Actually, as a followup to my previous post, if you want a specific recommendation, try the penfed platinum rewards card. no foreign transaction fee, no annual fee, 5% back on gas, 3% back on groceries, 1% back on everything else. You can also get a $250 sign up bonus at the moment. Although penfed is designed for federal employees, anybody can get in. If you don't have a qualifying relative, then the easiest way to get in is to make a small one time donation ($20, I think) to one of the military charities listed. I did years ago, and it's easily paid for itself 100 times over. They've got great car loan and mortgage rates.
Good. Maybe this will teach future political leaders that censorship is a bad idea.
Oh who am I kidding, these idiots never learn anything.
Of course they won't learn. They didn't learn from last time. There was no surprise about what the outcome would be. This had already been pretty well tested. Illinois had passed the same sort of law, and it was struck down in the Court of Appeals (http://www.gamecensorship.com/Illinois.htm). The state ended up paying one-half million dollars in legal fees. Yet already knowing the result of that case (I'm sure the politicians did their due diligence and researched the matter before making law, right?), California passed their law, then did their usual by taking it a step further....to the supreme court, and for two million dollars.
It's like saying "if I smack my head into the wall even harder, maybe it won't hurt this time".
Re:Ok so figure out a way to not screw other peopl
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 1
Oh come on! WTF was the point of your original post? You asked me to explain it, but you already knew the answer. And you knew the answer was "because there was a mistake". Asking someone to explain something when you leave out such an important detail (one which makes the entire attempt at explanation pointless) is borderline trolling.
Re:Ok so figure out a way to not screw other peopl
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 1
Gladly. This is one of the most common complaints I hear from people about taxes lately, and it all comes down to not understanding how your own property taxes work.
Many cities/counties/states have laws in place that limit the rate of increase of property taxes. In california, it's known as Prop 13. In Michigan it's called the homestead credit. Generally these laws limit the increase to either a small percentage or to the rate of inflation.
Now, taxes are based on the valuation of your home. Typically when you live in a place with one of these laws, you will have 2 values on your home: an assessed value, and a taxable value. Assessed value is how much the taxing authority believes your house is worth (the accuracy of this value is another matter, but you can contest this with your taxing authority if it's inaccurate). Taxable value is how much your home is actually considered to be worth for purposes of taxation. When you first buy your house, your assessed value and taxable value will be the same. However, as you live there over the years, the two numbers can drift apart. Assessed value will change along with the market value (again, I don't want to debate the accuracy of this...dispute it if yours is wrong). Taxable value, however, will never increase by more than the limited percentage. In most cases, taxable value can never be more than assessed value, though I beleive there are some places that also limit the rate of decrease in taxable value. Typically that's not the case (but when it is, you can end up with the reverse scenario...property value goes up, but taxes still go down). So ususally your new taxable value is the lesser of either the assessed value or last years taxable value plus the allowed rate of increase
So, lets say you buy a house for $100k. You start out with: assessed value = $100k taxable value = $100k
Now lets say tax increases are limited to a 5% increase. Lets also say that the market booms, and after 1 year, your home is now worth $150k. You now have: assessed value = $150k taxable value = $100k + 5% = $105k
Now, after another year the value of your house drops to $125k. So you say "my value dropped, so taxes should go down, right?". Wrong. Your taxable value is still well under the assessed value. Even if you add the max 5% to your taxable value, you still end up with a new taxable value of approximately $110k. The's well under the $125k assessed value. So you value drops but your taxes increase. It's not because you are getting ripped off. It's because before you were getting a really good deal, and now you are still getting a good deal...just not quite as good as before.
If the next year your property value falls below the ~$110k of your current taxable value, THEN you will see your taxes start to decrease.
If the parents sunk all of their money into a $500k house and that was their only asset (thus leaving him no inheritance), then blame the parents for poor financial planning.
If someone leaves you a $500k house free and clear that's a pretty damn good inheritance and hardly poor financial planning on their part.
If their intention was for you to live in that free and clear house despite what your personal income might be, and they sunk all the money into the house and left nothing else, despite knowing that property taxes do exist and are due every year....sorry, but yes that is bad financial planning. However, if they didn't intend for you to be able to live in that $500k house on your $20k salary , then what the problem that you have to sell it? They clearly didn't want you to stay there (or wanted you to aspire to something better paying than a barista).
But aside from that, why should someone who only makes $20k/year (or whatever a barista might make...not much) be expected to be able to live in a $500k house?
Because it's bought and paid for, and his property. The question is, why should someone with low income but fully owned property NOT be allowed to live in it?
Becuase it's not bought and paid-for for eternity. The lot may be, and the building materials may be, but the fire department, police department, utilities, trash pickup, hospitals, schools, public road, jails, military defense, and 100 other things aren't.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 1
tax dodge is that if you sold the stock, you'd pay tax on it. if you loan money against it and then just lose the collateral, you don't.
What's you point? If you sell the stock you have a gain. If you take a loan, you have GAINED nothing. The loan still has to be repaid. And every year you don't pay it off, you continue to accrue interest on the debt. Even with an interest rate of 3% (very low for a non-secured loan), paying it back after 5 years will still have cost ~16%. So after 5 years, you've paid a bunch of money, and paid off your loan, so you never had a gain.
If the stock crashes and becomes worthless, do you think you are just going to be forgiven of his debt? Highly doubt it. That generally doesn't happen. And when it does, forgiveness of a debt is considered taxable income. Generally, the only time debt forgiveness isn't taxed is in bankruptcy. Aditionally, there is currently an additional law, The Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act, which was passed in 2007 and expires in 2012, that allows for untaxed debt forgiveness on the mortgage of your primary residence, up to a maximum of $1M ($2M if you are married). But beyond that, any debt forgivess is considered income, and fully taxable at the income tax rates.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 1
If that happens, then it's called tax fraud. The IRS doesn't care whether you exchange cash, goods, or services. It's all taxed at whatever the cash value of the exchange would be.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 1
Uh, not really. I think you are obviously missing something there. OK, so you lend me $1000. Over the next 5 months I pay you back a couple hundred per month (plus a small amount for interest). Why should I be taxed on it? If I borrow it and then pay it back, I've gained nothing, so I should pay no taxes. Likewise, you've gained only the interest, so that's all you should pay tax on. Where's the tax dodge?
Re:Ok so figure out a way to not screw other peopl
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 1
Except that many areas place limits on property tax increases for your primary residence. Usually it's doesn't rise more than a couple percent or the rate of inflation.
If the parents sunk all of their money into a $500k house and that was their only asset (thus leaving him no inheritance), then blame the parents for poor financial planning. But aside from that, why should someone who only makes $20k/year (or whatever a barista might make...not much) be expected to be able to live in a $500k house?
OK, so in all of that, other than the GPS (which I already acknowledge), I see no mention of what I asked...features that had been removed or specs downgraded. I want to know what these supposed "repeatedly downgraded" and "without several features" are.
And I hardly see a delay from Dec 8 to Dec 19 as being very notable for a preorder. Limited quantity issues after that, sure. But many people actually had these before christmas. I ordered mine from amazon on Dec 21 (after the release date) and received it by Jan 16. That's not too bad of a release backlog considering how popular these were.
Other than the GPS (which was removed from the spec, and even though it's still in there, it performs horribly for most users), what other spec was downgraded? And I'm not aware of any promised features that it was released without (though for all practical purposes, I'll accept GPS as an answer here since it's so bad it might as well not even exist). I'll grant you the GPS was a tremendous screw up on their part, but other than that you seem to be exaggerating. I'm not aware of anything else that changed.
Awesome argument, because we all know the only alternative is living in a cave. You totally nailed that one.
And as for your comparison to the military, is that really the comparison you want to make? The military wakes you up in the middle of the night because they are training and conditioning you to be prepared for when a life or death emergency arises. Are things really life-or-death at Foxconn (cue the jokes)? And since military comparisons are apparently apt, then the military can throw you in jail. Should Foxconn be able to do the same? No, I think comparing the military and Foxconn is probably not the best thought out comparison.
As for your on-call comparison...yeah, I'm absolutely sure that Foxconn is paying on-call pay to all 8000 of those workers.
I know the keys are right next to each other on the keyboard, but "Xhengzhou" is simply not possible in the Chinese spelling system. You got it right in the summary (Zhengzhou), but the headline is just nutty.
Oh....you went a totally different direction on that one. And here I was reading your post thinking "well, the D and V keys are sort of close together, but not really right next to each other"
I don't get the exclusive association between Apple and Foxconn presented by the tech press. Foxconn is the world's largest electronics manufacturer and makes products for Dell, Sony, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Microsoft, HP, and pretty much every other major computer-related company.
And I don't get why people keep asking ths question. I don't see Dell, Sony, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Microsoft, HP or any other (besides Apple) executives publicly bragging about how they can get an army of near-slaves (living in factory dorms) to wake up on a moments notice in the middle of the night and work a 12 hour shift for tea and a biscuit just in order to make a last minute fix to a design screw-up that apple probably should have caught a lot earlier. That executive was PROUD of that. The executives from the other companies surely know exactly what's going on there, but for them it's probably something they'd rather keep quiet about than brag about in public? And why would they rather keep quiet? Because when you start bragging about it, you invite the criticism.
I've always thought that apt (apt-get, aptitude, Debian) has the right solution to this.
You get your software from a repository, and only software that is approved by the maintainers of the repository gets in.
Then, _you_ get to choose which repositories you trust.
That way, you don't have to judge the quality of all software yourself. You can leave that to the people who maintain the repositories. They will build up reputation over time, and you can go with the ones that have a good enough reputation by your standards.
That's basically what android does. It comes configured for one repository (Google's Android Market), but you can turn on the ability to use other repositories and get your software from them. It just turns out that the default repository isn't necessarily very good at screening out bad stuff. So maybe Amazon's market will do a better job. I have no idea. However, in debian, it's entirely possible someone could just setup a repository that accepts anything submitted to them, in which case you'd have to decide whether or not you trust that repository or not, so it's not really any different.
The only significant way apt-get is any different from android is that (once you choose which repositories to trust) apt-get provides a way to "browse" all repositories simultaneously, whereas in Android you browse them one at a time.
They did - Samsung will open a new factory in Texas for producing the A? CPUs. Too bad that they will be shipped to China for final assembly as there are no suitable factories in US:)
Yep. As far as I know, there isn't a single US factory that houses 8000 "workers" on-site, ready to wake up in the middle of the night without warning and work a 12 hour shift with a biscuit and tea as their reward.
Oh, or did you mean that none of the factories are suitable because they all lack the necessary suicide nets?
Huh? In what way does the cold virus alter your DNA, such that a DNA sequencing machine could be used to diagnose it? And you know, doctors currently have all sorts of diagnostic tests at hand that could be used unnecessarily, yet I've never heard of doctors using an x-ray, EKG, MRI, or anything of the sort to diagnose a cold.
Yeah, I know, it was probably a joke and not meant to be taken seriously, but your score was +3 Insightful, not +3 Funny.
Looking at the screenshots, it looks like it's running MythTV with a custom theme
I wonder how the Mythbuntu folks feel about this. Seeing as this Ubuntu respin has never been officially endorsed by Canonical (to my knowledge), may be seen as a bit of a hijacking of the project...
Uh, what screenshots are you looking at? The ones in the linked article? It looks nothing like MythTV, other than in the generic way in which you could say any media app (Windows Media Center, Sage TV, XBMC, etc) looks like MythTV (you know, it's got a program guide, and a list of videos with coverart). If there's one thing in there that makes it painfully obvious that it ISN'T mythtv, it's got to be the screenshot that shows you can rent/buy movies...myth doesn't have anything at all like that.
Errm, IQ Scores are always centered at 100 by definition. Ergo average IQ score can't go up or down, only the raw survey scores can. Who would have thought that the very channel you praise for not dumbing down the populace would dumb down that fact.
Erm, no, sorry. IQ Scores are NOT always centered at 100 by definition. As raw scores shift higher, IQ scores will likewise shift higher until the the raw-score-to-IQ-score conversion process is renormalized. How often are they normalized? It wasn't an easy question to answer, but I found one website that claims they are only normalized "every 10 or so years". http://www.psychpage.com/learning/library/intell/culture_iq_notes_5.html
Also, it seems that before the Flynn effect was discovered, there was no such periodic renormalizaion (which makes sense...why would you renormalize before anybody has even discovered that they've become unnormalized). Therefore at the time the Flynn effect was defined, scores were not normalized, and the Flynn effect was indeed described as IQ scores increasing over time. Look around the web. Every single reference to the Flynn effect I can find, even those from reputable sources, describe it as an increase in IQ scores over time. For instance, here's a page on it from a Psychology Professor at Indiana University: http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/flynneffect.shtml
But congratulations on getting a +5 Informative for posting incorrect information. Maybe you should watch more Discovery Channel.
You aren't familiar with the definition of popular that includes so many people preordering that, by the time release day hits, Amazon has a 5-7 week backlog, which continued to grow until Amazon has to stop accepting preorders? Nope, that doesn't sound popular at all.
I have seen elderly people who have to exit the scooter to put things in the cart, then climb back up again.
So you've seen people who could potentially be handicapped on these scooters? Well, that was my point. They can be one reason why it's useful to have someone park close and not have to walk far, even at a store where you traditionally would have to do a ton of walking.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, as a followup to my previous post, if you want a specific recommendation, try the penfed platinum rewards card. no foreign transaction fee, no annual fee, 5% back on gas, 3% back on groceries, 1% back on everything else. You can also get a $250 sign up bonus at the moment. Although penfed is designed for federal employees, anybody can get in. If you don't have a qualifying relative, then the easiest way to get in is to make a small one time donation ($20, I think) to one of the military charities listed. I did years ago, and it's easily paid for itself 100 times over. They've got great car loan and mortgage rates.
Get a better credit card. Just google for "credit card with no foreign transaction fee" (without quotes) and you'll find plenty.
Good. Maybe this will teach future political leaders that censorship is a bad idea.
Oh who am I kidding, these idiots never learn anything.
Of course they won't learn. They didn't learn from last time. There was no surprise about what the outcome would be. This had already been pretty well tested. Illinois had passed the same sort of law, and it was struck down in the Court of Appeals (http://www.gamecensorship.com/Illinois.htm). The state ended up paying one-half million dollars in legal fees. Yet already knowing the result of that case (I'm sure the politicians did their due diligence and researched the matter before making law, right?), California passed their law, then did their usual by taking it a step further....to the supreme court, and for two million dollars.
It's like saying "if I smack my head into the wall even harder, maybe it won't hurt this time".
Oh come on! WTF was the point of your original post? You asked me to explain it, but you already knew the answer. And you knew the answer was "because there was a mistake". Asking someone to explain something when you leave out such an important detail (one which makes the entire attempt at explanation pointless) is borderline trolling.
Gladly. This is one of the most common complaints I hear from people about taxes lately, and it all comes down to not understanding how your own property taxes work.
Many cities/counties/states have laws in place that limit the rate of increase of property taxes. In california, it's known as Prop 13. In Michigan it's called the homestead credit. Generally these laws limit the increase to either a small percentage or to the rate of inflation.
Now, taxes are based on the valuation of your home. Typically when you live in a place with one of these laws, you will have 2 values on your home: an assessed value, and a taxable value. Assessed value is how much the taxing authority believes your house is worth (the accuracy of this value is another matter, but you can contest this with your taxing authority if it's inaccurate). Taxable value is how much your home is actually considered to be worth for purposes of taxation. When you first buy your house, your assessed value and taxable value will be the same. However, as you live there over the years, the two numbers can drift apart. Assessed value will change along with the market value (again, I don't want to debate the accuracy of this...dispute it if yours is wrong). Taxable value, however, will never increase by more than the limited percentage. In most cases, taxable value can never be more than assessed value, though I beleive there are some places that also limit the rate of decrease in taxable value. Typically that's not the case (but when it is, you can end up with the reverse scenario...property value goes up, but taxes still go down). So ususally your new taxable value is the lesser of either the assessed value or last years taxable value plus the allowed rate of increase
So, lets say you buy a house for $100k. You start out with:
assessed value = $100k
taxable value = $100k
Now lets say tax increases are limited to a 5% increase. Lets also say that the market booms, and after 1 year, your home is now worth $150k. You now have:
assessed value = $150k
taxable value = $100k + 5% = $105k
Now, after another year the value of your house drops to $125k. So you say "my value dropped, so taxes should go down, right?". Wrong. Your taxable value is still well under the assessed value. Even if you add the max 5% to your taxable value, you still end up with a new taxable value of approximately $110k. The's well under the $125k assessed value. So you value drops but your taxes increase. It's not because you are getting ripped off. It's because before you were getting a really good deal, and now you are still getting a good deal...just not quite as good as before.
If the next year your property value falls below the ~$110k of your current taxable value, THEN you will see your taxes start to decrease.
If the parents sunk all of their money into a $500k house and that was their only asset (thus leaving him no inheritance), then blame the parents for poor financial planning.
If someone leaves you a $500k house free and clear that's a pretty damn good inheritance and hardly poor financial planning on their part.
If their intention was for you to live in that free and clear house despite what your personal income might be, and they sunk all the money into the house and left nothing else, despite knowing that property taxes do exist and are due every year....sorry, but yes that is bad financial planning. However, if they didn't intend for you to be able to live in that $500k house on your $20k salary , then what the problem that you have to sell it? They clearly didn't want you to stay there (or wanted you to aspire to something better paying than a barista).
But aside from that, why should someone who only makes $20k/year (or whatever a barista might make...not much) be expected to be able to live in a $500k house?
Because it's bought and paid for, and his property. The question is, why should someone with low income but fully owned property NOT be allowed to live in it?
Becuase it's not bought and paid-for for eternity. The lot may be, and the building materials may be, but the fire department, police department, utilities, trash pickup, hospitals, schools, public road, jails, military defense, and 100 other things aren't.
tax dodge is that if you sold the stock, you'd pay tax on it. if you loan money against it and then just lose the collateral, you don't.
What's you point? If you sell the stock you have a gain. If you take a loan, you have GAINED nothing. The loan still has to be repaid. And every year you don't pay it off, you continue to accrue interest on the debt. Even with an interest rate of 3% (very low for a non-secured loan), paying it back after 5 years will still have cost ~16%. So after 5 years, you've paid a bunch of money, and paid off your loan, so you never had a gain.
If the stock crashes and becomes worthless, do you think you are just going to be forgiven of his debt? Highly doubt it. That generally doesn't happen. And when it does, forgiveness of a debt is considered taxable income. Generally, the only time debt forgiveness isn't taxed is in bankruptcy. Aditionally, there is currently an additional law, The Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act, which was passed in 2007 and expires in 2012, that allows for untaxed debt forgiveness on the mortgage of your primary residence, up to a maximum of $1M ($2M if you are married). But beyond that, any debt forgivess is considered income, and fully taxable at the income tax rates.
If that happens, then it's called tax fraud. The IRS doesn't care whether you exchange cash, goods, or services. It's all taxed at whatever the cash value of the exchange would be.
Uh, not really. I think you are obviously missing something there. OK, so you lend me $1000. Over the next 5 months I pay you back a couple hundred per month (plus a small amount for interest). Why should I be taxed on it? If I borrow it and then pay it back, I've gained nothing, so I should pay no taxes. Likewise, you've gained only the interest, so that's all you should pay tax on. Where's the tax dodge?
Except that many areas place limits on property tax increases for your primary residence. Usually it's doesn't rise more than a couple percent or the rate of inflation.
If the parents sunk all of their money into a $500k house and that was their only asset (thus leaving him no inheritance), then blame the parents for poor financial planning. But aside from that, why should someone who only makes $20k/year (or whatever a barista might make...not much) be expected to be able to live in a $500k house?
OK, so in all of that, other than the GPS (which I already acknowledge), I see no mention of what I asked...features that had been removed or specs downgraded. I want to know what these supposed "repeatedly downgraded" and "without several features" are.
And I hardly see a delay from Dec 8 to Dec 19 as being very notable for a preorder. Limited quantity issues after that, sure. But many people actually had these before christmas. I ordered mine from amazon on Dec 21 (after the release date) and received it by Jan 16. That's not too bad of a release backlog considering how popular these were.
Other than the GPS (which was removed from the spec, and even though it's still in there, it performs horribly for most users), what other spec was downgraded? And I'm not aware of any promised features that it was released without (though for all practical purposes, I'll accept GPS as an answer here since it's so bad it might as well not even exist). I'll grant you the GPS was a tremendous screw up on their part, but other than that you seem to be exaggerating. I'm not aware of anything else that changed.
Awesome argument, because we all know the only alternative is living in a cave. You totally nailed that one.
And as for your comparison to the military, is that really the comparison you want to make? The military wakes you up in the middle of the night because they are training and conditioning you to be prepared for when a life or death emergency arises. Are things really life-or-death at Foxconn (cue the jokes)? And since military comparisons are apparently apt, then the military can throw you in jail. Should Foxconn be able to do the same? No, I think comparing the military and Foxconn is probably not the best thought out comparison.
As for your on-call comparison...yeah, I'm absolutely sure that Foxconn is paying on-call pay to all 8000 of those workers.
In Xhengzhou, Thousands Vie For Foxconn Jobs
I know the keys are right next to each other on the keyboard, but "Xhengzhou" is simply not possible in the Chinese spelling system. You got it right in the summary (Zhengzhou), but the headline is just nutty.
Oh....you went a totally different direction on that one. And here I was reading your post thinking "well, the D and V keys are sort of close together, but not really right next to each other"
With 15 million iPads sold last quarter, the tablet market is now larger than the entire desktop PC market.
LOL. Then I guess the Christmas season must have been Apple's slow quarter, because Q1 2011 PC shipments were 85 million.
I don't get the exclusive association between Apple and Foxconn presented by the tech press. Foxconn is the world's largest electronics manufacturer and makes products for Dell, Sony, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Microsoft, HP, and pretty much every other major computer-related company.
And I don't get why people keep asking ths question. I don't see Dell, Sony, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Microsoft, HP or any other (besides Apple) executives publicly bragging about how they can get an army of near-slaves (living in factory dorms) to wake up on a moments notice in the middle of the night and work a 12 hour shift for tea and a biscuit just in order to make a last minute fix to a design screw-up that apple probably should have caught a lot earlier. That executive was PROUD of that. The executives from the other companies surely know exactly what's going on there, but for them it's probably something they'd rather keep quiet about than brag about in public? And why would they rather keep quiet? Because when you start bragging about it, you invite the criticism.
I've always thought that apt (apt-get, aptitude, Debian) has the right solution to this.
You get your software from a repository, and only software that is approved by the maintainers of the repository gets in.
Then, _you_ get to choose which repositories you trust.
That way, you don't have to judge the quality of all software yourself. You can leave that to the people who maintain the repositories. They will build up reputation over time, and you can go with the ones that have a good enough reputation by your standards.
That's basically what android does. It comes configured for one repository (Google's Android Market), but you can turn on the ability to use other repositories and get your software from them. It just turns out that the default repository isn't necessarily very good at screening out bad stuff. So maybe Amazon's market will do a better job. I have no idea. However, in debian, it's entirely possible someone could just setup a repository that accepts anything submitted to them, in which case you'd have to decide whether or not you trust that repository or not, so it's not really any different.
The only significant way apt-get is any different from android is that (once you choose which repositories to trust) apt-get provides a way to "browse" all repositories simultaneously, whereas in Android you browse them one at a time.
They did - Samsung will open a new factory in Texas for producing the A? CPUs. Too bad that they will be shipped to China for final assembly as there are no suitable factories in US :)
Yep. As far as I know, there isn't a single US factory that houses 8000 "workers" on-site, ready to wake up in the middle of the night without warning and work a 12 hour shift with a biscuit and tea as their reward.
Oh, or did you mean that none of the factories are suitable because they all lack the necessary suicide nets?
Huh? In what way does the cold virus alter your DNA, such that a DNA sequencing machine could be used to diagnose it? And you know, doctors currently have all sorts of diagnostic tests at hand that could be used unnecessarily, yet I've never heard of doctors using an x-ray, EKG, MRI, or anything of the sort to diagnose a cold.
Yeah, I know, it was probably a joke and not meant to be taken seriously, but your score was +3 Insightful, not +3 Funny.
Which is exactly not the behaviour you would expect from a clock. The metaphor is flawed.
Flawed? Please, I'll take their clock any day. So it moves backward on average 1-2 times per decade. Big deal. My clock has to do it once per year.
Looking at the screenshots, it looks like it's running MythTV with a custom theme
I wonder how the Mythbuntu folks feel about this.
Seeing as this Ubuntu respin has never been officially endorsed by Canonical (to my knowledge), may be seen as a bit of a hijacking of the project...
Uh, what screenshots are you looking at? The ones in the linked article? It looks nothing like MythTV, other than in the generic way in which you could say any media app (Windows Media Center, Sage TV, XBMC, etc) looks like MythTV (you know, it's got a program guide, and a list of videos with coverart). If there's one thing in there that makes it painfully obvious that it ISN'T mythtv, it's got to be the screenshot that shows you can rent/buy movies...myth doesn't have anything at all like that.
Flynn Effect
(Link didn't work the first time)
Errm, IQ Scores are always centered at 100 by definition. Ergo average IQ score can't go up or down, only the raw survey scores can. Who would have thought that the very channel you praise for not dumbing down the populace would dumb down that fact.
Erm, no, sorry. IQ Scores are NOT always centered at 100 by definition. As raw scores shift higher, IQ scores will likewise shift higher until the the raw-score-to-IQ-score conversion process is renormalized. How often are they normalized? It wasn't an easy question to answer, but I found one website that claims they are only normalized "every 10 or so years".
http://www.psychpage.com/learning/library/intell/culture_iq_notes_5.html
Also, it seems that before the Flynn effect was discovered, there was no such periodic renormalizaion (which makes sense...why would you renormalize before anybody has even discovered that they've become unnormalized). Therefore at the time the Flynn effect was defined, scores were not normalized, and the Flynn effect was indeed described as IQ scores increasing over time. Look around the web. Every single reference to the Flynn effect I can find, even those from reputable sources, describe it as an increase in IQ scores over time. For instance, here's a page on it from a Psychology Professor at Indiana University:
http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/flynneffect.shtml
But congratulations on getting a +5 Informative for posting incorrect information. Maybe you should watch more Discovery Channel.
You aren't familiar with the definition of popular that includes so many people preordering that, by the time release day hits, Amazon has a 5-7 week backlog, which continued to grow until Amazon has to stop accepting preorders? Nope, that doesn't sound popular at all.
I have seen elderly people who have to exit the scooter to put things in the cart, then climb back up again.
So you've seen people who could potentially be handicapped on these scooters? Well, that was my point. They can be one reason why it's useful to have someone park close and not have to walk far, even at a store where you traditionally would have to do a ton of walking.