IIRC, TIA was just a rename of the previous version. We already have 100% warrentless wiretapping, or at least the Narus gear is in place to do it, and has been for awhile - pictures of some of it were even linked here at one point.
Of course, these are the actions not of a government that loves its people, it's the actions of one afraid of its people, but determined not to allow anything like an "American Spring" to take place by nipping it in the bud before any momentum can gather.
It could almost be useful if they were smart enough to get to Hari Seldon's equations from the data (evidently that's the stated goal), but they aren't.
Same experience here -- windows needed to run on a linux box, old or new, and VB really works great even on older machines that don't have all the nice new stuff. If that mahcine would have been fine with a native winxp, it'll still be fine with one running under VB/linux.
One warning - if you install an opsys in a VB instance with the virtual extensions enabled, it won't run on one without it no matter what. So if you turn on all the fancy new stuff on a new machine, those VB appliances won't move back to the older ones, period. Ditto changing some other things post install, but for example cutting back the number of CPU's is something you'd expect to break the appliance, or cutting memory way back after an install, so I can't whine. I have had trouble adding virtual cpus to windows appliances (XP).
Not all of Virtual box is open source. If you want guest opsys to have any reasonable access to say, USB, you have to get the non-open source (but for now, still free as in beer) version.
Betcha a buck that this is what they are calling crap, and can't fix because no one gets the source to it. Go get virtual box and see for yourself on this, it's quite clear on the downloads page.
Yeah, you can get a really hobbled open source version, but if like me, you're using it to run windows on a linux machine, and the reason for windows is to run a USB embedded device programmer, you don't have a ton of choice about this one.
Yup, master marketer -- sold "think different" to entire herds, just buy this bling and you're special! Pulled the MAFIAA's heads only partway out of their asses, better than nothing. The rest, hell, skip it. Before the.com bubble, every telecom mag out there was talking "convergence" -- the iPhone. Steve didn't hardly invent that at all - Dick Tracy's author did, well earlier, in concept. Steve just waited for others to invent the tech to actually make one -- he invented none of that either. Ditto all the rest. Just a great salesman, Steve. This, we worship? I think not.
See the forums in my sig, that's just what I'm doing -- good point with which I fully agree. This way, I don't have to tell lies to stockholders, or some funding agency to be able to set up a nice lab and follow my nose scientifically - rather than chase the latest scientific fad that gets easy funding. I'm just stealing our bank bailout money back from the banksters. They aren't as smart or as good at this as "the masters of the universe" think they are. And when they say they're doing gods work, I think they got the one with the horns in mind.
Right now, yes it is. Think about this a second. You could have owned say 30k shares of GM after they announced it was going bankrupt. Could you take those shares to GM and demand, say, a drill press? Nope. They're just pieces of paper, not even that now, just bits someplace, and worth precisely what someone else will pay you for them - GM has no reason to care unless they own some too, and might, if they have money, and feel like it, pay a dividend on. Other than that - utterly worthless. Worse even than our fiat currency, which is at least backed by a promise of a very large outfit (the US government) to be worth something, they seem to say, kind of.
.
Investing is dead, has been for a long time. IF you bought the markets 10 years ago, you've lost money - much less purchasing power . Trading, you can make money on, but it's pure psychology - there is no intrinsic value in these things whatever. So, it's like poker, not so much like roulette - you can do well no matter what hand we're all dealt, by being better at it than the next guy at the table, and knowing how to read his "tells".
Disgusting I know. I no longer have the energy to run another company, or do a startup, so this is what I do with the money I earned honestly to get by in retirement. Have to since the gov has ruined all plain savers by making interest rates more or less zero. SS won't take care of me, so what else can I do? I'm unemployable -- too old, smoke, drink, and a serial offender at the CEO position, and no one is hiring old CEO's just now. I justify it by thinking I'm stealing back that money the big banks stole from us with governement (eg hired) help. I am putting it to good use, see my forums. It's what pays the bills for fusion research.
Yup, and it might be obvious - a real face-palm in hindsight. We know of no other stable particles that can oscillate in flavor as neutrinos appear to do. Could it be that the mass-energy of a neutrino is not a simple number, but a complex one? Complex numbers show up all over in any math that handles anything periodic (FFT anyone?).
Could it simply be that the wavefunction is large during the purported oscillation, and the new flavor pops out on the leading edge each time? There are a lot of holes not so much in the theory, but in people's gut understanding of even the current theory. Quantum stuff is pretty hard to get a gut feel for...
Many of us in the fusion world, amateur (surprisingly large) and pro, think this must be crap. One respectable scientist we know of has tried to dupe Rossi, and did get some heat - about the amount you'd expect from the chemical reactions possible. No more. No excess copper in the reactor after.
.
For those saying "why aren't there patents" - there have been attempts, which were rejected for lack of clarity on what was being patented. For most of the time (including now as far as I know) the only people willing to publish their papers are owned by, well, themselves.
.
I've not looked up the masses, but yes, this end of the periodic table doesn't have much you can do with binding energy in it. I probably should, so I could state definitively that this can't work. If it was really that easy, would we not have seen it before now, happening by accident and so on? I put hot H (actually mostly other H isotopes) in nickel containing stainless steel daily -- nothing special happens at any energy regime I reach (which are in general well above what the Rossi claims are).
.
I think everyone honestly in the fusion field wants some form of it to be real, and to work. But we also realize that there are a lot of people in this field for various dishonest reasons, from gaining corner offices with perks, to tenure, to just making sure they have a job for life, as in give us X billion more dollars and Y more years, and we'll really make it work this time - we just didn't make it big and expensive enough the last 4-5 roundy rounds. Even fairly honest people fall into that trap when it means lifetime security at a cushy job, and those of us in the open source fusion world (yes, it exists and is thriving) wish it were otherwise - but there it is.
.
I AM a betting man - my day job is as a trader. Anyone want to take a bet with me? You get the side that "this is real" to win, I'll take the other side for plenty of money and a year time limit. I'll put my money where my mouth is. I'll take anyone, but what would be fun is say if Rossi himself would take that bet for say, half a million -- with a registered agent holding the bucks (must be real money, and guaranteed no counterparty risk). I note that while they've taken plenty of "bets" it's under conditions where it's not actually a bet -- they don't pay back if they fail.
.
To me it looks like they climbed to the top of the snake oil tree and fell out, hitting every branch on the way down.
No disclosure. No duplication of the results in independent labs. No explanation of why it could work. No patent apps that actually disclose the process. Just the usual "gimme money and someday it will work". A couple of prominent boosters mean nothing - those guys can be had with the average financier's lunch money, famous or not, and examples abound on both sides of every science controversy.
They are worse than broke to honest accounting practice -- they are highly negative, which they are allowed to not report due to FASB rule 137 (see wiki on that). Your belly button lint might have value, they don't. Further, they're not in the club, like Lehman. They're goin down. They are blocking customers from taking their money out - so they are telling the truth. No *external* hack is happening.
No question ZH is on the paranoid end of the spectrum. But they are right often enough, and bankrate is paid shills. Go check FASB rules yourself - ask yourself why the banks no longer have to report losses in derivatives. Check who contributed to the congressmen who voted for that. Go check any of what I said yourself, from any source you like.
.
Or don't whine about the consequences of not knowing. I trade for a living and have dug into where the money went for the past 4 years -- even paid a forensic accountant for 6 months to do the digging I couldn't. (I made money on that deal overall -- nice to know what's coming before people who don't do their homework as well as I).
Over at ZeroHedge (no they can't take a slashdotting so I'm not making it too easy) they point out that people are leaving BOA in droves, and pulling out all their money post-haste to make it moot whether they put up roadblocks to actually closing accounts.
.
They, and several other "too big to fail" banks are literally broke, and a run on them would make that all too obvious. While some people observe that their market cap (total stock value) is less than their "book value" we must remember that they got FASB rules suspended, and are marking all the bad mortgages on their books to a fantasy that they'll all pay off, rather than the market value which reflects their real worth. Honest books would show they have negative value.
.
Since they are only propped up by loans from the fed, and FDIC doesn't have the money to back up the guarantees, the government sure ain't going to say anything that would cause a bank run, except for a couple of senators that have already mentioned in session only an idiot would still have an account with any of them. Do you suppose they know things they don't tell us? Count on it -- their own stock portfolios beat the best unprivileged managers every year, and by fat margins (double digit %) -- insider trading is legal for congressmen.
.
Run, don't walk, if you're in one of the TBTF banks, find a local or a credit union. You've been warned. This won't end pretty. Some of them have bad paper exposure in the trillions, and it's not on the books because the rules were changed for the emergency. The bad stuff is still there....
The sad thing is that prior art is patented regularly. Just try to get a patent, no matter how obviously bad, dismissed. It only takes >$1 mil, and maybe a few years, during which you can't do business.
Unfortunately, that does seem to be the case. Funny the cognitive dissonance when they mention how it's *small* companies that create most of the jobs and innovation. There is no way you can now break into the big boys club. They just patent everything they can, and while they hate each other -- they can cross-license at nominal or no cost. But a little guy with one patent who starts eating into their market share will always find they've patented about 10 obvious things they can use against him, as the days of anything being simple, covered by just one patent, are long gone. As durrr said above, we're all fucked.
Yeah, mostly. Taking pictures of something and then maybe editing them is real creative -- tons of people see that value, and are fed by it, right? Movies have to be written. Software has to be written....and my computers can't weld or hold a milling tool (but if they could, I'd have to put in the instructions), so they make nothing physical. I suppose it depends on what you consider of true value.
So, can a party to a contract unilaterally change the terms and not have to allow the contract to be canceled? Yeah, the thing is trivial to disable (supposedly), but I have long term paid up front, and lotsa minutes on the phone. Would they let me keep the phone but ditch the onstar and tracking? Is that even possible? I suppose I'll have to go out and push the button and ask. Seems like a Netflix moment for them at this point and the only way to get them to say "I messed up" is going to be a lot of cancellations that demand repayment of money already given them.
You bring up a great question and idea -- let me take a little farther. What constitutes "rich" in material things is variable. It's certainly true that a job with great bennies you can't easily be fired from is worth more than the same pay as a contractor - no question. Ask the bank for a loan with one vs the other sometime if you don't think so. On the other hand, as you point out - double or triple the money certainly papers over a lot of other things (which is why I'm a contractor when I bother to work, myself).
.
Of course, you can have high income, but (by choice) high debt and be "poor" again, but again, I feel like that's choice.
.
Further, some people choose, and make no mistake, it's a choice, to live in places that really cost a lot more. I live in the deep boonies, where 30k/yr pretax is way plenty and I live high on that here - new cars, home paid off, lots of acres. Move me to silicon valley, or NYC - I can't afford rent, maybe food-only. Suddenly I'm poor, though my income is the same.
.
Someone above suggested adding tax brackets. I'd surely agree -- due to failed Fed policies, a 1913 nickel buys more than a dollar does today, and clearly inflation is part of the current system setup (a requirement, actually) and bracket creep is an old government trick to raise taxes without seeming to. And that's the problem - to admit to the level of actual inflation, which is far higher than CPI - they'd have to admit to a management failure, and increase SS and other COLA payouts, no? So that's not gonna fly politically, even though it's a good idea.
.
Other than the rich being able to game the complex tax codes -- which we could do something about, there are other issues. Almost half of workers pay zero tax. No way that's good or fair, they should at least pay a little something, and since there are so many more of them than rich (which is another social problem) there's actually much more money there -- and it'd be easier to get better off people to pay more if they couldn't point to all those paying nothing, but still able to vote for goodies, entitlements, and pork. I think you really do want to avoid punishing people (too much) for being successful here, or lose some real important motivations, and all we have is humans to work with, not angels.
Truly, there are plenty we should simply take it all from and put into jail, but we don't seem to be able to do that to anyone able to afford campaign contributions at this point -- the record is clear on that one.
You obviously haven't spent anytime listening to shortwave or longwave radio -- so you're a good little sheeple only checking the mainstream media. Yes, there is tons of lightning going on around the earth 24/7, and you know what? At LF, and in the right ionospheric conditions, the radio noise goes around and around the earth, like in a giant echo chamber. The period is such that it echoes at about 7 Hz. Pretty cool the first time you hear the effect on lightning, or on some LF radio station. Not very good for intelligibility, though. With an I and Q type receiver, you can even here it in stereo reverb...
without lines on the "map" it's hard to tell without a program, though I'd assume all the bright lights are where people are "rich" vs where they aren't so much.
The real thing beats maps and artificial borders all out.
As someone studying the financial crisis that's ongoing and all the finger pointing and trying to figure out who owes who and can't pay -- all by country boundaries, this puts a better perspective on how artificial all that is.
Someone once said, to catch mice, make a noise like a cheese. In this case, it sure does work better to appear to be a potential campaign contributer. Just sayin'. This is from practical experience (and success).
Ha! Yeah, all this talk about the PC is dead, tablets, phones etc being the way is just telling me that the larger bulk of the market create NOTHING USEFUL in the world, other than to hand money to corps for toys. Content creation, whether it be writing code or English -- stories or screenplays -- intelligent posts, economic analyses - you name it, if it's valuable transformation of raw data into useful information, it went through a real keyboard, or it just plain takes way too long to get done.
.
Mobility seems cool to some people, but I don't really move around that much, and frankly find all these people pretending to be productive on their mobile devices are really just using them as excuses for impoliteness to those physically present around them. I'm perfectly happy to sit here, maintain my forums, trade stocks, write articles for publication on a good old fashioned box PC (well, yeah, it has displays that would shame the matrix, and 512 cuda cores along with an i7, so not that plain or that old fashione). I RUIN keyboards at no longer than 6 months intervals, typing way way over 120 wpm if I'm excited, and looking at this one (about 4 months) no numbers/letters on the keys, yet some big dips where my nails have actually eaten away the plastic. I will never, ever, be happy with a little texty keyboard, a touch screen one, or even my fairly nice laptop, which I do no creative work on whatever - it's too hard to type fast on that tiny thing (made for midgets?) and you're always accidentally clicking it's little smear-screen "mouse" when it's least handy. To hell with that. Just gimme a regular box.
Now that I'm (wisely, I think) back to zero mobile devices, when I do go out, my time is my own - I don't even know the onstar phone numbers for my cars and would never give them out if I did. Why is it that anyone who has your phone number is alright assuming you want to talk to them whenever THEY feel like it? Send me an email, I'll call you when *I* feel like it. Or see you F/F if possible - quality over quantity of mindless babble. These "mobile productivity enhancing devices" are an epic fail for actually getting anything done other than *talking* about getting something done./rant
I won't mind seeing the end of that brain dead bloated office suite. Haven't used it for years anyway. When I wrote my digital signal processing book, the publisher requested I NOT use junk like that -- just get the content right, we have people to make it pretty as we like - and we don't like having to deal with the junk most authors think makes their work better looking (in error). So, being a windows guy then, I used notepad(!). Of course, for the last decade, I don't run windows anymore anyway, sucks hard compared to linux. If I need it for some reason, there's virtual box...windows in a sandboxed window is about right for that piece of utter crap.
I can take care of myself, and don't want *any* cops - rental or not (and the "real ones" are about the same anyway). If they cared, they'd be on board themselves. They don't. They have nothing to lose by failure. It's a colossal waste of money, and the only reason for it to exist is to condition people to a full police state and utter loss of privacy, not the stated purpose (as with many other gov programs -- stated purpose is misdirection at best).
I remember how nice it was before TSA -- where the %^$ are you coming from on that? Troll? You bought a ticket, you got help finding your gate, you got on a plane, the cute chick brought drinks and semi-edible food, no problems at all, other than the usual delays and sometimes lost baggage. No getting your baggage back slashed with a note from the TSA because it had something odd shaped in it either.
Yeah, Bush wasted in 8 years, what Obama managed in less than three. Great record. You can't believe any of these socio-psycho-paths, they're all losers and hard to tell apart -- they talk a little different, but 100% go for more spending, more centralized power -- and no promises kept. Since I didn't get my hope, I hope I get some change from the bill I paid. You have to go back to Eisenhower's warning of the military-industrial complex to find anyone even remotely innocent from any party. Suck it up, the system is broken, you have no choice at the polls except between two clowns pre-vetted to walk the line the money draws for them in the sand. And voting one out just means the new guy who gets in (because you had no other way to vote the one out than to vote for the other jerk) thinks he's got a "mandate" as you can see if you pay minimal attention to last time.
1. Holed planes don't fly well, so can't be used as weapons against ground targets well.
2. The last few who tried to blow a plane failed -- burning your nuts doesn't count, it's occasion for laughter. Something about suicide bombers. They're not real smart, and the supply is diminishing in a satisfactorily Darwinian fashion, as one might expect.
3. Why think any smart terrorist would bother with an airplane again, when there are so many other easier things to do now that we watch the planes, but more or less ignore all else? Doh!
TSA is nothing but a way to funnel money to certain ex-government employees, who formed companies to sell them stuff. Not one credible threat detected or stopped by them (see Bruce Schneier) -- and the one guy who fired his pants was stopped by passengers. That trick won't work again, now that passengers realize they do have something to lose by going along with an attempt. Air rage is bad enough -- now you want to give a plane full of people a reason to attack you? As we say here, GoodLuckWithThat!
Yup, the vast majority of concealed weapons permit holders don't do crimes, and often prevent them. I don't see a problem. But then I'm one of them myself. Better hope I'm around when someone tries to kill us, as your sorry a$$ is grass without my help.
Corporations with more money and power than governments now own them all in fee simple. Clear things up for ya?
Check out M Chertoff, who benefits monetarily from every one of those soft porn scanners sold....Used to kinda run the TSA, clear things up any further for ya?
There used to be "do the right thing" and even shame. Now there's "don't get caught" - thanks school system for disallowing all talk of morals.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, these are the actions not of a government that loves its people, it's the actions of one afraid of its people, but determined not to allow anything like an "American Spring" to take place by nipping it in the bud before any momentum can gather.
It could almost be useful if they were smart enough to get to Hari Seldon's equations from the data (evidently that's the stated goal), but they aren't.
Same experience here -- windows needed to run on a linux box, old or new, and VB really works great even on older machines that don't have all the nice new stuff. If that mahcine would have been fine with a native winxp, it'll still be fine with one running under VB/linux. One warning - if you install an opsys in a VB instance with the virtual extensions enabled, it won't run on one without it no matter what. So if you turn on all the fancy new stuff on a new machine, those VB appliances won't move back to the older ones, period. Ditto changing some other things post install, but for example cutting back the number of CPU's is something you'd expect to break the appliance, or cutting memory way back after an install, so I can't whine. I have had trouble adding virtual cpus to windows appliances (XP).
Not all of Virtual box is open source. If you want guest opsys to have any reasonable access to say, USB, you have to get the non-open source (but for now, still free as in beer) version. Betcha a buck that this is what they are calling crap, and can't fix because no one gets the source to it. Go get virtual box and see for yourself on this, it's quite clear on the downloads page. Yeah, you can get a really hobbled open source version, but if like me, you're using it to run windows on a linux machine, and the reason for windows is to run a USB embedded device programmer, you don't have a ton of choice about this one.
Yup, master marketer -- sold "think different" to entire herds, just buy this bling and you're special! Pulled the MAFIAA's heads only partway out of their asses, better than nothing. The rest, hell, skip it. Before the .com bubble, every telecom mag out there was talking "convergence" -- the iPhone. Steve didn't hardly invent that at all - Dick Tracy's author did, well earlier, in concept. Steve just waited for others to invent the tech to actually make one -- he invented none of that either. Ditto all the rest. Just a great salesman, Steve. This, we worship? I think not.
See the forums in my sig, that's just what I'm doing -- good point with which I fully agree. This way, I don't have to tell lies to stockholders, or some funding agency to be able to set up a nice lab and follow my nose scientifically - rather than chase the latest scientific fad that gets easy funding. I'm just stealing our bank bailout money back from the banksters. They aren't as smart or as good at this as "the masters of the universe" think they are. And when they say they're doing gods work, I think they got the one with the horns in mind.
.
Investing is dead, has been for a long time. IF you bought the markets 10 years ago, you've lost money - much less purchasing power . Trading, you can make money on, but it's pure psychology - there is no intrinsic value in these things whatever. So, it's like poker, not so much like roulette - you can do well no matter what hand we're all dealt, by being better at it than the next guy at the table, and knowing how to read his "tells".
Disgusting I know. I no longer have the energy to run another company, or do a startup, so this is what I do with the money I earned honestly to get by in retirement. Have to since the gov has ruined all plain savers by making interest rates more or less zero. SS won't take care of me, so what else can I do? I'm unemployable -- too old, smoke, drink, and a serial offender at the CEO position, and no one is hiring old CEO's just now. I justify it by thinking I'm stealing back that money the big banks stole from us with governement (eg hired) help. I am putting it to good use, see my forums. It's what pays the bills for fusion research.
Yup, and it might be obvious - a real face-palm in hindsight. We know of no other stable particles that can oscillate in flavor as neutrinos appear to do. Could it be that the mass-energy of a neutrino is not a simple number, but a complex one? Complex numbers show up all over in any math that handles anything periodic (FFT anyone?). Could it simply be that the wavefunction is large during the purported oscillation, and the new flavor pops out on the leading edge each time? There are a lot of holes not so much in the theory, but in people's gut understanding of even the current theory. Quantum stuff is pretty hard to get a gut feel for...
.
For those saying "why aren't there patents" - there have been attempts, which were rejected for lack of clarity on what was being patented. For most of the time (including now as far as I know) the only people willing to publish their papers are owned by, well, themselves.
.
I've not looked up the masses, but yes, this end of the periodic table doesn't have much you can do with binding energy in it. I probably should, so I could state definitively that this can't work. If it was really that easy, would we not have seen it before now, happening by accident and so on? I put hot H (actually mostly other H isotopes) in nickel containing stainless steel daily -- nothing special happens at any energy regime I reach (which are in general well above what the Rossi claims are).
.
I think everyone honestly in the fusion field wants some form of it to be real, and to work. But we also realize that there are a lot of people in this field for various dishonest reasons, from gaining corner offices with perks, to tenure, to just making sure they have a job for life, as in give us X billion more dollars and Y more years, and we'll really make it work this time - we just didn't make it big and expensive enough the last 4-5 roundy rounds. Even fairly honest people fall into that trap when it means lifetime security at a cushy job, and those of us in the open source fusion world (yes, it exists and is thriving) wish it were otherwise - but there it is.
.
I AM a betting man - my day job is as a trader. Anyone want to take a bet with me? You get the side that "this is real" to win, I'll take the other side for plenty of money and a year time limit. I'll put my money where my mouth is. I'll take anyone, but what would be fun is say if Rossi himself would take that bet for say, half a million -- with a registered agent holding the bucks (must be real money, and guaranteed no counterparty risk). I note that while they've taken plenty of "bets" it's under conditions where it's not actually a bet -- they don't pay back if they fail.
.
To me it looks like they climbed to the top of the snake oil tree and fell out, hitting every branch on the way down. No disclosure. No duplication of the results in independent labs. No explanation of why it could work. No patent apps that actually disclose the process. Just the usual "gimme money and someday it will work". A couple of prominent boosters mean nothing - those guys can be had with the average financier's lunch money, famous or not, and examples abound on both sides of every science controversy.
They are worse than broke to honest accounting practice -- they are highly negative, which they are allowed to not report due to FASB rule 137 (see wiki on that). Your belly button lint might have value, they don't. Further, they're not in the club, like Lehman. They're goin down. They are blocking customers from taking their money out - so they are telling the truth. No *external* hack is happening.
.
Or don't whine about the consequences of not knowing. I trade for a living and have dug into where the money went for the past 4 years -- even paid a forensic accountant for 6 months to do the digging I couldn't. (I made money on that deal overall -- nice to know what's coming before people who don't do their homework as well as I).
.
They, and several other "too big to fail" banks are literally broke, and a run on them would make that all too obvious. While some people observe that their market cap (total stock value) is less than their "book value" we must remember that they got FASB rules suspended, and are marking all the bad mortgages on their books to a fantasy that they'll all pay off, rather than the market value which reflects their real worth. Honest books would show they have negative value.
.
Since they are only propped up by loans from the fed, and FDIC doesn't have the money to back up the guarantees, the government sure ain't going to say anything that would cause a bank run, except for a couple of senators that have already mentioned in session only an idiot would still have an account with any of them. Do you suppose they know things they don't tell us? Count on it -- their own stock portfolios beat the best unprivileged managers every year, and by fat margins (double digit %) -- insider trading is legal for congressmen.
.
Run, don't walk, if you're in one of the TBTF banks, find a local or a credit union. You've been warned. This won't end pretty. Some of them have bad paper exposure in the trillions, and it's not on the books because the rules were changed for the emergency. The bad stuff is still there....
The sad thing is that prior art is patented regularly. Just try to get a patent, no matter how obviously bad, dismissed. It only takes >$1 mil, and maybe a few years, during which you can't do business.
Unfortunately, that does seem to be the case. Funny the cognitive dissonance when they mention how it's *small* companies that create most of the jobs and innovation. There is no way you can now break into the big boys club. They just patent everything they can, and while they hate each other -- they can cross-license at nominal or no cost. But a little guy with one patent who starts eating into their market share will always find they've patented about 10 obvious things they can use against him, as the days of anything being simple, covered by just one patent, are long gone. As durrr said above, we're all fucked.
Yeah, mostly. Taking pictures of something and then maybe editing them is real creative -- tons of people see that value, and are fed by it, right? Movies have to be written. Software has to be written....and my computers can't weld or hold a milling tool (but if they could, I'd have to put in the instructions), so they make nothing physical. I suppose it depends on what you consider of true value.
So, can a party to a contract unilaterally change the terms and not have to allow the contract to be canceled? Yeah, the thing is trivial to disable (supposedly), but I have long term paid up front, and lotsa minutes on the phone. Would they let me keep the phone but ditch the onstar and tracking? Is that even possible? I suppose I'll have to go out and push the button and ask. Seems like a Netflix moment for them at this point and the only way to get them to say "I messed up" is going to be a lot of cancellations that demand repayment of money already given them.
Of course, you can have high income, but (by choice) high debt and be "poor" again, but again, I feel like that's choice.
Further, some people choose, and make no mistake, it's a choice, to live in places that really cost a lot more. I live in the deep boonies, where 30k/yr pretax is way plenty and I live high on that here - new cars, home paid off, lots of acres. Move me to silicon valley, or NYC - I can't afford rent, maybe food-only. Suddenly I'm poor, though my income is the same.
Someone above suggested adding tax brackets. I'd surely agree -- due to failed Fed policies, a 1913 nickel buys more than a dollar does today, and clearly inflation is part of the current system setup (a requirement, actually) and bracket creep is an old government trick to raise taxes without seeming to. And that's the problem - to admit to the level of actual inflation, which is far higher than CPI - they'd have to admit to a management failure, and increase SS and other COLA payouts, no? So that's not gonna fly politically, even though it's a good idea.
Other than the rich being able to game the complex tax codes -- which we could do something about, there are other issues. Almost half of workers pay zero tax. No way that's good or fair, they should at least pay a little something, and since there are so many more of them than rich (which is another social problem) there's actually much more money there -- and it'd be easier to get better off people to pay more if they couldn't point to all those paying nothing, but still able to vote for goodies, entitlements, and pork. I think you really do want to avoid punishing people (too much) for being successful here, or lose some real important motivations, and all we have is humans to work with, not angels. Truly, there are plenty we should simply take it all from and put into jail, but we don't seem to be able to do that to anyone able to afford campaign contributions at this point -- the record is clear on that one.
You obviously haven't spent anytime listening to shortwave or longwave radio -- so you're a good little sheeple only checking the mainstream media. Yes, there is tons of lightning going on around the earth 24/7, and you know what? At LF, and in the right ionospheric conditions, the radio noise goes around and around the earth, like in a giant echo chamber. The period is such that it echoes at about 7 Hz. Pretty cool the first time you hear the effect on lightning, or on some LF radio station. Not very good for intelligibility, though. With an I and Q type receiver, you can even here it in stereo reverb...
As someone studying the financial crisis that's ongoing and all the finger pointing and trying to figure out who owes who and can't pay -- all by country boundaries, this puts a better perspective on how artificial all that is.
Someone once said, to catch mice, make a noise like a cheese. In this case, it sure does work better to appear to be a potential campaign contributer. Just sayin'. This is from practical experience (and success).
.
Mobility seems cool to some people, but I don't really move around that much, and frankly find all these people pretending to be productive on their mobile devices are really just using them as excuses for impoliteness to those physically present around them. I'm perfectly happy to sit here, maintain my forums, trade stocks, write articles for publication on a good old fashioned box PC (well, yeah, it has displays that would shame the matrix, and 512 cuda cores along with an i7, so not that plain or that old fashione). I RUIN keyboards at no longer than 6 months intervals, typing way way over 120 wpm if I'm excited, and looking at this one (about 4 months) no numbers/letters on the keys, yet some big dips where my nails have actually eaten away the plastic. I will never, ever, be happy with a little texty keyboard, a touch screen one, or even my fairly nice laptop, which I do no creative work on whatever - it's too hard to type fast on that tiny thing (made for midgets?) and you're always accidentally clicking it's little smear-screen "mouse" when it's least handy. To hell with that. Just gimme a regular box.
Now that I'm (wisely, I think) back to zero mobile devices, when I do go out, my time is my own - I don't even know the onstar phone numbers for my cars and would never give them out if I did. Why is it that anyone who has your phone number is alright assuming you want to talk to them whenever THEY feel like it? Send me an email, I'll call you when *I* feel like it. Or see you F/F if possible - quality over quantity of mindless babble. These "mobile productivity enhancing devices" are an epic fail for actually getting anything done other than *talking* about getting something done. /rant
I won't mind seeing the end of that brain dead bloated office suite. Haven't used it for years anyway. When I wrote my digital signal processing book, the publisher requested I NOT use junk like that -- just get the content right, we have people to make it pretty as we like - and we don't like having to deal with the junk most authors think makes their work better looking (in error). So, being a windows guy then, I used notepad(!). Of course, for the last decade, I don't run windows anymore anyway, sucks hard compared to linux. If I need it for some reason, there's virtual box...windows in a sandboxed window is about right for that piece of utter crap.
I remember how nice it was before TSA -- where the %^$ are you coming from on that? Troll? You bought a ticket, you got help finding your gate, you got on a plane, the cute chick brought drinks and semi-edible food, no problems at all, other than the usual delays and sometimes lost baggage. No getting your baggage back slashed with a note from the TSA because it had something odd shaped in it either.
Yeah, Bush wasted in 8 years, what Obama managed in less than three. Great record. You can't believe any of these socio-psycho-paths, they're all losers and hard to tell apart -- they talk a little different, but 100% go for more spending, more centralized power -- and no promises kept. Since I didn't get my hope, I hope I get some change from the bill I paid. You have to go back to Eisenhower's warning of the military-industrial complex to find anyone even remotely innocent from any party. Suck it up, the system is broken, you have no choice at the polls except between two clowns pre-vetted to walk the line the money draws for them in the sand. And voting one out just means the new guy who gets in (because you had no other way to vote the one out than to vote for the other jerk) thinks he's got a "mandate" as you can see if you pay minimal attention to last time.
2. The last few who tried to blow a plane failed -- burning your nuts doesn't count, it's occasion for laughter.
Something about suicide bombers. They're not real smart, and the supply is diminishing in a satisfactorily Darwinian fashion, as one might expect.
3. Why think any smart terrorist would bother with an airplane again, when there are so many other easier things to do now that we watch the planes, but more or less ignore all else? Doh!
TSA is nothing but a way to funnel money to certain ex-government employees, who formed companies to sell them stuff. Not one credible threat detected or stopped by them (see Bruce Schneier) -- and the one guy who fired his pants was stopped by passengers. That trick won't work again, now that passengers realize they do have something to lose by going along with an attempt. Air rage is bad enough -- now you want to give a plane full of people a reason to attack you? As we say here, GoodLuckWithThat!
Yup, the vast majority of concealed weapons permit holders don't do crimes, and often prevent them. I don't see a problem. But then I'm one of them myself. Better hope I'm around when someone tries to kill us, as your sorry a$$ is grass without my help.
Check out M Chertoff, who benefits monetarily from every one of those soft porn scanners sold....Used to kinda run the TSA, clear things up any further for ya?
There used to be "do the right thing" and even shame. Now there's "don't get caught" - thanks school system for disallowing all talk of morals.