By "draconian" you mean, show any state ID; an ID which in pretty much ever state that ID laws have been enacted can be obtained free of charge and in many cases can even be done through a home visit. We must have a different meaning for draconian up here in Canada since every time I vote I have to show some form of ID and no one seems to have a problem.
By fraud I was more referring to cases like Kierra Fontae, Shelia Romona Hodges and Brandon Earl Mclean; each of which were convicted of voting twice for Obama in 2008, or Lessadolla Sower (former NAACP official) for voting 10 times through absentee ballots (in true Dem style, 4 of those ballots were for dead people). Then there are numerous cases of people voting in two states every election cycle and the normal occurrence of districts reporting more votes than registered voters. Of course catching any of these types of fraud cases is next to impossible in a system where people can vote without any requirement to prove their identity.
And if you think permitting fraudulent registrations does not fundamentally undermine the election process then there is just no debating with you. For every Mickey Mouse that's easy to catch there is a Mike Smith who is just as imaginary but doesn't get caught in the review process. You may also want to look up the ACORN convictions; they are not for simply submitting fraudulent forms (if they were the convictions would run in the 100's of thousands), the convictions are usually for actively filling out the forms themselves or for using illegal methods to collect the registrations.
And let the 2000 elections go. Two independent reviews (well 1 was run by Democrats) of the felons list found no foul play just some asinine short cuts taken by a company trying to save some money. All of this was know in advance of the election so in many districts the 'purge lists' were completely ignored; in all others voters who believed they should be able to vote were given provisional ballots. The butterfly ballot (a Democrat creation) and the announcement of the polls closing an hour before they actually were (estimated to have prevented at least 15,000 people from voting) probably had more impact on the final outcome. All of those things can be explained by standard human incompetence more so than malice.
And yet of all the convictions of voter fraud seem to be around Democrats and Democrat friendly organizations (even in Democratic controlled areas in case you want to imply any type of witch hunting). Just last year at least 10 separate states investigated, indicted and/or convicted people for voter fraud and in almost every case (with at least 1 exception) the suspects were Democrats and/or their operatives.
Then there are the more general instances of felons voting (registration records where available as well as statistics concerning their various soci-economic factors all point to the tendency for felons to lean Democrat), outright voter intimidation (think Black Panthers with clubs standing outside polling stations) and well lets face it, the entire state of Illinois (where voter turn out can be upwards of 120% in some districts and at times it has been estimated that 1 in ten votes were fraudulent).
In 2010 ACORN alone had over 15 convictions of fraud related activities.
But I guess 1 idiot with a camera (who happened to be pointing out how easy it was to commit voter fraud as part of his investigation) balances that all out.
With over 80% of the receipients of the DOE grants/loans being Obama supporters, there is definitely at least the appearance of something; Solyndra being the best (worst) example. Solydra was not given the loans under Bush because their balance sheets just didn't add up. Even people within the Obama administration warned that their numbers were funny and not worth the risk but they received over half a billion in loan guarantees anyway. There was also communication between the Admin and Solyndra involving the scheduling of layoff announcements to avoid having a negative impact (for the Dems) on the 2010 elections.
The gun walking program under Bush was a joint operation with the Mexican government where 450 weapons were permitted to be sold and then tracked with RFID tags. The tracking failed for several reasons (including inept ATF agents installing the tags) and the program was discontinued. Fast & Furious was a completely new program started in 2009 with no interaction with the Mexican government and no plan to actually track the over 1600 (and possibly over 2000) guns that shop owners were being forced to sell illegally (even after they complained about having to make the sales).
As I posted above, F&F did not involve the legal sale of guns, gun shop owners were directly instructed by the ATF to sell weapons illegally. There are even official statements released by the ATF showing shop owners were concerned about making the sales.
F&F did not involve legal gun sales that just happened to end up being misused, it involved illegal gun sales to suspected traffickers. Gun store owners were directly instructed to illegally sell guns and were told that the ATF would be tracking them. The owners were actually very wary about making the sales but were instructed to keep selling by the ATF agents in charge.
So people are crying foul because A) the ATF had to instruct shop owners to disregard local, state and federal laws to sell the guns in question, B) there was no real program in place to track the illegally sold guns which led to terrible consequences and C) people in Washington are already using F&F as an excuse to talk about toughening gun laws even though the laws in place to prevent just such sales had to be expressly ignored to allow the program to take place.
"Wide Receiver" was a Bush program that failed but unlike F&F, WR was at least set up to track the weapons they allowed to be sold to the cartels. The 450 guns the ATF allowed to be sold under WR were tagged with RFID chips and tracked through aerial surveillance. Of course the ATF did a awful job tagging them and used RFID with short battery lives and also damaged most of them when installing them, reducing their effectiveness. There were also refueling issues with the surveillance they opened huge windows in the smuggling window.
F&F, on the other hand, allowed over 1600 weapons to be sold to suspected traffickers without even the smallest attempt to track them. It was essentially a "let's just see what happens" type of deal.
Solyndra and Beacon Power were the loan recipients that outright failed but here are several other green energy companies that received loans under the DOE program that are hemorrhaging money. The independent auditor put the current risk at about $2.7 billion loss on loans totaling about $24 billion but even on the companies that will be making payments it's expected the terms will be renegotiated since they are having some difficulty. Solyndra and Beacon were excluded because they had already failed at the time of the review.
In general, the government should not be in the game of picking winners and losers in the market. It's fine to give some assistance to emerging markets (I'd prefer limited tax write offs as opposed to outright loans or loan guarantees) but when the Feds pick company A over company B that is artificially affecting the market and it is no longer free.
The USDA, when faced with the task of trying to make up for a funding cut in the federal school lunch program reclassified ketchup as a vegetable to make it cheaper for schools to meet the federally mandated school lunch requirements. That's pretty much the point, the USDA is a bureaucratic entity that when push comes to shove will choose the bureaucratic solution and put actual health and safety issues on the back burner.
But to be fair to the GP, many state laws are put in place to meet the very strict FEDERAL rules with their strings attached to education funding such as the national School Lunch Program and No Child Left Behind. These federal programs set general guidelines but then leave enforcement and the more specific rules up to the State and local governments. If a state or local agency is found not to be meeting the Federal requirements however, then they may be defunded or, depending on the exact violation, possibly face a federal charge. Federal defunding of even a food lunch program (since these are paid on a per meal basis and not based on actual cost) can often mean a major difference in the schools overall financial health.
There is also questions about the identity of the 'food inspector'. Their are claims from one source that it was in fact a federal USDA employee and other sources claiming it was a state contractor; as of yet the Carolina Journal is unable to confirm the exact agency the 'inspector' worked for.
And before you start throwing the 'idiot radicals' title around you may want to reread your own response. A disinterested third party would have a hard time picking Causality's post as coming from the radical. Although you probably knew that already since you had to post AC.
There are dozens of videos on reputable sites showing hands on examples of playbooks with full OS2 running and the email client/contact integration.
And yes, the built in video chat only connect to other playbooks, much like Facetime and iUsers, but if you want to talk to people on other platforms there are several video apps that do that. I personally don't want to video chat with anyone and was just commenting on the fact that the built in app is so easy to use my mother keeps ringing me on it.
If you install the 2.0 OS beta (or wait a couple weeks for the full release) you can have full email, contact and calendar apps which includes integration with other social networks like Twitter and Linkedin.
As for Android apps, with OS 2.0 you can sideload almost anything right now. You can also load the Marketplace directly onto a cracked playbook but that tends to have extremely unstable results. For new apps you don't even need to develop specifically for the Blackberry OS, the compiler translates most Android library calls for you so you simply compile your Android app twice and then list it directly in the BB Appworld. There's at least one Andorid market in the process of doing this right now for their entire library.
I picked up a playbook just before Christmas (it's the only BB device I own) and barely put it down the entire holiday season. It was hooked up to my parents TV for almost the entire 3 weeks I was visiting, streaming whatever I had downloaded or copied to it, and when my brother or nephews wanted to watch something I didn't I could still stream it and continue playing Angry Birds or read a ebook. I'm still using it every day. It's the perfect size to just lay down on and end table and grab to play a quick game of Monopoly or search for some useless tidbit of information.
My 66 year old mother loved hers and still comments on it whenever I'm talking to her. I just wish I didn't who her how easy the video chat was to use.
Which would of course mean having to charge higher rents to cover the additional tax (plus even higher to ensure that additional income is covered during tax time) which would then be passed through the renter to their customers.
End result, government gets fatter while consumers get screwed.
Basic rule of capitalism, businesses DO NOT pay taxes. Their name be on the cheque they send to the IRS (or respective tax agency) but the money came from their customers.
No, you move to Canada where winnings are taxed at 0%. Why make people pay for something they won? The company offering the prize already pays the taxes while procuring it so the prize you see is what you actually get, no strings attached.
So while on a game show in Canada you're likely to only win a new toaster oven and a pair of gloves at least they're yours free and clear. In the US however, if you win the Showcase Showdown on the Price is Right you're likely not leaving the studio with even half of the prizes you won since you'll have to sell them off to pay the taxes on the whole thing (or if they offer low ball cash alternatives you'll have to opt for that).
And what significant role in making Steve Jobs fortune did you play that makes you in any way deserving of his money simply because he died?
The idea that people have that an inheritance tax is in any way justified is simply put, jealousy. If Jobs had continued to live he would not have been taxed on his total wealth until such time as he made some move to liquidate it (sell shares) and then he would have been taxed at whatever the applicable rate was. Why does his passing in any way justify the government from taking a percentage of his wealth until the various recipients decide to do the same. It's not like he was 'gifting' money away to people as a means to bypass the taxation system and pay them under the table, he died; his assets were legally obligated to go to someone.
Unless a person made their fortune while living in a foreign country and then moved to the US (in which case the US government had no claims on that income anyway) it was already taxed at some point. Taxing it again in the name of 'fairness' when they die is nothing more than a money grab by the government and a way for petty people to attack people they see as being better off then themselves. So what if the heir of a rich person never has to work a day in their lives. Does that truly affect anyone else. Tax them when they spend or earn money off of their inheritance just the same as anyone else.
Family owned businesses close or are sold off all the time because the founders managed to make it successful enough that it has value but not to the point where their heirs have the liquid assets required to pay off inheritance taxes when they die. It's not all that hard for a family company to be valued at over $1 million (the current $5 million exception is only temporary until 2013) but the likelihood of the heirs being able to pay the taxes of 55% is pretty low without them having to borrow against the business itself and put it on shaky financial grounds. While most of the companies affected by this are far from the limelight there are at least 3 major league sport franchises that had to deal with this not too long ago.
For the first 2 years of his term the Repubs couldn't even filibuster a bill without getting 100% of Republican and at least some Democrat reps support (or the independents who caucus with the Dems). And since the 2010 midterms the Republican house has passed dozens of bills which Harry Reid refuses to even open for debate in the Senate.
To be more accurate, the Republicans lost control during the 2006 elections when the Dems took control of both Houses of congress. From 2006 to the end of Bush's term in 2008 the Dems maintained complete control of the legislative branch of the US government. The Dems only lost that control during the 2010 midterms when the House went to the Repubs; the Senate remained under Dem control leading to the current legislative stalemate where one house will pass a bill and the other will refuse to even vote on it.
In the US federal system the President has some executive authority but the Legislative branch makes most of the rules since they control the purse strings. Only when both houses and the Presidency belong to the same party does the President have almost limitless powers (assuming he can get along with the House and Senate leaders from his own party).
Most of the reports about absentee military ballots being denied involve the Democrat candidate. After a quick Google search you'd be hard pressed to find a story about people trying to directly eliminate military absentee votes that isn't about a Dem candidates. They ever go so far as to deny bulk military ballots, handled through military mail channels, because they were missing post stamps that were unavailable to them due to their deployment. Hell, just putting the words "military" and "vote" in any search regardless of other search terms will usually result in at least half the results being anti-military voting stories about the Dems.
Even with the passage of the MOVE act overseas ballots have dropped because of the extremely slow action on the administrations part to actually enforce the act.
You may also be one of the only people who believe that military votes break Dem; the Dems certainly don't think so. With the possible exception of the last Presidential election (and that's up for debate since it was closer than usual and no formal stats are taken that separate actual military votes) the majority of military votes have always been expected to go Republican.
That might make a difference in a Federal election but there are no Federal elections in the US. The individual states determine the election conditions as well as who is eligible to vote (keeping in mind the Constitution) so even if you have a Federally approved ID it doesn't mean you have standing to vote within any particular state.
Almost every bit of polling data since the 70's shows a clear trend that the lower the income the more likely you are to vote Democrat. In 2006 the breakeven point was somewhere around a family income of 50k but below that almost 60% of votes went to Dems. And it's not like the rich were overwhelmingly Repub; above 50K it was roughly a 52/48 split for them.
A similar pattern holds true for education levels with people with high school or below predominately voting Dem and those with some University or Bachelor degrees tending Repub and then a turn back to Dem for those with Masters and Phds.
Oh wait, sorry to interrupt your attempt at trolling with some facts. Carry on.
I was just replying to your reflexive fanboi "several months" claim with the fact the release date of the Transformer, which has the chip in question, is Dec 19th; something that was pretty easy to find out.
As for graphics, while the iPad2 GPU is better in some respects, it's also not as good in others but I would personally opt for the higher res screen on the Prime.
So go grab your iPad2 and be happy with your victory in one gpl fill test over a system available in a couple weeks that happens to be thinner and lighter with more RAM, a sd card slot, a better camera, native hdmi ports, has a larger screen, a faster cpu and a very usable keyboard accessory that also boosts battery life by 80% or more; to each his/her own.
As far as I can tell the Playbook only really uses a Blackberry phone for it's native email app and since all mail is accessible through the browser anyway, that's hardly a deal breaker. There's even suppose to be a new email app with no Blackberry phone requirement in OS 2.0.
I was holding out for the next gen Asus Transformer but I just picked up a 32Gb Playbook for $299 and I've never owned a blackberry product in my life. The only crippling I can see is the native email client requires a blackberry but that's suppose to change in OS 2.0. Even with that there are links to Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail even Aol directly on the main screen and at least with Gmail, the mobile page looks as good as any app.
The only real drawback is because they launch through the browser you don't get notifications in the status bar when new mail arrives. I don't know about you but having newly arrived mail show up as an icon in my status bar isn't really worth the extra 2-300 dollars it would cost to get something comparable with a native app.
Now there is definitely a shortage of apps on Blackberry AppWorld but that should change with their new Android to Blackberry conversion tools and the ones that are there, especially the EA games, look amazing. For that matter it's possible to run an Android emulator on the playbook although not all apps are compatible. Some people have even used the DOS emulator for playbook to load a full version of Win95 onto it (to each his own I guess).
Basically, if the Playbook is crippled in any significant way, I've yet to find it.
Ahh, the classic "if you don't agree with me you want old people to die" debating tactic which is pretty interesting coming from someone who gloats about how they use every loophole to minimize their contributions to the financial well being of the government. Where do you think the money to pay for all the wonderful government support programs come from?
Anyway, I must have missed the part of any of my responses that I made a case against SS; I merely point out that your defense of SS as anything but a Ponzi scheme is wrong. For good or bad that's exactly what it is. Of course you may be more in the Robert E. Wright camp and call it a pyramid scheme, but in this case I'll side with Paul Krugman and go with the Ponzi definition.
People do not pay insurance with the express purpose of receiving a return on their investment, therefore it can't really be a Ponzi scheme. Most people paying insurance never cash in and that's how the system works. Insurance companies generally only fail if they miscalculate risk or something completely unforeseeable occurs.
Banks, on the other hand, are supposed to have assets that cover all depositor liability. Those assets however do not have to be in the form of cash; they can also include investments and outstanding loans, so they may not be immediately available upon request. Banks can fail due to bad investments, or poor loan policies, but by in large should always have more assets on the books then they owe to depositors.
Social Security, by it's very design, never has enough money on hand to cover all outstanding liabilities and since those now claiming benefits no longer pay into the system all of the shortfall is paid for by 'new investors'. If those new investors stop paying then current claimants would only receive benefits for a short time before the money is all gone.
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By "draconian" you mean, show any state ID; an ID which in pretty much ever state that ID laws have been enacted can be obtained free of charge and in many cases can even be done through a home visit. We must have a different meaning for draconian up here in Canada since every time I vote I have to show some form of ID and no one seems to have a problem.
By fraud I was more referring to cases like Kierra Fontae, Shelia Romona Hodges and Brandon Earl Mclean; each of which were convicted of voting twice for Obama in 2008, or Lessadolla Sower (former NAACP official) for voting 10 times through absentee ballots (in true Dem style, 4 of those ballots were for dead people). Then there are numerous cases of people voting in two states every election cycle and the normal occurrence of districts reporting more votes than registered voters. Of course catching any of these types of fraud cases is next to impossible in a system where people can vote without any requirement to prove their identity.
And if you think permitting fraudulent registrations does not fundamentally undermine the election process then there is just no debating with you. For every Mickey Mouse that's easy to catch there is a Mike Smith who is just as imaginary but doesn't get caught in the review process. You may also want to look up the ACORN convictions; they are not for simply submitting fraudulent forms (if they were the convictions would run in the 100's of thousands), the convictions are usually for actively filling out the forms themselves or for using illegal methods to collect the registrations.
And let the 2000 elections go. Two independent reviews (well 1 was run by Democrats) of the felons list found no foul play just some asinine short cuts taken by a company trying to save some money. All of this was know in advance of the election so in many districts the 'purge lists' were completely ignored; in all others voters who believed they should be able to vote were given provisional ballots. The butterfly ballot (a Democrat creation) and the announcement of the polls closing an hour before they actually were (estimated to have prevented at least 15,000 people from voting) probably had more impact on the final outcome. All of those things can be explained by standard human incompetence more so than malice.
And yet of all the convictions of voter fraud seem to be around Democrats and Democrat friendly organizations (even in Democratic controlled areas in case you want to imply any type of witch hunting). Just last year at least 10 separate states investigated, indicted and/or convicted people for voter fraud and in almost every case (with at least 1 exception) the suspects were Democrats and/or their operatives.
Then there are the more general instances of felons voting (registration records where available as well as statistics concerning their various soci-economic factors all point to the tendency for felons to lean Democrat), outright voter intimidation (think Black Panthers with clubs standing outside polling stations) and well lets face it, the entire state of Illinois (where voter turn out can be upwards of 120% in some districts and at times it has been estimated that 1 in ten votes were fraudulent).
In 2010 ACORN alone had over 15 convictions of fraud related activities.
But I guess 1 idiot with a camera (who happened to be pointing out how easy it was to commit voter fraud as part of his investigation) balances that all out.
With over 80% of the receipients of the DOE grants/loans being Obama supporters, there is definitely at least the appearance of something; Solyndra being the best (worst) example. Solydra was not given the loans under Bush because their balance sheets just didn't add up. Even people within the Obama administration warned that their numbers were funny and not worth the risk but they received over half a billion in loan guarantees anyway. There was also communication between the Admin and Solyndra involving the scheduling of layoff announcements to avoid having a negative impact (for the Dems) on the 2010 elections.
The gun walking program under Bush was a joint operation with the Mexican government where 450 weapons were permitted to be sold and then tracked with RFID tags. The tracking failed for several reasons (including inept ATF agents installing the tags) and the program was discontinued. Fast & Furious was a completely new program started in 2009 with no interaction with the Mexican government and no plan to actually track the over 1600 (and possibly over 2000) guns that shop owners were being forced to sell illegally (even after they complained about having to make the sales).
As I posted above, F&F did not involve the legal sale of guns, gun shop owners were directly instructed by the ATF to sell weapons illegally. There are even official statements released by the ATF showing shop owners were concerned about making the sales.
F&F did not involve legal gun sales that just happened to end up being misused, it involved illegal gun sales to suspected traffickers. Gun store owners were directly instructed to illegally sell guns and were told that the ATF would be tracking them. The owners were actually very wary about making the sales but were instructed to keep selling by the ATF agents in charge.
So people are crying foul because A) the ATF had to instruct shop owners to disregard local, state and federal laws to sell the guns in question, B) there was no real program in place to track the illegally sold guns which led to terrible consequences and C) people in Washington are already using F&F as an excuse to talk about toughening gun laws even though the laws in place to prevent just such sales had to be expressly ignored to allow the program to take place.
F&F is 100% Obama's; it began in 2009.
"Wide Receiver" was a Bush program that failed but unlike F&F, WR was at least set up to track the weapons they allowed to be sold to the cartels. The 450 guns the ATF allowed to be sold under WR were tagged with RFID chips and tracked through aerial surveillance. Of course the ATF did a awful job tagging them and used RFID with short battery lives and also damaged most of them when installing them, reducing their effectiveness. There were also refueling issues with the surveillance they opened huge windows in the smuggling window.
F&F, on the other hand, allowed over 1600 weapons to be sold to suspected traffickers without even the smallest attempt to track them. It was essentially a "let's just see what happens" type of deal.
Solyndra and Beacon Power were the loan recipients that outright failed but here are several other green energy companies that received loans under the DOE program that are hemorrhaging money. The independent auditor put the current risk at about $2.7 billion loss on loans totaling about $24 billion but even on the companies that will be making payments it's expected the terms will be renegotiated since they are having some difficulty. Solyndra and Beacon were excluded because they had already failed at the time of the review.
In general, the government should not be in the game of picking winners and losers in the market. It's fine to give some assistance to emerging markets (I'd prefer limited tax write offs as opposed to outright loans or loan guarantees) but when the Feds pick company A over company B that is artificially affecting the market and it is no longer free.
Which was the GPs point.
The USDA, when faced with the task of trying to make up for a funding cut in the federal school lunch program reclassified ketchup as a vegetable to make it cheaper for schools to meet the federally mandated school lunch requirements. That's pretty much the point, the USDA is a bureaucratic entity that when push comes to shove will choose the bureaucratic solution and put actual health and safety issues on the back burner.
But to be fair to the GP, many state laws are put in place to meet the very strict FEDERAL rules with their strings attached to education funding such as the national School Lunch Program and No Child Left Behind. These federal programs set general guidelines but then leave enforcement and the more specific rules up to the State and local governments. If a state or local agency is found not to be meeting the Federal requirements however, then they may be defunded or, depending on the exact violation, possibly face a federal charge. Federal defunding of even a food lunch program (since these are paid on a per meal basis and not based on actual cost) can often mean a major difference in the schools overall financial health.
There is also questions about the identity of the 'food inspector'. Their are claims from one source that it was in fact a federal USDA employee and other sources claiming it was a state contractor; as of yet the Carolina Journal is unable to confirm the exact agency the 'inspector' worked for.
And before you start throwing the 'idiot radicals' title around you may want to reread your own response. A disinterested third party would have a hard time picking Causality's post as coming from the radical. Although you probably knew that already since you had to post AC.
There are dozens of videos on reputable sites showing hands on examples of playbooks with full OS2 running and the email client/contact integration.
And yes, the built in video chat only connect to other playbooks, much like Facetime and iUsers, but if you want to talk to people on other platforms there are several video apps that do that. I personally don't want to video chat with anyone and was just commenting on the fact that the built in app is so easy to use my mother keeps ringing me on it.
If you install the 2.0 OS beta (or wait a couple weeks for the full release) you can have full email, contact and calendar apps which includes integration with other social networks like Twitter and Linkedin.
As for Android apps, with OS 2.0 you can sideload almost anything right now. You can also load the Marketplace directly onto a cracked playbook but that tends to have extremely unstable results. For new apps you don't even need to develop specifically for the Blackberry OS, the compiler translates most Android library calls for you so you simply compile your Android app twice and then list it directly in the BB Appworld. There's at least one Andorid market in the process of doing this right now for their entire library.
I picked up a playbook just before Christmas (it's the only BB device I own) and barely put it down the entire holiday season. It was hooked up to my parents TV for almost the entire 3 weeks I was visiting, streaming whatever I had downloaded or copied to it, and when my brother or nephews wanted to watch something I didn't I could still stream it and continue playing Angry Birds or read a ebook. I'm still using it every day. It's the perfect size to just lay down on and end table and grab to play a quick game of Monopoly or search for some useless tidbit of information.
My 66 year old mother loved hers and still comments on it whenever I'm talking to her. I just wish I didn't who her how easy the video chat was to use.
Which would of course mean having to charge higher rents to cover the additional tax (plus even higher to ensure that additional income is covered during tax time) which would then be passed through the renter to their customers.
End result, government gets fatter while consumers get screwed.
Basic rule of capitalism, businesses DO NOT pay taxes. Their name be on the cheque they send to the IRS (or respective tax agency) but the money came from their customers.
No, you move to Canada where winnings are taxed at 0%. Why make people pay for something they won? The company offering the prize already pays the taxes while procuring it so the prize you see is what you actually get, no strings attached.
So while on a game show in Canada you're likely to only win a new toaster oven and a pair of gloves at least they're yours free and clear. In the US however, if you win the Showcase Showdown on the Price is Right you're likely not leaving the studio with even half of the prizes you won since you'll have to sell them off to pay the taxes on the whole thing (or if they offer low ball cash alternatives you'll have to opt for that).
They deserve money, but so do we.
And what significant role in making Steve Jobs fortune did you play that makes you in any way deserving of his money simply because he died?
The idea that people have that an inheritance tax is in any way justified is simply put, jealousy. If Jobs had continued to live he would not have been taxed on his total wealth until such time as he made some move to liquidate it (sell shares) and then he would have been taxed at whatever the applicable rate was. Why does his passing in any way justify the government from taking a percentage of his wealth until the various recipients decide to do the same. It's not like he was 'gifting' money away to people as a means to bypass the taxation system and pay them under the table, he died; his assets were legally obligated to go to someone.
Unless a person made their fortune while living in a foreign country and then moved to the US (in which case the US government had no claims on that income anyway) it was already taxed at some point. Taxing it again in the name of 'fairness' when they die is nothing more than a money grab by the government and a way for petty people to attack people they see as being better off then themselves. So what if the heir of a rich person never has to work a day in their lives. Does that truly affect anyone else. Tax them when they spend or earn money off of their inheritance just the same as anyone else.
Family owned businesses close or are sold off all the time because the founders managed to make it successful enough that it has value but not to the point where their heirs have the liquid assets required to pay off inheritance taxes when they die. It's not all that hard for a family company to be valued at over $1 million (the current $5 million exception is only temporary until 2013) but the likelihood of the heirs being able to pay the taxes of 55% is pretty low without them having to borrow against the business itself and put it on shaky financial grounds. While most of the companies affected by this are far from the limelight there are at least 3 major league sport franchises that had to deal with this not too long ago.
For the first 2 years of his term the Repubs couldn't even filibuster a bill without getting 100% of Republican and at least some Democrat reps support (or the independents who caucus with the Dems). And since the 2010 midterms the Republican house has passed dozens of bills which Harry Reid refuses to even open for debate in the Senate.
To be more accurate, the Republicans lost control during the 2006 elections when the Dems took control of both Houses of congress. From 2006 to the end of Bush's term in 2008 the Dems maintained complete control of the legislative branch of the US government. The Dems only lost that control during the 2010 midterms when the House went to the Repubs; the Senate remained under Dem control leading to the current legislative stalemate where one house will pass a bill and the other will refuse to even vote on it.
In the US federal system the President has some executive authority but the Legislative branch makes most of the rules since they control the purse strings. Only when both houses and the Presidency belong to the same party does the President have almost limitless powers (assuming he can get along with the House and Senate leaders from his own party).
Most of the reports about absentee military ballots being denied involve the Democrat candidate. After a quick Google search you'd be hard pressed to find a story about people trying to directly eliminate military absentee votes that isn't about a Dem candidates. They ever go so far as to deny bulk military ballots, handled through military mail channels, because they were missing post stamps that were unavailable to them due to their deployment. Hell, just putting the words "military" and "vote" in any search regardless of other search terms will usually result in at least half the results being anti-military voting stories about the Dems.
Even with the passage of the MOVE act overseas ballots have dropped because of the extremely slow action on the administrations part to actually enforce the act.
You may also be one of the only people who believe that military votes break Dem; the Dems certainly don't think so. With the possible exception of the last Presidential election (and that's up for debate since it was closer than usual and no formal stats are taken that separate actual military votes) the majority of military votes have always been expected to go Republican.
That might make a difference in a Federal election but there are no Federal elections in the US. The individual states determine the election conditions as well as who is eligible to vote (keeping in mind the Constitution) so even if you have a Federally approved ID it doesn't mean you have standing to vote within any particular state.
Almost every bit of polling data since the 70's shows a clear trend that the lower the income the more likely you are to vote Democrat. In 2006 the breakeven point was somewhere around a family income of 50k but below that almost 60% of votes went to Dems. And it's not like the rich were overwhelmingly Repub; above 50K it was roughly a 52/48 split for them.
A similar pattern holds true for education levels with people with high school or below predominately voting Dem and those with some University or Bachelor degrees tending Repub and then a turn back to Dem for those with Masters and Phds.
Oh wait, sorry to interrupt your attempt at trolling with some facts. Carry on.
I was just replying to your reflexive fanboi "several months" claim with the fact the release date of the Transformer, which has the chip in question, is Dec 19th; something that was pretty easy to find out.
As for graphics, while the iPad2 GPU is better in some respects, it's also not as good in others but I would personally opt for the higher res screen on the Prime.
So go grab your iPad2 and be happy with your victory in one gpl fill test over a system available in a couple weeks that happens to be thinner and lighter with more RAM, a sd card slot, a better camera, native hdmi ports, has a larger screen, a faster cpu and a very usable keyboard accessory that also boosts battery life by 80% or more; to each his/her own.
Type "pre-order transformer prime" into your favorite search engine. I was able to place a pre-order on two of the first 4 sites I checked.
Release date is Dec. 19th btw.
You can order a Transformer Prime with a Tegra 3 right now and have it before Christmas.
As far as I can tell the Playbook only really uses a Blackberry phone for it's native email app and since all mail is accessible through the browser anyway, that's hardly a deal breaker. There's even suppose to be a new email app with no Blackberry phone requirement in OS 2.0.
I was holding out for the next gen Asus Transformer but I just picked up a 32Gb Playbook for $299 and I've never owned a blackberry product in my life. The only crippling I can see is the native email client requires a blackberry but that's suppose to change in OS 2.0. Even with that there are links to Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail even Aol directly on the main screen and at least with Gmail, the mobile page looks as good as any app.
The only real drawback is because they launch through the browser you don't get notifications in the status bar when new mail arrives. I don't know about you but having newly arrived mail show up as an icon in my status bar isn't really worth the extra 2-300 dollars it would cost to get something comparable with a native app.
Now there is definitely a shortage of apps on Blackberry AppWorld but that should change with their new Android to Blackberry conversion tools and the ones that are there, especially the EA games, look amazing. For that matter it's possible to run an Android emulator on the playbook although not all apps are compatible. Some people have even used the DOS emulator for playbook to load a full version of Win95 onto it (to each his own I guess).
Basically, if the Playbook is crippled in any significant way, I've yet to find it.
Ahh, the classic "if you don't agree with me you want old people to die" debating tactic which is pretty interesting coming from someone who gloats about how they use every loophole to minimize their contributions to the financial well being of the government. Where do you think the money to pay for all the wonderful government support programs come from?
Anyway, I must have missed the part of any of my responses that I made a case against SS; I merely point out that your defense of SS as anything but a Ponzi scheme is wrong. For good or bad that's exactly what it is. Of course you may be more in the Robert E. Wright camp and call it a pyramid scheme, but in this case I'll side with Paul Krugman and go with the Ponzi definition.
People do not pay insurance with the express purpose of receiving a return on their investment, therefore it can't really be a Ponzi scheme. Most people paying insurance never cash in and that's how the system works. Insurance companies generally only fail if they miscalculate risk or something completely unforeseeable occurs.
Banks, on the other hand, are supposed to have assets that cover all depositor liability. Those assets however do not have to be in the form of cash; they can also include investments and outstanding loans, so they may not be immediately available upon request. Banks can fail due to bad investments, or poor loan policies, but by in large should always have more assets on the books then they owe to depositors.
Social Security, by it's very design, never has enough money on hand to cover all outstanding liabilities and since those now claiming benefits no longer pay into the system all of the shortfall is paid for by 'new investors'. If those new investors stop paying then current claimants would only receive benefits for a short time before the money is all gone.