I am so through with this. I don't know where you went to school, but they didn't do you any favors when it comes to economics or history. You sound like a combination of modern AM radio and a 40 year old book on how hyperinflation would destroy the country by 1984.
The actual cause of the great depression was the exact opposite of what your Keynesian shaman friends told you. The cause of the Great Depression was government inflating the currency and mis-allocating labor and existing credit to public projects and not allowing the economy to restructure.
ROFLMAO! That's funny! You should take that show on the road!
I agree to some extent, but would contend in the case of Europe that it's a unified currency for a union that does not form a commonwealth. Here in California, there's a net outflow of our tax dollars to the red states in order to prop up their economies. That's true even in good times. And it makes sense because California would be worse off if conditions in the red states were worse.
Of course the red states call that socialism, but that doesn't stop them from cashing the checks.
The rest of the EU would have saved a lot of time and money and hurt if they had just assumed Greece's debts. Germany could have payed off the whole thing without even noticing the additional debt because of the difference in the size of their economies. But Germany would rather lose half a trillion of tax revenue than to pay off 50 billion of Greek debt.
Your understanding of economics comes from propaganda and is essentially zero. There's more to economics than can be found in Ayn Rand and the Turner Diaries.
That comes from you not understanding that gold is not just a commodity, it's actual money.
More Libertarian bullshit. Gold is subject to the same rules of supply and demand that any commodity is. It's not a magical device that ignores economics.
It's what created the Great Depression. So really, all currencies may go down in flames.
Yes, currencies went down in flames but that was a symptom of the collapse, not a cause. The cause of the collapse was austerity plans (sound familiar? Europe is doing it again!) which reduced government spending and caused economies to shrink, which caused further austerity plans. Does this not ring any bells? Countries that increased government spending weathered the depression better than those that decreased it. What really ended the depression? The massive government spending leading up to World War II, a war that was to a large part a result of the German austerity measures.
As the saying goes "Those who don't learn from history are brain dead morons who deserve to repeat it."
Since then US had one stimulus after another, don't forget, Clinton stimulated with low interest rates, there was internet bubble caused by that 'stimulus', then it burst, but that time there was no Freddie/Fannie/FDIC to propagate the bursting of that bubble and so it was basically contained to the individual and some institutional investors losing money.
What Kool-aid are you drinking that alters hisory? Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the FDIC all existed at that time. What was different was that banks hadn't yet been given the go ahead to speculate in risky investments like stocks and derivatives. In other words regulation worked. Unfortunately that regulation was removed in 1999 by a Republican congress and a conservative Democratic president. The banks wanted to invest in those things because they could make them a lot of money. Unfortunately, as we saw, it can loose them a lot of money, too. The removal of that regulation is primarily what gave us this crash. But of course, conservatives such as yourself think that going back to the regulations that kept us depression free from 1937 to 1999 would be equivalent to Communism.
The SS trust fund isn't gone. It's in T-bills. The same kind of T-bills that keep on selling at very low interest. Apparently the people buying them are not yet concerned about inflation. In fact some people (think China) will keep buying them to keep the dollar overvalued compared to the yuan. Remember, there was a time when the national debt was over 100% of GDP, and we survived that.
No, spending money that the country does not have by borrowing and printing and creating inflation (check gold prices)
I could just stop reading there and know the rest of the post is bullshit because you have no understanding of economics. You think gold prices are an indication of inflation, when they are really an indication of increased demand for gold. You can check on inflation predictions by checking U.S. bond prices. China can't afford high U.S. inflation (i.e. a devaluation of the dollar) and will keep buying bonds. A cheaper dollar would be a problem for their deliberately undervalued currency.
Your "correct way" of fixing the the economy would make the great depression look like a lost wallet. The currency would collapse to zero and unemployment would hit 80 percent. It would be a great way of making the U.S. look like Somalia. At least until the revolution came. And don't think the rebels are going to turn the country into your libertarian paradise.
But most of all your post is a sad commentary on the state of education in this country.
If there's a "-1 Troll" moderation, why isn't there a "-1 Dufus" mod? You may not like the projects on which it is spent, but that doesn't mean that it's not stimulating the economy. Do you somehow think that money just disappeared? That the people hired to do these things took the money and put it under a mattress?
Not to mention that a large number of the things on that map weren't done with stimulus money, and in some cases weren't done with federal money. If some town is stupid enough to pay its city manager $800k, it's no business of yours unless you live there. I wouldn't be surprised if half of them were gross misrepresentations or outright lies.
Hell, didn't Verizon announce their own Android app store?
Yes, it appears as a separate tab in the Marketplace app. You can go there to install all the Vcast apps.
Who's gonna bet that the Google Marketplace app suddenly disappears from Verizon phones?
If it does, you go to a Google website and download the Marketplace app. If Verizon prevents that, then we all go find a different carrier when our contracts are up. If the Verizon app store is as closed and controlled as the Apple AppStore, I would leave.
the ultimate question I have, is will Verizon make you use V-cast apps? Will they force you to use Bing? Will they even allow you to use the App Store?
Verizon doesn't make Android phones use V-cast apps (although they can be installed if the user wants them). Verizon doesn't force Android phones to use Bing. Most, if not all, default to Google. Verizon Android phones use the Marketplace for apps and Amazon.com for music, so I assume a Verizon iPhone would use the App Store for apps and iTunes for music.
Even if it was my "new every 2" year, I wouldn't be getting an iPhone. I like to play classic games on console emulators on my phone. I like to be able to visit flash based web sites when necessary. I also like to be able to transfer things back and forth over USB and bluetooth without worrying about whether I'm allowed to do that. I don't buy my music from iTunes. I like free tethering.
Of course Verizon will love the iPhone, because the whole concept fits in with their control freak persona.
The problem is more that we're at a point in resolution that for productivity/business purposes it's not the pixels that matter but screen format.
Like it or not most non-entertainment computing is still done in units of about 8.5"x11". So the screen you want is one that fits an integral number of those best. For single page, you'd want a 10:13 display at least 19" diagonal. For dual page you'd want a 20:13 display of at least 27".
A 4:3 monitor displaying a single page wastes 42% of the area. A 16:10 monitor displaying a single page wastes 52%. Another way of putting it, using fit width, a 4:3 monitor can see a 6.3" vertical region of the page while a 16:10 monitor sees 5.3". It's a substantial difference. And it's what we get when we put "content providers" in charge of deciding what we're going to do with out computers.
Not to mention that the original submission was about laptops. You can't drag a 2048x1536 27" monitor with you through security in order to use it on the airplane. Even if you get it and the fully charged UPS through security, the flight attendants get pretty POed when it won't fit under the seat in front of you.
TFS wasn't as clear as the submission. The submitter was talking about laptops. And unfortunately the answer is laptop manufacturers have decided that what you really want to do on your laptop is watch DVDs. Who would want to do anything productive on a laptop?
My previous laptop was a ThinkPad X31 with a 12.1" 1024x768 screen (4:3) because I wanted the lightest laptop possible. When it died, I bought an X200s with 12.1" 1280x800 (16:10). It sucks for actual work because of what is effectively 20% less screen space, even though the screen area isn't reduced by nearly that much. Think of it as viewing a maximized PDF in "fit width" mode. With a wide screen you just see less. Using VNC to even virtual displays as small as 1024x768 is painful. Add in smaller palm rests and a shorter (vertically) keyboard and it's practically annoying.
Of course at work I hook it up to a large format 4x3 monitor. At home I have a 1680x1050 monitor that's large enough that I don't need to maximize windows. But when I'm on the road it's still that damn wide screen. I could buy a larger laptop, but who wants to lug that much weight around the world and annoy the people sitting next to you on the plane because your laptop is half in their seat.
New rule. Any laptop screen smaller than 14" must be in 4:3 format.
For me this is the most profound discovery in the history of us. Without hyperbole.
Unfortunately the announcement of this discovery was accompanied by way to much hyperbole. For all we know this planet could have runaway greenhouse, be fully covered with a 300 mile deep ocean, or have no liquid water whatsoever. We'll need some really huge space telescopes to confirm its properties before we could justify making this journey with an unmanned probe. By big, I mean a few years of the US military budget to pay for them (My very rough estimate is $1.5T to get an image of the planet, but since the technologies don't really exist it could be less or a lot more). Even that would be cheap compared to sending the probe.
In other words, it ain't gonna happen in our lifetimes unless unlimited free energy is discovered soon.
The Andromeda paradox [wikipedia.org] for instance indicate that, if relativity is right, then the future is predetermined, since two observers moving at different speeds will have different opinions on what is happening in a distant place.
Like most relativistic paradoxes it's not a paradox at all. 'Now' is a term that should only be applied locally. Even once existence of the fleet in motion is seen, the observers will disagree about where it is, when it left, and how long it's been in transit. In other words a present that can't be seen is no more determined than a future that can't be seen or a part of the past that can't be seen.
It's primarily a problem of language not being equal to mathematics. We think of the future as undetermined, the past as concrete, and the present as the point where future solidifies to become past. Well, the undetermined and the concrete and the surface where they meet are all defined in relativity. They just don't correspond to the past/present/future definition we are used to. In relativity, we can't see any part of the future. We can only see a single point of the present, called "here". And the parts of the past that we can see and are determined are defined by light travel time. Anything outside of those regions we can see cannot affect anything 'now.'
It's not easy to visualize. For that you can blame four billion years of evolution where visualizing relativity was not a required survival trait.
Yeah, 30 is about right for a light rider with minimal additional load for one day. You could probably average 20 a day in that condition. Add a wagon and 10-15 might be the maximum. Visit any rural area and the distance between towns is probably dependent upon how far you could travel in a day when they were established. 10 miles or less apart when the dominant mode of transportation was walking. 15 to 20 miles when horses or horse+cart became dominant. After all, if you're building a home on the frontier, you probably don't want it to be more than a day's ride from town.
I'd say "A free office suite that includes every configuration option and feature from every office suite that ever existed yet requires that documents be tapped out in Morse code on the space bar is to Office as SIP is to Skype."
You don't need to. Skype through other Android apps works fine. Verizon enforces this policy by requesting that the app authors disable VOIP. If the app authors don't do so, Verizon doesn't do anything to stop them from distributing the app.
Just get Fring and call through it rather than using the Skype app. The only thing you lose is that your Skype contact list doesn't get integrated with your phone contact list in Fring. Your phone contacts are visible in Fring, but your Fring/Skype contacts don't show up on the phone contact list.
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I am so through with this. I don't know where you went to school, but they didn't do you any favors when it comes to economics or history. You sound like a combination of modern AM radio and a 40 year old book on how hyperinflation would destroy the country by 1984.
The actual cause of the great depression was the exact opposite of what your Keynesian shaman friends told you. The cause of the Great Depression was government inflating the currency and mis-allocating labor and existing credit to public projects and not allowing the economy to restructure.
ROFLMAO! That's funny! You should take that show on the road!
I agree to some extent, but would contend in the case of Europe that it's a unified currency for a union that does not form a commonwealth. Here in California, there's a net outflow of our tax dollars to the red states in order to prop up their economies. That's true even in good times. And it makes sense because California would be worse off if conditions in the red states were worse.
Of course the red states call that socialism, but that doesn't stop them from cashing the checks.
The rest of the EU would have saved a lot of time and money and hurt if they had just assumed Greece's debts. Germany could have payed off the whole thing without even noticing the additional debt because of the difference in the size of their economies. But Germany would rather lose half a trillion of tax revenue than to pay off 50 billion of Greek debt.
Your understanding of economics comes from propaganda and is essentially zero. There's more to economics than can be found in Ayn Rand and the Turner Diaries.
That comes from you not understanding that gold is not just a commodity, it's actual money.
More Libertarian bullshit. Gold is subject to the same rules of supply and demand that any commodity is. It's not a magical device that ignores economics.
It's what created the Great Depression. So really, all currencies may go down in flames.
Yes, currencies went down in flames but that was a symptom of the collapse, not a cause. The cause of the collapse was austerity plans (sound familiar? Europe is doing it again!) which reduced government spending and caused economies to shrink, which caused further austerity plans. Does this not ring any bells? Countries that increased government spending weathered the depression better than those that decreased it. What really ended the depression? The massive government spending leading up to World War II, a war that was to a large part a result of the German austerity measures.
As the saying goes "Those who don't learn from history are brain dead morons who deserve to repeat it."
Since then US had one stimulus after another, don't forget, Clinton stimulated with low interest rates, there was internet bubble caused by that 'stimulus', then it burst, but that time there was no Freddie/Fannie/FDIC to propagate the bursting of that bubble and so it was basically contained to the individual and some institutional investors losing money.
What Kool-aid are you drinking that alters hisory? Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the FDIC all existed at that time. What was different was that banks hadn't yet been given the go ahead to speculate in risky investments like stocks and derivatives. In other words regulation worked. Unfortunately that regulation was removed in 1999 by a Republican congress and a conservative Democratic president. The banks wanted to invest in those things because they could make them a lot of money. Unfortunately, as we saw, it can loose them a lot of money, too. The removal of that regulation is primarily what gave us this crash. But of course, conservatives such as yourself think that going back to the regulations that kept us depression free from 1937 to 1999 would be equivalent to Communism.
The SS trust fund isn't gone. It's in T-bills. The same kind of T-bills that keep on selling at very low interest. Apparently the people buying them are not yet concerned about inflation. In fact some people (think China) will keep buying them to keep the dollar overvalued compared to the yuan. Remember, there was a time when the national debt was over 100% of GDP, and we survived that.
No, spending money that the country does not have by borrowing and printing and creating inflation (check gold prices)
I could just stop reading there and know the rest of the post is bullshit because you have no understanding of economics. You think gold prices are an indication of inflation, when they are really an indication of increased demand for gold. You can check on inflation predictions by checking U.S. bond prices. China can't afford high U.S. inflation (i.e. a devaluation of the dollar) and will keep buying bonds. A cheaper dollar would be a problem for their deliberately undervalued currency.
Your "correct way" of fixing the the economy would make the great depression look like a lost wallet. The currency would collapse to zero and unemployment would hit 80 percent. It would be a great way of making the U.S. look like Somalia. At least until the revolution came. And don't think the rebels are going to turn the country into your libertarian paradise.
But most of all your post is a sad commentary on the state of education in this country.
If there's a "-1 Troll" moderation, why isn't there a "-1 Dufus" mod? You may not like the projects on which it is spent, but that doesn't mean that it's not stimulating the economy. Do you somehow think that money just disappeared? That the people hired to do these things took the money and put it under a mattress?
Not to mention that a large number of the things on that map weren't done with stimulus money, and in some cases weren't done with federal money. If some town is stupid enough to pay its city manager $800k, it's no business of yours unless you live there. I wouldn't be surprised if half of them were gross misrepresentations or outright lies.
I don't have to root my Verizon Android phone to do any of those things.
Hell, didn't Verizon announce their own Android app store?
Yes, it appears as a separate tab in the Marketplace app. You can go there to install all the Vcast apps.
Who's gonna bet that the Google Marketplace app suddenly disappears from Verizon phones?
If it does, you go to a Google website and download the Marketplace app. If Verizon prevents that, then we all go find a different carrier when our contracts are up. If the Verizon app store is as closed and controlled as the Apple AppStore, I would leave.
the ultimate question I have, is will Verizon make you use V-cast apps? Will they force you to use Bing? Will they even allow you to use the App Store?
Verizon doesn't make Android phones use V-cast apps (although they can be installed if the user wants them). Verizon doesn't force Android phones to use Bing. Most, if not all, default to Google. Verizon Android phones use the Marketplace for apps and Amazon.com for music, so I assume a Verizon iPhone would use the App Store for apps and iTunes for music.
iPhone does let you write your own apps, fandroid.
And if you pay $99, Steve Jobs will even let you run your apps on your own phone.
Even if it was my "new every 2" year, I wouldn't be getting an iPhone. I like to play classic games on console emulators on my phone. I like to be able to visit flash based web sites when necessary. I also like to be able to transfer things back and forth over USB and bluetooth without worrying about whether I'm allowed to do that. I don't buy my music from iTunes. I like free tethering.
Of course Verizon will love the iPhone, because the whole concept fits in with their control freak persona.
The problem is more that we're at a point in resolution that for productivity/business purposes it's not the pixels that matter but screen format. Like it or not most non-entertainment computing is still done in units of about 8.5"x11". So the screen you want is one that fits an integral number of those best. For single page, you'd want a 10:13 display at least 19" diagonal. For dual page you'd want a 20:13 display of at least 27".
A 4:3 monitor displaying a single page wastes 42% of the area. A 16:10 monitor displaying a single page wastes 52%. Another way of putting it, using fit width, a 4:3 monitor can see a 6.3" vertical region of the page while a 16:10 monitor sees 5.3". It's a substantial difference. And it's what we get when we put "content providers" in charge of deciding what we're going to do with out computers.
My fingers are broken, you insensitive bastard!
Not to mention that the original submission was about laptops. You can't drag a 2048x1536 27" monitor with you through security in order to use it on the airplane. Even if you get it and the fully charged UPS through security, the flight attendants get pretty POed when it won't fit under the seat in front of you.
TFS wasn't as clear as the submission. The submitter was talking about laptops. And unfortunately the answer is laptop manufacturers have decided that what you really want to do on your laptop is watch DVDs. Who would want to do anything productive on a laptop?
My previous laptop was a ThinkPad X31 with a 12.1" 1024x768 screen (4:3) because I wanted the lightest laptop possible. When it died, I bought an X200s with 12.1" 1280x800 (16:10). It sucks for actual work because of what is effectively 20% less screen space, even though the screen area isn't reduced by nearly that much. Think of it as viewing a maximized PDF in "fit width" mode. With a wide screen you just see less. Using VNC to even virtual displays as small as 1024x768 is painful. Add in smaller palm rests and a shorter (vertically) keyboard and it's practically annoying.
Of course at work I hook it up to a large format 4x3 monitor. At home I have a 1680x1050 monitor that's large enough that I don't need to maximize windows. But when I'm on the road it's still that damn wide screen. I could buy a larger laptop, but who wants to lug that much weight around the world and annoy the people sitting next to you on the plane because your laptop is half in their seat.
New rule. Any laptop screen smaller than 14" must be in 4:3 format.
For me this is the most profound discovery in the history of us. Without hyperbole.
Unfortunately the announcement of this discovery was accompanied by way to much hyperbole. For all we know this planet could have runaway greenhouse, be fully covered with a 300 mile deep ocean, or have no liquid water whatsoever. We'll need some really huge space telescopes to confirm its properties before we could justify making this journey with an unmanned probe. By big, I mean a few years of the US military budget to pay for them (My very rough estimate is $1.5T to get an image of the planet, but since the technologies don't really exist it could be less or a lot more). Even that would be cheap compared to sending the probe.
In other words, it ain't gonna happen in our lifetimes unless unlimited free energy is discovered soon.
The Andromeda paradox [wikipedia.org] for instance indicate that, if relativity is right, then the future is predetermined, since two observers moving at different speeds will have different opinions on what is happening in a distant place.
Like most relativistic paradoxes it's not a paradox at all. 'Now' is a term that should only be applied locally. Even once existence of the fleet in motion is seen, the observers will disagree about where it is, when it left, and how long it's been in transit. In other words a present that can't be seen is no more determined than a future that can't be seen or a part of the past that can't be seen.
It's primarily a problem of language not being equal to mathematics. We think of the future as undetermined, the past as concrete, and the present as the point where future solidifies to become past. Well, the undetermined and the concrete and the surface where they meet are all defined in relativity. They just don't correspond to the past/present/future definition we are used to. In relativity, we can't see any part of the future. We can only see a single point of the present, called "here". And the parts of the past that we can see and are determined are defined by light travel time. Anything outside of those regions we can see cannot affect anything 'now.'
It's not easy to visualize. For that you can blame four billion years of evolution where visualizing relativity was not a required survival trait.
Yeah, 30 is about right for a light rider with minimal additional load for one day. You could probably average 20 a day in that condition. Add a wagon and 10-15 might be the maximum. Visit any rural area and the distance between towns is probably dependent upon how far you could travel in a day when they were established. 10 miles or less apart when the dominant mode of transportation was walking. 15 to 20 miles when horses or horse+cart became dominant. After all, if you're building a home on the frontier, you probably don't want it to be more than a day's ride from town.
Fring went and made a liar out of me. An update they shipped today appears to have removed the Skype plugin entirely.
I'd say "A free office suite that includes every configuration option and feature from every office suite that ever existed yet requires that documents be tapped out in Morse code on the space bar is to Office as SIP is to Skype."
SIP is a royal PITA to set up and use. I tried it and decided I have better things to do with my time.
You don't need to. Skype through other Android apps works fine. Verizon enforces this policy by requesting that the app authors disable VOIP. If the app authors don't do so, Verizon doesn't do anything to stop them from distributing the app.
Just get Fring and call through it rather than using the Skype app. The only thing you lose is that your Skype contact list doesn't get integrated with your phone contact list in Fring. Your phone contacts are visible in Fring, but your Fring/Skype contacts don't show up on the phone contact list.