> We also know he's a friggin' negro and just DOESN'T BELONG THERE, amirite?:)
Oh really. Except for the sperm donor the closest Barry came to black growing up was when Gramps arranged for some mentoring on 'blackness' by fellow CP member Frank Davis. Why do you think the guy acts so white Biden made the (racist if uttered by a Republican so I won't repeat them) remarks he made back in the campaign? Why do you think Obama so desperately tries to act black and fails? He had zero connection to the African-American experience until he got to college where he so wanted to be an African-American instead of a half African raised as an upper middle class white boy. Even joining Reverend Wright's racist church for twenty years hasn't made him truly 'Black', just given him enough cred to 'pass' when he needs to. But his 'people' will always be ivy league rich progressives.
Ok since you obviously know these things that nobody else does, perhaps you know Mr. Obama's GPA, his SAT score or have access to his thesis? We know these things about other Presidents. We have even seen Mrs. Obama's senior thesis. For example we know W's GPA was actually comparable to Gore or Kerry's. Yet somehow Gore and Kerry are considered so super smart while W is universally ridiculed as an idiot. So where does Obama fit in? Everyone in DC says he is the smartest guy who ever sat in the comfy chair. Is he? I haven't seen the slightest evidence of it in his (not his speechwriters) words or in his deeds. So put us all some knowledge on dude.
Or maybe there is a reason his records are sealed. Because they would make it plain he is a below average shlub who was admitted and honored more for his biography and 'diversity' than his ability.
All I'm sayin' is if the media still have the energy and resources to root around in Mrs. Palin's old emails, air drop into Alaska back in the campaign to root around in her trash cans, etc. perhaps a little attention to the guy who actually IS president and appears to want to run for reelection might be worthy of the basic scrutiny the media would give a candidate for governor or senate. Or we might want to face the reality that the media already know Obama's story and are intent on the voters never learning it.
Ok, we have a media frenzy about a 1/2 term governor of Alaska who was an unsuccessful candidate for VP. Gotta examine every last email she ever typed.
Meanwhile we have a POTUS where we know almost nothing of his history other than a ghostwritten highly fictionalized (read the intro in the damned thing, it is fictionalized) autobiography. All of his IL Senate records are 'missing', all of his records from Columbia and Harvard are sealed and the media are totally incurious about this. We don't know how the hell a community organizer paid the freight to get a degree at Harvard, not exactly known for it's low low prices. We know almost nothing of his community organizing days with Alinsky founded organizations and with ACORN.
The initial cost is much higher than a fossil fuel plant. But without trains full of coal running in for a twenty year typical operating life that still could make it practical. What they don't talk about, because they probably can't, is what the annual operating costs will look like. Since they have never tried this molten salt thing on a commercial scale they likely just don't know.
I'm normally against pissing away money on hopeless green projects but this one might be worth trying since the math isn't totally hopeless.
Of course the second it actually works the greens will be dead set against it. Gotta be some obscure critter living out in that desert ya know,
> That's why so many were returned, and Linux quickly disappeared from the netbook scene.
Good grief, how many times will this lie keep popping back up. Microsoft's minions floated this turd knowing that no matter how many times it gets called out it will keep popping back up. ASUS themselves went on record stating there wasn't any difference in the return rates.
What happened is early netbooks used Linux because XP was EOL and a netbook had zero chance of running Vista. Once Microsoft made XP available at prices too good to be true, thought to range between $0 and $35 per unit (depending on side deals, co-marketing kickbacks, etc.) no OEM was going to incur the wrath of MIcrosoft by shipping Linux. Thus died the netbook.
Netbooks were envisioned as small, inexpensive and netcentric. What ships now under the netbook label meets none of those definitions. They are just the lower range of the laptop spectrum.
In a sane world I'd disagree. But I know we live in an insane one and it won't take long for the idiots who thought using an HTML rendering library to render the login screen will start adding net based content as plugins to the login screen. Why not put a weatherbug up? Or a news ticker. Or the phase of the moon, and getting it locally is just too much trouble. Stock tickers? Why not. Until an exploit.
Bet WebKit's squalid bulk didn't go into the 5KLoC vs 50KLoC size difference.
> But does not actually provide a shut down option, because that might confuse users too much.
Ah, but if you are one of the advanced users (who GNOME wishes would just take the hint and switch to another desktop) who insist on a shutdown option, you can go read the arcane lore on a blog that describes in perfect detail how to download a non-supported third party plugin that will add a shutdown option. Of course the blog post isn't easy to find on Google and documents a procedure that doesn't quite work right with the current release and the link to the actual download is now a 404 error with herbal viagra adverts on it.
> You apparently have no idea what this device is for.
Yea, I read the site. But I'm still having trouble figuring out what it might do that a netbook with a hundred bux of USB devices stuffed into its ports can't. MIDI isn't expensive, NTSC video in isn't expensive. And the netbook will have more grunt than you are getting from the mmuless cpu simulated in that FPGA. So unless the idea (not mentioned on the site) is to have enough spare gates that video effects can be offloaded to special custom circuits in unused space in the FPGA I don't see it as a practical device. As a experiment or base for further development perhaps, but not as is.
Just slapping "OPEN!" on something doesn't make me wanna buy. For $500 I get a device that (someday when the software gets written) will process standard def video? And output VGA? Really? In 2011?
Yes it is nice that everything is implemented in a FPGA and totally open. Perhaps someone will run with it and use these building blocks to make something interesting. But as long as an FPGA is the target it will never compete. Compare and contrast these features with what $25 will get you in an ARM. You can see by going back a few days here on Slashdot. Although there ain't no way in hell that project will get to market at $25 quan 1 either, academics have no notion what it costs to actually bring a product to market... but it won't be $500.
> A "navigational" laser capable of vaporizing "medium" sized objects might fall under some kind of prohibited dual use technology.
Probably not. Remember the scale of the problem here. Small is paint flecks and such, large is a small washer so medium is between those ranges. Sure the usual suspects at the Parliament of Tyrants (UN) might bang their spoons on their high chairs but we can ignore that.
This isn't panic time. Low Earth orbit really shouldn't be much of a problem. Without constant effort stuff tends to come down and the smaller the faster. The higher orbits are high volume areas. That only leaves the middle to really worry about, right?
Yea a lose bolt can really ruin your day (or satellite) right now but we are going to have to develop some defenses. Otherwise micrometeors will eventually score a hit. Again, take it in threes. Come up with some sort of armor for microscopic stuff to embed into, some sort of active (laser?) defense for medium and dodge anything big enough to see in time to light an engine.
But while Science! used to be optimistic and forward looking these days it is timid and obsessed with Doom! and what might go wrong.
> He doesnt want to be associated with Gnome any more, and wants his own distinctive > look and feel, no matter whether he alienates a number of existing Gnome users.
GNOME disbanded and isn't an option anymore. The desktop formerly known as GNOME is unmaintained abandonware. The former devels from GNOME have a new ground up rewrite that is being sold under the old brand name as GNOME3 but bears no real connection to it.
Ubuntu and anyone else paying attention saw this coming and made plans. Too bad Ubuntu's plan is almost as lame as GNOME3. This sort of lemming like behaviour happens from time to time. Too much suppressed envy for iOS and now Android is leading to a charge to build a perfect environment for a smartphone or tablet but a really lousy one for a desktop. Only hope it passes before we run out of viable desktops, for now XFCE seems OK for me.
If this is the best "DOOM!" Climate Change story the legacy media can whip up today maybe we are near the end of the scare.
Then we who are sane can set about purging the defilers from the temples of Science! and setting it to rights.
Climate Change can't possibly be science, it fails one of the most basic tenets in that it isn't falsifiable. Try it if you doubt, ask a True Believer masquarading as a scientist what test could falsify their theory. There isn't one. IT gets warmer, Global Warming. Cooler? Climate Change. Drier? Wetter? More ice? Less ice? More clouds? Less clouds? And so on. All data lead the Warmist to the exact same conclusions and more importantly the exact same policy prescriptions. And of course a real scientist wouldn't dare propose policy on such a complex question in the knowledge of his ignorance of too many other fields.
> No 'liberals like simple taxes with few exceptions. It's conservatives who want a child > exception, the ability to write off business expenses, marriage excemptions etc etc..
Yea, and your team does it too to protect their pets. Witness how many Sagans of dollars get pissed away annually on 'green energy.'
But seriously, you picked those examples?
You have the brass clackers to accuse the R team over the child execption? Try to repeal it and watch who would be howling loudest. You bastards hand out the Earned Income Tax Credit which is an oxymoron because to 'Earn' the 'Credit' you can't be paying any income tax. It is income redistribution straight up.
No writeoff for business expenses? Exxon Mobile only cleared 8% last year. So which is it, tax their gross income at a couple lousy percent or force em to resort to some horrible increases at the pump or what exactly? And if you are taxing them at only one or two percent of gross income what about Apple with their insanely great margins around 40%? They also get taxed at the same low rate and make out like bandits because I assume you love them? You have to tax profits, not gross. Or better just don't tax corporations at all and get em when the money goes to payroll, dividends, etc. because if they roll it over into expansion to avoid taxes it is a win for everyone anyway.
You do understand what the marriage penalty is, right? Before the fix getting married could mean a MAJOR jack in your taxes. Defend that. Double dog dare you.
Really, Dems went along with fixing that one because if they hadn't it would have given the game away. Being against it would have been read as "Screw getting married, have a bastard and sign up for yer benefits like the little whore you are. Come here, Uncle Sugar can take better care of you than any man possibly can." Not that don't believe that almost to a (wo)man but it is still too early for the votors to know it.
> If you want to balance the budget, start taxing the 50+% of low income > people who didn't pay anything...
I like the cut of your jib. But we wouldn't have to go that far. Just eliminate withholding and make everyone pay quarterly like the self employed do. First quarter people would bitch and moan and by the second they would be in DC with their sporting goods hunting congress critter. Except of course the only way such a scheme could pass congress is if it had a majority of folks who would be busily responding to the outrage they had created by whacking away at the feral government so folks wouldn't quite be shootin' mad.
But yea, for a longterm fix the poor must either be taxed or denied the franchise. The first revolution was about "No Taxation without Representation." Then we found that "Taxation with Representation" wasn't too great and now we are fast realizing "Representation without Taxation" is just another way of saying "the Plebs voting themselves Bread and Circuses from the Treasury." Everybody pays or the system doesn't work. A bit of progressivity in the rates can be accepted so long as everybody suffers when taxes go up.
> Imagine if, for example, it was possible to buy so many services on credit that you > increased your income? Governments can do that.
But not for long. First comes inflation and if the government doubles down on the stupid and keeps doing it long enough it progresses to hyperinflation and collapse. TANSTAAFL.
> And a bunch of other mythical consequences that didn't pan out from the trickle-down theory.
Actually.... care to go lookup revenue figures and observe what happened EVERY time tax rates have been cut? Yup, except for the poorly conceived tax cuts as part of Porkulus, cutting taxes has boosted the economy enough to produce a revenue increase for the government. The deficits go up because spending keeps growing faster than revenue. But tax cuts really works and will keep right on working so long as we remain on the bizzaro world side of the 'ol Laffer Curve. I'd love to live long enough to see the day when a tax cut caused a decrease in revenue because it would mean that at long last were back on the sane side.
> Seriously, your sig is PRO-WAR. It's funny, but you're not the sort of person > I want to take economical advice from.
His sig happens to be 100% true. So lemme get this straight, you consider someone speaking the objective truth (because it it conflicts with your hippie emotion driven thinking) to be unreliable. Worse you judge the merits of arguments based on who makes them? And any sane person should bother reading your scribblings why?
> If we tax by the mile, the pickup and the hybrid get the same charge, so why > buy a new vehicle? Incentive: old pickup.'
These are Democrats we are talking about. Nothing about it will be simple and in ten years it will go beyond complicated to 'no mortal can know it and stay sane'.
Of course hybrids will get a special rate, probably on day one. Since they want to use a GPS logger they are already planning on taxing based on where and when you drive, even if the initial proposal doesn't mention it. And of course states and cities will be invited to attach to a teat on their new cash cow. Every planner's wet dream of taxing the shit out of rush hour commuters instead of building ever more lanes will come true. When the rural peasants scream about being taxed to death they will get special rates for driving long runs over low traffic rural byways. And because of the fine information detail they will quickly move from taxing just for revenue but to impose social policy.
Right now the automobile is popular because it lets the ordinary citizen go wherever the hell he wants without asking anyone's permission and nobody even having to know about it. This plan upends most of that up front and all of it once the obvious (and already planned out) mission creep sets in. This is a feature not a side effect. Progressives HATE cars for exactly the same reasons most people love them.
> They know, knew, and understand that you cannot fix a deficit or reduce the > national debt without raising taxes.
That is just insane. Go find any source of information you prefer and find graphs of revenue and spending over the last few decades. The problem isn't on the revenue side, our problem is we want to spend too fracking much. Trying to solve a problem of uncontrolled spending by finding new revenue ain't going to work. If your spouse is spending like a drunken sailor getting a second job won't fix it, s/he will just see that as a reason to just spend even more. Which, if you will look at the information I just asked you to inspect, is exactly what has happened EVERY time we have tried to solve the deficit by raising taxes. Even though the taxes are almost always part of a 'grand bargain' to cut X dollars of spending for every Y dollar of new taxes what actually happens is the taxes are increases and spending goes UP instead of down. EVERY. TIME. This last showdown was the first time in memory that spending will actually go down (mostly smoke and mirrors but WTH) instead of the rate of growth being trimmed. Even the sainted Reagan never cut the size of government, only the growth rate.
The problem is Democrats (with the support of too damned many RINOs) have spent the last century making increasingly expensive promises that couldn't be paid for. All those guys back in the 60's and 70's yelling "we are heaping impossible commitments of debt upon our children and grandchildren" were right. Just glad most of the hippie scum who supported the creation of this monster welfare state are retiring just in time to bear the brunt of their own stupidity. Thank Obama for ramping Bush's insane spending to levels that defy vocabulary itself for bringing the trainwreck from twenty years in the future to 'any day now.'
> So all their talk about cutting and tax reduction is impossible on paper, basic math > will tell you less revenue in means less to spend with. Less input = less output.
Math says nothing of the sort. The tax rate cuts (I'm assuming you are parroting leftie talking points against Ryan's plan) are offset by elimination of deductions to make them revenue neutral. However by simplifying the code significant economic growth is possible which of course helps the govenment two ways: it increases tax revenues and decreases income transfer payments to the unemployed.
Here is what appears to be an iron law. After varying tax rates all over the map over the past century we have had an income tax it appears impossible to collect more than 18-20% of GDP, it spikes to 20% and falls back.. The more you raise rates the more people have incentives to avoid taxation at the highest rates and rich people can afford lots of tax advice, especially when a crapload of money is at stake. Again, you can look this up on the Internet thingie. Since we are already banging up against that limit talk of increasing income taxes is just stupid. Yea you can 'punish the rich' and all that but the revenue won't show up in the treasury, meanwhile because CBO is a bunch of 'tards the revenue will have been expected and spent because of the utterly broken static scoring model they insist on using. More likely is higher rates slow the economy and you get lower revenues. So Yea, bigger deficits!
So will certain New York Times blowhards now stop holding up China as the model to emulate as we learn almost daily they have as many problems as we do? Nah. They get off on the idea of an all powerful State that 'gets things done.' And if a hundred million people in mass graves didn't clue em in that Communism sucks then nothing will.
Likewise for the cadre of Young Communists here on/. of course.
> Of course a dead giveaway is the access software needed, so this works > only for hiding data that the holder cannot access.
Lots of use cases for that. You encode a hard drive at your embassy and send it back with an unsuspecting minion. When they get home your people there do a 'routine check' on the laptop and extract the too hot for ordinary channels memo, again with the user totally unsuspecting that he was a courier.
Human rights group in hellhole country wants to get a release out? Find some tourist willing to be the carrier, inject the data onto their laptop and tell them to quietly contact the group's main office back in the first world when they get home.
> Of course, such attacks are always foiled by brave patriots. And thus no damage > is ever produced - no need for inconvenient proof.
And you forget one more use. The ever ready excuse. An aging poorly maintained facility goes foom! Accept blame or play the cyber card. Imagine you are Imanutjob in Iran. Your Russian designed and built of crap brought in through an international blockade reactor goes foom! and radiates a million people. Accept blame or claim the Joooossss! and the Great Satan sabotoged the facility with a fiendish cyber attack?
Stock market system somewhere crashes. Chinese hackers might prove more expedient as a 'cause.'
It is really a perfect answer to any problem. Hell, Sony's networks are still out. Who is to say last week's Amazon outage won't eventually be blamed on the wily hackers.
> Gee, the Israelis and Americans sure are cyber-stupid to try the same > cyber-thing twice on you guys!
Dunno, what else we got? Even the crazed cowboy warmonger Bush didn't have the stones to pull the trigger on a raid on Iran's nuke program and with President Zero even a threat of physical force[1] isn't credible. And with the current state of near hostilities between Zero's minions and Israel these days the hope of them riding in on a white jet and solving the problem for the world isn't that high. So again, what else we got?
And as long as the Iranians insist on running Windows on their critical terror infrastructure why not keep abusing it? With a little luck the world might at least get that lesson pounded into them, that Windows == fail.
[1] Against enemies that is, neutrals or friends are a different story. Support any foe, oppose any friend seems to be the current administration's motto. Perhaps they misheard JFK or something... or perhaps they are just on the other f*ck*ng side.
> Unless you're a millionaire, internet over 3G is way too expensive.
Not quite. You forgot probably the most important group: Those spending OPM. And those in NY or CA where normal economics don't apply.
But yea, any person spending $50/mo of their own money for 3G on a tablet needs their head examined. Good grief people, just how attached to the damned Internet do you have to be, DSL or cable modem at home, $50-$100/mo/person in the household for smartphone(s) and now tablets?
If the cell companies won't allow tethering, won't offer an extra device plan, etc. then 3G is kinda pointless. Of course it already is pointless, which is why they try so hard to make sure nobody actually uses much of it, because unless/until they get microcells on every street there ain't enough bandwidth via radio to be practical. Too bad they keep showing endless commercials showing people watching movies and video chatting on their phones, people keep expecting they can do those things and get pissed when they can't.
Slashdot Mirror
> We also know he's a friggin' negro and just DOESN'T BELONG THERE, amirite? :)
Oh really. Except for the sperm donor the closest Barry came to black growing up was when Gramps arranged for some mentoring on 'blackness' by fellow CP member Frank Davis. Why do you think the guy acts so white Biden made the (racist if uttered by a Republican so I won't repeat them) remarks he made back in the campaign? Why do you think Obama so desperately tries to act black and fails? He had zero connection to the African-American experience until he got to college where he so wanted to be an African-American instead of a half African raised as an upper middle class white boy. Even joining Reverend Wright's racist church for twenty years hasn't made him truly 'Black', just given him enough cred to 'pass' when he needs to. But his 'people' will always be ivy league rich progressives.
> Paranoid troll much?
Ok since you obviously know these things that nobody else does, perhaps you know Mr. Obama's GPA, his SAT score or have access to his thesis? We know these things about other Presidents. We have even seen Mrs. Obama's senior thesis. For example we know W's GPA was actually comparable to Gore or Kerry's. Yet somehow Gore and Kerry are considered so super smart while W is universally ridiculed as an idiot. So where does Obama fit in? Everyone in DC says he is the smartest guy who ever sat in the comfy chair. Is he? I haven't seen the slightest evidence of it in his (not his speechwriters) words or in his deeds. So put us all some knowledge on dude.
Or maybe there is a reason his records are sealed. Because they would make it plain he is a below average shlub who was admitted and honored more for his biography and 'diversity' than his ability.
All I'm sayin' is if the media still have the energy and resources to root around in Mrs. Palin's old emails, air drop into Alaska back in the campaign to root around in her trash cans, etc. perhaps a little attention to the guy who actually IS president and appears to want to run for reelection might be worthy of the basic scrutiny the media would give a candidate for governor or senate. Or we might want to face the reality that the media already know Obama's story and are intent on the voters never learning it.
Ok, we have a media frenzy about a 1/2 term governor of Alaska who was an unsuccessful candidate for VP. Gotta examine every last email she ever typed.
Meanwhile we have a POTUS where we know almost nothing of his history other than a ghostwritten highly fictionalized (read the intro in the damned thing, it is fictionalized) autobiography. All of his IL Senate records are 'missing', all of his records from Columbia and Harvard are sealed and the media are totally incurious about this. We don't know how the hell a community organizer paid the freight to get a degree at Harvard, not exactly known for it's low low prices. We know almost nothing of his community organizing days with Alinsky founded organizations and with ACORN.
The initial cost is much higher than a fossil fuel plant. But without trains full of coal running in for a twenty year typical operating life that still could make it practical. What they don't talk about, because they probably can't, is what the annual operating costs will look like. Since they have never tried this molten salt thing on a commercial scale they likely just don't know.
I'm normally against pissing away money on hopeless green projects but this one might be worth trying since the math isn't totally hopeless.
Of course the second it actually works the greens will be dead set against it. Gotta be some obscure critter living out in that desert ya know,
> That's why so many were returned, and Linux quickly disappeared from the netbook scene.
Good grief, how many times will this lie keep popping back up. Microsoft's minions floated this turd knowing that no matter how many times it gets called out it will keep popping back up. ASUS themselves went on record stating there wasn't any difference in the return rates.
What happened is early netbooks used Linux because XP was EOL and a netbook had zero chance of running Vista. Once Microsoft made XP available at prices too good to be true, thought to range between $0 and $35 per unit (depending on side deals, co-marketing kickbacks, etc.) no OEM was going to incur the wrath of MIcrosoft by shipping Linux. Thus died the netbook.
Netbooks were envisioned as small, inexpensive and netcentric. What ships now under the netbook label meets none of those definitions. They are just the lower range of the laptop spectrum.
> Don't be silly. You just edit the configuration XML directly in gconf.
Neener, it is you who are silly, didn't you know gconf is toast and dconf is the new hotness. This week at least.
> Need I say more?
In a sane world I'd disagree. But I know we live in an insane one and it won't take long for the idiots who thought using an HTML rendering library to render the login screen will start adding net based content as plugins to the login screen. Why not put a weatherbug up? Or a news ticker. Or the phase of the moon, and getting it locally is just too much trouble. Stock tickers? Why not. Until an exploit.
Bet WebKit's squalid bulk didn't go into the 5KLoC vs 50KLoC size difference.
> But does not actually provide a shut down option, because that might confuse users too much.
Ah, but if you are one of the advanced users (who GNOME wishes would just take the hint and switch to another desktop) who insist on a shutdown option, you can go read the arcane lore on a blog that describes in perfect detail how to download a non-supported third party plugin that will add a shutdown option. Of course the blog post isn't easy to find on Google and documents a procedure that doesn't quite work right with the current release and the link to the actual download is now a 404 error with herbal viagra adverts on it.
> You apparently have no idea what this device is for.
Yea, I read the site. But I'm still having trouble figuring out what it might do that a netbook with a hundred bux of USB devices stuffed into its ports can't. MIDI isn't expensive, NTSC video in isn't expensive. And the netbook will have more grunt than you are getting from the mmuless cpu simulated in that FPGA. So unless the idea (not mentioned on the site) is to have enough spare gates that video effects can be offloaded to special custom circuits in unused space in the FPGA I don't see it as a practical device. As a experiment or base for further development perhaps, but not as is.
Just slapping "OPEN!" on something doesn't make me wanna buy. For $500 I get a device that (someday when the software gets written) will process standard def video? And output VGA? Really? In 2011?
Yes it is nice that everything is implemented in a FPGA and totally open. Perhaps someone will run with it and use these building blocks to make something interesting. But as long as an FPGA is the target it will never compete. Compare and contrast these features with what $25 will get you in an ARM. You can see by going back a few days here on Slashdot. Although there ain't no way in hell that project will get to market at $25 quan 1 either, academics have no notion what it costs to actually bring a product to market... but it won't be $500.
> A "navigational" laser capable of vaporizing "medium" sized objects might fall under some kind of prohibited dual use technology.
Probably not. Remember the scale of the problem here. Small is paint flecks and such, large is a small washer so medium is between those ranges. Sure the usual suspects at the Parliament of Tyrants (UN) might bang their spoons on their high chairs but we can ignore that.
This isn't panic time. Low Earth orbit really shouldn't be much of a problem. Without constant effort stuff tends to come down and the smaller the faster. The higher orbits are high volume areas. That only leaves the middle to really worry about, right?
Yea a lose bolt can really ruin your day (or satellite) right now but we are going to have to develop some defenses. Otherwise micrometeors will eventually score a hit. Again, take it in threes. Come up with some sort of armor for microscopic stuff to embed into, some sort of active (laser?) defense for medium and dodge anything big enough to see in time to light an engine.
But while Science! used to be optimistic and forward looking these days it is timid and obsessed with Doom! and what might go wrong.
> He doesnt want to be associated with Gnome any more, and wants his own distinctive
> look and feel, no matter whether he alienates a number of existing Gnome users.
GNOME disbanded and isn't an option anymore. The desktop formerly known as GNOME is unmaintained abandonware. The former devels from GNOME have a new ground up rewrite that is being sold under the old brand name as GNOME3 but bears no real connection to it.
Ubuntu and anyone else paying attention saw this coming and made plans. Too bad Ubuntu's plan is almost as lame as GNOME3. This sort of lemming like behaviour happens from time to time. Too much suppressed envy for iOS and now Android is leading to a charge to build a perfect environment for a smartphone or tablet but a really lousy one for a desktop. Only hope it passes before we run out of viable desktops, for now XFCE seems OK for me.
If this is the best "DOOM!" Climate Change story the legacy media can whip up today maybe we are near the end of the scare.
Then we who are sane can set about purging the defilers from the temples of Science! and setting it to rights.
Climate Change can't possibly be science, it fails one of the most basic tenets in that it isn't falsifiable. Try it if you doubt, ask a True Believer masquarading as a scientist what test could falsify their theory. There isn't one. IT gets warmer, Global Warming. Cooler? Climate Change. Drier? Wetter? More ice? Less ice? More clouds? Less clouds? And so on. All data lead the Warmist to the exact same conclusions and more importantly the exact same policy prescriptions. And of course a real scientist wouldn't dare propose policy on such a complex question in the knowledge of his ignorance of too many other fields.
> No 'liberals like simple taxes with few exceptions. It's conservatives who want a child
> exception, the ability to write off business expenses, marriage excemptions etc etc..
Yea, and your team does it too to protect their pets. Witness how many Sagans of dollars get pissed away annually on 'green energy.'
But seriously, you picked those examples?
You have the brass clackers to accuse the R team over the child execption? Try to repeal it and watch who would be howling loudest. You bastards hand out the Earned Income Tax Credit which is an oxymoron because to 'Earn' the 'Credit' you can't be paying any income tax. It is income redistribution straight up.
No writeoff for business expenses? Exxon Mobile only cleared 8% last year. So which is it, tax their gross income at a couple lousy percent or force em to resort to some horrible increases at the pump or what exactly? And if you are taxing them at only one or two percent of gross income what about Apple with their insanely great margins around 40%? They also get taxed at the same low rate and make out like bandits because I assume you love them? You have to tax profits, not gross. Or better just don't tax corporations at all and get em when the money goes to payroll, dividends, etc. because if they roll it over into expansion to avoid taxes it is a win for everyone anyway.
You do understand what the marriage penalty is, right? Before the fix getting married could mean a MAJOR jack in your taxes. Defend that. Double dog dare you.
Really, Dems went along with fixing that one because if they hadn't it would have given the game away. Being against it would have been read as "Screw getting married, have a bastard and sign up for yer benefits like the little whore you are. Come here, Uncle Sugar can take better care of you than any man possibly can." Not that don't believe that almost to a (wo)man but it is still too early for the votors to know it.
> If you want to balance the budget, start taxing the 50+% of low income
> people who didn't pay anything...
I like the cut of your jib. But we wouldn't have to go that far. Just eliminate withholding and make everyone pay quarterly like the self employed do. First quarter people would bitch and moan and by the second they would be in DC with their sporting goods hunting congress critter. Except of course the only way such a scheme could pass congress is if it had a majority of folks who would be busily responding to the outrage they had created by whacking away at the feral government so folks wouldn't quite be shootin' mad.
But yea, for a longterm fix the poor must either be taxed or denied the franchise. The first revolution was about "No Taxation without Representation." Then we found that "Taxation with Representation" wasn't too great and now we are fast realizing "Representation without Taxation" is just another way of saying "the Plebs voting themselves Bread and Circuses from the Treasury." Everybody pays or the system doesn't work. A bit of progressivity in the rates can be accepted so long as everybody suffers when taxes go up.
> Imagine if, for example, it was possible to buy so many services on credit that you
> increased your income? Governments can do that.
But not for long. First comes inflation and if the government doubles down on the stupid and keeps doing it long enough it progresses to hyperinflation and collapse. TANSTAAFL.
> And a bunch of other mythical consequences that didn't pan out from the trickle-down theory.
Actually.... care to go lookup revenue figures and observe what happened EVERY time tax rates have been cut? Yup, except for the poorly conceived tax cuts as part of Porkulus, cutting taxes has boosted the economy enough to produce a revenue increase for the government. The deficits go up because spending keeps growing faster than revenue. But tax cuts really works and will keep right on working so long as we remain on the bizzaro world side of the 'ol Laffer Curve. I'd love to live long enough to see the day when a tax cut caused a decrease in revenue because it would mean that at long last were back on the sane side.
> Seriously, your sig is PRO-WAR. It's funny, but you're not the sort of person
> I want to take economical advice from.
His sig happens to be 100% true. So lemme get this straight, you consider someone speaking the objective truth (because it it conflicts with your hippie emotion driven thinking) to be unreliable. Worse you judge the merits of arguments based on who makes them? And any sane person should bother reading your scribblings why?
> If we tax by the mile, the pickup and the hybrid get the same charge, so why
> buy a new vehicle? Incentive: old pickup.'
These are Democrats we are talking about. Nothing about it will be simple and in ten years it will go beyond complicated to 'no mortal can know it and stay sane'.
Of course hybrids will get a special rate, probably on day one. Since they want to use a GPS logger they are already planning on taxing based on where and when you drive, even if the initial proposal doesn't mention it. And of course states and cities will be invited to attach to a teat on their new cash cow. Every planner's wet dream of taxing the shit out of rush hour commuters instead of building ever more lanes will come true. When the rural peasants scream about being taxed to death they will get special rates for driving long runs over low traffic rural byways. And because of the fine information detail they will quickly move from taxing just for revenue but to impose social policy.
Right now the automobile is popular because it lets the ordinary citizen go wherever the hell he wants without asking anyone's permission and nobody even having to know about it. This plan upends most of that up front and all of it once the obvious (and already planned out) mission creep sets in. This is a feature not a side effect. Progressives HATE cars for exactly the same reasons most people love them.
> They know, knew, and understand that you cannot fix a deficit or reduce the
> national debt without raising taxes.
That is just insane. Go find any source of information you prefer and find graphs of revenue and spending over the last few decades. The problem isn't on the revenue side, our problem is we want to spend too fracking much. Trying to solve a problem of uncontrolled spending by finding new revenue ain't going to work. If your spouse is spending like a drunken sailor getting a second job won't fix it, s/he will just see that as a reason to just spend even more. Which, if you will look at the information I just asked you to inspect, is exactly what has happened EVERY time we have tried to solve the deficit by raising taxes. Even though the taxes are almost always part of a 'grand bargain' to cut X dollars of spending for every Y dollar of new taxes what actually happens is the taxes are increases and spending goes UP instead of down. EVERY. TIME. This last showdown was the first time in memory that spending will actually go down (mostly smoke and mirrors but WTH) instead of the rate of growth being trimmed. Even the sainted Reagan never cut the size of government, only the growth rate.
The problem is Democrats (with the support of too damned many RINOs) have spent the last century making increasingly expensive promises that couldn't be paid for. All those guys back in the 60's and 70's yelling "we are heaping impossible commitments of debt upon our children and grandchildren" were right. Just glad most of the hippie scum who supported the creation of this monster welfare state are retiring just in time to bear the brunt of their own stupidity. Thank Obama for ramping Bush's insane spending to levels that defy vocabulary itself for bringing the trainwreck from twenty years in the future to 'any day now.'
> So all their talk about cutting and tax reduction is impossible on paper, basic math
> will tell you less revenue in means less to spend with. Less input = less output.
Math says nothing of the sort. The tax rate cuts (I'm assuming you are parroting leftie talking points against Ryan's plan) are offset by elimination of deductions to make them revenue neutral. However by simplifying the code significant economic growth is possible which of course helps the govenment two ways: it increases tax revenues and decreases income transfer payments to the unemployed.
Here is what appears to be an iron law. After varying tax rates all over the map over the past century we have had an income tax it appears impossible to collect more than 18-20% of GDP, it spikes to 20% and falls back.. The more you raise rates the more people have incentives to avoid taxation at the highest rates and rich people can afford lots of tax advice, especially when a crapload of money is at stake. Again, you can look this up on the Internet thingie. Since we are already banging up against that limit talk of increasing income taxes is just stupid. Yea you can 'punish the rich' and all that but the revenue won't show up in the treasury, meanwhile because CBO is a bunch of 'tards the revenue will have been expected and spent because of the utterly broken static scoring model they insist on using. More likely is higher rates slow the economy and you get lower revenues. So Yea, bigger deficits!
So will certain New York Times blowhards now stop holding up China as the model to emulate as we learn almost daily they have as many problems as we do? Nah. They get off on the idea of an all powerful State that 'gets things done.' And if a hundred million people in mass graves didn't clue em in that Communism sucks then nothing will.
Likewise for the cadre of Young Communists here on /. of course.
> Of course a dead giveaway is the access software needed, so this works
> only for hiding data that the holder cannot access.
Lots of use cases for that. You encode a hard drive at your embassy and send it back with an unsuspecting minion. When they get home your people there do a 'routine check' on the laptop and extract the too hot for ordinary channels memo, again with the user totally unsuspecting that he was a courier.
Human rights group in hellhole country wants to get a release out? Find some tourist willing to be the carrier, inject the data onto their laptop and tell them to quietly contact the group's main office back in the first world when they get home.
> Of course, such attacks are always foiled by brave patriots. And thus no damage
> is ever produced - no need for inconvenient proof.
And you forget one more use. The ever ready excuse. An aging poorly maintained facility goes foom! Accept blame or play the cyber card. Imagine you are Imanutjob in Iran. Your Russian designed and built of crap brought in through an international blockade reactor goes foom! and radiates a million people. Accept blame or claim the Joooossss! and the Great Satan sabotoged the facility with a fiendish cyber attack?
Stock market system somewhere crashes. Chinese hackers might prove more expedient as a 'cause.'
It is really a perfect answer to any problem. Hell, Sony's networks are still out. Who is to say last week's Amazon outage won't eventually be blamed on the wily hackers.
> Gee, the Israelis and Americans sure are cyber-stupid to try the same
> cyber-thing twice on you guys!
Dunno, what else we got? Even the crazed cowboy warmonger Bush didn't have the stones to pull the trigger on a raid on Iran's nuke program and with President Zero even a threat of physical force[1] isn't credible. And with the current state of near hostilities between Zero's minions and Israel these days the hope of them riding in on a white jet and solving the problem for the world isn't that high. So again, what else we got?
And as long as the Iranians insist on running Windows on their critical terror infrastructure why not keep abusing it? With a little luck the world might at least get that lesson pounded into them, that Windows == fail.
[1] Against enemies that is, neutrals or friends are a different story. Support any foe, oppose any friend seems to be the current administration's motto. Perhaps they misheard JFK or something... or perhaps they are just on the other f*ck*ng side.
> Unless you're a millionaire, internet over 3G is way too expensive.
Not quite. You forgot probably the most important group: Those spending OPM. And those in NY or CA where normal economics don't apply.
But yea, any person spending $50/mo of their own money for 3G on a tablet needs their head examined. Good grief people, just how attached to the damned Internet do you have to be, DSL or cable modem at home, $50-$100/mo/person in the household for smartphone(s) and now tablets?
If the cell companies won't allow tethering, won't offer an extra device plan, etc. then 3G is kinda pointless. Of course it already is pointless, which is why they try so hard to make sure nobody actually uses much of it, because unless/until they get microcells on every street there ain't enough bandwidth via radio to be practical. Too bad they keep showing endless commercials showing people watching movies and video chatting on their phones, people keep expecting they can do those things and get pissed when they can't.