No, but your argument was situational awareness, driving skill and vehicle condition prevents accidents - totally omitting 'reducing speed' from the list. It was the 'driving skill' point that made me post a reply to your comment as it's this kind of 'boy racer' attitude [wikipedia.org] which causes so many deaths.
In itself reducing speed doesn't prevent accidents. It reduces the damage caused when they happen, which in turn reduces fatality rates, especially in vehicle/pedestrian and vehicle/cyclist accidents.
What prevents accidents is driving to the road conditions. This means slowing down when there's visibility or traffic or traction problems which can affect your ability to see a hazard and react to it, and similarly, when there's an increased potential for hazards/pedestrian traffic (like driving in a commercial or residential district). This is not slowing down for the sake of slowing down because speed kills, this is driving at a speed that's reasonable for the road conditions, which used to be part of the critical thinking they taught in driver's ed.
Somehow, somewhere, "driving too fast for the conditions" morphed into "speed kills". People take the simplified conclusion, and skip the logic steps that led to that conclusion, and it's been used ever since as justification to lower the speed limit even when it's not appropriate to do so. If you're driving at a speed that's appropriate for the conditions, you *will* find a stretch of road where you're exceeding the posted speed limits. It's inevitable... especially on superhighways, roads are generally engineered for a speed that's higher than the posted limit, and if you're driving to the conditions, and the conditions are ideal, then it's not unreasonable to drive faster than the limit.
The problem is that people don't know their own limits. I read somewhere that 80% of drivers think they're better than average... they overestimate their abilities, and they don't recognize their limitations. Doesn't help that the police might actually arrest you on suspicion of drunk driving if you pull over to the side of a highway and sleep because you're not safe to drive....:(
An alert and attentive driver who knows their vehicle's capabilities, and who is driving to the conditions is a safer driver, and speed limits have nothing to do with that equation. Driving to the conditions is the important part. Take the same stretch of road in midsummer, sun's high in the sky, you can see for miles, road is perfectly dry. It's *much* safer to drive at a high speed in these conditions than it is in the middle of a blizzard in the winter. And yet the speed limit is the same. So either the speed limit is too slow for the summer conditions, or it's too high for the winter conditions. It can't be right for both situations. The problem is... you will find drivers who drive the speed limit in both situations, because that's what the signage says they should be doing. These same drivers are part of that 80% who think they're above average, because they obey the signage and don't break any of the rules of the road, and the only way to make it safe for everybody is to put the speed limit where it'll be safe in the worst conditions.
They are only around ~3000 lbs, which hardly makes them heavy compared to other cars. Expensive? They are on the low end between $20 and $30k.
What kind of real world mileage do you get out of that, if you don't mind my asking?
I drive a 2011 Subaru Impreza... a car that's in no way designed for efficiency (it's designed to drive around corners really fast), and I don't make any effort to try to conserve fuel, and I get about 35-40mpg real world out of it (with a manual transmission). It cost $10,000 less than a similarly-equipped Prius. If, over the lifetime of the Prius, you have not saved $10,000 in gas, then I'm coming out ahead on the cost scale.
And the reason I'm putting this to you is this: you can buy a turbodiesel VW for less than the Impreza cost, and reasonably expect 70mpg out of it in real world driving conditions. And, around here at least, diesel is less expensive than gasoline.
You can live an upper class life in the US on $10k, as long as you are willing to make a few sacrifices. It's all about your point of view.
I'd like to find the part of the US where $10,000/year would cover rent, utilities (heat/electricity/water), and food... much of the country, that's not even enough for rent.
Economies elsewhere in the world are different. You can make a reasonable comparison between Canada and the US, because they're very similar: most costs are about the same, and they've been trading between which country has the higher per capita income for a little while now... right now, Canada has a slightly higher per capita than the US. Here, if you don't have a monthly car payment you can live quite comfortably on $40,000/year without sacrificing too much, whereas in China, $40k is an enormous amount of money. The prices on just about every consumer good under the sun are completely different in China. Heck, you can't even compare it to Australia, which is another wealthy former colony with a mostly European population, because pricing on some things is completely out of whack between the different regions (just ask somebody who's bought consumer electronics in Australia).
I don't think anyone will give you shit for collecting vinyl records, as long as you're not one of those nutters who claims they are better at reproducing sound than a properly mastered CD
That's why vinyl sounds better... it's not that the medium itself is better, it's that it's not physically possible to press a record that's been as overmastered as the crap that they can do with a CD.
Because most people wouldn't be satisfied with an 40x8 monochrome text display driven by a 4MHz processor and possessing no hard drive or external storage.
Take a laptop from 30 years ago, and give it a modern battery (without changing anything else), and you'll have a laptop that'll last a week on a single charge. People just wouldn't be happy with the spec, because it would *really* slag down trying to watch Youtube....
Whereas in a country with a decent social security net and single-pay healthcare system, they don't need to worry about being denied for future insurance/coverage, nor living on food stamps (disability pay can be reasonably good depending on the career you're leaving... my work plan gives full pay for 20 weeks, and 2/3 pay until I reach retirement age and can start collecting pension, and I would be eligible to collect public money from the disability program as well, so I'd actually be getting a small pay raise).
Vicious circle indeed, but it'll take some *major* reform to get out from under it in the US. I don't think the political will is there right now but I do hope that by introducing a single-pay healthcare system, things will gradually start to improve.
Patients have been self-diagnosing for as long as doctors have existed. I'm guilty of it myself, and won't usually see a doctor unless I think the doctor will actually be able to do something. (no point in seeing a doctor for a runny nose, it's probably just allergies or a cold... if it's allergies the doctor can't do anything other than give me the antihistamines I'm already taking, and if it's a cold, no self-respecting doctor will give me anti-virals for something my body can heal on its own in a few days).
Regulating apps like this isn't about flow control... it's about accountability. "Doctor, this app on my iPhone says that I have pneumonia, I need antibiotics!" would be a best case scenario... more likely people will assume that the app is telling them the truth and will self-medicate on that basis. At best, this means you're taking some cough medicine when you don't need it, and you'll heal on your own anyway. At worst... I don't really want to think about a worst-case scenario with somebody with no medical training self-diagnosing and self-treating. People have been doing that for years with WebMD, and they were using "common wisdom" for centuries before that.
Given that stupid people *will* take what these kinds of apps say as gospel, they need to be regulated to make sure they're giving reliable information.
Now, when it comes to a glorified calendar app, like one I've seen mentioned here already, (iRounds), I don't think it should be regulated. It's not dispensing any medical advice or diagnosis, it's simply providing a platform to facilitate the doctor's scheduling and communication.
Then their economy wouldn't be so bad and they could contribute better to worldwide invention rates, whch are what saves the most lives in the long run
Government-provided health care relies on the idea of handing out what already exists. As such it is a static analysis that is pennywise, pound foolish in ignoring the real lifesaving force: new treatments.
Would you say that the economy of Canada, with its lower unemployment rate and higher per-capita income than the US is doing badly?
There are other reasons that health care is so much more expensive in the US, though... because they never instituted proper tort laws (in part because of the privatized medical system), doctors' malpractice and other insurance is a lot higher. This, in turn, gets passed on to the users of the system, and it becomes a vicious circle... people sue for larger and larger amounts of money because they won't be able to get insurance in the private system, and need to be able to pay the increased medical fees, but the stupidly large amounts of money they sue for (and their propensity to sue for things that they'd never get away with in the UK or Canada) are the reason that the medical fees are going up.
You are absolutely right that things are much cheaper per capita in the UK. They are in Canada and Australia, too, and pretty much everywhere else where universal health care exists, not to mention the other economic benefits of having a population with access to preventative health care. But in the absence of sane tort laws, introducing public health care in the US won't fix the problem, either.
According to your numbers, the largest possible market for companies like newegg, ncix, etc. Is 0.001% of 1 billion - or 100,000 people. Yet those companies have expanded into each other's markets as well as expanded within their own markets. Granted, their bread and butter is mainly desktops but they do sell a significant number of laptop upgrades on the storage side (RAM, HDDs).
*shrugs* I have replaced laptop CPU's before, but mostly in Mini-ITX form factor desktops. I did do a laptop once, but it was more trouble than it was worth, and when you consider the cost of the CPU against the $300 it would have cost to buy a new laptop, it probably didn't make economic sense. If the laptop didn't have sentimental value for its owner, I wouldn't have bothered trying.
As has been said, RAM and HDD's are designed to be easy to replace in laptops. Well, in non-fruity laptops. Even my Dell Vostro V130n, which was an early ultrabook, had a removable case and everything was accessible to people who were able to do the work. It really boils down to a question of whether it is worth doing the work, though. I can spend $150 on a CPU upgrade for my laptop, not factoring in the cost of the increased hard drive and memory, or I can spend $300 on a new laptop which is better across the board. Unless the laptop has major sentimental value, it's simply not worth upgrading it in most cases.
The same holds for desktops, and I'm pretty sure that the main reason that the desktop upgrade market still exists is that it's easier to upgrade individual components (less work), and the enthusiast market doesn't build their own laptops (actually, most enthusiasts I know don't even own laptops, or if they do, they own a cheap laptop that they don't do any gaming on).
Oh, and just to piss off the OP, my degree is in Philosophy/Linguistics... not everybody who studied arts is inept with computers, just as not everybody who studied sciences is capable with them. Amazingly, it's entirely possible to be capable with a device and not seek a career that revolves around it *gasp*.
Facebook operates in different jurisdictions, however... and in some of those jurisdicitons, you can't give away copyright like that. In other areas (some of which overlap the first group), they can't use your image or your name without your permission.
The US has some seriously fucked up laws, when it comes to privacy, and I'm glad that the judge is calling them to task on it. Sadly, I'm not certain that the lawsuit will be as successful as it would be if it were filed in Canada, Germany, or any of the other areas where this kind of thing is *really* illegal.
TFA makes it pretty clear that they're not suing over the radio patents at all... this is over things like location awareness, e-mail push, and embedded video players....
You don't seriously believe trickle-down economics actually work, do you? It may interest you to know that with the incredibly high unemployment in the US right now, and the rampant foreclosures and bankruptcy in the working class, the NYSE is trading at record highs, and corporate income is higher than it was 5 years ago...
The tax should be even at all levels of income, period end of statement. That is the Constitutional answer, as well as the most logical and "Fair". If I pay 13%, then some person making a bazillion dollars a year should pay 13%. If that person pays 10%, I pay 10%.
No, because that shifts a greater proportion of the burden on those at the lower echelons. It needs to average out, which would mean that they'd need to set a higher base rate than they could if they were to exempt lower income tiers and gradually introduce the full tax rate as your income rises.
There's a reason that there's a poverty line, and a tax exempt income level... it's because you need a certain minimum amount of money to be able to survive. If the person who's barely making that money has to pay income tax, then they will not be able to eke out a living. It may interest you to know that working full time, 40hr/week, at minimum wage is below the poverty line in much of the US.
Oregon has the highest minimum wage in the US, at $8.80/hr (surprised the hell out of me, I would have thought it was New York). Assuming you work 40hr/week, and don't take any time off, working the full 52 weeks, it's $18,304/year before taxes. Compare that to Minnesota where the minimum is $5.25/hr, and it's only $10,920/year before taxes. The national poverty line in the US is $11,170/year, and it tends to be more in northern states because of the colder weather (you eat more calories in the winter, and you spend more on heating, while not getting a reprieve from cooling in the summer). Try Oklahoma, where they can legally pay you $2/hr if the employer makes less than $100,000/year, let alone the states which have no minimum wage at all. Even the federal minimum of $7.25/hr is only $15k/year before taxes.
Why should somebody who's not even making enough to stay above the poverty line (Minnesota) pay the same tax rate as I do, when I make more than 6x as much? While I appreciate your desire for equality, 10% of $11,000 is $1,100, leaving him with less than $10,000 to spend on rent, food, transit, clothes, etc., where I'd still have $60,000 left over after taxes. Given that the average rent in Minneapolis is over $1,000/mo for a 1br, that's hardly fair. And that's assuming that the government could even make ends meet with only a 10% income tax... I doubt that would even cover the military budget, let alone the rest of the stuff the government is responsible for.
Flat tax isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it needs to be a consumption tax, not an income tax, and it needs to exempt things that are necessary to life, like utilities, rent, unprepared food, health care, and public transit. It would, necessarily, need to be a high enough rate, because it's only covering luxuries, and as such, it'd never pass... most people wouldn't be willing to pay a 30-40% sales tax* on luxuries/imports (not for resale), even when considering that it'd mean no income tax and a *lot* more disposible income for everybody.
* - and no, I haven't done the numbers to figure out what the sales tax would have to be... it'd need to be enough to be able to cover costs, but low enough to not stifle the economy... it may not be workable at all, but it's worth looking into as a possibility.
Neither of you are right. Religion *should* be taught in schools, just not in science classes. More accurately, Comparative Religion should be taught.
In other words, a basic class that says "this is what the xians believe, this is what the muslims believe, this is the jews, this is the buddhists, this is the hindus, this is the shinto, etc." should be required. Maybe when people start to realize that different religions have different belief systems, they'll start to understand that people have a right to believe what works for them, and that there is no single path. Everybody needs to be allowed to find the right path for themselves.
At the moment, the main factors they use are type of car and age of driver, however this really penalises young drivers even if they drive carefully, because crashes are disproportionately caused by young drivers (primarily men).
Around here, the insurance companies stopped giving preferential rates to young women over young men a few years ago (and never did once you were over 25 anyway). They base their rates on amount of driving (how many km's/year you drive), where you're driving (rural rates are lower than urban rates), type of car (a $150,000 sports car will necessarily be more expensive to insure than a $10,000 pickup truck), history (years without a claim/ticket) and experience of the driver.
Not age, but years of driving experience... while this translates to young people getting worse rates, it's because they have less years on the road, not because they are young. A 30-year old who decides to get their driver's license for the first time will be paying the same shitty rate that a 16-year old with their provisional license would. Probably worse, actually, because the 30-year old likely wouldn't be added to their parents' policy as a 3rd driver.
Why does it cost money to NOT publish my phone number?
Because they make money providing their customer lists to the people who publish phone directories, political organizations that request the list, telemarketers, etc.
Why does it cost money to renew my car registration online via an automated system instead of at a building that costs rent and overhead with a human employee?
Because the whole point of a car registration is to serve as an impediment to prevent any idiot from buying a car. Doesn't work very well, but can you imagine how bad it would be if people who couldn't scrape together $35 once a year were allowed to operate and maintain a car? It costs a lot more than $35/year to keep a car safe; oil changes alone will be at least twice that, let alone regular maintenance that isn't covered by warranty, like wheel alignments, new tires/balance, brake service, etc..... And do you really expect somebody who can't afford $35/year to be driving a new car that's under warranty?
Why does it cost my bank $3 a page to mail me copies of old bank statements (and why can't they send me pdf's)?
Because you have the wrong bank? I can get those online with my bank, in pdf format, or in searchable/downloadable csv format. They charge money to mail it out to you because it costs them money to mail it out to you.
Doesn't work 100% of the time, but works pretty well.Only time it's failed to pick up my car was when the license plate was covered in snow after being parked at a hotel for 2 weeks. They use a combination of transponders (for regular travellers), and optical recognition of license plates for one-off uses.
The current OS/X UI is loosely based on CDE, actually, with a few carry-overs from old school Mac System.:)
GP didn't say that MS and Canonical were trying to copy Apple, though several others have said it. He said that they were trying to foist a tablet-centric UI on the desktop users... this is certainly true for MS, but I don't think that Unity is a tablet UI, I think it's a netbook UI... on a netbook it's actually pretty efficient at how it uses the low screen resolution, but it is less than ideal for a large high resolution screen.
Personally, I think xfce or e17 are more likely to make a long-term splash than KDE... both can be made to look/behave like KDE (or OS/X for that matter), but both are significantly more customizable. In the end, I think e17 wins out on featureset, though... the profiles feature means that you can ship it with a bunch of pre-configured user interface layouts out of the box, and the user can pick which one they want on first boot, and change on the fly. Last i checked, xfce doesn't have that functionality.
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No, but your argument was situational awareness, driving skill and vehicle condition prevents accidents - totally omitting 'reducing speed' from the list. It was the 'driving skill' point that made me post a reply to your comment as it's this kind of 'boy racer' attitude [wikipedia.org] which causes so many deaths.
In itself reducing speed doesn't prevent accidents. It reduces the damage caused when they happen, which in turn reduces fatality rates, especially in vehicle/pedestrian and vehicle/cyclist accidents.
What prevents accidents is driving to the road conditions. This means slowing down when there's visibility or traffic or traction problems which can affect your ability to see a hazard and react to it, and similarly, when there's an increased potential for hazards/pedestrian traffic (like driving in a commercial or residential district). This is not slowing down for the sake of slowing down because speed kills, this is driving at a speed that's reasonable for the road conditions, which used to be part of the critical thinking they taught in driver's ed.
Somehow, somewhere, "driving too fast for the conditions" morphed into "speed kills". People take the simplified conclusion, and skip the logic steps that led to that conclusion, and it's been used ever since as justification to lower the speed limit even when it's not appropriate to do so. If you're driving at a speed that's appropriate for the conditions, you *will* find a stretch of road where you're exceeding the posted speed limits. It's inevitable... especially on superhighways, roads are generally engineered for a speed that's higher than the posted limit, and if you're driving to the conditions, and the conditions are ideal, then it's not unreasonable to drive faster than the limit.
The problem is that people don't know their own limits. I read somewhere that 80% of drivers think they're better than average... they overestimate their abilities, and they don't recognize their limitations. Doesn't help that the police might actually arrest you on suspicion of drunk driving if you pull over to the side of a highway and sleep because you're not safe to drive.... :(
An alert and attentive driver who knows their vehicle's capabilities, and who is driving to the conditions is a safer driver, and speed limits have nothing to do with that equation. Driving to the conditions is the important part. Take the same stretch of road in midsummer, sun's high in the sky, you can see for miles, road is perfectly dry. It's *much* safer to drive at a high speed in these conditions than it is in the middle of a blizzard in the winter. And yet the speed limit is the same. So either the speed limit is too slow for the summer conditions, or it's too high for the winter conditions. It can't be right for both situations. The problem is... you will find drivers who drive the speed limit in both situations, because that's what the signage says they should be doing. These same drivers are part of that 80% who think they're above average, because they obey the signage and don't break any of the rules of the road, and the only way to make it safe for everybody is to put the speed limit where it'll be safe in the worst conditions.
They are only around ~3000 lbs, which hardly makes them heavy compared to other cars. Expensive? They are on the low end between $20 and $30k.
What kind of real world mileage do you get out of that, if you don't mind my asking?
I drive a 2011 Subaru Impreza... a car that's in no way designed for efficiency (it's designed to drive around corners really fast), and I don't make any effort to try to conserve fuel, and I get about 35-40mpg real world out of it (with a manual transmission). It cost $10,000 less than a similarly-equipped Prius. If, over the lifetime of the Prius, you have not saved $10,000 in gas, then I'm coming out ahead on the cost scale.
And the reason I'm putting this to you is this: you can buy a turbodiesel VW for less than the Impreza cost, and reasonably expect 70mpg out of it in real world driving conditions. And, around here at least, diesel is less expensive than gasoline.
You can live an upper class life in the US on $10k, as long as you are willing to make a few sacrifices. It's all about your point of view.
I'd like to find the part of the US where $10,000/year would cover rent, utilities (heat/electricity/water), and food... much of the country, that's not even enough for rent.
Economies elsewhere in the world are different. You can make a reasonable comparison between Canada and the US, because they're very similar: most costs are about the same, and they've been trading between which country has the higher per capita income for a little while now... right now, Canada has a slightly higher per capita than the US. Here, if you don't have a monthly car payment you can live quite comfortably on $40,000/year without sacrificing too much, whereas in China, $40k is an enormous amount of money. The prices on just about every consumer good under the sun are completely different in China. Heck, you can't even compare it to Australia, which is another wealthy former colony with a mostly European population, because pricing on some things is completely out of whack between the different regions (just ask somebody who's bought consumer electronics in Australia).
I don't think anyone will give you shit for collecting vinyl records, as long as you're not one of those nutters who claims they are better at reproducing sound than a properly mastered CD
I haven't heard a "properly mastered CD" in years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
That's why vinyl sounds better... it's not that the medium itself is better, it's that it's not physically possible to press a record that's been as overmastered as the crap that they can do with a CD.
Because most people wouldn't be satisfied with an 40x8 monochrome text display driven by a 4MHz processor and possessing no hard drive or external storage.
Take a laptop from 30 years ago, and give it a modern battery (without changing anything else), and you'll have a laptop that'll last a week on a single charge. People just wouldn't be happy with the spec, because it would *really* slag down trying to watch Youtube....
Whereas in a country with a decent social security net and single-pay healthcare system, they don't need to worry about being denied for future insurance/coverage, nor living on food stamps (disability pay can be reasonably good depending on the career you're leaving... my work plan gives full pay for 20 weeks, and 2/3 pay until I reach retirement age and can start collecting pension, and I would be eligible to collect public money from the disability program as well, so I'd actually be getting a small pay raise).
Vicious circle indeed, but it'll take some *major* reform to get out from under it in the US. I don't think the political will is there right now but I do hope that by introducing a single-pay healthcare system, things will gradually start to improve.
Patients have been self-diagnosing for as long as doctors have existed. I'm guilty of it myself, and won't usually see a doctor unless I think the doctor will actually be able to do something. (no point in seeing a doctor for a runny nose, it's probably just allergies or a cold... if it's allergies the doctor can't do anything other than give me the antihistamines I'm already taking, and if it's a cold, no self-respecting doctor will give me anti-virals for something my body can heal on its own in a few days).
Regulating apps like this isn't about flow control... it's about accountability. "Doctor, this app on my iPhone says that I have pneumonia, I need antibiotics!" would be a best case scenario... more likely people will assume that the app is telling them the truth and will self-medicate on that basis. At best, this means you're taking some cough medicine when you don't need it, and you'll heal on your own anyway. At worst... I don't really want to think about a worst-case scenario with somebody with no medical training self-diagnosing and self-treating. People have been doing that for years with WebMD, and they were using "common wisdom" for centuries before that.
Given that stupid people *will* take what these kinds of apps say as gospel, they need to be regulated to make sure they're giving reliable information.
Now, when it comes to a glorified calendar app, like one I've seen mentioned here already, (iRounds), I don't think it should be regulated. It's not dispensing any medical advice or diagnosis, it's simply providing a platform to facilitate the doctor's scheduling and communication.
Then their economy wouldn't be so bad and they could contribute better to worldwide invention rates, whch are what saves the most lives in the long run
Government-provided health care relies on the idea of handing out what already exists. As such it is a static analysis that is pennywise, pound foolish in ignoring the real lifesaving force: new treatments.
Would you say that the economy of Canada, with its lower unemployment rate and higher per-capita income than the US is doing badly?
There are other reasons that health care is so much more expensive in the US, though... because they never instituted proper tort laws (in part because of the privatized medical system), doctors' malpractice and other insurance is a lot higher. This, in turn, gets passed on to the users of the system, and it becomes a vicious circle... people sue for larger and larger amounts of money because they won't be able to get insurance in the private system, and need to be able to pay the increased medical fees, but the stupidly large amounts of money they sue for (and their propensity to sue for things that they'd never get away with in the UK or Canada) are the reason that the medical fees are going up.
You are absolutely right that things are much cheaper per capita in the UK. They are in Canada and Australia, too, and pretty much everywhere else where universal health care exists, not to mention the other economic benefits of having a population with access to preventative health care. But in the absence of sane tort laws, introducing public health care in the US won't fix the problem, either.
According to your numbers, the largest possible market for companies like newegg, ncix, etc. Is 0.001% of 1 billion - or 100,000 people. Yet those companies have expanded into each other's markets as well as expanded within their own markets. Granted, their bread and butter is mainly desktops but they do sell a significant number of laptop upgrades on the storage side (RAM, HDDs).
*shrugs* I have replaced laptop CPU's before, but mostly in Mini-ITX form factor desktops. I did do a laptop once, but it was more trouble than it was worth, and when you consider the cost of the CPU against the $300 it would have cost to buy a new laptop, it probably didn't make economic sense. If the laptop didn't have sentimental value for its owner, I wouldn't have bothered trying.
As has been said, RAM and HDD's are designed to be easy to replace in laptops. Well, in non-fruity laptops. Even my Dell Vostro V130n, which was an early ultrabook, had a removable case and everything was accessible to people who were able to do the work. It really boils down to a question of whether it is worth doing the work, though. I can spend $150 on a CPU upgrade for my laptop, not factoring in the cost of the increased hard drive and memory, or I can spend $300 on a new laptop which is better across the board. Unless the laptop has major sentimental value, it's simply not worth upgrading it in most cases.
The same holds for desktops, and I'm pretty sure that the main reason that the desktop upgrade market still exists is that it's easier to upgrade individual components (less work), and the enthusiast market doesn't build their own laptops (actually, most enthusiasts I know don't even own laptops, or if they do, they own a cheap laptop that they don't do any gaming on).
Oh, and just to piss off the OP, my degree is in Philosophy/Linguistics... not everybody who studied arts is inept with computers, just as not everybody who studied sciences is capable with them. Amazingly, it's entirely possible to be capable with a device and not seek a career that revolves around it *gasp*.
Facebook operates in different jurisdictions, however... and in some of those jurisdicitons, you can't give away copyright like that. In other areas (some of which overlap the first group), they can't use your image or your name without your permission.
The US has some seriously fucked up laws, when it comes to privacy, and I'm glad that the judge is calling them to task on it. Sadly, I'm not certain that the lawsuit will be as successful as it would be if it were filed in Canada, Germany, or any of the other areas where this kind of thing is *really* illegal.
TFA makes it pretty clear that they're not suing over the radio patents at all... this is over things like location awareness, e-mail push, and embedded video players....
You don't seriously believe trickle-down economics actually work, do you? It may interest you to know that with the incredibly high unemployment in the US right now, and the rampant foreclosures and bankruptcy in the working class, the NYSE is trading at record highs, and corporate income is higher than it was 5 years ago...
The tax should be even at all levels of income, period end of statement. That is the Constitutional answer, as well as the most logical and "Fair". If I pay 13%, then some person making a bazillion dollars a year should pay 13%. If that person pays 10%, I pay 10%.
No, because that shifts a greater proportion of the burden on those at the lower echelons. It needs to average out, which would mean that they'd need to set a higher base rate than they could if they were to exempt lower income tiers and gradually introduce the full tax rate as your income rises.
There's a reason that there's a poverty line, and a tax exempt income level... it's because you need a certain minimum amount of money to be able to survive. If the person who's barely making that money has to pay income tax, then they will not be able to eke out a living. It may interest you to know that working full time, 40hr/week, at minimum wage is below the poverty line in much of the US.
Oregon has the highest minimum wage in the US, at $8.80/hr (surprised the hell out of me, I would have thought it was New York). Assuming you work 40hr/week, and don't take any time off, working the full 52 weeks, it's $18,304/year before taxes. Compare that to Minnesota where the minimum is $5.25/hr, and it's only $10,920/year before taxes. The national poverty line in the US is $11,170/year, and it tends to be more in northern states because of the colder weather (you eat more calories in the winter, and you spend more on heating, while not getting a reprieve from cooling in the summer). Try Oklahoma, where they can legally pay you $2/hr if the employer makes less than $100,000/year, let alone the states which have no minimum wage at all. Even the federal minimum of $7.25/hr is only $15k/year before taxes.
Why should somebody who's not even making enough to stay above the poverty line (Minnesota) pay the same tax rate as I do, when I make more than 6x as much? While I appreciate your desire for equality, 10% of $11,000 is $1,100, leaving him with less than $10,000 to spend on rent, food, transit, clothes, etc., where I'd still have $60,000 left over after taxes. Given that the average rent in Minneapolis is over $1,000/mo for a 1br, that's hardly fair. And that's assuming that the government could even make ends meet with only a 10% income tax... I doubt that would even cover the military budget, let alone the rest of the stuff the government is responsible for.
Flat tax isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it needs to be a consumption tax, not an income tax, and it needs to exempt things that are necessary to life, like utilities, rent, unprepared food, health care, and public transit. It would, necessarily, need to be a high enough rate, because it's only covering luxuries, and as such, it'd never pass... most people wouldn't be willing to pay a 30-40% sales tax* on luxuries/imports (not for resale), even when considering that it'd mean no income tax and a *lot* more disposible income for everybody.
* - and no, I haven't done the numbers to figure out what the sales tax would have to be... it'd need to be enough to be able to cover costs, but low enough to not stifle the economy... it may not be workable at all, but it's worth looking into as a possibility.
Neither of you are right. Religion *should* be taught in schools, just not in science classes. More accurately, Comparative Religion should be taught.
In other words, a basic class that says "this is what the xians believe, this is what the muslims believe, this is the jews, this is the buddhists, this is the hindus, this is the shinto, etc." should be required. Maybe when people start to realize that different religions have different belief systems, they'll start to understand that people have a right to believe what works for them, and that there is no single path. Everybody needs to be allowed to find the right path for themselves.
At the moment, the main factors they use are type of car and age of driver, however this really penalises young drivers even if they drive carefully, because crashes are disproportionately caused by young drivers (primarily men).
Around here, the insurance companies stopped giving preferential rates to young women over young men a few years ago (and never did once you were over 25 anyway). They base their rates on amount of driving (how many km's/year you drive), where you're driving (rural rates are lower than urban rates), type of car (a $150,000 sports car will necessarily be more expensive to insure than a $10,000 pickup truck), history (years without a claim/ticket) and experience of the driver.
Not age, but years of driving experience... while this translates to young people getting worse rates, it's because they have less years on the road, not because they are young. A 30-year old who decides to get their driver's license for the first time will be paying the same shitty rate that a 16-year old with their provisional license would. Probably worse, actually, because the 30-year old likely wouldn't be added to their parents' policy as a 3rd driver.
I don't think Opportunity has been wasted at all....
Why does it cost money to NOT publish my phone number?
Because they make money providing their customer lists to the people who publish phone directories, political organizations that request the list, telemarketers, etc.
Why does it cost money to renew my car registration online via an automated system instead of at a building that costs rent and overhead with a human employee?
Because the whole point of a car registration is to serve as an impediment to prevent any idiot from buying a car. Doesn't work very well, but can you imagine how bad it would be if people who couldn't scrape together $35 once a year were allowed to operate and maintain a car? It costs a lot more than $35/year to keep a car safe; oil changes alone will be at least twice that, let alone regular maintenance that isn't covered by warranty, like wheel alignments, new tires/balance, brake service, etc..... And do you really expect somebody who can't afford $35/year to be driving a new car that's under warranty?
Why does it cost my bank $3 a page to mail me copies of old bank statements (and why can't they send me pdf's)?
Because you have the wrong bank? I can get those online with my bank, in pdf format, or in searchable/downloadable csv format. They charge money to mail it out to you because it costs them money to mail it out to you.
Your sarcasm detector is broken.
Why would we ever waste police resources on this kind of person?
Because most of the civilized world has public health care, and it costs less to talk him out of it than it would to fix it after the fact.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Highway_407
Doesn't work 100% of the time, but works pretty well.Only time it's failed to pick up my car was when the license plate was covered in snow after being parked at a hotel for 2 weeks. They use a combination of transponders (for regular travellers), and optical recognition of license plates for one-off uses.
They were considered 1st world nations, during the cold war....
The current OS/X UI is loosely based on CDE, actually, with a few carry-overs from old school Mac System. :)
GP didn't say that MS and Canonical were trying to copy Apple, though several others have said it. He said that they were trying to foist a tablet-centric UI on the desktop users... this is certainly true for MS, but I don't think that Unity is a tablet UI, I think it's a netbook UI... on a netbook it's actually pretty efficient at how it uses the low screen resolution, but it is less than ideal for a large high resolution screen.
Personally, I think xfce or e17 are more likely to make a long-term splash than KDE... both can be made to look/behave like KDE (or OS/X for that matter), but both are significantly more customizable. In the end, I think e17 wins out on featureset, though... the profiles feature means that you can ship it with a bunch of pre-configured user interface layouts out of the box, and the user can pick which one they want on first boot, and change on the fly. Last i checked, xfce doesn't have that functionality.