The beauty of science is that, in this case, they can both be wrong and the truth can lie somewhere in between or even beyond either position. The complexity is most of the fun part!
This is a difficult dichotomy. If everyone lived in cities, we could pack far more human onto the earth - which is bad. If we had a fixed number of humans, and we kept them all in a very small area, that would be good for the earth.
If you live in the "country" and have, say, a square mile per person - it really doesn't matter what you do. No matter how inefficiently you live (burn your trash, use firewood to heat your house, drive 30 miles to get to a store) you won't affect the environment in any significant way.
If you put a million people in a square mile, they will essentially destroy that area, and will tax the surrounding area very, very heavily - making for exceptionally poor living conditions, even if there is little burning, everyone recycles just about everything, and people use almost no autos. It's wonderfully efficient if you're trying to maximize the population, and horrible for the environment and living conditions. Ever wonder why the cities are generally so impersonal/hostile, and yet if you drive a country road everyone waves?
A side note: if we only had 1 person for every square mile of land mass, the total earth human population would be 50M. With a slum you could keep all those people in an area the size of Washington D.C. I think I know which version of society I'd rather live in.
That's why I buy everything of consequence with credit cards. My current one allows me to get a refund on _anything_ within 90 days (It's a Chase Visa Sapphire, fwiw). Note that I didn't say "return" the merchandise, I said I'd get a refund. Visa will bitchslap the vendor. As the vendor, that sucks, but many large vendors have ways to get their money back from the distributor. It's an ugly business all around.
plus reasonable shutdown costs to complete archiving of documentation. That's the way it should be.
The problem is that all the people who have regular contact with the contractors and their employees are good friends and colleagues, so they're far more likely to make sure their "friends" has a soft landing.
Now we'll see what kind of idiots work on the contract negotiation side of NASA. Time for the blood sucking lawyers to get to work...
This is like a law against blocking or spoofing your caller ID. The people who do it get away with it because there's no way to track them down. This is just a sad attempt to make a "pile on" law in the rare instance that they do catch someone.
I'd rather take my chances with the TSA rifling through my bags than ship USPS parcel post. Hell, I'd have to ship my stuff a month in advance to make sure it got there, and there's no way to track it if it gets lost. USPS might even be worse than letting American Eagle check your bags to a Caribbean island.
Really? It's not a tablet computer - it doesn't run a full OS. You'll only be able to buy the "apps" that are in the apple store. Lots of good stuff there - but not exactly serious stand alone applications. Tablet computers are fully functional devices (running OSX, Windows, or *ix) with the ability to run full sized software applications.
The iPad is an appliance. For the target audience, that's probably a good thing. The key is, it isn't a computer - it doesn't replace a computer any more than my phone does. I use my phone for surfing and email and simple calculations, some minor text editing, etc. The iPad is a big pda with web capability.
I'm surprised that you feel the Kindle isn't enough for reading. My wife's seems to surf the web pretty easily, and the connection is free (as in Beer). The full size (DX) would probably be even better, but I haven't tried one.
It's not that people will get tired with netbooks, it's that some people don't want/need a netbook form factor but there was no "affordable" tablet form factor. Oddly, I really wanted a tablet but now that I have a netbook I don't want a tablet as badly - I'd rather have an ereader. It's become clear that a tablet without a keyboard wouldn't serve enough functions for me. Actually, the Always Innovating convertable is still the closest to the form factor I'd prefer, but (as with the iPad) the lack of ability to run windows apps would prevent me from using several commercial utilities which are essential to my business.
NASA does lots of cool stuff - research and science on both earth and the rest of the universe. I happen to think manned space flight is very cool, but I'm getting more and more frustrated that NASA is seen as only manned space flight*, or that space research has to include manned space flight to be worthwhile.
If a congressman doesn't think NASA has any goals or program direction, it means he or she hasn't looked beyond putting people on a ship to [insert non-earth destination].
* this problem has plagued NASA for decades - manned spaceflight sucks up the bulk of funds, despite having a relatively low science per dollar quotient. It's good for marketing, though.
I think you're mistaking "state of the art" with "common desktop" capabilities. In 1984, 400k floppies and 16 color graphics was mainstream for desktop computers. Hell-Linotype was already producing machines which were used to manipulate full color photographic images and John Lasseter, who would head Pixar (to be formed in two years) created the fully animated 3D computer short "Wally B" while at Lucasfilm. State of the art was quite a bit more advanced. That's not to say they didn't have challenges, however it is particularly short sighted of them to not transfer the data to new media as it became available.
Which government employees to fire, though? The entire military? Police and Fire services? Teachers? They're all government employees.
I think every congressperson should come up with $Deficit/535 reductions in spending - from their own district. Anyone who comes up with an extra 10% in their own can cut 2% from somebody else's district. (I grew up near D.C. - I like politics to be a blood sport)
The issue isn't that it works, it's the volumetric efficiency of the storage. LP is nowhere near gasoline, and is very expensive. These are likely worthwhile because they convert natural gas (which costs about 1/3 to 1/2 LP, delivered, on a MMBTU basis).
It may be slightly better for the environment since it's burning^wconverting more H per C than gasoline, but it's still hydrocarbon based.
If I had to guess, this gives these players a stable, off-grid (aka backup) power source as backup while being cost competitive with local electrical rates. It sure as hell beats having to maintain diesel generators.
If you have prescriptions or a chronic condition like diabetes, move to somewhere with socialized medicine (seriously). If yuo're pretty healthy, give the HSA a shot.
Here's the thing about healthcare - it's only stupid expensive if you're uninsured. That sounds odd, but it turns out that if you don't get negotiated rates with providers, they will charge you an outrageous amount. Often the "rack rate" for a procedure is between 3 and 10 times what large payers like Anthem have negotiated. A $2000 exploratory ultrasound in the hospital might only be $250-$300 allowable charges once Anthem applies their discount. Wart removal? $200 rack, $40 negotiated.
The HSA has two parts - you pay for your "routine" healthcare, but at the Anthem (or whomever) discounted rates. Often you get a physical for no charge each year. If you mess yourself up, or you contract some serious problem, you pay out up to your deductible (usually $3000-4000 for an individual) and - this is the good part - the insurance company picks up 100% of your bills after that. And for all this, your premiums will be about half what they would be under a co-pay plan, plus you get to put away money tax free.
I'll tell you, If you get hit by a bus, that 80/20 plan you have with your employer will eat you alive. It's very simple to rack up $100k in medical bills for a major life event.
Now, it's not perfect. As an individual, your insurer has the chance each year to decide you're too expensive and cancel your ass. (This is where group policies are better, but for healthy people will double your premium) Also, there is no defined prescription coverage - you pay what the insurer would have paid. For "regular" prescriptions, it's often LESS than the oh-so-advertised $4/prescription that many chains have now. For name-brand drugs, though, you could be in for serious costs. So if you have maintenance meds, check to see what the insurer's negotiated rates are before you jump.
Personally, I like the HSA. I get to get whatever care I want, I pay discounted rates for what I consume, and if I have a stroke or a heart attack my maximum out of pocket costs are going to be capped pretty low. And those costs - it turns out - I get to legally hide from the IRS if I'm a saver. Quite honestly - if you and your family are healthy - you can likely cover your whole family, plus the maximum IRS deduction - for the same amount as a group plan would have cost. After two or three years of being healthy, you should have enough in your HSA account to cover practically any major medical catastrophe with little to nothing out of pocket.
And, hey, isn't that really what insurance is about? Protecting you against the major loss?
Hold on there, boy. Have you never heard of the internet? Practically every piece of hardware you're likely to encounter has an XP 32 bit mode driver on the manufacturer's website. The same is most certainly not true for Linux. I've installed Ubuntu, and found out the hard way. $100 for an OS? I suppose that's true if you either (a) don't comparison shop or (b) don't get your OS with a new PC. In those cases, it will run you between nothing (OS paid for by crapware you get rid of when you wipe your new PC) and $40. The time I gave up on Ubuntu it was because it was going to cost me $65 for a new network card for my laptop because the one I had didn't have any linux compatible drivers. Some forums suggested that a moderately adept user could recompile a driver from a card with a similar chip and it might work. I've never had to modify code and recompile a driver under Windows to make it work.
Viruses are - as we know - mostly written to attack the part of the system between the keyboard and the chair. Put Linux on 90+% of all machines and eliminate Windows from the market and you'll need anti-virus for Linux. Viruses do exist, but nobody worth their salt running linux is going to fall for them. In the past two decades, I haven't (knowingly) had a virus. In fact, the last one I remember was on an Apple. Apple II that is.
Ubuntu is nice, and if somebody were to use it on a new machine in isolation, it would get two thumbs way up from me. But I just can't suggest somebody switch from windows without banking on some serious retraining time. FWIW, I would say the same thing to a long time any user - if you're going to switch OS (win-osx-*ix), plan on some serious retraining, or some serious inefficiency for a while.
I skipped Vista (except for the media center PC). I didn't have any new PCs during Vista's reign, and I don't upgrade the OS on work PCs. It had some nice features - I had friends who had switched - but it wasn't compelling. If it had it, it wasn't obvious (or at least did't seem to be a marquee feature)
Gross receipts tax. It's like a VAT, but on everything you receive. No deductions, no exemptions, no exclusions. Applies to everyone with a tax ID (i.e. persons and corporations). Double taxation for small businesses? Yup - you get the protection of the government via corporate veil, you pay the extra. (disclaimer - I own an S corp - I would be double taxed)
Then it doesn't matter what is deductable. It doesn't matter how you make it or where it comes from - gifts, cap gains, interest, wages, inheritance. It favors local production (fewer middlemen). It's easy to administer. Everybody pays something.
It does not, however, allow for social tinkering via the tax code, so it will never be adopted.
I really didn't understand this problem until my daughter went into first grade. When she was three, she spent about 30 minutes on a car ride rolling off addition and subtraction (single digit) faster than the 6 year old who was actually doing the flash cards. She got about 8 or 9 out of 10 correct.
Flash forward three years and she (for an unknown reason) got a "block" on her arithmetic. Adding the simplest of numbers became a chore. Her classmates were ahead of her, and she started to feel peer pressure - she just locks up. When not focusing on math, she'll reel off an answer to most word problems. If it's a math exercise, we hit tears very quickly.
We're working on it, and I hope she can get out from under this block.
Oh, that's easy. You pass laws so that decisions don't ever have to be made. The "perfect" law is one which exactly embodies the intent and leaves no room for interpretation. In doing so, you relieve the bureaucracy of any responsibility or culpability. Mission accomplished.
(the fact that one cannot successfully legislate without unintentional - or intentional - loopholes provides the ongoing necessity of further legislation)
I am a long time Windows user, and have toyed with switching to Linux a couple of times. It always ends up being more frustrating than it's worth. It's fun to bitch and complain about Microsoft, but they do manage to name everything pretty well. It is a royal pain to find things in Windows if you don't know where to look, but even the best of Linux distros have oddly named shit everywhere. Whomever came up with the search bar for Win7 was a God damned genius - it's helped me more than anything else to find the obscure program or setting they seem to like to move with every release.
As bad as MS can be, for most computer things, it just works. Where it doesn't, it's certainly no worse than OSX and often better than Linux. MS could do a much better job with codecs, imho, but most websites are designed around the mass market - and that means Windows. Drivers are more common. And don't get me started with file permissions. Windows may be a sieve when it comes to security, but there's nothing quite as frustrating as the OS not letting you do something you want to do (MS found that out with Vista, the hard way).
The biggest issue is that your brother knows Windows. There are no good help files or guides that show "if you did it this way in windows, here's how you do it in Linux." You have to know what Linux calls it to find the analogous app - and that is far from trivial. Play that game 10 times in a row, and you're likely to go back and install Windows ME for relief! In the spirit of slashdot, I'll bring up a car analogy. I try to go to St. Croix, USVI in the winter each year, and the first day or two of driving on the left is a stressful time - and this is in an automatic transmission car that's set up for right side driving (so everything is in exactly the same place I'm used to). Switching to Linux is like...um...putting me in an airplane. Sure, it will get me places I used to go, and new places I couldn't have gone before, and get me there faster, and a whole host of better things. But if all I've ever done is drive a car, I'm likely to abandon that plane as useful transportation very quickly unless I commit to pretty extensive training.
if everyone is so afraid of their computer memory being used to the fullest, why do these people install so much of it?
Most users remember back to at least the 90s. You had to install enough ram to do what you needed (load the OS and program(s) - WinNT had the audacity to require 8MB to run well). There was no caching of any useful sort, so your free memory was really a measure of how many programs you could load. Programs, like Photoshop, added scratch files to overcome the physical RAM limits, but at a horrible performance penalty should have to actually use it. "Free RAM" became synonymous with "how many things you could do or open simultaneously."
All modern operating systems have moved on, but people haven't been educated about this. They remember how bad it was when they ran out of memory, and panic when the OS reports it's almost full. Honestly, it would be far better if MS would have reported the cached memory differently. I don't really care how much memory is used as superfetch cache most of the time - I'm more concerned with the total active usage. My netbook "only" has 2GB, but I do some 24/96 audio recording with it, and will occasionally work with photoshop images, so I am concerned if I have less than 500-600MB free when I open a session as I'm likely to exceed the physical RAM. I can read the data, so it's not a big deal, but others freak out about it.
I would highly recommend purchasing Slysoft's AnyDVD HD. Yes, it will set you back $100, plus about $50/yr (they've gone to subscription since they continuously crack the BR keys - but they are very good at it). Once you have this in place, you can play the content you've purchased on any output from your machine. You can even back up the raw, unencrypted content so that you can play it with any software player which has the base (VC-1/x264) codec installed.
Trust me, if you have a Windows based media PC, you want AnyDVD (HD). And you want to support Slysoft with your money so that they keep on top of the cracks which prevent you from enjoying the items you've purchased.
(note: I am not affiliated in any way with Slysoft, except as a 4+ year satisfied customer with a 300+ title library on HD which I ripped from my own collection)
People have been ducking sales tax in the US by buying online because you generally have to have a physical presence in a state to be required to remit sales tax. I say people, and not businesses/web vendors, since most states have a "use tax" which applies to anything purchased out of state and used within the state, and very few people ever pay the use tax since there is no reporting.
That's far too young to be thrown into an environment with college students who are about 18 to 23 years old
(1) you require college students to have a HS diploma, (2) you're requiring students (generally) to complete 12 years of education, and (3) you don't let them start until they're between 5 and 6
It's not much of a stretch to realize that you're not going to find many 16 year olds in college.
That said, there is still a lot of maturing to do for most 16 year olds. Even a lot of 18 year olds are pretty slim on the maturity front. I'll be honest, I'm not sure how comfortable I'd be sending my 16 year old off to college somewhere. A local CC, though, wouldn't be a big deal.
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Um, it has a hard keyboard with it - it's going to be thicker than a screen-only device.
If you want to be bothered by something, you should complain that the keyboard is out but the screen has not rotated to landscape.
The beauty of science is that, in this case, they can both be wrong and the truth can lie somewhere in between or even beyond either position. The complexity is most of the fun part!
This is a difficult dichotomy. If everyone lived in cities, we could pack far more human onto the earth - which is bad. If we had a fixed number of humans, and we kept them all in a very small area, that would be good for the earth.
If you live in the "country" and have, say, a square mile per person - it really doesn't matter what you do. No matter how inefficiently you live (burn your trash, use firewood to heat your house, drive 30 miles to get to a store) you won't affect the environment in any significant way.
If you put a million people in a square mile, they will essentially destroy that area, and will tax the surrounding area very, very heavily - making for exceptionally poor living conditions, even if there is little burning, everyone recycles just about everything, and people use almost no autos. It's wonderfully efficient if you're trying to maximize the population, and horrible for the environment and living conditions. Ever wonder why the cities are generally so impersonal/hostile, and yet if you drive a country road everyone waves?
A side note: if we only had 1 person for every square mile of land mass, the total earth human population would be 50M. With a slum you could keep all those people in an area the size of Washington D.C. I think I know which version of society I'd rather live in.
Oh that's right, I can't return it
That's why I buy everything of consequence with credit cards. My current one allows me to get a refund on _anything_ within 90 days (It's a Chase Visa Sapphire, fwiw). Note that I didn't say "return" the merchandise, I said I'd get a refund. Visa will bitchslap the vendor. As the vendor, that sucks, but many large vendors have ways to get their money back from the distributor. It's an ugly business all around.
plus reasonable shutdown costs to complete archiving of documentation. That's the way it should be.
The problem is that all the people who have regular contact with the contractors and their employees are good friends and colleagues, so they're far more likely to make sure their "friends" has a soft landing.
Now we'll see what kind of idiots work on the contract negotiation side of NASA. Time for the blood sucking lawyers to get to work...
This is like a law against blocking or spoofing your caller ID. The people who do it get away with it because there's no way to track them down. This is just a sad attempt to make a "pile on" law in the rare instance that they do catch someone.
I'd rather take my chances with the TSA rifling through my bags than ship USPS parcel post. Hell, I'd have to ship my stuff a month in advance to make sure it got there, and there's no way to track it if it gets lost. USPS might even be worse than letting American Eagle check your bags to a Caribbean island.
I'm not saying google intends to do this, but I doubt sports illustrated would let their swimsuit issue go for the same price as the rest.
Yeah, but you don't really read the swimsuit edition for "the articles."
Really? It's not a tablet computer - it doesn't run a full OS. You'll only be able to buy the "apps" that are in the apple store. Lots of good stuff there - but not exactly serious stand alone applications. Tablet computers are fully functional devices (running OSX, Windows, or *ix) with the ability to run full sized software applications.
The iPad is an appliance. For the target audience, that's probably a good thing. The key is, it isn't a computer - it doesn't replace a computer any more than my phone does. I use my phone for surfing and email and simple calculations, some minor text editing, etc. The iPad is a big pda with web capability.
I'm surprised that you feel the Kindle isn't enough for reading. My wife's seems to surf the web pretty easily, and the connection is free (as in Beer). The full size (DX) would probably be even better, but I haven't tried one.
It's not that people will get tired with netbooks, it's that some people don't want/need a netbook form factor but there was no "affordable" tablet form factor. Oddly, I really wanted a tablet but now that I have a netbook I don't want a tablet as badly - I'd rather have an ereader. It's become clear that a tablet without a keyboard wouldn't serve enough functions for me. Actually, the Always Innovating convertable is still the closest to the form factor I'd prefer, but (as with the iPad) the lack of ability to run windows apps would prevent me from using several commercial utilities which are essential to my business.
NASA does lots of cool stuff - research and science on both earth and the rest of the universe. I happen to think manned space flight is very cool, but I'm getting more and more frustrated that NASA is seen as only manned space flight*, or that space research has to include manned space flight to be worthwhile.
If a congressman doesn't think NASA has any goals or program direction, it means he or she hasn't looked beyond putting people on a ship to [insert non-earth destination].
* this problem has plagued NASA for decades - manned spaceflight sucks up the bulk of funds, despite having a relatively low science per dollar quotient. It's good for marketing, though.
I think you're mistaking "state of the art" with "common desktop" capabilities. In 1984, 400k floppies and 16 color graphics was mainstream for desktop computers. Hell-Linotype was already producing machines which were used to manipulate full color photographic images and John Lasseter, who would head Pixar (to be formed in two years) created the fully animated 3D computer short "Wally B" while at Lucasfilm. State of the art was quite a bit more advanced. That's not to say they didn't have challenges, however it is particularly short sighted of them to not transfer the data to new media as it became available.
Which government employees to fire, though? The entire military? Police and Fire services? Teachers? They're all government employees.
I think every congressperson should come up with $Deficit/535 reductions in spending - from their own district. Anyone who comes up with an extra 10% in their own can cut 2% from somebody else's district. (I grew up near D.C. - I like politics to be a blood sport)
The issue isn't that it works, it's the volumetric efficiency of the storage. LP is nowhere near gasoline, and is very expensive. These are likely worthwhile because they convert natural gas (which costs about 1/3 to 1/2 LP, delivered, on a MMBTU basis).
It may be slightly better for the environment since it's burning^wconverting more H per C than gasoline, but it's still hydrocarbon based.
If I had to guess, this gives these players a stable, off-grid (aka backup) power source as backup while being cost competitive with local electrical rates. It sure as hell beats having to maintain diesel generators.
If you have prescriptions or a chronic condition like diabetes, move to somewhere with socialized medicine (seriously). If yuo're pretty healthy, give the HSA a shot.
Here's the thing about healthcare - it's only stupid expensive if you're uninsured. That sounds odd, but it turns out that if you don't get negotiated rates with providers, they will charge you an outrageous amount. Often the "rack rate" for a procedure is between 3 and 10 times what large payers like Anthem have negotiated. A $2000 exploratory ultrasound in the hospital might only be $250-$300 allowable charges once Anthem applies their discount. Wart removal? $200 rack, $40 negotiated.
The HSA has two parts - you pay for your "routine" healthcare, but at the Anthem (or whomever) discounted rates. Often you get a physical for no charge each year. If you mess yourself up, or you contract some serious problem, you pay out up to your deductible (usually $3000-4000 for an individual) and - this is the good part - the insurance company picks up 100% of your bills after that. And for all this, your premiums will be about half what they would be under a co-pay plan, plus you get to put away money tax free.
I'll tell you, If you get hit by a bus, that 80/20 plan you have with your employer will eat you alive. It's very simple to rack up $100k in medical bills for a major life event.
Now, it's not perfect. As an individual, your insurer has the chance each year to decide you're too expensive and cancel your ass. (This is where group policies are better, but for healthy people will double your premium) Also, there is no defined prescription coverage - you pay what the insurer would have paid. For "regular" prescriptions, it's often LESS than the oh-so-advertised $4/prescription that many chains have now. For name-brand drugs, though, you could be in for serious costs. So if you have maintenance meds, check to see what the insurer's negotiated rates are before you jump.
Personally, I like the HSA. I get to get whatever care I want, I pay discounted rates for what I consume, and if I have a stroke or a heart attack my maximum out of pocket costs are going to be capped pretty low. And those costs - it turns out - I get to legally hide from the IRS if I'm a saver. Quite honestly - if you and your family are healthy - you can likely cover your whole family, plus the maximum IRS deduction - for the same amount as a group plan would have cost. After two or three years of being healthy, you should have enough in your HSA account to cover practically any major medical catastrophe with little to nothing out of pocket.
And, hey, isn't that really what insurance is about? Protecting you against the major loss?
Hold on there, boy. Have you never heard of the internet? Practically every piece of hardware you're likely to encounter has an XP 32 bit mode driver on the manufacturer's website. The same is most certainly not true for Linux. I've installed Ubuntu, and found out the hard way. $100 for an OS? I suppose that's true if you either (a) don't comparison shop or (b) don't get your OS with a new PC. In those cases, it will run you between nothing (OS paid for by crapware you get rid of when you wipe your new PC) and $40. The time I gave up on Ubuntu it was because it was going to cost me $65 for a new network card for my laptop because the one I had didn't have any linux compatible drivers. Some forums suggested that a moderately adept user could recompile a driver from a card with a similar chip and it might work. I've never had to modify code and recompile a driver under Windows to make it work.
Viruses are - as we know - mostly written to attack the part of the system between the keyboard and the chair. Put Linux on 90+% of all machines and eliminate Windows from the market and you'll need anti-virus for Linux. Viruses do exist, but nobody worth their salt running linux is going to fall for them. In the past two decades, I haven't (knowingly) had a virus. In fact, the last one I remember was on an Apple. Apple II that is.
Ubuntu is nice, and if somebody were to use it on a new machine in isolation, it would get two thumbs way up from me. But I just can't suggest somebody switch from windows without banking on some serious retraining time. FWIW, I would say the same thing to a long time any user - if you're going to switch OS (win-osx-*ix), plan on some serious retraining, or some serious inefficiency for a while.
I skipped Vista (except for the media center PC). I didn't have any new PCs during Vista's reign, and I don't upgrade the OS on work PCs. It had some nice features - I had friends who had switched - but it wasn't compelling. If it had it, it wasn't obvious (or at least did't seem to be a marquee feature)
Gross receipts tax. It's like a VAT, but on everything you receive. No deductions, no exemptions, no exclusions. Applies to everyone with a tax ID (i.e. persons and corporations). Double taxation for small businesses? Yup - you get the protection of the government via corporate veil, you pay the extra. (disclaimer - I own an S corp - I would be double taxed)
Then it doesn't matter what is deductable. It doesn't matter how you make it or where it comes from - gifts, cap gains, interest, wages, inheritance. It favors local production (fewer middlemen). It's easy to administer. Everybody pays something.
It does not, however, allow for social tinkering via the tax code, so it will never be adopted.
I really didn't understand this problem until my daughter went into first grade. When she was three, she spent about 30 minutes on a car ride rolling off addition and subtraction (single digit) faster than the 6 year old who was actually doing the flash cards. She got about 8 or 9 out of 10 correct.
Flash forward three years and she (for an unknown reason) got a "block" on her arithmetic. Adding the simplest of numbers became a chore. Her classmates were ahead of her, and she started to feel peer pressure - she just locks up. When not focusing on math, she'll reel off an answer to most word problems. If it's a math exercise, we hit tears very quickly.
We're working on it, and I hope she can get out from under this block.
Oh, that's easy. You pass laws so that decisions don't ever have to be made. The "perfect" law is one which exactly embodies the intent and leaves no room for interpretation. In doing so, you relieve the bureaucracy of any responsibility or culpability. Mission accomplished.
(the fact that one cannot successfully legislate without unintentional - or intentional - loopholes provides the ongoing necessity of further legislation)
I am a long time Windows user, and have toyed with switching to Linux a couple of times. It always ends up being more frustrating than it's worth. It's fun to bitch and complain about Microsoft, but they do manage to name everything pretty well. It is a royal pain to find things in Windows if you don't know where to look, but even the best of Linux distros have oddly named shit everywhere. Whomever came up with the search bar for Win7 was a God damned genius - it's helped me more than anything else to find the obscure program or setting they seem to like to move with every release.
As bad as MS can be, for most computer things, it just works. Where it doesn't, it's certainly no worse than OSX and often better than Linux. MS could do a much better job with codecs, imho, but most websites are designed around the mass market - and that means Windows. Drivers are more common. And don't get me started with file permissions. Windows may be a sieve when it comes to security, but there's nothing quite as frustrating as the OS not letting you do something you want to do (MS found that out with Vista, the hard way).
The biggest issue is that your brother knows Windows. There are no good help files or guides that show "if you did it this way in windows, here's how you do it in Linux." You have to know what Linux calls it to find the analogous app - and that is far from trivial. Play that game 10 times in a row, and you're likely to go back and install Windows ME for relief! In the spirit of slashdot, I'll bring up a car analogy. I try to go to St. Croix, USVI in the winter each year, and the first day or two of driving on the left is a stressful time - and this is in an automatic transmission car that's set up for right side driving (so everything is in exactly the same place I'm used to). Switching to Linux is like...um...putting me in an airplane. Sure, it will get me places I used to go, and new places I couldn't have gone before, and get me there faster, and a whole host of better things. But if all I've ever done is drive a car, I'm likely to abandon that plane as useful transportation very quickly unless I commit to pretty extensive training.
if everyone is so afraid of their computer memory being used to the fullest, why do these people install so much of it?
Most users remember back to at least the 90s. You had to install enough ram to do what you needed (load the OS and program(s) - WinNT had the audacity to require 8MB to run well). There was no caching of any useful sort, so your free memory was really a measure of how many programs you could load. Programs, like Photoshop, added scratch files to overcome the physical RAM limits, but at a horrible performance penalty should have to actually use it. "Free RAM" became synonymous with "how many things you could do or open simultaneously."
All modern operating systems have moved on, but people haven't been educated about this. They remember how bad it was when they ran out of memory, and panic when the OS reports it's almost full. Honestly, it would be far better if MS would have reported the cached memory differently. I don't really care how much memory is used as superfetch cache most of the time - I'm more concerned with the total active usage. My netbook "only" has 2GB, but I do some 24/96 audio recording with it, and will occasionally work with photoshop images, so I am concerned if I have less than 500-600MB free when I open a session as I'm likely to exceed the physical RAM. I can read the data, so it's not a big deal, but others freak out about it.
I would highly recommend purchasing Slysoft's AnyDVD HD. Yes, it will set you back $100, plus about $50/yr (they've gone to subscription since they continuously crack the BR keys - but they are very good at it). Once you have this in place, you can play the content you've purchased on any output from your machine. You can even back up the raw, unencrypted content so that you can play it with any software player which has the base (VC-1/x264) codec installed.
Trust me, if you have a Windows based media PC, you want AnyDVD (HD). And you want to support Slysoft with your money so that they keep on top of the cracks which prevent you from enjoying the items you've purchased.
(note: I am not affiliated in any way with Slysoft, except as a 4+ year satisfied customer with a 300+ title library on HD which I ripped from my own collection)
People have been ducking sales tax in the US by buying online because you generally have to have a physical presence in a state to be required to remit sales tax. I say people, and not businesses/web vendors, since most states have a "use tax" which applies to anything purchased out of state and used within the state, and very few people ever pay the use tax since there is no reporting.
That's far too young to be thrown into an environment with college students who are about 18 to 23 years old
(1) you require college students to have a HS diploma,
(2) you're requiring students (generally) to complete 12 years of education, and
(3) you don't let them start until they're between 5 and 6
It's not much of a stretch to realize that you're not going to find many 16 year olds in college.
That said, there is still a lot of maturing to do for most 16 year olds. Even a lot of 18 year olds are pretty slim on the maturity front. I'll be honest, I'm not sure how comfortable I'd be sending my 16 year old off to college somewhere. A local CC, though, wouldn't be a big deal.