ignoring that the Loonie is worth more than $1 US now, I believe.
Yahoo is locating a data center in the county I live in and MS a little farther down the Columbia and on the other side.
In addition, the county-owned public utility districts (which are both of those and the Dalles where Google is) also operate a fiber-network in the Pacific Northwest.
Ummm - people are paying Verizon to use that copper. They have a duty to maintain it, not just charge for it whether it works or not. We have regular outages, often for 24 hours, on our business lines - always Verizon's fault. If we had an alternative, we'd have switched away from Verizon years ago.
Ask someone (or yourself) if you'd be in favor of a school that selected a small group of students who excelled in a particular area (like math), provided them with special instructors (who might even be paid extra) and special education sessions, special equipment (things as expensive as computers), free transportation to contests, and maybe even uniforms and special privileges for the competing students.
I haven't posed this to anyone in a long time, but when I did in the past, almost everyone opposed this kind of elitism. But most high schools and colleges still have football, basketball and other kinds of athletic teams, which is what I was describing.
I'm not especially excited by the idea of "mathletes", but I think it would be nice if schools devoted as many resources and as much emphasis to academic and intellectual areas (or even arts) as they do to athletics.
Whether it's tubes vs. transistors or vinyl vs. CD, it's worth keeping in mind the distinction of "sounds better" vs. "reproduces accurately". You may *like* the sound of tubes or vinyl better, but within normal limits of operation, there is no way tubes or vinyl more accurately reproduce sound than CDs or well-designed solid-state equipment.
As far as the article - the THD levels (3% to 30%) aren't unusual for 60's era equipment. Since the late 70's it's no big trick to design "transistor" equipment that has essentially unmeasurable THD even approaching rated power levels - it just requires lots of feedback and a better power supply than most consumer equipment has.
There isn't much point in observing that tubes clip waveforms more softly when you can design solid state equipment that never clips at all. However, some people may prefer the distorted output of tube amps to the accurate output of solid state amps.
I still use tube amps for guitar ("sounds better"), but all solid-state for playback ("more accurate"). Fender (and probably others) now offer DSP based amps that will emulate tube amplifier sound - haven't ever tried them, so I'm not sure how good they sound.
You must be one of those "revisionist historians" W is always whining about. Ask Bush Sr. why he lost re-election ("Read my lips... oops, sorry, guess I'm going to raise taxes anyway"). There was also a huge tax hike early in Clinton's first term, billed as the "largest tax increase in history" (which also preceded the longest period of sustained growth is US history as you indicate).Reagan himself insituted a tax hike following his first tax cut, as well as a huge increase in FICA taxes, which is most of the the taxes you pay today.
But otherwise you're right - there were no tax increases other than the ones you forgot to mention.
Yes, you can write off property tax, mortgage interest, and even homeowner's insurance. Suppose your home office is 15% of your home's area - you deduct 15% of the above against your business and 85% against your personal taxes. Why split it? Because your business income is subject to "self-employment tax" - the same as Social Security, but double (15.3%) with no exemptions, deductions (like Sched A anyway), etc. Unless you make over $100K a year, you'll probably pay more in self-employment tax than income tax, so you want to cut your business income as much as possible. The other big home office deduction is depreciation (if you own) or rent. But if you depreciate you need to look carefully at the tax laws if you ever plan on selling.
Oh, and you're home office has to be used *exclusively* for business - not part bedroom or rec room, or whatever.
I run StarBand. They say they've closed port 80, and they say they throttle speed for napster and similar stuff - there was an email to that effect from them a while ago.
Except for one 3 or 4 hr outage a few days ago, the reliability does seem to be getting better. You can *expect* 80-100KBps upstream, but you'll be doing well if you can match a 33KBps modem. The dish also acts like a magnet for rain and wet snow, so you can plan on a lot of trips in inclement weather to clean it off (or else forget about broadband until it dries). The third party mail service uses a "Window-ized" smtp that won't work with Linux (haven't checked lately though). OTOH, 80KByte/sec downloads are typical - mozilla in a little over 2 minutes. Browsing is comparable to a fast modem usually, but not always. There are latency delays, and also network delays. Ping times for yahoo.com run 700ms to 2s, avg about 900ms. It does support 2 or 3 simultaneous users pretty well, as the delays and latency don't really increase much in that case. They seem to manage load pretty well, and I don't see much difference with time of day. Overall I like it, but I also have no other choice until fiber comes to my door in about 5 years.
DirectTV installs were about as posted - StarBand was cheaper (maybe $600 total) last spring. If you have Dish also, you get $10/month off on the combination. At the moment it looks like Dish will buy DirectTV (and they own a chunk of StarBand too) You may find this really hard to believe, but tech support is actually very good.
The Constitutional purpose of patents is not to make money but to promote progress in science and the useful arts. Patenting the trivial or obvious or patenting prior art (this one seems to include both cases) is detrimental to progress in science or any other field.
Patenting things which are prior art is also detrimental to capitalism, since it increases the risk of lawsuits if not actual damages and limits genuine innovation. *Bogus* patents are antithetical to "making money" in both the short and long term, unless you're a lawyer. They're no different than the mob's "protection" rackets.
> Just wait for this low priced service to rise 10-50% over the next few years. @Home had cheap roll out price, but now it cost $51.00 a month here in > Oregon.
Do you get to vote for @Home's mgmt? We get to elect the Public Utility District commissioners. I'm paying less than 3 cents per KWh right now.
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ignoring that the Loonie is worth more than $1 US now, I believe.
Yahoo is locating a data center in the county I live in and MS a little farther down the Columbia and on the other side.
In addition, the county-owned public utility districts (which are both of those and the Dalles where Google is) also operate a fiber-network in the Pacific Northwest.
Ummm - people are paying Verizon to use that copper. They have a duty to maintain it, not just charge for it whether it works or not. We have regular outages, often for 24 hours, on our business lines - always Verizon's fault. If we had an alternative, we'd have switched away from Verizon years ago.
Ask someone (or yourself) if you'd be in favor of a school that selected a small group of students who excelled in a particular area (like math), provided them with special instructors (who might even be paid extra) and special education sessions, special equipment (things as expensive as computers), free transportation to contests, and maybe even uniforms and special privileges for the competing students.
I haven't posed this to anyone in a long time, but when I did in the past, almost everyone opposed this kind of elitism. But most high schools and colleges still have football, basketball and other kinds of athletic teams, which is what I was describing.
I'm not especially excited by the idea of "mathletes", but I think it would be nice if schools devoted as many resources and as much emphasis to academic and intellectual areas (or even arts) as they do to athletics.
Whether it's tubes vs. transistors or vinyl vs. CD, it's worth keeping in mind the distinction of "sounds better" vs. "reproduces accurately". You may *like* the sound of tubes or vinyl better, but within normal limits of operation, there is no way tubes or vinyl more accurately reproduce sound than CDs or well-designed solid-state equipment.
As far as the article - the THD levels (3% to 30%) aren't unusual for 60's era equipment. Since the late 70's it's no big trick to design "transistor" equipment that has essentially unmeasurable THD even approaching rated power levels - it just requires lots of feedback and a better power supply than most consumer equipment has.
There isn't much point in observing that tubes clip waveforms more softly when you can design solid state equipment that never clips at all. However, some people may prefer the distorted output of tube amps to the accurate output of solid state amps.
I still use tube amps for guitar ("sounds better"), but all solid-state for playback ("more accurate"). Fender (and probably others) now offer DSP based amps that will emulate tube amplifier sound - haven't ever tried them, so I'm not sure how good they sound.
You must be one of those "revisionist historians" W is always whining about. Ask Bush Sr. why he lost re-election ("Read my lips ... oops, sorry, guess I'm going to raise taxes anyway"). There was also a huge tax hike early in Clinton's first term, billed as the "largest tax increase in history" (which also preceded the longest period of sustained growth is US history as you indicate).Reagan himself insituted a tax hike following his first tax cut, as well as a huge increase in FICA taxes, which is most of the the taxes you pay today.
But otherwise you're right - there were no tax increases other than the ones you forgot to mention.
Yes, you can write off property tax, mortgage interest, and even homeowner's insurance. Suppose your home office is 15% of your home's area - you deduct 15% of the above against your business and 85% against your personal taxes. Why split it? Because your business income is subject to "self-employment tax" - the same as Social Security, but double (15.3%) with no exemptions, deductions (like Sched A anyway), etc. Unless you make over $100K a year, you'll probably pay more in self-employment tax than income tax, so you want to cut your business income as much as possible. The other big home office deduction is depreciation (if you own) or rent. But if you depreciate you need to look carefully at the tax laws if you ever plan on selling.
Oh, and you're home office has to be used *exclusively* for business - not part bedroom or rec room, or whatever.
I don't know what Mark Twain said, but Shakespeare said: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." [Henry VI, Part 2]
Ironically, I found the reference by googling.
I run StarBand. They say they've closed port 80, and they say they throttle speed for napster and similar stuff - there was an email to that effect from them a while ago.
Except for one 3 or 4 hr outage a few days ago, the reliability does seem to be getting better. You can *expect* 80-100KBps upstream, but you'll be doing well if you can match a 33KBps modem. The dish also acts like a magnet for rain and wet snow, so you can plan on a lot of trips in inclement weather to clean it off (or else forget about broadband until it dries). The third party mail service uses a "Window-ized" smtp that won't work with Linux (haven't checked lately though). OTOH, 80KByte/sec downloads are typical - mozilla in a little over 2 minutes. Browsing is comparable to a fast modem usually, but not always. There are latency delays, and also network delays. Ping times for yahoo.com run 700ms to 2s, avg about 900ms. It does support 2 or 3 simultaneous users pretty well, as the delays and latency don't really increase much in that case. They seem to manage load pretty well, and I don't see much difference with time of day. Overall I like it, but I also have no other choice until fiber comes to my door in about 5 years.
DirectTV installs were about as posted - StarBand was cheaper (maybe $600 total) last spring. If you have Dish also, you get $10/month off on the combination. At the moment it looks like Dish will buy DirectTV (and they own a chunk of StarBand too) You may find this really hard to believe, but tech support is actually very good.
The Constitutional purpose of patents is not to make money but to promote progress in science and the useful arts. Patenting the trivial or obvious or patenting prior art (this one seems to include both cases) is detrimental to progress in science or any other field.
Patenting things which are prior art is also detrimental to capitalism, since it increases the risk of lawsuits if not actual damages and limits genuine innovation. *Bogus* patents are antithetical to "making money" in both the short and long term, unless you're a lawyer. They're no different than the mob's "protection" rackets.
> Just wait for this low priced service to rise 10-50% over the next few years. @Home had cheap roll out price, but now it cost $51.00 a month here in > Oregon.
Do you get to vote for @Home's mgmt? We get to elect the Public Utility District commissioners. I'm paying less than 3 cents per KWh right now.