcing that so that there isn't evil 'variability' in the user experience. Because they claim that when potential users see your customized desktop vs another user's customized desktop it will confuse and frighten them. That when they see all this chaos they won't convert and the 'Year of Linux on the Desktop^WTablet' won't happen.
It is a wicked impulse at heart, one that drove most of the history of the 20th Century. The belief that a technocratic elite could and should rule the masses, bringing stability and order to society. If I have to give you the names of the various flavors this basic idea took you weren't paying attention in history class. But it is clear the GNOMEs are infected, Steve Jobs has always had the will to power, RMS certainly believes himself fit to command others and given half a chance I suspect the disease is already sleeping the the hearts of many at Google. The fight to keep our computing Free has never been more important, now we have Free Software (from the GNU project itself... remember what the G in GNOME stands for) that wants to command and control us. Bleh.
> Them - "So what, do you think you are smarter than me or something?"
Or another non-offensive yet correct answer would be:
"Ubuntu makes a good desktop but a lousy server. Since I wrangle servers a lot I prefer to run the exact same environment so I don't have to remember the small differences. And they both follow the same basic path anyway, just a matter of when each will end up with a new feature."
> The Angry Birds get paid, the small local guy does not.
Of course. Amazon needs Angry Birds to draw people to the Amazon store. But they also need an app a day to keep em coming back and paying for A list titles to give away is expensive. So they also promote smaller apps that need the exposure Amazon can give them more than Amazon needs that particular app. It makes perfect economic sense once you examine who is gaining more from the transaction and notice that end is making more money up front. But nobody enters into voluntary trade unless they believe they are benefiting from it. The idea is the other side is gaining longer term. Amazon pays to give away Angry Birds in the hope it will drive enough traffic long term to repay their expense exactly like a small developer lets Amazon give their app away for free in the hope the exposure leads to follow on sales on the title given away plus future add-ons and their next title by making their brand more desirable.
If one developer doesn't want to be App of the Day there are a dozen others competing for the honor. It is like The Tonight Show. As best as I can tell nobody who appears on the show as a guest gets paid but there is a long line of publicists trying to get their clients booked on the show anyway. Why? Because almost every guest is pitching something, the new season of their TV show about to start, a new movie just hit the multiplex, a new album out, a new book, something. So everybody wins, Jay gets almost all of the budget for the show instead of paying guests, the guests obviously believe doing the show pushes product and the network gets a pretty cheap show to push their own adverts into and the ratings are good enough the affiliates are happy.
Nope, because of Microsoft's monopoly everyone buys a Windows license when they buy a new PC. And since there is zero chance of that changing the economy can fall off a cliff and Linux adoption on the desktop won't budge from the ~1% of people cluefull enough to install it themselves and annoyed enough with Windows infestations and other breakage to go to the bother of being an outcast.
> gift those natives with blankets full of cooties.
I just love how progressive politics causes people to divorce from reality. Go look up the dates on a couple of events. Date #1, when these blankets (with cooties) were supposedly being given to the Indians/Native Americans to cause a plague to descend upon them and Date #2 is the date when the germ theory of disease became accepted science. The rest is an exercise for the non-progressive student. (Progressive students tending to be immune to fact based arguments.)
> The sort of "idiot" that is told that the recruitment agency they are going through..
In which case it probably doesn't matter much how much time you spend carefully formatting it. They will be doing the final editing so write it in whatever you want, with as little formatting as possible and export. They will be doing the final polish anyway, probably by just jerking your text into one of their carefully built up templates.
Don't think you are exactly a troll or fool, just really ignorant and your kung-fu is really weak That said, what sort of idjit sends out a resume in Word these days? Half the time a Word doc won't render correctly on another copy of the same version.release of Word itself. On the other hand if it looks good in your copy of Adobe Reader it will almost certainly look the same in their copy of Adobe Reader or when printed on their printer. So that takes care of your concerns about brochures and your resume.
That leaves the possible problem of colaborating with someone who only uses Office AND creates such complex documents that translating between another product causes issues. In the real world there aren't many of those. Lets face it, 90% of users use almost no features in Word or OO.o. And of the 10% of power users you can probably work out an interop plan, since such people have learned, at a minimum, to deal with differing versions of Word since the PC and Mac versions don't release at the same time and that 10% is almost always an early adopter.
> manually typing in CSS and HTML does not show me what it looks like.
It does if you keep one or more browsers open on the document under construction. You will see EXACTLY what it will look like and even be able to see it in as many browsers as you need to support. And by running a local webserver and pointing the browsers at that you even see PHP, perl, whatever you are scripting your pages with. Just a question of whether you are a true webmaster or just another shlub using a GUI crutch. Hint: real Masters of HTML are worth a lot more. Break free of the cruches, kick your skills up to the next level and increase your worth.
> The Gimp creates visual distortions as the algorithms are not well done like Photoshop's.
Whatever. I certainly haven't seen anything like that. If you are airbrushing a supermodel's cleavage for the cover of Vogue you might actually need PhotoShop. If you are creating art for web pages you just need to invest some time in retraining in GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus and OO.o.
> Audicity is a joke for those who do professional audio editing, etc.
You do know Audacity is a great tool for it's intended audience, the podcaster and occasional audio editing user, right? It is apparently even popular on Windows. It makes no pretense of being the core of a digital audio workstation. There are of course other programs which do make those claims. There are even companies who sell laptops preloaded with Linux and a lot of audio creation software installed and integrated and sold as a digital audio workstation. I don't do that sort of work so can't tell you if it is on par with popular mainstream PC/Mac workstations. Hint: if it uses PulseAudio it ain't pro; if it isn't using JACK it ain't worth jack.
In the end, and to get back on topic, you have to run the calculus of whether the costs of closed software, which include the risk of being driven out of business by the BSA and the (perhaps zero for you) cost in loss of Freedom (RMS sense) are outweighed by a greater increase in productivity.
That is probably what Contessa Brewer thought when she got all snarky with Congressman Brooks with her "and just where did you get your economics degree" line. She obviously hadn't done any opposition research on her guest because she certainly wasn't ready for his answer. :)
Since the courts are insane beyond recall there is only one option left. Congress needs to pass a law. Throw the creationists a bone to get them on board. Mandate the Patent Office to assume the design of every existing natural creature was patented by God with the issue date in 4000BC. And to stop the next step direct the Library of Congress to assume He filed a copyright on the full genome of every creature on the same date. Then direct them to assume any gene sequence derived from a naturally occurring creature is a derived work so that only the new material is eligible for a new copyright if it is different enough and separate enough from the original work.
A few things to consider.
1. A 10K solar system is pretty puny. If you really are paying less than $100/mo it might be able to do what you are hoping and supply half you energy needs though. But for most people a $10K solar buy would be farting into the wind.
2. You are hoping for 500/yr on a 10K investment. That is pretty pitiful since the principle is going to be lost to depreciation in ten years. And you WILL be sinking at least one battery replacement into the system in a ten year run. Treasury bills are paying 3% right now, that would give you $300/yr and at the end of the ten years you still have the principle. (assuming we aren't in a Max Max post kaboom world by then) If you are figuring on inflation buy a few ounces of gold with that 10K to hedge.
> I quoted the Apollo program as a good example of a government program that created
> jobs (through gov. contracts as well as in NASA), innovated technologies and even
> created new technologies.
Wrong way to look at it, cherrypicking one part of the dataset. Throw in the shuttle era and recalculate the cost/benefit. Remember that government programs are immortal, sure they might do some useful things at first but you have to carry their dead weight forever. And in another fifty years how much money will NASA piss away?
> > Because we are broke.
> That's a total right wing lie. Our government is 'broke' because we're not charging
> the taxes necessary to pay for the services we provide.
Sorry, it is now a pretty widely accepted truth that attempts to extract more than about 18.5% of US GDP in taxes doesn't succeed more than a couple of years, until people change their behavior to avoid confiscatory taxation. We are spending on the order of 25% of GDP currently. So beyond the folly of trying to raise tax rates in the middle of a recession/depression there is the hard reality that it just wouldn't raise much revenue while almost certainly lowering GDP. Remember that even Obama was admitting that raising tax rates was a bad idea in this economy as recently as December. The Laffer Curve is math, you can't argue against math. Well you can try to argue we are on the 'good' side of the curve but anyone who has looked at a plot of the numbers will point at you and laugh.
So we either scale back the spending or find some way to get the economy growing enough that rising GDP means tax revenues rise enough to balance the budget or some combination of the two. And if the economic growth actually employs a few people they switch from takers to makers and pay taxes instead of being a drain, that is a twofer in balancing the budget.
> And with the interest rate on Treasury bonds hovering at 3%, it seems like now would
> be an ideal time to go into more debt to build the infrastructure that we'll be needing soon.
One small problem. Interest rates are still that low for one reason. As boned as we are the rest of the world is worse right now so money keeps sloshing into Treasury Notes. How much longer can that continue? Better question: How much longer would that continue if instead of the current debate about reigning in spending we instead went hog wild borrowing even more insane amounts of money to piss away. Our debt load is getting really close to the debt to GDP levels that signal a crisis. See the PIIGS for examples of what happens next. Riots, mass hysteria, cats and dogs sleeping together.
> Strawman. Wise technological progress has always consisted of replacing
> one set of problems with a hopefully smaller set.
We understand that. Greens don't. They really believe there is power in unicorn farts or something that has no bad side effects. Of course the cynical believe they (or at least the leaders) too understand the truth... but that by making every large scale energy choice impractical by litigation and protests they will eventually get what really want, a return to a low energy low population world. Humans are the problem in their worldview and modern civilization takes humans from a problem for the Earth to a disease to be exterminated at all cost.
> Bird kills are a concern, but they're greatly exaggerated.
Of course they are. But the pushback begins on every 'alternative' energy the second it starts looking like it might someday be practical. Practical meaning economically practical without massive government subsidy and kickbacks to green groups.
> The Audubon Society is fully behind wind power. That should tell you something.
Yes, it tells me something. They are, like most 'green' groups more a political organization than anything else. But trust me on this, just like the 180 the usual suspects pulled the second He Who Must Not Be Named (for fear of Godwin's Law) went from OK guy to enemy #1 the second he invaded Russia the Audubon Society will turn on wind the second it isn't another green slush fund of free government money going to the 'right people.'
> And the amount of land required may be overstated.
Won't matter, the arguments used against it are strawmen anyway, ignite one another pops up to take it's place. Every. TIme. Google a bit and you can get ahead of the curve. Extracting large amounts of energy from the wind might lead to Global Climate Change, dontchaknow. And for a few billion in grant money they will be certain to provide ample peer reviewed evidence, complete with computer models. Then we can have global wind credit exchanges to go with our carbon indulgences.
Geothermal causes earthquakes.
> If you covered all man made structures with solar PV, you would have more than enough power to run our society.
I know the green propaganda makes that claim but a few moments of thought dispels that myth. If covering all of our structures with PV could power our society that would imply that on average most buildings receive enough light to power them with enough left over for the really large energy hogs like data centers, smelters, etc. And that just ain't close to being true, it is the rare building that can collect enough power for its own climate control, to say nothing of the entire energy needs. When you drill into the claims you learn that it is only true if we redesign our entire civilization to require less energy. A LOT less. As in energy efficiency that makes no economic sense unless you have the government making energy cost insane amounts to drive it. Translation, tear down our high energy using civilization and replace it with one 'more in tune with the Earth.' Translation of that: "1/10 of current population living a third world lifestyle except with lots of Internet bandwidth."
Remember that we are also hellbent on replacing dinosaur based fuel in our transportation with electric so factor that huge future need into plans for the grid.
> There is also lots of land that is already pretty wasted. For example, you could put solar farms on old mountain top removal mines.
Except those aren't the best spots from an availability of sunlight or wind basis. Deserts are where the sun shines all day. Which is also why photovoltaics on buildings are a bad idea in most of the areas people actually live.
> Yeah, really. Once the subsidies get killed off like they did in the late 1970's,
> solar will once again be put back on the shelf and all those workers will be out of a job.
And the subsidies will get killed off. Because we are broke. We will either end the foolishness now while we still have a choice or we will keep denying the math until the kaboom. But one way or another it ends soon. But that really doesn't matter anyway because solar is just alike all other green / alternative energy, a chimera.
Green energy is energy without consequences and that just doesn't exist. On a small scale while there are ample government subsidies and the externalities can be ignored a lot of stuff looks great. But put one into large scale production and each and every one ends up with horrible side effects... as bad as or worse than dead dinosaur based energy. And then the same greens who preened when they were putting government subsidied solar panels installed on the roof of their yuppie dream home suddenly realize that making photovoltaic solar panels is a very nasty industrial process that consumes almost as much energy in producing a panel as it produces, that large scale solar farms destroy the fragile desert ecology, etc. Already happening, useful scale solar projects have a hard time getting past the environmental impact study phase now; it only gets worse as the scale ramps up. See hydroelectric, the last generation's free green energy dream become nightmare.
Wind is just as bad. Sounds wonderful until you imagine a few hundred square miles of endless windmills making mincemeat out of the bird population and the huge transmission lines to bring the power from the uninhabited barren wastelands that tend to have reliable wind to the coastal hives where people live.
> The timing of recent events was in my view largely down to News Intl's BSkyB takeover bid.
That is a common theory, but would only explain the story in England. The wall to wall coverage here requires a larger explanation. And isn't it just a hoot that the NYT is all over this story? If true it is a tale of sleezy journalism going under even the low bar for British tabloid journalism. But the NYT commits treason on a regular basis, it is the rare state secret that they don't consider part of 'all the news thats fit to print.' Sure they hated BushHitler but they have continued splashing secrets into print years after he left office. What sort of fudged up moral compass puts traitors who get their oen country's soldiers killed in a position to pontificate on the moral transgressions of their felllow journalists?
We already are discovering that the practice of cracking voicemail boxes of fools (who never set a pin or set a totally lame one) was a widespread practive in the british tabloid press, yet the official investigation has not opened up to question others. And we are expected to believe Rupert himself was aware of and approved of shady practices at a sleezy tabloid, or at least Jr. did? Like they wouldn't practice plausable deniability in industry the same as they do in politics, the military and elsewhere? And finally, we here in America are expected to give a crap about a scandal about tabloids in England when our own tabloids are just as awful?
No, this story and the timing is aimed at, if not forcing Murdoch out completely, at least putting Holder on his ass hard enough that Fox News over here shuts up through the '12 election cycle. A unified press singing the praises of the LightWorker is about the only realistic chance the idiot has of being releected and so that is what they intend to have happen. Chicago style if needed.