BS. You even said you're not driving 132mph. Your efficiency at 132mph will be much, much lower than at any normal highway speed up to 85mph since air resistance goes up exponentially with speed. Come back to us when you have some real mpg numbers at 132mph.
The energy density of petrol, and better yet, diesel cars is still unequalled.
That's irrelevant, because in an internal-combusion engine, most of that energy is just wasted as heat, and only a small fraction is used for locomotion. In an electric car, close to 100% of the stored energy is used for locomotion (unless maybe you have the heater on). You don't need the energy density of gasoline to make an electric car competitive with gas cars. (And diesel cars mostly don't exist in the US, or have insanely-high price tags: the VW models I've looked at carry a $5k surcharge to get the diesel engine.)
And no diesel or gas car is going to go 132mph for hundreds of miles, unless you've added an auxiliary fuel tank or something, because the efficiency at 132mph is crap, so you'll burn through your fuel tank in a much shorter distance than if you drove at an economical speed like 65mph.
Maybe, maybe not. But either way, "they" weren't fucked at all as the anonymous OP above said, since they got the passwords pretty quickly, and years in prison seems ridiculous for something like this where, regardless of his intentions, he didn't withhold the passwords for any long duration, but rather only insisted (it seems, correct me if I'm wrong) on following official policy to the letter (maybe to make things hard for them, but still, it was their policy, not his) and giving the passwords to the Mayor directly, and did so when presented with the opportunity. People have gone to prison for much less time for violent crimes, and this wasn't really a crime, it was a dispute. It should have been handled in Civil court, just like if someone takes your money and refuses to give you what you paid for, the police will refuse to arrest them for theft (even though that's exactly what it is), they'll just tell you to sue them in Civil court.
Obviously, people in power will do things to keep themselves enriched and in power, but they have to justify it to the voters somehow. Telling them "we need more highly-paid superintendents" isn't going to go over very well. However, telling the people in richer towns that poor kids are going to be bused to their schools, and that their kids are going to be bused to schools in the ghetto town on the other side of the county, WILL cause them to vote against consolidation. It doesn't matter much what the percentage of minorities is: minorities in city A don't get to vote in rich town B's elections because they don't live there. (Moreover, minorities tend not to vote nearly as much anyway.)
I'm not sure how being in the same "district" as a poorly performing school (or "blacks", as you suggest) would have any impact on anything. I mean, they're already in the same "state" as these undesirable schools, sometimes in the same "county", and yet things keep chugging along just fine.
Of course they do, because they're in entirely separate school districts, so it's no different than being in a different state. By having different districts, funding for school(s) in one district have no effect on the funding on school(s) in another district. So rich white people don't have to worry about their property taxes being used to fund minorities in another part of the county or state.
If anything, having your district include shittier inner-city schools could be a boon to you, as districts with the poorest-performing schools are the ones that get the lions share of the funding.
No, they don't. Property taxes only go to fund the school in the district those property taxes come from. So rich neighborhoods, with high property tax revenues (because of the high house values there) keep all their money and pour it into their own schools, while poor neighborhoods in a poor district in the same county have to make-do with much lower funding since the property values in the ghetto are very low and consequently property tax revenues per capita are much lower. It doesn't help that rich people tend to have far fewer kids than poor people, so that's even more funding per child in the rich districts than the poor districts. The poor districts might get some Federal funding to help out, but it's probably still nowhere near the per-capita funding that the rich kids get.
It's not an "organized racist movement", but then again neither is "white flight", it's just richer people working and voting to keep themselves separate from poorer people, and these divisions are usually along racial lines since minorities tend to be much poorer (making it completely impossible to really tell how much racism is involved versus simple classism but it's usually safe to assume a certain level of it).
Um, if I remember this case correctly (it's been several years now I think), he DID give them the passwords, but not directly, he insisted on giving them to the city's mayor.
On Reddit, there is no separate page you have to visit to moderate story submissions; all the submissions can be modded up or down at any time, so if something is stupid, it'll just get modded down to oblivion after enough people look at it and decide it's crap. Here, you're relying on people to take their time to check out the Firehose.
Ok, if they all do that (it might need to be mandated Federally though), that would solve that problem. However, it still doesn't solve the other problem, which is: what do you do when the Federal site goes down? Again, the ObamaCare rollout disaster shows that the Federal government isn't exactly competent at setting up reliable web services.
No way. The problem with your solution is that there's no way to remit the taxes to the ~10,000 different tax jurisdictions across the country, unless you're the size of Amazon. Some 1 or 2-person internet shop being run out of a basement might be able to handle getting their shopping cart set up to use the Federal API you propose (it'd just be built into all the major shopping cart programs after all), but remitting those taxes requires cutting checks to all the different authorities, and there's no way to do that efficiently, unless this Federal program is also going to do collections and remission, so that sellers only have to remit the tax to one place (the Federal government agency put in charge of this), and then that place doles out the money to the 10k places it's supposed to go to.
Also, the other big problem is expecting this API and service to actually work correctly. The ObamaCare rollout disaster should make it obvious that you can't trust the Federal government to roll out any internet-based service that will actually work right when it's needed. What's going to happen when the broken code they got some overpaid consulting firm to make barfs, and sellers can't query the API for an hour (or even 5 minutes)? All internet transactions nationwide will be unable to go through for that time. That's unacceptable.
What we really need is a choice for the states: either 1) a Federal law that forbids municipalities or counties from charging separate sales tax, and forbids any exceptions in sales tax for any items at all, and requires all sales taxes to be uniform, so that the only thing sellers need to figure out is the tax rate in each state, meaning they only need to know 51 different percentages, and only have to remit to 51 different places maximum. OR, 2) a Federal law forbidding sales taxes to be charged on out-of-state purchases, and they can keep all the wacky exceptions and municipal add-ons they want. Their choice.
No, sales taxes are the most regressive form of taxation, that is they hit the poor the hardest. Interesting then, that the northeast Blue states all have high sales taxes and other regressive forms of taxation (like all the toll roads and bridges with insanely-high tolls).
Also, NJ is famous for the highest property taxes in the US. The reason for this is racism: every little municipality (there's ~550 of them) has its own separate school district and property tax. They refuse to merge the school districts into county-wide districts like most other states, because no one wants their town's school to be in the same school district as some poorer (mostly black) township or city on the other side of the county. The phrase "home rule" is used a lot here as a euphamism for the real reason no one wants consolidation. Interesting that the northeast liberals are the most racist people in the country.
What's really bad is that the so-called "liberals" in this country are big fans of taxes that hurt poorer and working-class people the hardest. Sales taxes are the most regressive form of taxation, yet if you look at most of the "Blue" states, they have extremely high regressive tax schemes. The only Blue states that really walk the walk are Delaware, Oregon, and New Hampshire. There's also Alaska and Montana, which are strong Red states.
Stupid Slashdot. Why does this shitty site not have a way to mod down moronic submissions like this? This isn't the first time I've seen something this poorly-researched pop up on here.
No, why would I do that? Running anything under Wine is iffy at best. If Oovoo cared about Linux users, they'd either make a native Linux version, or test it themselves under Wine, and advise users to do that (perhaps making sure that their program does work well under Wine, by making changes if necessary).
I was thinking the same thing; I really thought this guy was less naive than that, since after all, he managed to leak all that stuff and then escape the country, rather than sitting around and getting shipped to Guantanamo while thinking the US justice system would get things right.
Maybe he just said that to sound good, without actually believing it.
This is precisely why it's better to stick with Free/open-source alternatives whenever possible and feasible. You never have to worry about an open-source application getting bought up by some stupid corporation and totally ruined. It's been tried before, of course, most famously with the MySQL and OpenOffice takeovers by Oracle, but when it happens, the project is forked and everyone who's tired of the mismanaged version just switches to the fork.
So allow me to say, which since getting engaged I so rarely get to do anymore....I TOLD YOU SO, I did, I told you so. I said "If you all go mobile it will bite you right in the ass, its all proprietary and locked down and nasty"
Someone could easily have said the same thing about PCs: it's all proprietary and locked down and nasy, with only proprietary OSes (MS-DOS, PC-DOS, and DR-DOS, maybe CP-M), proprietary applications (WordPerfect, WordStar, Lotus 1-2-3, dBase), and shenanigans like MS making it so competing applications don't work in DOS. Luckily, that's ancient history and Free software came to PCs, but it sure took a long time, and there's still tons of people happily using nasty proprietary crap (Windows 8 and MacOS X).
Back in the 80s, PCs were a new market, so there was nothing available besides proprietary crapware. Today, mobile is a new market, so it's largely the same deal. Luckily, the technical similarities between mobile devices and PCs/servers is making it so that Free software has more of a foothold to get into the mobile market, so we see things like CyanogenMod and other open-source Android respins, plus more experimental Linux builds for certain mobile devices.
As for your doomday prophecy about the "return of the consoles", that seems rather ridiculous to me. Yes, lots of people are happily buying into walled gardens (especially Apple's), but PCs haven't gone anywhere, they just stopped expanding as a market (largely because a 6-year-old PC still runs all the latest software just fine, so you never need to upgrade to something new until something actually dies). MS is trying to emulate the "app store" thing with Windows 8, but it isn't going anywhere, just like their Windows Phone has been a total flop.
Sorry, but Oovoo is crap, because there's no Linux version. Even MS Skype has a Linux version. I did find some discussion in the oovoo forum saying they had a Linux version in development, but that was back in 2007, so it's probably safe to say they've given up on it.
No, but they had millions of users who liked and used the product (apparently some competing service had several million new users sign up all of a sudden when iGoogle shut down), which means there's positive revenue there. If you're making money with a product (and it's profitable, obviously), it's pretty stupid to give up on that product. You don't have to concentrate on it that much if you don't want, but you can at least assign a bare minimum of resources to it to keep it alive if customers like it that much. A large company like Google should have no problem with that.
At this point, Google has made such a bad reputation for itself by killing off so many products that people liked that anyone who's been around a while will be very wary of relying on Google for anything at all besides their most core products, and even there they need to be extremely wary (look how much Google has fucked up the GMail UI). This isn't a good reputation to have. No, it's probably not a good idea to spread yourself too thin either, but Google's strategy of "throw all kinds of shit on the wall, see what sticks and becomes massively profitable, and shitcan everything else even if it's fairly popular" isn't a good way to build a brand either.
Why can't you forward your email to one account? I do it with GMail and it works fine; it's easy to apply different labels to mails coming from different accounts, and then set up different sections in the Priority Inbox to show them separately if you want. And it'll even forward outgoing emails through any account you wish (normally you'd set it up so when you respond, it goes from the account it came through).
Do you have any friends? Are you single? I'm quite serious.
Back when I was single, I didn't watch many movies or TV shows either; I did activities that were singular in nature, like computer work, reading, house repair, and even some woodworking, stuff you would never do with the company of a female. Now I'm married, and I watch a fair number of movies and TV shows (on Netflix, never live). My wife has no interest in sitting and staring at me while I write programs or cut wood, but watching Netflix is something that we can do together (in addition to outside activities: hiking, going out to eat, going to social events, etc.), and I suspect it's the same for many couples.
You're an idiot. FOSS-lovers have no problem bashing FOSS packages they don't like. Some prime examples are: GNOME3, Unity, KDE (much more during the early 4.0 series than now), systemd, Upstart, PulseAudio, Mono and anything written on top of it, Linux and its kernel (coming from the *BSD-lovers), HURD, and I'm sure there's plenty more I've missed. Go browse a Linux or FOSS-oriented forum sometime; you'll see no end of bickering about and criticism of various distros, software packages, languages, etc. This isn't to say some, or even perhaps a lot, of the criticism isn't well-founded, but FOSS-lovers are definitely not even remotely united in their advocation of FOSS software.
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BS. You even said you're not driving 132mph. Your efficiency at 132mph will be much, much lower than at any normal highway speed up to 85mph since air resistance goes up exponentially with speed. Come back to us when you have some real mpg numbers at 132mph.
The energy density of petrol, and better yet, diesel cars is still unequalled.
That's irrelevant, because in an internal-combusion engine, most of that energy is just wasted as heat, and only a small fraction is used for locomotion. In an electric car, close to 100% of the stored energy is used for locomotion (unless maybe you have the heater on). You don't need the energy density of gasoline to make an electric car competitive with gas cars. (And diesel cars mostly don't exist in the US, or have insanely-high price tags: the VW models I've looked at carry a $5k surcharge to get the diesel engine.)
And no diesel or gas car is going to go 132mph for hundreds of miles, unless you've added an auxiliary fuel tank or something, because the efficiency at 132mph is crap, so you'll burn through your fuel tank in a much shorter distance than if you drove at an economical speed like 65mph.
Maybe, maybe not. But either way, "they" weren't fucked at all as the anonymous OP above said, since they got the passwords pretty quickly, and years in prison seems ridiculous for something like this where, regardless of his intentions, he didn't withhold the passwords for any long duration, but rather only insisted (it seems, correct me if I'm wrong) on following official policy to the letter (maybe to make things hard for them, but still, it was their policy, not his) and giving the passwords to the Mayor directly, and did so when presented with the opportunity. People have gone to prison for much less time for violent crimes, and this wasn't really a crime, it was a dispute. It should have been handled in Civil court, just like if someone takes your money and refuses to give you what you paid for, the police will refuse to arrest them for theft (even though that's exactly what it is), they'll just tell you to sue them in Civil court.
Obviously, people in power will do things to keep themselves enriched and in power, but they have to justify it to the voters somehow. Telling them "we need more highly-paid superintendents" isn't going to go over very well. However, telling the people in richer towns that poor kids are going to be bused to their schools, and that their kids are going to be bused to schools in the ghetto town on the other side of the county, WILL cause them to vote against consolidation. It doesn't matter much what the percentage of minorities is: minorities in city A don't get to vote in rich town B's elections because they don't live there. (Moreover, minorities tend not to vote nearly as much anyway.)
I'm not sure how being in the same "district" as a poorly performing school (or "blacks", as you suggest) would have any impact on anything. I mean, they're already in the same "state" as these undesirable schools, sometimes in the same "county", and yet things keep chugging along just fine.
Of course they do, because they're in entirely separate school districts, so it's no different than being in a different state. By having different districts, funding for school(s) in one district have no effect on the funding on school(s) in another district. So rich white people don't have to worry about their property taxes being used to fund minorities in another part of the county or state.
If anything, having your district include shittier inner-city schools could be a boon to you, as districts with the poorest-performing schools are the ones that get the lions share of the funding.
No, they don't. Property taxes only go to fund the school in the district those property taxes come from. So rich neighborhoods, with high property tax revenues (because of the high house values there) keep all their money and pour it into their own schools, while poor neighborhoods in a poor district in the same county have to make-do with much lower funding since the property values in the ghetto are very low and consequently property tax revenues per capita are much lower. It doesn't help that rich people tend to have far fewer kids than poor people, so that's even more funding per child in the rich districts than the poor districts. The poor districts might get some Federal funding to help out, but it's probably still nowhere near the per-capita funding that the rich kids get.
It's not an "organized racist movement", but then again neither is "white flight", it's just richer people working and voting to keep themselves separate from poorer people, and these divisions are usually along racial lines since minorities tend to be much poorer (making it completely impossible to really tell how much racism is involved versus simple classism but it's usually safe to assume a certain level of it).
Um, if I remember this case correctly (it's been several years now I think), he DID give them the passwords, but not directly, he insisted on giving them to the city's mayor.
Yes, but once it's on the main page, it's stuck.
On Reddit, there is no separate page you have to visit to moderate story submissions; all the submissions can be modded up or down at any time, so if something is stupid, it'll just get modded down to oblivion after enough people look at it and decide it's crap. Here, you're relying on people to take their time to check out the Firehose.
Ok, if they all do that (it might need to be mandated Federally though), that would solve that problem. However, it still doesn't solve the other problem, which is: what do you do when the Federal site goes down? Again, the ObamaCare rollout disaster shows that the Federal government isn't exactly competent at setting up reliable web services.
Are you an idiot? What kind of conservative complains about regressive taxation?
Sales tax does apply to essentials, it depends on the state. Lots of states tax food, clothing, etc.
If you're poor and buying non-essentials, well, there's the reason why you're poor.
So are you a southwestern conservative prejudiced dick?
With an attitude like that, you sound like the conservative prejudiced dick.
No way. The problem with your solution is that there's no way to remit the taxes to the ~10,000 different tax jurisdictions across the country, unless you're the size of Amazon. Some 1 or 2-person internet shop being run out of a basement might be able to handle getting their shopping cart set up to use the Federal API you propose (it'd just be built into all the major shopping cart programs after all), but remitting those taxes requires cutting checks to all the different authorities, and there's no way to do that efficiently, unless this Federal program is also going to do collections and remission, so that sellers only have to remit the tax to one place (the Federal government agency put in charge of this), and then that place doles out the money to the 10k places it's supposed to go to.
Also, the other big problem is expecting this API and service to actually work correctly. The ObamaCare rollout disaster should make it obvious that you can't trust the Federal government to roll out any internet-based service that will actually work right when it's needed. What's going to happen when the broken code they got some overpaid consulting firm to make barfs, and sellers can't query the API for an hour (or even 5 minutes)? All internet transactions nationwide will be unable to go through for that time. That's unacceptable.
What we really need is a choice for the states: either 1) a Federal law that forbids municipalities or counties from charging separate sales tax, and forbids any exceptions in sales tax for any items at all, and requires all sales taxes to be uniform, so that the only thing sellers need to figure out is the tax rate in each state, meaning they only need to know 51 different percentages, and only have to remit to 51 different places maximum. OR, 2) a Federal law forbidding sales taxes to be charged on out-of-state purchases, and they can keep all the wacky exceptions and municipal add-ons they want. Their choice.
No, sales taxes are the most regressive form of taxation, that is they hit the poor the hardest. Interesting then, that the northeast Blue states all have high sales taxes and other regressive forms of taxation (like all the toll roads and bridges with insanely-high tolls).
Also, NJ is famous for the highest property taxes in the US. The reason for this is racism: every little municipality (there's ~550 of them) has its own separate school district and property tax. They refuse to merge the school districts into county-wide districts like most other states, because no one wants their town's school to be in the same school district as some poorer (mostly black) township or city on the other side of the county. The phrase "home rule" is used a lot here as a euphamism for the real reason no one wants consolidation. Interesting that the northeast liberals are the most racist people in the country.
What's really bad is that the so-called "liberals" in this country are big fans of taxes that hurt poorer and working-class people the hardest. Sales taxes are the most regressive form of taxation, yet if you look at most of the "Blue" states, they have extremely high regressive tax schemes. The only Blue states that really walk the walk are Delaware, Oregon, and New Hampshire. There's also Alaska and Montana, which are strong Red states.
Stupid Slashdot. Why does this shitty site not have a way to mod down moronic submissions like this? This isn't the first time I've seen something this poorly-researched pop up on here.
No, why would I do that? Running anything under Wine is iffy at best. If Oovoo cared about Linux users, they'd either make a native Linux version, or test it themselves under Wine, and advise users to do that (perhaps making sure that their program does work well under Wine, by making changes if necessary).
I was thinking the same thing; I really thought this guy was less naive than that, since after all, he managed to leak all that stuff and then escape the country, rather than sitting around and getting shipped to Guantanamo while thinking the US justice system would get things right.
Maybe he just said that to sound good, without actually believing it.
This is precisely why it's better to stick with Free/open-source alternatives whenever possible and feasible. You never have to worry about an open-source application getting bought up by some stupid corporation and totally ruined. It's been tried before, of course, most famously with the MySQL and OpenOffice takeovers by Oracle, but when it happens, the project is forked and everyone who's tired of the mismanaged version just switches to the fork.
So allow me to say, which since getting engaged I so rarely get to do anymore....I TOLD YOU SO, I did, I told you so. I said "If you all go mobile it will bite you right in the ass, its all proprietary and locked down and nasty"
Someone could easily have said the same thing about PCs: it's all proprietary and locked down and nasy, with only proprietary OSes (MS-DOS, PC-DOS, and DR-DOS, maybe CP-M), proprietary applications (WordPerfect, WordStar, Lotus 1-2-3, dBase), and shenanigans like MS making it so competing applications don't work in DOS. Luckily, that's ancient history and Free software came to PCs, but it sure took a long time, and there's still tons of people happily using nasty proprietary crap (Windows 8 and MacOS X).
Back in the 80s, PCs were a new market, so there was nothing available besides proprietary crapware. Today, mobile is a new market, so it's largely the same deal. Luckily, the technical similarities between mobile devices and PCs/servers is making it so that Free software has more of a foothold to get into the mobile market, so we see things like CyanogenMod and other open-source Android respins, plus more experimental Linux builds for certain mobile devices.
As for your doomday prophecy about the "return of the consoles", that seems rather ridiculous to me. Yes, lots of people are happily buying into walled gardens (especially Apple's), but PCs haven't gone anywhere, they just stopped expanding as a market (largely because a 6-year-old PC still runs all the latest software just fine, so you never need to upgrade to something new until something actually dies). MS is trying to emulate the "app store" thing with Windows 8, but it isn't going anywhere, just like their Windows Phone has been a total flop.
Sorry, but Oovoo is crap, because there's no Linux version. Even MS Skype has a Linux version. I did find some discussion in the oovoo forum saying they had a Linux version in development, but that was back in 2007, so it's probably safe to say they've given up on it.
It's likely that any such patents don't have much time left before they're expired.
No, but they had millions of users who liked and used the product (apparently some competing service had several million new users sign up all of a sudden when iGoogle shut down), which means there's positive revenue there. If you're making money with a product (and it's profitable, obviously), it's pretty stupid to give up on that product. You don't have to concentrate on it that much if you don't want, but you can at least assign a bare minimum of resources to it to keep it alive if customers like it that much. A large company like Google should have no problem with that.
At this point, Google has made such a bad reputation for itself by killing off so many products that people liked that anyone who's been around a while will be very wary of relying on Google for anything at all besides their most core products, and even there they need to be extremely wary (look how much Google has fucked up the GMail UI). This isn't a good reputation to have. No, it's probably not a good idea to spread yourself too thin either, but Google's strategy of "throw all kinds of shit on the wall, see what sticks and becomes massively profitable, and shitcan everything else even if it's fairly popular" isn't a good way to build a brand either.
Why can't you forward your email to one account? I do it with GMail and it works fine; it's easy to apply different labels to mails coming from different accounts, and then set up different sections in the Priority Inbox to show them separately if you want. And it'll even forward outgoing emails through any account you wish (normally you'd set it up so when you respond, it goes from the account it came through).
Don't worry, I'm also biased against many liberals, especially the ones who are fans of Obama.
No, he's commenting on the bias of the NYT. That should be completely obvious from his comment.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised; most conservatives are so hopelessly gullible and idiotic they actually believe Onion articles are real.
Do you have any friends? Are you single? I'm quite serious.
Back when I was single, I didn't watch many movies or TV shows either; I did activities that were singular in nature, like computer work, reading, house repair, and even some woodworking, stuff you would never do with the company of a female. Now I'm married, and I watch a fair number of movies and TV shows (on Netflix, never live). My wife has no interest in sitting and staring at me while I write programs or cut wood, but watching Netflix is something that we can do together (in addition to outside activities: hiking, going out to eat, going to social events, etc.), and I suspect it's the same for many couples.
You're an idiot. FOSS-lovers have no problem bashing FOSS packages they don't like. Some prime examples are: GNOME3, Unity, KDE (much more during the early 4.0 series than now), systemd, Upstart, PulseAudio, Mono and anything written on top of it, Linux and its kernel (coming from the *BSD-lovers), HURD, and I'm sure there's plenty more I've missed. Go browse a Linux or FOSS-oriented forum sometime; you'll see no end of bickering about and criticism of various distros, software packages, languages, etc. This isn't to say some, or even perhaps a lot, of the criticism isn't well-founded, but FOSS-lovers are definitely not even remotely united in their advocation of FOSS software.
You may have your business, and decide to use Libre Office. Great for you and your 2 employees.
I'm quite sure H&R Block has far, far more than 2 employees, and they get along just fine with OpenOffice.