Well... yeah, that can be pared down for sure, and a lot depends on where you live. My rent is $900, and that's not a 1-bedroom apartment, it's a 3-bed, 2-bath house with a garage and large yard in a decent subdivision. I have a vegetable garden.
I don't have a car loan, either. I'm driving one that I bought for $1200, cash, so my expenses there are gas and insurance. I don't have A/C (don't really need it where I live), and my highest utility bills in the dead of winter run about $110 for gas and electric combined, because I shrink-wrap the windows and keep the thermostat at 65F.
I'm not a joyless tightwad, either. I just prefer to spend my money on the things I want, or save it, rather than waste it on car payments or cell phone data plans or satellite tv -- things that are not necessary to my survival or happiness. See: Maslow's hierarchy.:)
I just wish I'd been this clever when I was 20! Too soon old, too late smart, they say.
While your numbers reflect the reality that most people tend to live beyond their means, they also reflect stupidity.
Any single-income household grossing $50k/year should not be in a $300k house and $25k car. I find it disturbing that anyone should paint the picture you did, and in the next paragraph, use the phrase "bare necessities".
I make less than your hypothetical $50k, yet my total expenses in a month are 1/5th of my net, after taxes. Okay, I don't have a new McMansion, or a new car. Don't need them. Could I afford them? Sure. But it would take all of my money, and leave me none for savings and things I like to do.
I'm sorry, but that's the reality: Anyone in either of your scenarios is a moron, or at the very least, can't do math.
Trying to keep a ten-year-old all-American auto on the road is a money pit.
Me and my 14-year-old Saturn would beg to disagree. I bought it for $1000 two years ago, and my TCO thus far has been brake rotors and an A/C hose (besides the occasional tune-up, oil changes, etc). And at the 38 MPG it still gets, there is no new car with a fuel economy high enough to justify its price.
My old man has an '84 Toyota he bought for $600. The sum total of replacement parts it's required in 8 years and 40k miles (it's well over 200k total now) -- a battery and an alternator. It gets 37 MPG.
But then, I know what to look for, having been a mechanic. You, on the other hand -- keep buying those new cars! I'll buy them from you later at 10% of the price, after you've taken the hit.
I learned to drive without ABS, traction control, and all that other bullshit. Consequently, I had to learn to drive.
Once, I borrowed my ma's car on a snowy day, and almost wrecked it when the ABS did its thing. Having it NOT lock the wheels when I needed it to was totally unexpected behavior.
If I ever end up with a car that has ABS, I'm disabling it right off the bat. Same for traction control, which I've experienced in some cars, and found utterly useless. I'm sure they're great for incompetent drivers, but for anyone with a sufficient command of driving skill, only make things worse. But that's our nanny state. Anything designed to save idiots from themselves becomes legislated for all.
TV rots kids' brains? Why are we still arguing this? It is, as AGW disciples say, "settled science." Whether it's the flashing or the short scenes or the pernicious advertising or the political propaganda, it doesn't matter. Television is not healthy for children, and I defy anyone to prove any net good to it.
A word on the "I grew up on TV and I'z okay" posts: you're not. You just don't know any better. You don't have the outside perspective to see the difference. Maybe you're "okay," but could you be a little smarter if you grew up reading instead? Probably. Because while you were learning your ABCs and counting to 10 with Big Bird, the other 7-year-old down the street in a TV-less household is learning long division and reading National Geographic.
Now, that may not be a direct correlation, because I suspect the parents who keep the idiot box away from their kids not only care more, but are probably better educated to begin with. Regardless, I have found no case in which TV-babysat children are ahead of their non-TV-babysat peers in any way.
But, libertarian that I am, you do whatever you want with your kids. We still need fry cooks and garbagemen.
I work for a company that provides VoIP and data services (the kind of company the OP should be calling). We have some damn good sysadmins, who can run everything from Asterisk to Postfix. But we don't. Internally, we use an off-the-shelf Asterisk implementation with a nice interface, and for email, hosted Exchange on one domain and Google stuff on the other. We could write our own ticketing system, but we use a hosted solution. It costs us far less to pay for some of these hosted services than to develop our own.
So, while we could hand-roll everything, we don't. Our whole business is based on Asterisk somehow, but we don't use it raw. Time spent maintaining our own software is time we're denying our customers.
As far as boxed, premise solutions go, I really like the Adtran 7100. Handles all voice and data up to 100 seats, and their phones are very good too.
News presenter: "Sea ice in the Arctic at lowest levels EVAR! (Since 1979.)"
Ah, but there has been less ice before 1979, hasn't there? In fact, the rising, choking sea ice is why scientists thought, for a time, that global cooling was what was happening, careening the planet headlong into a new Ice Age. Surely a few Slashdotters are old enough to remember this.
Do we have a problem? Yep. Should we be doing things to clean up our environment? Absolutely. But beware any "solution" that comes from the realm of politics. Think about it. Only a handful of Congressmen have science education. Most are lawyers.
Considering the general fear and loathing of politicians around here -- I mean, really, Slashdot! We all know politicians are morons. Now you want to trust them to change the climate of the entire planet? Or, in trying to do so, pass the most tyrannical laws America has ever seen? You're off your rocker.
...that the KDE folks are working at making the little details better, rather than the Gnome fix-what-ain't-broke philosophy. (Not meant to start that old flame war, but mentioned because it's nice to have choices.)
Count me as one of the people who found the Windows 95 desktop to be a godsend. Taskbar, docking for a handful of everyday applications, a clock so I know when it's beer:30, and one comprehensive "start" menu to find stuff I don't need that often. There's a reason this design has been so successful: it's intuitive for most everyone. KDE 3.5 -> 4.0 wasn't a major change, just like Win95 -> Vista. (Referring to UI there, not core) There were, of course, growing pains for both, but by KDE 4.8 and Win7, pretty much worked out.
If we want to yet again bring up the conversion of Windows users to Linux, KDE is the only Linux DE that isn't a confusing pile of shit to a Windows user. It's a virtually painless transition, especially if the user in question has already gotten used to cross-platform applications like Firefox & Thunderbird.
My job has programming and sysadmin duties, so I'm not exactly a fresh-from-MS noob. Do I lose nerd cred for using a DE that resembles Windows? Meh. I don't care. I've got KDE where I want it -- clean, simple, organized, a workflow I'm used to for 15+ years, and exactly the right amount of eye candy. I've no interest in using an incomprehensible desktop with tons of keyboard shortcuts just to prove I'm 1337.:-)
We've already agreed on KDE. Now I say it: Grishnakh, I like the way you think. I'll add, portable oxy-acetylene rig with cutting torch. Or, there are some darn powerful battery powered impact wrenches out there.
Kinda like Mythbusters "proved" that a steel framed skyscraper can fall down like Aunt Jemima's pancakes from a fire by building a wooden model of the World Trade Center. Anyone thinking there is truth on TV does not deserve a nerd card.
I've been using KDE for years, and I always set it as the default DE for any new converts I make from Windows. It's enough like the XP interface for the user to quickly get comfortable. No complaints.
You make a good point about radical departures. The reason, IMO, that Windows 95 took the world by storm, is that it was a user interface that came very easy and natural to computer users. Its layout and functionality made sense. Its overall interface has stuck for almost 20 years now, and will probably continue to do so. Gnome and Win8 are competing to throw all that out the window. Why? It wasn't broke; don't fix it.
At this point the debate about solutions to global warming should look to Economists for evaluation of those proposed solutions, Climatologists are now not the experts who are needed to evaluate the proposed solutions.
But to take it in a different direction. If the solution proposed is Terraforming to deal with the impacts of global warming, much like solution the, um Economists from Freakanomics, came up with, then the experts needed would be Engineers in collaboration with Climate Scientists.
Sensibility of course comes down in favor of the engineering solution, but between the banksters and their economists on one side, and scientists and engineers on the other, guess who will win the political battle?
Take for example all the pie-in-the-sky methods proposed for sequestering carbon, as seen in Popular Science. All of them cost enormous amounts of (you guessed it, TAX) money. Lots of profit! The 1%-ers must profit profit profit from cleaning up the environment, after profiting from dirtying it!
Much simpler, cheaper, and more effective would be the change of some farming methods to increase organic topsoil. We know how the natural carbon cycle works, and we don't need expensive pumping stations and rare earth magnets and gobs of electricity to exploit it. Plant cover crops and trees? Re-green the deserts? But Wall Street can't get their fingers in that pie!
The solutions are simple, cheap, and effective. But not so long as politicians and economists and bankers continue to exploit science to their financial ends.
Hit the nail on the head. Topsoil loss is one of, if not the major source of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's a far and away bigger source than automobiles. The soil itself is our most easily accessible and workable carbon sink.
You'd think, all these people running around screaming about CO2, would know this. Adding an inch of organic topsoil to an area the size of, say, Nebraska... would clean more CO2 out of the air than taking all the SUV's off the planet's roads.
The bonus -- better yields, less fertilizer use, less chemical use, less erosion, better drought tolerance... etc.
The amplification of the hydrologic cycle is resulting in more intense precipitation events with longer periods of little precipitation in between, and dryer conditions in general for much of the USA. Preparing for every eventuallity seems rather costly when we know that some are not worth considering.
Working toward fixing desertification, deforestation, soil loss... is preparation for anything climate does. It's the same stuff regardless, and costs the same.
What's with the AGW-my-way-or-the-highway attitude around here? So much for/. being a haven for inquisitive scientific minds. I have actual solutions that are simple to implement, don't require carbon taxes, and result in a cleaner, saner environment for everyone whether the climate gets colder, hotter, wetter, or drier, but every time I suggest one I get lambasted for not fervently believing what you people see in your magic AGW crystal balls. There must be some heap magic in them crystal balls too, because all the climate scientists in the world can't predict if it will rain at my house tomorrow as accurately as I can feel it in my bones.
This is why water storage, in the form mainly of swales and ponds, for agriculture, is so critical. I live in a high desert region where this pretty much already happens, and instead of collecting the rain, we foolishly let it run downstream to flood places like Ohio.
So, I'm thinking, the flood/drought cycle is easier fixed with a bit of geo-engineering than trying to predict the future with AGW theories and otherwise sitting on our hands. Is it easier to deal with what climate hands us, or to change the whole climate?
As it is, I seem to have been brutally modded down by people who would rather bitch in advance about fruit what life will hand them next year, instead of making lemonade. WTF?
Thank you oh so much for informing me of my ignorance, AC. I guess the fact that I preside over an educational & support organization dedicated to sustainable agriculture was just a case of bad hiring?
As others mention below, the end result (if predictions are accurate, which is by no means guaranteed) is that the grain belt shifts northward into areas that aren't currently suitable for it, with the idea being that we don't really lose much staple crop farming capacity. While my organization focuses its efforts on soil reparative and water storage techniques which would mitigate such a situation, we don't see it as the Armageddon-level event predicted by the more strident GW acolytes. There are important things we need to be doing right now, rather than wasting our time arguing over what may or may not happen in the future.
The bottom line there is that we (my organization) don't need to hypothesize about what climate change will do. We are preparing farmers for any eventuality, including no change at all.
How about you, AC? What are you doing about it? Driving a Prius?
Farmers through the upper parts of the grain belt are terribly concerned about the shorter winters and longer growing season that Global Warming has been threatening them with... and of course farmers everywhere in the USA are dreadfully concerned about the looming prospect of increased rainfall....
What if I preferred my women to be genitally mutilated? Would that be a good reason to mutilate girls at birth? What if 80% of men favored it? Or heck, why stop at genitals? I bet we could get 90%+ of men to agree that girls should have their tongues removed at birth, eh? Because we all prefer women who don't talk back, don't we? It's just a minor modification... you don't need a tongue to live... it will prevent a lot of kissing and body piercing and that awful disease-transmitting oral sex, not to mention greatly reducing the possibility of lesbianism!
Imagine the public outrage over *that* notion... at which point anyone should feel very stupid for even using your argument.
I keep seeing this complaint -- "KDE is a resource hog! Horrors!"
What? You still running a Pentium I? I can't walk through Micro Center without tripping over 6-core processors and
I mean, sure, it's not cool to simply keep writing code to keep using up every bit of hardware you can buy, like MS does, but come on. I don't get the obsession behind needing a window manager that uses only 100M out of 12GB.
The safest place I can be is in a room with a bunch of guys with guns, most or all of them dedicated to the defense of ordinary citizens like me.
Cops dedicated to defending citizens? You must not live in the US... or any other country in this reality. You must have led a very sheltered life in Upper East Whitebreadville to trust police like that.
You hide out with the cops, the guys in suits come in, flash badges, and tell them you're a terrorist suspect. Off you go.
The fundamental flaw in your logic is in trusting other people to protect you. Get your own guns.
Marketing genius. If I'm making a gadget that looks exactly like the last gadget, I'll cook up a story with a reporter about how this amazing top secret gadget got stolen from my secret Bat-lair and exposed to the public... thus generating the storm of publicity that will get millions of hipster douchebags to camp out in front of my stores for 3 days to buy my latest indistinguishable-from-my-last-one gadget. I mean, how about that? My company's biggest fans read Gizmodo, and how coincidental Gizmodo gets my "stolen" "next-gen" gadget?
Not that Apple did that or anything;-) but it sounds like a good marketing plan;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Well... yeah, that can be pared down for sure, and a lot depends on where you live. My rent is $900, and that's not a 1-bedroom apartment, it's a 3-bed, 2-bath house with a garage and large yard in a decent subdivision. I have a vegetable garden.
I don't have a car loan, either. I'm driving one that I bought for $1200, cash, so my expenses there are gas and insurance. I don't have A/C (don't really need it where I live), and my highest utility bills in the dead of winter run about $110 for gas and electric combined, because I shrink-wrap the windows and keep the thermostat at 65F.
I'm not a joyless tightwad, either. I just prefer to spend my money on the things I want, or save it, rather than waste it on car payments or cell phone data plans or satellite tv -- things that are not necessary to my survival or happiness. See: Maslow's hierarchy. :)
I just wish I'd been this clever when I was 20! Too soon old, too late smart, they say.
While your numbers reflect the reality that most people tend to live beyond their means, they also reflect stupidity. Any single-income household grossing $50k/year should not be in a $300k house and $25k car. I find it disturbing that anyone should paint the picture you did, and in the next paragraph, use the phrase "bare necessities". I make less than your hypothetical $50k, yet my total expenses in a month are 1/5th of my net, after taxes. Okay, I don't have a new McMansion, or a new car. Don't need them. Could I afford them? Sure. But it would take all of my money, and leave me none for savings and things I like to do. I'm sorry, but that's the reality: Anyone in either of your scenarios is a moron, or at the very least, can't do math.
Trying to keep a ten-year-old all-American auto on the road is a money pit.
Me and my 14-year-old Saturn would beg to disagree. I bought it for $1000 two years ago, and my TCO thus far has been brake rotors and an A/C hose (besides the occasional tune-up, oil changes, etc). And at the 38 MPG it still gets, there is no new car with a fuel economy high enough to justify its price.
My old man has an '84 Toyota he bought for $600. The sum total of replacement parts it's required in 8 years and 40k miles (it's well over 200k total now) -- a battery and an alternator. It gets 37 MPG.
But then, I know what to look for, having been a mechanic. You, on the other hand -- keep buying those new cars! I'll buy them from you later at 10% of the price, after you've taken the hit.
I learned to drive without ABS, traction control, and all that other bullshit. Consequently, I had to learn to drive.
Once, I borrowed my ma's car on a snowy day, and almost wrecked it when the ABS did its thing. Having it NOT lock the wheels when I needed it to was totally unexpected behavior.
If I ever end up with a car that has ABS, I'm disabling it right off the bat. Same for traction control, which I've experienced in some cars, and found utterly useless. I'm sure they're great for incompetent drivers, but for anyone with a sufficient command of driving skill, only make things worse. But that's our nanny state. Anything designed to save idiots from themselves becomes legislated for all.
TV rots kids' brains? Why are we still arguing this? It is, as AGW disciples say, "settled science." Whether it's the flashing or the short scenes or the pernicious advertising or the political propaganda, it doesn't matter. Television is not healthy for children, and I defy anyone to prove any net good to it.
A word on the "I grew up on TV and I'z okay" posts: you're not. You just don't know any better. You don't have the outside perspective to see the difference. Maybe you're "okay," but could you be a little smarter if you grew up reading instead? Probably. Because while you were learning your ABCs and counting to 10 with Big Bird, the other 7-year-old down the street in a TV-less household is learning long division and reading National Geographic.
Now, that may not be a direct correlation, because I suspect the parents who keep the idiot box away from their kids not only care more, but are probably better educated to begin with. Regardless, I have found no case in which TV-babysat children are ahead of their non-TV-babysat peers in any way.
But, libertarian that I am, you do whatever you want with your kids. We still need fry cooks and garbagemen.
...doesn't mean you should.
I work for a company that provides VoIP and data services (the kind of company the OP should be calling). We have some damn good sysadmins, who can run everything from Asterisk to Postfix. But we don't. Internally, we use an off-the-shelf Asterisk implementation with a nice interface, and for email, hosted Exchange on one domain and Google stuff on the other. We could write our own ticketing system, but we use a hosted solution. It costs us far less to pay for some of these hosted services than to develop our own.
So, while we could hand-roll everything, we don't. Our whole business is based on Asterisk somehow, but we don't use it raw. Time spent maintaining our own software is time we're denying our customers.
As far as boxed, premise solutions go, I really like the Adtran 7100. Handles all voice and data up to 100 seats, and their phones are very good too.
News presenter: "Sea ice in the Arctic at lowest levels EVAR! (Since 1979.)"
Ah, but there has been less ice before 1979, hasn't there? In fact, the rising, choking sea ice is why scientists thought, for a time, that global cooling was what was happening, careening the planet headlong into a new Ice Age. Surely a few Slashdotters are old enough to remember this.
Do we have a problem? Yep. Should we be doing things to clean up our environment? Absolutely. But beware any "solution" that comes from the realm of politics. Think about it. Only a handful of Congressmen have science education. Most are lawyers.
Considering the general fear and loathing of politicians around here -- I mean, really, Slashdot! We all know politicians are morons. Now you want to trust them to change the climate of the entire planet? Or, in trying to do so, pass the most tyrannical laws America has ever seen? You're off your rocker.
...that the KDE folks are working at making the little details better, rather than the Gnome fix-what-ain't-broke philosophy. (Not meant to start that old flame war, but mentioned because it's nice to have choices.)
Count me as one of the people who found the Windows 95 desktop to be a godsend. Taskbar, docking for a handful of everyday applications, a clock so I know when it's beer:30, and one comprehensive "start" menu to find stuff I don't need that often. There's a reason this design has been so successful: it's intuitive for most everyone. KDE 3.5 -> 4.0 wasn't a major change, just like Win95 -> Vista. (Referring to UI there, not core) There were, of course, growing pains for both, but by KDE 4.8 and Win7, pretty much worked out.
If we want to yet again bring up the conversion of Windows users to Linux, KDE is the only Linux DE that isn't a confusing pile of shit to a Windows user. It's a virtually painless transition, especially if the user in question has already gotten used to cross-platform applications like Firefox & Thunderbird.
My job has programming and sysadmin duties, so I'm not exactly a fresh-from-MS noob. Do I lose nerd cred for using a DE that resembles Windows? Meh. I don't care. I've got KDE where I want it -- clean, simple, organized, a workflow I'm used to for 15+ years, and exactly the right amount of eye candy. I've no interest in using an incomprehensible desktop with tons of keyboard shortcuts just to prove I'm 1337. :-)
Microsoft are now the white-hat privacy advocates?
And what of Ixquick/Startpage?
We've already agreed on KDE. Now I say it: Grishnakh, I like the way you think. I'll add, portable oxy-acetylene rig with cutting torch. Or, there are some darn powerful battery powered impact wrenches out there.
Kinda like Mythbusters "proved" that a steel framed skyscraper can fall down like Aunt Jemima's pancakes from a fire by building a wooden model of the World Trade Center. Anyone thinking there is truth on TV does not deserve a nerd card.
I've been using KDE for years, and I always set it as the default DE for any new converts I make from Windows. It's enough like the XP interface for the user to quickly get comfortable. No complaints.
You make a good point about radical departures. The reason, IMO, that Windows 95 took the world by storm, is that it was a user interface that came very easy and natural to computer users. Its layout and functionality made sense. Its overall interface has stuck for almost 20 years now, and will probably continue to do so. Gnome and Win8 are competing to throw all that out the window. Why? It wasn't broke; don't fix it.
At this point the debate about solutions to global warming should look to Economists for evaluation of those proposed solutions, Climatologists are now not the experts who are needed to evaluate the proposed solutions.
But to take it in a different direction. If the solution proposed is Terraforming to deal with the impacts of global warming, much like solution the, um Economists from Freakanomics, came up with, then the experts needed would be Engineers in collaboration with Climate Scientists.
Sensibility of course comes down in favor of the engineering solution, but between the banksters and their economists on one side, and scientists and engineers on the other, guess who will win the political battle?
Take for example all the pie-in-the-sky methods proposed for sequestering carbon, as seen in Popular Science. All of them cost enormous amounts of (you guessed it, TAX) money. Lots of profit! The 1%-ers must profit profit profit from cleaning up the environment, after profiting from dirtying it!
Much simpler, cheaper, and more effective would be the change of some farming methods to increase organic topsoil. We know how the natural carbon cycle works, and we don't need expensive pumping stations and rare earth magnets and gobs of electricity to exploit it. Plant cover crops and trees? Re-green the deserts? But Wall Street can't get their fingers in that pie!
The solutions are simple, cheap, and effective. But not so long as politicians and economists and bankers continue to exploit science to their financial ends.
Hit the nail on the head. Topsoil loss is one of, if not the major source of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's a far and away bigger source than automobiles. The soil itself is our most easily accessible and workable carbon sink.
You'd think, all these people running around screaming about CO2, would know this. Adding an inch of organic topsoil to an area the size of, say, Nebraska... would clean more CO2 out of the air than taking all the SUV's off the planet's roads.
The bonus -- better yields, less fertilizer use, less chemical use, less erosion, better drought tolerance... etc.
The amplification of the hydrologic cycle is resulting in more intense precipitation events with longer periods of little precipitation in between, and dryer conditions in general for much of the USA. Preparing for every eventuallity seems rather costly when we know that some are not worth considering.
Working toward fixing desertification, deforestation, soil loss... is preparation for anything climate does. It's the same stuff regardless, and costs the same.
What's with the AGW-my-way-or-the-highway attitude around here? So much for /. being a haven for inquisitive scientific minds. I have actual solutions that are simple to implement, don't require carbon taxes, and result in a cleaner, saner environment for everyone whether the climate gets colder, hotter, wetter, or drier, but every time I suggest one I get lambasted for not fervently believing what you people see in your magic AGW crystal balls. There must be some heap magic in them crystal balls too, because all the climate scientists in the world can't predict if it will rain at my house tomorrow as accurately as I can feel it in my bones.
This is why water storage, in the form mainly of swales and ponds, for agriculture, is so critical. I live in a high desert region where this pretty much already happens, and instead of collecting the rain, we foolishly let it run downstream to flood places like Ohio.
So, I'm thinking, the flood/drought cycle is easier fixed with a bit of geo-engineering than trying to predict the future with AGW theories and otherwise sitting on our hands. Is it easier to deal with what climate hands us, or to change the whole climate?
As it is, I seem to have been brutally modded down by people who would rather bitch in advance about fruit what life will hand them next year, instead of making lemonade. WTF?
Thank you oh so much for informing me of my ignorance, AC. I guess the fact that I preside over an educational & support organization dedicated to sustainable agriculture was just a case of bad hiring?
As others mention below, the end result (if predictions are accurate, which is by no means guaranteed) is that the grain belt shifts northward into areas that aren't currently suitable for it, with the idea being that we don't really lose much staple crop farming capacity. While my organization focuses its efforts on soil reparative and water storage techniques which would mitigate such a situation, we don't see it as the Armageddon-level event predicted by the more strident GW acolytes. There are important things we need to be doing right now, rather than wasting our time arguing over what may or may not happen in the future.
The bottom line there is that we (my organization) don't need to hypothesize about what climate change will do. We are preparing farmers for any eventuality, including no change at all.
How about you, AC? What are you doing about it? Driving a Prius?
That's crazy talk. Everyone knows that NASA is National Aeronautics and Space Agency, and NOAA is National Ocean--
Never mind. :-)
Farmers through the upper parts of the grain belt are terribly concerned about the shorter winters and longer growing season that Global Warming has been threatening them with... and of course farmers everywhere in the USA are dreadfully concerned about the looming prospect of increased rainfall....
By not aborting you, your mother condemned you to death someday of Alzheimer's or cancer or heart attack or diabetes or....
Maybe you should just kill yourself before you can die a horrible natural death.
What if I preferred my women to be genitally mutilated? Would that be a good reason to mutilate girls at birth? What if 80% of men favored it? Or heck, why stop at genitals? I bet we could get 90%+ of men to agree that girls should have their tongues removed at birth, eh? Because we all prefer women who don't talk back, don't we? It's just a minor modification... you don't need a tongue to live... it will prevent a lot of kissing and body piercing and that awful disease-transmitting oral sex, not to mention greatly reducing the possibility of lesbianism!
Imagine the public outrage over *that* notion... at which point anyone should feel very stupid for even using your argument.
^^^ 6-core processors and RAM at less than $5 a gig.
I keep seeing this complaint -- "KDE is a resource hog! Horrors!"
What? You still running a Pentium I? I can't walk through Micro Center without tripping over 6-core processors and
I mean, sure, it's not cool to simply keep writing code to keep using up every bit of hardware you can buy, like MS does, but come on. I don't get the obsession behind needing a window manager that uses only 100M out of 12GB.
The safest place I can be is in a room with a bunch of guys with guns, most or all of them dedicated to the defense of ordinary citizens like me.
Cops dedicated to defending citizens? You must not live in the US... or any other country in this reality. You must have led a very sheltered life in Upper East Whitebreadville to trust police like that.
You hide out with the cops, the guys in suits come in, flash badges, and tell them you're a terrorist suspect. Off you go.
The fundamental flaw in your logic is in trusting other people to protect you. Get your own guns.
Kinda like the "stolen/leaked" iPhone story.
Marketing genius. If I'm making a gadget that looks exactly like the last gadget, I'll cook up a story with a reporter about how this amazing top secret gadget got stolen from my secret Bat-lair and exposed to the public... thus generating the storm of publicity that will get millions of hipster douchebags to camp out in front of my stores for 3 days to buy my latest indistinguishable-from-my-last-one gadget. I mean, how about that? My company's biggest fans read Gizmodo, and how coincidental Gizmodo gets my "stolen" "next-gen" gadget?
Not that Apple did that or anything ;-) but it sounds like a good marketing plan ;-)
Cool story, Jobs!