It's absolutely nuts to train the smartest people in the world at the best schools in the world... and then ask them to kindly leave.
I used to hold that same opinion, but I no longer do. Probably the best way to improve the impoverished of foreign countries, is the overall improvement of their own economies. We can send foreign aid all we want, but it's just a band-aid. But by training and re-injecting their own countryman back into their economy, we are actually helping them more than money could ever. And the better off their economies are, the less likely wars are going to be, and will afford more opportunities to improve trade.
Who.what is more motivated to fix a countries major issues (poverty, curruption, infrastructure)? Millions of dollars in food/equipment, or engineers with a native love for their fellow man?
That's not really a fair judgement, and depending on the situation I'd do nearly the same thing.
A building like that isn't bought in cash, but financed. You buy a building as an individual, and you get some deduction on your taxes based on the interest you had to pay. You then rent the space to a company you also own. This ensures that (a) you have enough income guarantee to pay your mortgage, (b) you have income to write your mortgage expenses off against, (c) your company has a front page deduction on it's taxes for the rent it paid you.
This isn't about siphoning money out of your startup, it's about ensuring that the money that the startup has to spend anyways is as deductible as possible. If the startup bought the building as an S or C CORP, then it has to get the mortgage in it's name, and take that deduction over a 30-50 year period of time per IRS rules. It also has to have enough credit and assets in order to qualify for the mortgage.
Buy having the owner buy the building, then rent it back; the company doesn't have to qualify for the mortgage on it's own, gets to write off rent immediately with no 30 year deduction rules, and doesn't have the large dept on it's books making it look more financially stable.
The rent that WeWork is charged by the owner needs only be enough to cover the owners mortgage, and both get front line deductions on their taxes.
I really get tired of this argument. Do you even know where the term Autopilot comes from or what it means?
From Wikipedia emphasis mine:
An autopilot is a system used to control the trajectory of an aircraft without constant 'hands-on' control by a human operator being required. Autopilots do not replace human operators, but instead they assist them in controlling the aircraft. This allows them to focus on broader aspects of operations such as monitoring the trajectory, weather and systems.
The autopilot in every fucking definition of the word, is an assist device for the pilot, not a replacement. It handles speed, heading, and in some cases altitude. It doesn't monitor other aircraft, it doesn't avoid collisions, it doesn't (endless list of pilot tasks).
Seems to be the fundamental issue that everyone is missing. There is no way that the Tesla was going 65 at impact. The crush zone is barely impacted, the fire truck looks barely dented. At most that looks like a 7-10 MPH hit. Which means if the Autopilot was engaged, it was doing it's best to stop.
At 65 MPH, that Tesla would of be buried under that red truck up to it's A pillar's at a minimum, if not the B pillar.
I take a salary like my other employee's, and pay the same taxes as my employee for my salary. What the GP is saying, is that most small businesses are setup as S-Corp, LLC, or Partnerships. In those cases, any profit left in the company at the close of the business year is assigned to the owner(s) and taxed to the owner(s) personal taxes. At that point, according to the IRS, that assigned money is now my personally money, even though I have to leave it in the company to make the next months payroll.
The nice thing is that assigned income gets to bypass FICA, but is still on the hook for Fed and State income tax. But where the burn really happens, at least for me, is ever quarter I have to pay all those extra taxes, only to see that money go towards payroll next quarter if/when sales aren't enough to cover the salaries. This happens seasonally to me, ever winter.
Basically I get to pay taxes on my salary AND the companies 'profits' in Q1, only to burn through all that money in Q2 without being able to recoup that taxed money. I think that is what the GP was referring to when he/she said they were buying equipment with 'personal money'.
He/she is doing it wrong, it's just how it works and it can be very painful when your trying to plan for paying your employees more than 3 months out during the slow sales season.
Since when do folks actually quote twitter as a news reference? And quoting some no-body twitter account that claims to be quoting someone else is NOT reference source.
I mean seriously people, might as well quote "The Sun".
Talk about the wrong solution. This is Elon Musk we are talking about here. If he has problems getting to and from LAX, then the solution is to NOT go to LAX. Surely purchasing his own private Jet and flying from a more local airfield is an order of magnitude cheaper than digging a tunnel.
"Without a court order, why does the government get to have my name, contact info, salary history, and God knows what else?"
You already have to give the government this data every year, its called 'paying your taxes'. You don't get to wait until the government gets a court order for you to disclose your W-2 do you?
But have you bothered to look up how many businesses Trump owns and/or runs? The answer is over 500. That's a whole lot of successes for relatively few failures. Even conservatively, 95% of his businesses were/are successful.
So your choice is really; Some loud mouth bozo with a 95% success rate in running businesses of all types, or a useless puppet with not a single success in her life.
What competent windows administrator hasn't already blocked the telemetry, live tile, and play store IP addresses at the corporate firewall already?
This is a dick move for sure by microsoft (not that apple didn't do this years ago), but seriously folks... Maybe for certain elements you use the domain policy to disable features and whatnot, but blocking access to other computers is EXACTLY why we have firewalls.
I'm not a very good windows admin, just a programmer for a small consulting company. And the very FIRST thing we did after installing a test Windows 10 box on a isolated test network is determine all the IP addresses to block, and which ones to not block to let update and search still work.
I'm a bit late to the party, so probably no one around to mod this down (or up)...
The top 0.1% doesn't actually want this to happen, but maybe it really should. Imagine for a moment that the 99.9% loose almost everything (dollar wise). At that moment, I get to keep my house. I get to trade whatever I want with whomever I want completely tax free. When I work, I get to work on my terms, what I grow in my garden I get to keep and trade as I see fit. I get to keep my car (gas will be hard to find for a while).
Why? Because its at that moment that all the cash held by the top 0.1% means absolutely zilch. Completely worthless because no one else will want it in trade for anything. Who is going to come cease my house/car/whatever? The police don't have any money, so they aren't working. The IRS employees don't have money, they aren't working. Nobody is working for money anymore, because money is worthless. They can't take my house, because there is no one to take it for them. Is Trump going to walk to my house and tell me to leave? Nope.
So when everyone "looses" everything, the they people that have everything actually have nothing.
I was walking to my Middle School in Lakeland, FL. We were close enough that we could see the trails of every launch, and generally the glow of the engines. I stopped on the nearest hill to watch, as I always did, but this time to be greeted with an extra large glow. I know almost exactly the spot I was standing, just up the hill from Scott Lake. Its a day I'll never soon forget, as every class was nothing but re-watching the same tragedy over and over.
The local news was filled with storied about Christa McAuliffe for days and days afterwords. She was supposed to be the first School Teacher ever in space.
It was also a day filled with jokes. While somewhat sick, it is a very common way for people to deal with the pain.
I still remember almost every joke, they are forever etched into my memories.
Look, his toy is very neat but it uses ideas and designs that have been used since at least the 1960's. He has a planetary gear inside a harmonic drive, which looks to be driving a second planetary gear inside a 2nd harmonic drive.
A typical planetary gear is good for 30:1, a harmonic anywhere from 200:1 to 300:1.
Just to burn some Karma i'm going to offer an opposing argument.
My biggest objection to municipality run ISP's is the rural factor; There is no laws that says a municipality has to provide service to those just outside.
I'm on Verizon DSL where I live, 3/4 mile outside of town limits but in a non-dense area. In college town there are thousands of apartments in high density areas, and also served by Verizon.
Now say the town decides to run it's own fiber to all these apartments. Now Verizon loses all that customer base, but is still required to operate in the surrounding low density areas. What do you think is going to happen to MY bills?
I know this thread is old, but as far as 'build it and they will come' I've been tracking AltSlashdot for the last two days now and I think they will pull it off.
Ok, I tried the beta. Yeah its not pretty, the comment section is pretty small width wise, it looks HORRIBLE on my iPad... The client side filtering of comments completely ignores my long time preferences, etc etc.
To the point; Many have asked about cloning Slashdot, and retaking the community site. But has anyone thought about how such a mission could be accomplished? Yes I know I can go grab slashcode and standup a 16 core xeon box to toss on my 100mbps connection. But what about the users, the stories, the comments. We can't just screen scrape those to stand up a new site.
In what possible way could we honestly standup a new slashdot that is community owned?
I'm an S-Corp as well, vs. a LLC for exactly those reasons. Namely I pay myself a standard rate, and bill out at a higher rate. There are several advantages, and caviets.
Let me jump in a say that MOST contract houses run at the 1.8 to 2.1 factor and for good reasons. For example, say I'm at a 2.0 factor. If I want my hourly rate to myself to be $40 I'll charge 2.0 times that to my customer, or $80.
The best reason to stay in that 1.8 to 2.1 range is that it is easy to account for in case of an audit. Most GSA have base * overhead * profit, where profit is supposed to be only 15%. However the overhead side of the equation is big, because it covers all the indirect employees; secretaries, accountants, IT staff, CEO's, etc. So on any given GSA contract, the billing rates will all end up in the 1.8 to 2.1 range.
1) The key here is the IRS knows GSA, so anything in that range is legit, so long story short stay at or ABOVE the 50% mark for your hourly rate vs billing rate if you want to stay off the IRS radar. 2) As much as you'd like to, don't ever write off part of your house on the S-Corp. Yes its legal, but since it is highly abused your more likely to be flagged for an audit. 3) Expense as much as your toys as you can, computers, routers, printers are all valid deductions of the S-Corp income. 4) Use quickbooks and its payroll add-ons. Yes there are other tools, but quickbooks is easy an worth the $300. Wait for a good sale in Feb of almost every year for $100 off. 5) Set everything up hourly, not salary. Set your billing rates, pay rates, vacation rates, even 401K or 408K per hour. This just is much easier to track and bill your clients, and pay yourself and your future employee's!
Another easier way to fix the youtube issue is built into almost every browser, incognito mode. Always browse youtube in incognito and it wont matter if your logged into gmail or not.
The real question in my opinion is what kind of guiding system do the drones use. Flying with visual guidance is considerably harder
We did this back in 2002 with the X-31, although we used a simulated carrier. So while it was the first actual landing of a drone, it wasn't even close to the first to do a full auto carrier landing.
What the most likely primary sensor technology is GPS for the drone, merged with good old rate/accel/intertial sensor suite. What was done with the X-31 was put a suedolite (ground gps) around the target, in this case it would be the carrier. The X-31 would do a first pass through the 'bubble' created by the ground station and refine it's position to within 1 cm (yes that close) in all 3 axis. Then it would circle the target and autoland starting at about 15km out.
So I doubt it is anything fancy like imaging, ladar, radar, but more likely enhanced GPS that the X-31 pioneered.
Oh, and the X-31 could hit that landing without the arresting gear but doing a stale manuever, wicked cool if you ever get to see the videos. Modern Marvels did a show on it and it has some of the ok footage.
Alibre is worth learning if your serious about CAD/CAM. The personal version is only $99 and should do anything you want outside of NURBS. You absolutely don't want to use something like Blender for 2D/3D precision work.
Alibre tries to follow the Solidworks way of doing things, so if you learn Alibre then you can quickly migrate to something more high-end if you ever need too.
It has support for full parametric solids cad, so it isn't the old school Autocad stuff where you have to pretend you know what its going to look like from your 2D sketches.
When your ready to cut metal, or print plastic, Alibre can output a number of solid models (STL) formats, as well as DWG and DXF which are critical for using importing into a good CAM package (whole nother ask slashdot on choosing a good CAM).
Alibre has some pretty easy to follow tutorials to get you started.
I don't work for the company, just a VERY happy camper when I bit the bullet 2 years or so ago and got the $99 version. Used it to design a 3D printer down to every last nut/bolt.
Yes its a challenge, but like everything worth doing...
Last, but not least, get plugged into the forums at cnczone.com. They have categories for every type of machine from mills, lathes, to 3D printers; from every type of CAD package to every type of CAM. Its a great asset, and once your hooked you'll spend more time reading on cnczone than here on Slashdot (sacrilegious i know).
Just a guess that your experience with Win 7 was in a corporate environment?
I've been running Win 7 at home for just over a year now and not ONCE did Windows force an update down my throat.
In fact, it probably has the BEST update system I've used. It'll download in the background (if you so choose) and only install at your next reboot. It NEVER asks me to reboot. If I happen to, the updates install quickly (already downloaded) and the machine is ready next power-up.
Now at WORK... They force the pop-ups, the force in the installs, and the force the reboots at the most asinine times of day, totally wrecking my workflow. Don't blame the OS for something that is totally under the influence of your corporate IT policy.
I would agree that historically that was true. But ever since they start experimenting with the 'Metro' dashboard on the xbox, it has been stuffed with Adverts.
I'd have a hard time believing the xbox team is still in the red.
As a followup, and generally high regard for canines, have you ever made a cat-ling gun? If not, why not? If so, how many lives do they have on average?
Slashdot Mirror
It's absolutely nuts to train the smartest people in the world at the best schools in the world... and then ask them to kindly leave.
I used to hold that same opinion, but I no longer do. Probably the best way to improve the impoverished of foreign countries, is the overall improvement of their own economies. We can send foreign aid all we want, but it's just a band-aid. But by training and re-injecting their own countryman back into their economy, we are actually helping them more than money could ever. And the better off their economies are, the less likely wars are going to be, and will afford more opportunities to improve trade.
Who.what is more motivated to fix a countries major issues (poverty, curruption, infrastructure)? Millions of dollars in food/equipment, or engineers with a native love for their fellow man?
That's not really a fair judgement, and depending on the situation I'd do nearly the same thing.
A building like that isn't bought in cash, but financed. You buy a building as an individual, and you get some deduction on your taxes based on the interest you had to pay. You then rent the space to a company you also own. This ensures that (a) you have enough income guarantee to pay your mortgage, (b) you have income to write your mortgage expenses off against, (c) your company has a front page deduction on it's taxes for the rent it paid you.
This isn't about siphoning money out of your startup, it's about ensuring that the money that the startup has to spend anyways is as deductible as possible. If the startup bought the building as an S or C CORP, then it has to get the mortgage in it's name, and take that deduction over a 30-50 year period of time per IRS rules. It also has to have enough credit and assets in order to qualify for the mortgage.
Buy having the owner buy the building, then rent it back; the company doesn't have to qualify for the mortgage on it's own, gets to write off rent immediately with no 30 year deduction rules, and doesn't have the large dept on it's books making it look more financially stable.
The rent that WeWork is charged by the owner needs only be enough to cover the owners mortgage, and both get front line deductions on their taxes.
Perhaps they shouldn't call it autopilot?
I really get tired of this argument. Do you even know where the term Autopilot comes from or what it means?
From Wikipedia emphasis mine:
An autopilot is a system used to control the trajectory of an aircraft without constant 'hands-on' control by a human operator being required. Autopilots do not replace human operators, but instead they assist them in controlling the aircraft. This allows them to focus on broader aspects of operations such as monitoring the trajectory, weather and systems.
The autopilot in every fucking definition of the word, is an assist device for the pilot, not a replacement. It handles speed, heading, and in some cases altitude. It doesn't monitor other aircraft, it doesn't avoid collisions, it doesn't (endless list of pilot tasks).
Seems to be the fundamental issue that everyone is missing. There is no way that the Tesla was going 65 at impact. The crush zone is barely impacted, the fire truck looks barely dented. At most that looks like a 7-10 MPH hit. Which means if the Autopilot was engaged, it was doing it's best to stop.
At 65 MPH, that Tesla would of be buried under that red truck up to it's A pillar's at a minimum, if not the B pillar.
I'm also a small business owner...
I take a salary like my other employee's, and pay the same taxes as my employee for my salary. What the GP is saying, is that most small businesses are setup as S-Corp, LLC, or Partnerships. In those cases, any profit left in the company at the close of the business year is assigned to the owner(s) and taxed to the owner(s) personal taxes. At that point, according to the IRS, that assigned money is now my personally money, even though I have to leave it in the company to make the next months payroll.
The nice thing is that assigned income gets to bypass FICA, but is still on the hook for Fed and State income tax. But where the burn really happens, at least for me, is ever quarter I have to pay all those extra taxes, only to see that money go towards payroll next quarter if/when sales aren't enough to cover the salaries. This happens seasonally to me, ever winter.
Basically I get to pay taxes on my salary AND the companies 'profits' in Q1, only to burn through all that money in Q2 without being able to recoup that taxed money. I think that is what the GP was referring to when he/she said they were buying equipment with 'personal money'.
He/she is doing it wrong, it's just how it works and it can be very painful when your trying to plan for paying your employees more than 3 months out during the slow sales season.
Herd mentality more like it... but since we're using world maps to prove points:
If you want to live a long life, then forget metric as it obviously causes lower life expectancy.
Since when do folks actually quote twitter as a news reference? And quoting some no-body twitter account that claims to be quoting someone else is NOT reference source.
I mean seriously people, might as well quote "The Sun".
Disruptive? Damn, and I thought we were supposed to be courageous now.
Talk about the wrong solution. This is Elon Musk we are talking about here. If he has problems getting to and from LAX, then the solution is to NOT go to LAX. Surely purchasing his own private Jet and flying from a more local airfield is an order of magnitude cheaper than digging a tunnel.
"Without a court order, why does the government get to have my name, contact info, salary history, and God knows what else?"
You already have to give the government this data every year, its called 'paying your taxes'. You don't get to wait until the government gets a court order for you to disclose your W-2 do you?
Fact is neither Clinton nor Trump have ever declared personal bankruptcy.
Yes at least 4 businesses owned/run by Donald Trump have filed bankruptcy, and likely a few more.
http://www.rollingstone.com/po...
But have you bothered to look up how many businesses Trump owns and/or runs? The answer is over 500. That's a whole lot of successes for relatively few failures. Even conservatively, 95% of his businesses were/are successful.
http://qz.com/461688/a-list-of...
So your choice is really; Some loud mouth bozo with a 95% success rate in running businesses of all types, or a useless puppet with not a single success in her life.
What competent windows administrator hasn't already blocked the telemetry, live tile, and play store IP addresses at the corporate firewall already?
This is a dick move for sure by microsoft (not that apple didn't do this years ago), but seriously folks... Maybe for certain elements you use the domain policy to disable features and whatnot, but blocking access to other computers is EXACTLY why we have firewalls.
I'm not a very good windows admin, just a programmer for a small consulting company. And the very FIRST thing we did after installing a test Windows 10 box on a isolated test network is determine all the IP addresses to block, and which ones to not block to let update and search still work.
I'm a bit late to the party, so probably no one around to mod this down (or up)...
The top 0.1% doesn't actually want this to happen, but maybe it really should. Imagine for a moment that the 99.9% loose almost everything (dollar wise). At that moment, I get to keep my house. I get to trade whatever I want with whomever I want completely tax free. When I work, I get to work on my terms, what I grow in my garden I get to keep and trade as I see fit. I get to keep my car (gas will be hard to find for a while).
Why? Because its at that moment that all the cash held by the top 0.1% means absolutely zilch. Completely worthless because no one else will want it in trade for anything. Who is going to come cease my house/car/whatever? The police don't have any money, so they aren't working. The IRS employees don't have money, they aren't working. Nobody is working for money anymore, because money is worthless. They can't take my house, because there is no one to take it for them. Is Trump going to walk to my house and tell me to leave? Nope.
So when everyone "looses" everything, the they people that have everything actually have nothing.
I was walking to my Middle School in Lakeland, FL. We were close enough that we could see the trails of every launch, and generally the glow of the engines. I stopped on the nearest hill to watch, as I always did, but this time to be greeted with an extra large glow. I know almost exactly the spot I was standing, just up the hill from Scott Lake. Its a day I'll never soon forget, as every class was nothing but re-watching the same tragedy over and over.
The local news was filled with storied about Christa McAuliffe for days and days afterwords. She was supposed to be the first School Teacher ever in space.
It was also a day filled with jokes. While somewhat sick, it is a very common way for people to deal with the pain.
I still remember almost every joke, they are forever etched into my memories.
Creative? Maybe. Revolutionary? No.
Look, his toy is very neat but it uses ideas and designs that have been used since at least the 1960's. He has a planetary gear inside a harmonic drive, which looks to be driving a second planetary gear inside a 2nd harmonic drive.
A typical planetary gear is good for 30:1, a harmonic anywhere from 200:1 to 300:1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicyclic_gearing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_drive
Taking the low numbers, 30*200*30*200 yields 36Million to 1.
So his 11 million to 1 ratio seems about right for putting together otherwise common parts.
Just to burn some Karma i'm going to offer an opposing argument.
My biggest objection to municipality run ISP's is the rural factor; There is no laws that says a municipality has to provide service to those just outside.
I'm on Verizon DSL where I live, 3/4 mile outside of town limits but in a non-dense area. In college town there are thousands of apartments in high density areas, and also served by Verizon.
Now say the town decides to run it's own fiber to all these apartments. Now Verizon loses all that customer base, but is still required to operate in the surrounding low density areas. What do you think is going to happen to MY bills?
I know this thread is old, but as far as 'build it and they will come' I've been tracking AltSlashdot for the last two days now and I think they will pull it off.
Ok, I tried the beta. Yeah its not pretty, the comment section is pretty small width wise, it looks HORRIBLE on my iPad... The client side filtering of comments completely ignores my long time preferences, etc etc.
To the point; Many have asked about cloning Slashdot, and retaking the community site. But has anyone thought about how such a mission could be accomplished? Yes I know I can go grab slashcode and standup a 16 core xeon box to toss on my 100mbps connection. But what about the users, the stories, the comments. We can't just screen scrape those to stand up a new site.
In what possible way could we honestly standup a new slashdot that is community owned?
Brett
I'm going to chime in here, as other have.
I'm an S-Corp as well, vs. a LLC for exactly those reasons. Namely I pay myself a standard rate, and bill out at a higher rate. There are several advantages, and caviets.
Let me jump in a say that MOST contract houses run at the 1.8 to 2.1 factor and for good reasons. For example, say I'm at a 2.0 factor. If I want my hourly rate to myself to be $40 I'll charge 2.0 times that to my customer, or $80.
The best reason to stay in that 1.8 to 2.1 range is that it is easy to account for in case of an audit. Most GSA have base * overhead * profit, where profit is supposed to be only 15%. However the overhead side of the equation is big, because it covers all the indirect employees; secretaries, accountants, IT staff, CEO's, etc. So on any given GSA contract, the billing rates will all end up in the 1.8 to 2.1 range.
1) The key here is the IRS knows GSA, so anything in that range is legit, so long story short stay at or ABOVE the 50% mark for your hourly rate vs billing rate if you want to stay off the IRS radar.
2) As much as you'd like to, don't ever write off part of your house on the S-Corp. Yes its legal, but since it is highly abused your more likely to be flagged for an audit.
3) Expense as much as your toys as you can, computers, routers, printers are all valid deductions of the S-Corp income.
4) Use quickbooks and its payroll add-ons. Yes there are other tools, but quickbooks is easy an worth the $300. Wait for a good sale in Feb of almost every year for $100 off.
5) Set everything up hourly, not salary. Set your billing rates, pay rates, vacation rates, even 401K or 408K per hour. This just is much easier to track and bill your clients, and pay yourself and your future employee's!
Another easier way to fix the youtube issue is built into almost every browser, incognito mode. Always browse youtube in incognito and it wont matter if your logged into gmail or not.
We did this back in 2002 with the X-31, although we used a simulated carrier. So while it was the first actual landing of a drone, it wasn't even close to the first to do a full auto carrier landing.
What the most likely primary sensor technology is GPS for the drone, merged with good old rate/accel/intertial sensor suite. What was done with the X-31 was put a suedolite (ground gps) around the target, in this case it would be the carrier. The X-31 would do a first pass through the 'bubble' created by the ground station and refine it's position to within 1 cm (yes that close) in all 3 axis. Then it would circle the target and autoland starting at about 15km out.
So I doubt it is anything fancy like imaging, ladar, radar, but more likely enhanced GPS that the X-31 pioneered.
Oh, and the X-31 could hit that landing without the arresting gear but doing a stale manuever, wicked cool if you ever get to see the videos. Modern Marvels did a show on it and it has some of the ok footage.
Alibre is worth learning if your serious about CAD/CAM. The personal version is only $99 and should do anything you want outside of NURBS. You absolutely don't want to use something like Blender for 2D/3D precision work.
Alibre tries to follow the Solidworks way of doing things, so if you learn Alibre then you can quickly migrate to something more high-end if you ever need too.
It has support for full parametric solids cad, so it isn't the old school Autocad stuff where you have to pretend you know what its going to look like from your 2D sketches.
When your ready to cut metal, or print plastic, Alibre can output a number of solid models (STL) formats, as well as DWG and DXF which are critical for using importing into a good CAM package (whole nother ask slashdot on choosing a good CAM).
Alibre has some pretty easy to follow tutorials to get you started.
I don't work for the company, just a VERY happy camper when I bit the bullet 2 years or so ago and got the $99 version. Used it to design a 3D printer down to every last nut/bolt.
Yes its a challenge, but like everything worth doing...
Last, but not least, get plugged into the forums at cnczone.com. They have categories for every type of machine from mills, lathes, to 3D printers; from every type of CAD package to every type of CAM. Its a great asset, and once your hooked you'll spend more time reading on cnczone than here on Slashdot (sacrilegious i know).
Just a guess that your experience with Win 7 was in a corporate environment?
I've been running Win 7 at home for just over a year now and not ONCE did Windows force an update down my throat.
In fact, it probably has the BEST update system I've used. It'll download in the background (if you so choose) and only install at your next reboot. It NEVER asks me to reboot. If I happen to, the updates install quickly (already downloaded) and the machine is ready next power-up.
Now at WORK... They force the pop-ups, the force in the installs, and the force the reboots at the most asinine times of day, totally wrecking my workflow. Don't blame the OS for something that is totally under the influence of your corporate IT policy.
Consoles have been a money pit for Microsoft.
I would agree that historically that was true. But ever since they start experimenting with the 'Metro' dashboard on the xbox, it has been stuffed with Adverts.
I'd have a hard time believing the xbox team is still in the red.
http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/ads-up-games-down-the-ugly-profitable-truth-about-xbox-live-advertising
As a followup, and generally high regard for canines, have you ever made a cat-ling gun? If not, why not? If so, how many lives do they have on average?