Soon after the iOS App Store debuted and apps became the latest tech fad, I wondered about encryption standards in apps. I always felt a bit weird about logging in to places remotely using apps, wondering to what extent encryption wasn't being used. I'm glad the research was done and that on the plus side only one app was found to be sending logins out in clear. I haven't flown Southwest in years and won't in the future - I've upgraded my standards, up yours! As others have pointed out, any commercial app that handles logins shouldn't be approved if it's not using encryption. And Apple, Google, Microsoft and other app store vendors should lobby to change the stupid, outdated federal dictate that hampers encryption. At best what could that export restriction possibly do in the government's favor? It's not like it's going to prevent any criminals/terrorists/evil-doers from using the software they want to use, right?
First AC, I commend you for the very reasonable defense of your (presumed) profession. I agree with much of what you wrote. But I felt compelled enough to login to speak to one point you raised:
They don't get to make law and they'll face worse consequences than a layperson if they break it.
I have dealt with more than a few lawyers, including working with them (for free on my part) and employing them. I have considered law school in the past (the direction I was urged by family and friends to go in) - I enjoy law and our legal system (generally). The fact is, however, it is not within my realm of experience to corroborate your claim that lawyers face worse consequences if they break the law. I have experienced quite the opposite.
When I went up against a lawyer who was trying to steal away corporate rights from an organization I helped manage, I witnessed said lawyer act in bad faith, violate the canons of ethics in many respects and even perjure himself in a brazen fashion, in an attempt to prevail against our side. We contacted his state bar with proof of these strong claims and were essentially told that while perhaps some of his actions were questionable, he wasn't violating their standards. They showed us that, at least in that instance, first and foremost lawyers protect one another.
Against substantial odds we prevailed against the scum bag lawyer being discussed, but other than the settlement that barred him from attacking us in the future, we got not satisfaction in recompense for his wrongdoing from the legal system. No repayment for the very considerable legal expenses he forced us to pay to fight him off.
So, Attorney AC, based on my admittedly thin anecdotal experience, lawyers very often don't get punished for violating the law. They know how to take advantage of the system, and their colleagues protect them. They resort to underhanded and at times explicitly illegal tactics to gain the upper hand, and they don't get called on it except in extraordinary situations. I've also found that even good lawyers often have to resort to doing bad things in the course of their duties. Given that so many lawyers are scum, it's not hard to surmise that even the good ones have to act like scum in the course of dealing with the true scum. There is such a thing as a good lawyer; many presumably exist. They don't deserve to be negatively stereotyped. But the profession itself, at least in the US, justifiably carries a bad reputation.
Anyone who gave points to this pitifully ignorant post above should be flogged. Its author obviously either never took basic high school economics or failed the course. There is a real crisis. In absolute terms we're the most indebted country on the planet by far. If we didn't also have the world's reserve currency we would have sunk long ago. We have spending crisis, in which discretionary spending was boosted to ridiculous levels under Obama and Entitlements spending is going to be exploding as the Baby Boomers retire. If it had just been business as usual between the Republicans and Democrats, there wouldn't have been a fight over this debt ceiling vote. But the people, true American patriots who assembled as the Tea Party, were fed up with the spending crisis that D.C. had created, and they ended up sending a huge new crop of Congressman to fight for reduced deficits and debt.
As for calling those "vital social programs" Entitlements, the Obama Administration did not start doing that. That's what those programs are called. You can open up any Macro-Econ textbook to verify that fact. These programs, these unconstitutional, Socialist redistributions of wealth, entitle certain protected groups to money rightfully earned by others. And they are bankrupting the country. Public Entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, ObamaCare) plus Federal Employee Entitlements (salaries and pensions for the massive federal bureaucracy) account for an overwhelmingly high percentage of federal spending. The politicians have known for many years that there would eventually be a day of reckoning because of the gross financial negligence of Congress. Hopefully this is the time. Those who wish to maintain the status quo, like that fool above me, are in fact demanding much more pain for all American citizens shortly down the line. Even President Obama has admitted that the longer we go without reforming this system, the solution will become increasingly more painful.
What a mature argument befitting your advanced age, grandpa! You pathetic dolt. Why didn't you also yell at me to get off your lawn? Keep sucking those benefits while you can, you leech. Since it sounds like you're retired, you're therefore close to expiring and hopefully won't be a parasite on the national treasury too much longer. These Socialist programs are going away whether you like it or not. Soon enough dementia will take what's left of your meager braincells and so you won't care anyway. Pathetic old fool.
That's not a contrarian opinion. It's nothing but a collection of the usual bile. "vile dictator named Saddam Hussein"
Awww, pathetic little leftist so sad to read the truth. What, do you think Hussein wasn't a vile dictator? The fact that the US supported him at one point in time is immaterial to the point that he was a vile dictator. Most all Iraqis would agree with my characterization, so much so that many call him a "Jew" (even though he was himself an ardent Jew-hater, antisemitism is so ingrained in the culture that anyone who is hated becomes derogatorily referred to as "Jew").
You can rail against "entitlement" programs and bureaucracies until you're blue in the face, but I guarantee you wouldn't want to live without them. Might I point out that the money we spent on Iraq is enough to permanently fix social security?
You can guarantee I wouldn't want to live without them? You're foolish if you really think you can make such a guarantee. I would gladly sign on to a national referendum abolishing all federal entitlements for those not near retirement age if I could. I don't believe in intergenerational theft, and I don't believe in government authorized pyramid schemes. My generation is getting raped by these failing Socialist schemes, which we have to pay into but won't get any benefit from. Worse, if we don't massively change course from the record-setting, enormous Obama deficits, the country will shortly end up in the same situation as Greece is in currently. Is that really what you want? Do you have any concept of the destructiveness of the debt we continue to run up? Do you know what debt service means? I sincerely doubt you do.
I assume you're not old enough for Social Security, but I bet your parents are and claimed it.
I am thankfully far away from that age. My mother isn't retirement age yet, either, and won't be for a number of years to come. So you're wrong on that account as well.
Since you're using your computer and posting to a website, you've benefited from the FCC and the DoEnergy. If you drove on any US highway or ridden on an airplane, you've benefited from the DOT. I assume you were educated in the US,probably attended college and probably used at least some amount of student loans to pay for it. You can thank the DoEducation for that.
1. Yes, I'm on a computer on the Internet, but I don't know what the FCC or the DOE have to do with either. The DoD developed the forerunner to the Internet, which took off in academia and then was embraced by the free market. I appreciate the US government's contributions to the creation/maintenance of the Internet, but like I've indicated I have no problems with justified defense programs and research; since the Internet came from defense research originally, I don't have a beef with government having spent on it. 2. The federal government spending on interstate transportation projects facilitates regular interstate commerce and thus is constitutional. And transportation spending is small in comparison to the bankrupting entitlements and bureaucracies I argue against. 3. Yes, I attended university and graduated with high honors, but no, I didn't take out student loans to finance any of my education. I'm very proud of that fact.
If you really want to change something, why don't you take the time to actually learn what all of these agencies do.
You have such a weak argument you have to assume I don't know what federal agencies do. That's false. I've already shown that many of your other assumptions are faulty. You can't argue on the merits so you have to instead demagogue Reagan and Bush. Yes, Reagan allowed Congress to overspend especially on the domestic side, and he regretted it publicly in his farewell address. (Senate Majority Leader Tip O'Neill broke his promise to institute spending cuts, so Reagan only deserves a portion of that blame.) As for President Bush (43)
Hey AC, my foolish foe, you should check out what James Madison had to say about the general welfare clause of Article I, Section 8. But since I'm benevolent and know you're probably incapable of doing your own research, I'll start clueing you in: Madison said that the general welfare power granted to Congress there was a grant to carry out the duties expressly written in the rest of that section. Madison said it would be completely invalid to interpret that clause as granting unrestricted power to Congress because that would have made listing the expressed powers unnecessary and superfluous.
The Constitution created a legislature, Congress, with a limited, enumerated set of powers. It most certainly did not grant Congress general, unlimited power and scope to legislate on every matter and tax everything under the sun. All three branches of the US government knew this to be true until the corruption of the country in the 20th Century. Your view, as popular as it may be among the ignorant and their Progressive/Socialist masters, is utterly defective. And it is people like you who are destroying this country.
Those who know me personally or know my online record know that I'm one of the biggest deficit and debt hawks around, but I'll provide a contrarian opinion of sorts in this debate. It's not just the hunt for Bin Laden that cost us $3 trillion in this war on terrorism. If tracking down and eliminating Bin Laden was the only thing we spent that money and the rest of our treasure on (most importantly precious American lives), then that would be an unmitigated disaster. But it's obviously farcical and disingenuous to make that claim because killing Bin Laden wasn't the only accomplishment. We took away the safe haven Al Qaeda had in Afghanistan, and then, like it or lump it, we removed a vile dictator named Saddam Hussein and liberated Iraq. Now with the "Arab Spring" setting the Middle East ablaze, we have at least one marginal beachhead Arab state in a semi-stable, semi-functional, semi-democratic Iraq. It's also important to recognize that at the very least we have killed a lot of terrorists and would-be terrorist radicals who otherwise would have been left to plan attacks against us in the future.
Was it necessary to fight these wars? It's an arguable point. At the very least they weren't a total waste, but their efficacy, efficiency and opportunity costs can and should be examined. Did these wars do their part to massively increase our indebtedness? Absolutely they did, but not solely - they were coupled with out-of-control, unconstitutional Entitlements and bloated federal bureaucracies. (It must also be said that national security and national defense are responsibilities of the federal government under the Constitution, whereas the vast majority of Congress' other expenditures are unconstitutional and only permitted because of the post-FDR-New-Deal perversion of the Constitution that Americans have complacently allowed to remain and grow for 80 years.) But to paint the wars as caricatures, which is what is done when people say we spent $3 trillion killing Bin Laden, is at best satire and at worst historical revisionist propaganda.
The summary claims that one rule is to pay for more RAM over better processor. That sounds like poor advice for at least three reasons: 1) RAM can usually be user-upgraded later, while the processor usually can't be; 2) RAM is cheaper than the processor; 3) some OEMs overcharge for RAM upgrades (cough, Apple). Plus, it is dubious to claim processors are usually fast enough for most people. All told, whoever offered that suggestion wasn't thinking very soundly.
70% unit coverage? CCN complexity 20? Pre-sprint grooming of stories? This article is apparently not meant for a general geek audience. Can someone translate these terms into something that non-professional programmers can comprehend?
I hope I'm wrong, but I hear serious Nintendo fans vastly overestimating the hardware capabilities of the successor to the Wii. They're hoping for hardware that will rival next gen offerings from Sony and Microsoft despite the fact that Nintendo has shown it doesn't want to compete in that high-end console space anymore. I hope I'm wrong though. With all Nintendo's success in the last generation perhaps they can come out with a Wii successor that has beefy hardware.
I don't know about an unrestricted right to remove any information pertaining to yourself, but I do think we should have online protection over details that should be personal, like phone numbers and home addresses. I'll give you the following example to illustrate this point. Several years ago I created an LLC. When I created it the form I used said that I needed to use a real street address instead of a P.O. Box. I should have put down a mail drop but decided to use my home address, thinking that if someone looked up my record they'd see it but that nearly no one would look for my company because it was a small home-based business that didn't interact with customers. Big mistake. My business did not work out and I closed it.
I periodically search for my name on the search engines to see what turns up. Usually only what I expect to see related to my name is what I find, but a couple of weeks ago I decided to search for my name and city and to my dismay I found two sites listing my old company along with my name and home address, and one of the sites (corporationwiki.com) has received a number of complaints over failing to respond to people over privacy abuses, and the site's owners hide behind a private domain name registration. There's a similar problem with real estate sites that crawl real estate records and make them accessible through the search engines. Thus, when I purchase property in the future I'm going to obscure the record by buying it through an LLC that will not carry my name on the public record. I'm currently investigating my options for getting it removed.
Now some will contend that my personal address is a public record and that I should be entitled to privacy for it. I disagree. The state of California made license plate records private information only available to investigators after a stalker murdered a Hollywood start after tracking her down through her license plate information. I think home address information should be private across the board and that a person should have a right to have it deleted if it appears publicly online.
As most Western governments are financially broke, who in the world is going to pay for the work-free basic income you envision? Let me guess, soak the rich right? That's not going to cut it. Government could confiscate 90% or even 100% of the wealthiest people's income and they still wouldn't be able to balance their current enormous budget gaps for the existing Socialist programs they run.
Fail.
I'm really surprised that in a discussion about triple-screen budget PC gaming no one mentions AMD Crossfire (multiple graphics card support) or AMD Eyefinity (the feature that treats three separate displays as one combined display and which allows games that support it to properly run on all three screens).
I wonder if this father and other Egyptians who used Facebook in their revolt know that Zuckerberg and many of the other founders of the service are Jews. Or that the Intel processors they use to access the site are designed by Jews in the Jewish state of Israel.
For those of you who don't know, when female reporter Lara Logan was attacked and sexually molested by an Egyptian mob, the attackers were shouting at "Jew, Jew, Jew!" at her. She isn't even Jewish, but there's a pathological hatred for Jews in much of the Middle East.
Hey, I enjoy a good Apple troll now and then, but Light Peak (not Light Speed, Light Peak) appears to be the future and the successor to USB. USB 3 isn't exactly taking off, with even Intel eschewing it in its chipsets. Light Peak is billed as a replacement for many connection standards such as "SCSI, SATA, USB, FireWire, PCI Express and HDMI" Light Peak is Intel's new baby, and as with many computing technology advancements Apple likes to be ahead of the pack (especially when it comes to bus connections). will be backward compatible (even appearing to use the same physical connector as USB) and adaptable in a way that will allow it to replace a number of different connection types. It will be adopted by the other motherboard producers because, well, it seems like there's no competition against it as the future bus technology. Now were you trolling just to troll, or are you really so ignorant about the emerging technology that you'd post a comment like that in seriousness? If your comment wasn't meant in jest, why not get yourself some free education on the subject.
So right on, cayenne8! I've been screaming about this runaway growth in government spending for years now. Some have clearly gotten the message, but President Obama certainly has not. He just advocated a cut of $400 billion over 10 years. I think he's hoping people will hear $400 billion in cuts and assume he's talking about per year amounts. $400 billion over a decade in government cuts translates to (I know the math is challenging here) $40 billion per year, when we're running $1.5 TRILLION deficits per year. He also called for a freeze at the current post so-called "Stimulus" hyper-inflated government spending levels. And he thinks that's going to cut with people concerned about deficits and debt? He must think that portion of the American public is dominated by ignoramuses.
Federal spending needs to not be frozen or cut with a scalpel (like Obama advocated during the election), it needs to be slashed with a machete. Will that government workers in our bloated federal bureaucracies out of jobs? Certainly it will - it has to. The American people can't afford to pay for the scale of unnecessary, unconstitutional government. All sectors of government spending need to be slashed - Discretionary, Non-Discretionary (Entitlements) and Defense. It's important to point out for those on the Left who blame the wars for the deficits that less than two years of spending on Entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) equal ten years of spending on the War on Terrorism - and that figure is based on numbers from a year ago. The Baby Boomers are going to cause the Ponzi Retirement Schemes to collapse as they begin retiring en masse this year. Social Security is already now running an annual deficit, which wasn't predicted to happen for a number of years. Anyone who doesn't demand huge reform wants those schemes to go bankrupt. I'm calling you out, Left-wingers who say no changes are necessary.
The only thing that President Obama said on the debt problem that was at all worth saying was that Discretionary spending only accounts for a small fraction of total spending - about 9 to 12%. The rest of the pie needs to be massively reduced. Will it cause higher unemployment and lower GDP in the short term? Certainly. But that employment and GDP is based on a phony economic model anyway - one that says that we can endlessly spend and not care about our deficits and debt, not worry that Debt Service (interest on the national debt) will in a short number of years be more expensive than our current Defense spending levels. That's unsustainable. Anyone on the Left who says we can't cut or we can't make changes to the Ponzi Retirement Schemes because it will hurt old people is advocating the destruction of the country. It's really just that simple.
While a lot of your post is correct, you are mistaken about some of your claims. Inter vivo giving (gifts to family members during a giver's life) is limited to $13,000 a year tax free. And trusts do not in and of themselves shield against the death tax (a.k.a. the estate tax). Trusts are more efficient and protective than regular wills, but they don't bypass the death tax. I know because my beloved grandmother passed away in 2009, and we're still dealing with the complications of the death tax. I've had to become well acquainted with all of these issues because I've been acting as the family representative to my grandmother's financial professionals.
If you do the research you'll see for yourself that trusts don't shield you from the death tax. Instead, clients that may be hit by the death tax are usually sold insurance policies that are designed to pay in excess of the death tax liability. It's true that taxes on inheritance are nothing new in the US and that the Bush-era tax cuts made the death tax less oppressive, but it still does have impacts on American families that have accrued moderate assets. By the way, another thread discussed Warren Buffet. He has very dishonestly called for higher death taxes because he owns a corporation that sells death tax protection policies.
iOS and Mac OS X are much more similar to each other than base Unix is to OS X. iOS is OS X in most all respects. iOS's hardware support and services are paired down to run on a very small number of static hardware devices (i.e. devices that don't have any hardware upgrade potential), and its user interface elements are quite different. It runs on the ARM processor family where Mac OS X doesn't (at least not publicly). It has some additional components and APIs for mobile uses that Macs don't need.
But aside from that, it is OS X. Its file system structure is nearly identical when you peer into it, which tells you a lot about how the OS architecture. iOS has many of the same system file components and runs many of the exact same services. Its programming environment (Xcode) and programming language (Objective C) are shared with Mac OS X. Apple pulled Mac OS X developers off to help speed the original version of the iOS to market, and we've also heard that improvements in OS X have gone into iOS. Should I go on?
Microsoft still holds the copyrights to its software and therefore the distribution rights, so no, Intel can't just buy it retail and sell it in a manner that Microsoft disapproves of. Besides, it would be financially unworkable for Intel to have to buy retail licenses to sell these hypothetical Windows 8 phones. If Microsoft isn't on board it can block Intel legally and very definitively on copyright grounds. Besides that, check out the ruling in Omega v. Costco. IANAL.
I forgot to mention that I just started using my brother's Samsung Intercept, the first Android phone I've had any real user time on. And while I found the extra hardware capacitance and mechanical buttons useful, as a primarily iOS user (for my casual gadgets) I found the change in interface jarring. The large enter button in the middle of the layout had me trying to use it as a Home button just because of my muscle memory. The triangle back button isn't as elegant and harder to find. And I prefer my on-off button to be a small nub on the top of the device instead of on the face. I know that's largely because I've been such a heavy user of the iOS, but its interface works really well and I'm very accustomed to it. Changing it in such a fundamental way by removing the bottom Home button is idiotic.
For those who are curious, my impression of the Android platform so far is that it's generally less polished and less elegant than the iOS platform, but on the other hand Android is definitely more powerful and very satisfying to my geek side in the way that it exposes much more of the technical layer to the user. I also respect the platform's openness. I probably won't be switching to Android from iOS any time soon, unless, perhaps Apple borks the iOS interface by removing the Home button!
I have to hope beyond hope that this is just a really stupid rumor. Removing the iconic bottom home button from the iOS line would be very destructive, and replacing it with a complicated multitouch gesture would be adding insult to injury. If this feature is currently in a pre-release of the iOS, I seriously don't expect it to become an interface standard let alone the replacement for the Home button. However, I have a theory about this rumor and what may actually happen to the Home button (if anything) that I'll share at the end of this post.
The iOS's physical home button is a hallmark of the design and common to the whole iOS platform. (The feature-loss suffering new touch nano can be raised as an exception, but it's not technically an iOS device and I hope it's not indicative of a trend.) People know the home button well. They know that you can leave a foreground app with a simple tap of the home button. Yes, it's gained more functionality in certain areas and is therefore a little more complex now, but the button still works largely the same way. Depriving users of that nearly universally known interface convention would create major problems for users and engender a metric ton of bad will among the modern Apple user base that is increasingly being lured by very good alternatives on other platforms. And the notion of replacing the Home button with a complex multi-touch screen gesture that no current user will be familiar with means Apple would be destroying the well established muscle memory of its customers for an essential device function. It's utterly ludicrous!
The Home button also has important functionality that can't be ripped out and replaced with some lame software-only, complex multitouch gesture. Even if the multitouch gesture is easy to perform, using five fingers to do something by way of software is still always going to be more difficult than using a single finger on a physical interface. Moreover, it would be a mistake of extreme, proportions - an epic, epic fail - to make going "Home" something you have to do by pressing the screen in an unusual way. My mind can't even fully wrap around all the usability problems such a scheme would introduce. It would complicate the user interface considerably. The screen and multi-touch paradigm are already used for so many different things in software. Also, have you ever seen how users interact with multitouch in certain apps? There are visualizer apps that encourage the user to use multiple fingers. Sometimes users will just play around with the device by placing all five fingers on the screen in various ways. Does Apple really think it's a good idea to make that into a home screen gesture? If the company does, I say look out, and buy stock in competing device manufacturers.
Anyway, I'm tired of writing on this topic. Apple may be experimenting with this concept, but I seriously doubt it will replace the Home button. However, it is true that the Home button can be a source of mechanical breakdown. We also know that Apple likes to replace physical buttons in unconventional ways (look at their modern Mac mouse and trackpad designs). It's very possible in my opinion that the Home button will be replaced in the future, but it won't be taken off the bottom of the device. The physical nature of the button may go away. They may change over to a pseudo click button like their modern desktop mouse/trackpad designs. Or, I don't see why Apple couldn't move to a fully non-mechanical capacitance based button like the iPod 3G had from way back when. I loved that iPod. The Home button may change in physical form, but unless Apple's designers and management have lost their minds it won't disappear from the bottom of the iDevices completely.
A truly erroneous hard-left outlook, but stupidity is fitting given your account name. Jihadists are very clear about their intentions. It has almost nothing to do with forcing our economies on them. The primary driver of jihad is the desire to subjugate the entire world to the dictates of Islamic dictatorship. Radical Muslims view the non-Muslim controlled parts of the globe as the world they are at war with, and the war they are waging is to impose their religion on all non-Muslims. Other justifications for jihad are at best secondary motivators. And shame on you for whitewashing and apologizing for the unquestionably evil, outrageously heinous campaign of misery and death waged by radical Islam.
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Soon after the iOS App Store debuted and apps became the latest tech fad, I wondered about encryption standards in apps. I always felt a bit weird about logging in to places remotely using apps, wondering to what extent encryption wasn't being used. I'm glad the research was done and that on the plus side only one app was found to be sending logins out in clear. I haven't flown Southwest in years and won't in the future - I've upgraded my standards, up yours! As others have pointed out, any commercial app that handles logins shouldn't be approved if it's not using encryption. And Apple, Google, Microsoft and other app store vendors should lobby to change the stupid, outdated federal dictate that hampers encryption. At best what could that export restriction possibly do in the government's favor? It's not like it's going to prevent any criminals/terrorists/evil-doers from using the software they want to use, right?
First AC, I commend you for the very reasonable defense of your (presumed) profession. I agree with much of what you wrote. But I felt compelled enough to login to speak to one point you raised:
They don't get to make law and they'll face worse consequences than a layperson if they break it.
I have dealt with more than a few lawyers, including working with them (for free on my part) and employing them. I have considered law school in the past (the direction I was urged by family and friends to go in) - I enjoy law and our legal system (generally). The fact is, however, it is not within my realm of experience to corroborate your claim that lawyers face worse consequences if they break the law. I have experienced quite the opposite.
When I went up against a lawyer who was trying to steal away corporate rights from an organization I helped manage, I witnessed said lawyer act in bad faith, violate the canons of ethics in many respects and even perjure himself in a brazen fashion, in an attempt to prevail against our side. We contacted his state bar with proof of these strong claims and were essentially told that while perhaps some of his actions were questionable, he wasn't violating their standards. They showed us that, at least in that instance, first and foremost lawyers protect one another.
Against substantial odds we prevailed against the scum bag lawyer being discussed, but other than the settlement that barred him from attacking us in the future, we got not satisfaction in recompense for his wrongdoing from the legal system. No repayment for the very considerable legal expenses he forced us to pay to fight him off.
So, Attorney AC, based on my admittedly thin anecdotal experience, lawyers very often don't get punished for violating the law. They know how to take advantage of the system, and their colleagues protect them. They resort to underhanded and at times explicitly illegal tactics to gain the upper hand, and they don't get called on it except in extraordinary situations. I've also found that even good lawyers often have to resort to doing bad things in the course of their duties. Given that so many lawyers are scum, it's not hard to surmise that even the good ones have to act like scum in the course of dealing with the true scum. There is such a thing as a good lawyer; many presumably exist. They don't deserve to be negatively stereotyped. But the profession itself, at least in the US, justifiably carries a bad reputation.
Anyone who gave points to this pitifully ignorant post above should be flogged. Its author obviously either never took basic high school economics or failed the course. There is a real crisis. In absolute terms we're the most indebted country on the planet by far. If we didn't also have the world's reserve currency we would have sunk long ago. We have spending crisis, in which discretionary spending was boosted to ridiculous levels under Obama and Entitlements spending is going to be exploding as the Baby Boomers retire. If it had just been business as usual between the Republicans and Democrats, there wouldn't have been a fight over this debt ceiling vote. But the people, true American patriots who assembled as the Tea Party, were fed up with the spending crisis that D.C. had created, and they ended up sending a huge new crop of Congressman to fight for reduced deficits and debt.
As for calling those "vital social programs" Entitlements, the Obama Administration did not start doing that. That's what those programs are called. You can open up any Macro-Econ textbook to verify that fact. These programs, these unconstitutional, Socialist redistributions of wealth, entitle certain protected groups to money rightfully earned by others. And they are bankrupting the country. Public Entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, ObamaCare) plus Federal Employee Entitlements (salaries and pensions for the massive federal bureaucracy) account for an overwhelmingly high percentage of federal spending. The politicians have known for many years that there would eventually be a day of reckoning because of the gross financial negligence of Congress. Hopefully this is the time. Those who wish to maintain the status quo, like that fool above me, are in fact demanding much more pain for all American citizens shortly down the line. Even President Obama has admitted that the longer we go without reforming this system, the solution will become increasingly more painful.
What a mature argument befitting your advanced age, grandpa! You pathetic dolt. Why didn't you also yell at me to get off your lawn? Keep sucking those benefits while you can, you leech. Since it sounds like you're retired, you're therefore close to expiring and hopefully won't be a parasite on the national treasury too much longer. These Socialist programs are going away whether you like it or not. Soon enough dementia will take what's left of your meager braincells and so you won't care anyway. Pathetic old fool.
That's not a contrarian opinion. It's nothing but a collection of the usual bile. "vile dictator named Saddam Hussein"
Awww, pathetic little leftist so sad to read the truth. What, do you think Hussein wasn't a vile dictator? The fact that the US supported him at one point in time is immaterial to the point that he was a vile dictator. Most all Iraqis would agree with my characterization, so much so that many call him a "Jew" (even though he was himself an ardent Jew-hater, antisemitism is so ingrained in the culture that anyone who is hated becomes derogatorily referred to as "Jew").
You can rail against "entitlement" programs and bureaucracies until you're blue in the face, but I guarantee you wouldn't want to live without them. Might I point out that the money we spent on Iraq is enough to permanently fix social security?
You can guarantee I wouldn't want to live without them? You're foolish if you really think you can make such a guarantee. I would gladly sign on to a national referendum abolishing all federal entitlements for those not near retirement age if I could. I don't believe in intergenerational theft, and I don't believe in government authorized pyramid schemes. My generation is getting raped by these failing Socialist schemes, which we have to pay into but won't get any benefit from. Worse, if we don't massively change course from the record-setting, enormous Obama deficits, the country will shortly end up in the same situation as Greece is in currently. Is that really what you want? Do you have any concept of the destructiveness of the debt we continue to run up? Do you know what debt service means? I sincerely doubt you do.
I assume you're not old enough for Social Security, but I bet your parents are and claimed it.
I am thankfully far away from that age. My mother isn't retirement age yet, either, and won't be for a number of years to come. So you're wrong on that account as well.
Since you're using your computer and posting to a website, you've benefited from the FCC and the DoEnergy. If you drove on any US highway or ridden on an airplane, you've benefited from the DOT. I assume you were educated in the US,probably attended college and probably used at least some amount of student loans to pay for it. You can thank the DoEducation for that.
1. Yes, I'm on a computer on the Internet, but I don't know what the FCC or the DOE have to do with either. The DoD developed the forerunner to the Internet, which took off in academia and then was embraced by the free market. I appreciate the US government's contributions to the creation/maintenance of the Internet, but like I've indicated I have no problems with justified defense programs and research; since the Internet came from defense research originally, I don't have a beef with government having spent on it. 2. The federal government spending on interstate transportation projects facilitates regular interstate commerce and thus is constitutional. And transportation spending is small in comparison to the bankrupting entitlements and bureaucracies I argue against. 3. Yes, I attended university and graduated with high honors, but no, I didn't take out student loans to finance any of my education. I'm very proud of that fact.
If you really want to change something, why don't you take the time to actually learn what all of these agencies do.
You have such a weak argument you have to assume I don't know what federal agencies do. That's false. I've already shown that many of your other assumptions are faulty. You can't argue on the merits so you have to instead demagogue Reagan and Bush. Yes, Reagan allowed Congress to overspend especially on the domestic side, and he regretted it publicly in his farewell address. (Senate Majority Leader Tip O'Neill broke his promise to institute spending cuts, so Reagan only deserves a portion of that blame.) As for President Bush (43)
Hey AC, my foolish foe, you should check out what James Madison had to say about the general welfare clause of Article I, Section 8. But since I'm benevolent and know you're probably incapable of doing your own research, I'll start clueing you in: Madison said that the general welfare power granted to Congress there was a grant to carry out the duties expressly written in the rest of that section. Madison said it would be completely invalid to interpret that clause as granting unrestricted power to Congress because that would have made listing the expressed powers unnecessary and superfluous.
The Constitution created a legislature, Congress, with a limited, enumerated set of powers. It most certainly did not grant Congress general, unlimited power and scope to legislate on every matter and tax everything under the sun. All three branches of the US government knew this to be true until the corruption of the country in the 20th Century. Your view, as popular as it may be among the ignorant and their Progressive/Socialist masters, is utterly defective. And it is people like you who are destroying this country.
Those who know me personally or know my online record know that I'm one of the biggest deficit and debt hawks around, but I'll provide a contrarian opinion of sorts in this debate. It's not just the hunt for Bin Laden that cost us $3 trillion in this war on terrorism. If tracking down and eliminating Bin Laden was the only thing we spent that money and the rest of our treasure on (most importantly precious American lives), then that would be an unmitigated disaster. But it's obviously farcical and disingenuous to make that claim because killing Bin Laden wasn't the only accomplishment. We took away the safe haven Al Qaeda had in Afghanistan, and then, like it or lump it, we removed a vile dictator named Saddam Hussein and liberated Iraq. Now with the "Arab Spring" setting the Middle East ablaze, we have at least one marginal beachhead Arab state in a semi-stable, semi-functional, semi-democratic Iraq. It's also important to recognize that at the very least we have killed a lot of terrorists and would-be terrorist radicals who otherwise would have been left to plan attacks against us in the future.
Was it necessary to fight these wars? It's an arguable point. At the very least they weren't a total waste, but their efficacy, efficiency and opportunity costs can and should be examined. Did these wars do their part to massively increase our indebtedness? Absolutely they did, but not solely - they were coupled with out-of-control, unconstitutional Entitlements and bloated federal bureaucracies. (It must also be said that national security and national defense are responsibilities of the federal government under the Constitution, whereas the vast majority of Congress' other expenditures are unconstitutional and only permitted because of the post-FDR-New-Deal perversion of the Constitution that Americans have complacently allowed to remain and grow for 80 years.) But to paint the wars as caricatures, which is what is done when people say we spent $3 trillion killing Bin Laden, is at best satire and at worst historical revisionist propaganda.
The summary claims that one rule is to pay for more RAM over better processor. That sounds like poor advice for at least three reasons: 1) RAM can usually be user-upgraded later, while the processor usually can't be; 2) RAM is cheaper than the processor; 3) some OEMs overcharge for RAM upgrades (cough, Apple). Plus, it is dubious to claim processors are usually fast enough for most people. All told, whoever offered that suggestion wasn't thinking very soundly.
70% unit coverage? CCN complexity 20? Pre-sprint grooming of stories? This article is apparently not meant for a general geek audience. Can someone translate these terms into something that non-professional programmers can comprehend?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those! Hey, someone bemoaned this no longer being a popular Slashdotism, and I agree it should be brought back.
I hope I'm wrong, but I hear serious Nintendo fans vastly overestimating the hardware capabilities of the successor to the Wii. They're hoping for hardware that will rival next gen offerings from Sony and Microsoft despite the fact that Nintendo has shown it doesn't want to compete in that high-end console space anymore. I hope I'm wrong though. With all Nintendo's success in the last generation perhaps they can come out with a Wii successor that has beefy hardware.
I don't know about an unrestricted right to remove any information pertaining to yourself, but I do think we should have online protection over details that should be personal, like phone numbers and home addresses. I'll give you the following example to illustrate this point. Several years ago I created an LLC. When I created it the form I used said that I needed to use a real street address instead of a P.O. Box. I should have put down a mail drop but decided to use my home address, thinking that if someone looked up my record they'd see it but that nearly no one would look for my company because it was a small home-based business that didn't interact with customers. Big mistake. My business did not work out and I closed it.
I periodically search for my name on the search engines to see what turns up. Usually only what I expect to see related to my name is what I find, but a couple of weeks ago I decided to search for my name and city and to my dismay I found two sites listing my old company along with my name and home address, and one of the sites (corporationwiki.com) has received a number of complaints over failing to respond to people over privacy abuses, and the site's owners hide behind a private domain name registration. There's a similar problem with real estate sites that crawl real estate records and make them accessible through the search engines. Thus, when I purchase property in the future I'm going to obscure the record by buying it through an LLC that will not carry my name on the public record. I'm currently investigating my options for getting it removed.
Now some will contend that my personal address is a public record and that I should be entitled to privacy for it. I disagree. The state of California made license plate records private information only available to investigators after a stalker murdered a Hollywood start after tracking her down through her license plate information. I think home address information should be private across the board and that a person should have a right to have it deleted if it appears publicly online.
As most Western governments are financially broke, who in the world is going to pay for the work-free basic income you envision? Let me guess, soak the rich right? That's not going to cut it. Government could confiscate 90% or even 100% of the wealthiest people's income and they still wouldn't be able to balance their current enormous budget gaps for the existing Socialist programs they run. Fail.
I'm really surprised that in a discussion about triple-screen budget PC gaming no one mentions AMD Crossfire (multiple graphics card support) or AMD Eyefinity (the feature that treats three separate displays as one combined display and which allows games that support it to properly run on all three screens).
I wonder if this father and other Egyptians who used Facebook in their revolt know that Zuckerberg and many of the other founders of the service are Jews. Or that the Intel processors they use to access the site are designed by Jews in the Jewish state of Israel.
For those of you who don't know, when female reporter Lara Logan was attacked and sexually molested by an Egyptian mob, the attackers were shouting at "Jew, Jew, Jew!" at her. She isn't even Jewish, but there's a pathological hatred for Jews in much of the Middle East.
Hey, I enjoy a good Apple troll now and then, but Light Peak (not Light Speed, Light Peak) appears to be the future and the successor to USB. USB 3 isn't exactly taking off, with even Intel eschewing it in its chipsets. Light Peak is billed as a replacement for many connection standards such as "SCSI, SATA, USB, FireWire, PCI Express and HDMI" Light Peak is Intel's new baby, and as with many computing technology advancements Apple likes to be ahead of the pack (especially when it comes to bus connections). will be backward compatible (even appearing to use the same physical connector as USB) and adaptable in a way that will allow it to replace a number of different connection types. It will be adopted by the other motherboard producers because, well, it seems like there's no competition against it as the future bus technology. Now were you trolling just to troll, or are you really so ignorant about the emerging technology that you'd post a comment like that in seriousness? If your comment wasn't meant in jest, why not get yourself some free education on the subject.
Excellent point. I really don't want to have to buy new costly domain names for my most valuable sites.
I have to agree. I like my two PS3s, but with Sony acting like this I probably won't buy any Sony consoles in the future.
So right on, cayenne8! I've been screaming about this runaway growth in government spending for years now. Some have clearly gotten the message, but President Obama certainly has not. He just advocated a cut of $400 billion over 10 years. I think he's hoping people will hear $400 billion in cuts and assume he's talking about per year amounts. $400 billion over a decade in government cuts translates to (I know the math is challenging here) $40 billion per year, when we're running $1.5 TRILLION deficits per year. He also called for a freeze at the current post so-called "Stimulus" hyper-inflated government spending levels. And he thinks that's going to cut with people concerned about deficits and debt? He must think that portion of the American public is dominated by ignoramuses.
Federal spending needs to not be frozen or cut with a scalpel (like Obama advocated during the election), it needs to be slashed with a machete. Will that government workers in our bloated federal bureaucracies out of jobs? Certainly it will - it has to. The American people can't afford to pay for the scale of unnecessary, unconstitutional government. All sectors of government spending need to be slashed - Discretionary, Non-Discretionary (Entitlements) and Defense. It's important to point out for those on the Left who blame the wars for the deficits that less than two years of spending on Entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) equal ten years of spending on the War on Terrorism - and that figure is based on numbers from a year ago. The Baby Boomers are going to cause the Ponzi Retirement Schemes to collapse as they begin retiring en masse this year. Social Security is already now running an annual deficit, which wasn't predicted to happen for a number of years. Anyone who doesn't demand huge reform wants those schemes to go bankrupt. I'm calling you out, Left-wingers who say no changes are necessary.
The only thing that President Obama said on the debt problem that was at all worth saying was that Discretionary spending only accounts for a small fraction of total spending - about 9 to 12%. The rest of the pie needs to be massively reduced. Will it cause higher unemployment and lower GDP in the short term? Certainly. But that employment and GDP is based on a phony economic model anyway - one that says that we can endlessly spend and not care about our deficits and debt, not worry that Debt Service (interest on the national debt) will in a short number of years be more expensive than our current Defense spending levels. That's unsustainable. Anyone on the Left who says we can't cut or we can't make changes to the Ponzi Retirement Schemes because it will hurt old people is advocating the destruction of the country. It's really just that simple.
While a lot of your post is correct, you are mistaken about some of your claims. Inter vivo giving (gifts to family members during a giver's life) is limited to $13,000 a year tax free. And trusts do not in and of themselves shield against the death tax (a.k.a. the estate tax). Trusts are more efficient and protective than regular wills, but they don't bypass the death tax. I know because my beloved grandmother passed away in 2009, and we're still dealing with the complications of the death tax. I've had to become well acquainted with all of these issues because I've been acting as the family representative to my grandmother's financial professionals.
If you do the research you'll see for yourself that trusts don't shield you from the death tax. Instead, clients that may be hit by the death tax are usually sold insurance policies that are designed to pay in excess of the death tax liability. It's true that taxes on inheritance are nothing new in the US and that the Bush-era tax cuts made the death tax less oppressive, but it still does have impacts on American families that have accrued moderate assets. By the way, another thread discussed Warren Buffet. He has very dishonestly called for higher death taxes because he owns a corporation that sells death tax protection policies.
Death tax relief was extended through 2012 by the emergency tax compromise at the end of 2010.
See this recent informative article on the death tax for more information.
iOS and Mac OS X are much more similar to each other than base Unix is to OS X. iOS is OS X in most all respects. iOS's hardware support and services are paired down to run on a very small number of static hardware devices (i.e. devices that don't have any hardware upgrade potential), and its user interface elements are quite different. It runs on the ARM processor family where Mac OS X doesn't (at least not publicly). It has some additional components and APIs for mobile uses that Macs don't need.
But aside from that, it is OS X. Its file system structure is nearly identical when you peer into it, which tells you a lot about how the OS architecture. iOS has many of the same system file components and runs many of the exact same services. Its programming environment (Xcode) and programming language (Objective C) are shared with Mac OS X. Apple pulled Mac OS X developers off to help speed the original version of the iOS to market, and we've also heard that improvements in OS X have gone into iOS. Should I go on?
Microsoft still holds the copyrights to its software and therefore the distribution rights, so no, Intel can't just buy it retail and sell it in a manner that Microsoft disapproves of. Besides, it would be financially unworkable for Intel to have to buy retail licenses to sell these hypothetical Windows 8 phones. If Microsoft isn't on board it can block Intel legally and very definitively on copyright grounds. Besides that, check out the ruling in Omega v. Costco. IANAL.
I forgot to mention that I just started using my brother's Samsung Intercept, the first Android phone I've had any real user time on. And while I found the extra hardware capacitance and mechanical buttons useful, as a primarily iOS user (for my casual gadgets) I found the change in interface jarring. The large enter button in the middle of the layout had me trying to use it as a Home button just because of my muscle memory. The triangle back button isn't as elegant and harder to find. And I prefer my on-off button to be a small nub on the top of the device instead of on the face. I know that's largely because I've been such a heavy user of the iOS, but its interface works really well and I'm very accustomed to it. Changing it in such a fundamental way by removing the bottom Home button is idiotic.
For those who are curious, my impression of the Android platform so far is that it's generally less polished and less elegant than the iOS platform, but on the other hand Android is definitely more powerful and very satisfying to my geek side in the way that it exposes much more of the technical layer to the user. I also respect the platform's openness. I probably won't be switching to Android from iOS any time soon, unless, perhaps Apple borks the iOS interface by removing the Home button!
I have to hope beyond hope that this is just a really stupid rumor. Removing the iconic bottom home button from the iOS line would be very destructive, and replacing it with a complicated multitouch gesture would be adding insult to injury. If this feature is currently in a pre-release of the iOS, I seriously don't expect it to become an interface standard let alone the replacement for the Home button. However, I have a theory about this rumor and what may actually happen to the Home button (if anything) that I'll share at the end of this post.
The iOS's physical home button is a hallmark of the design and common to the whole iOS platform. (The feature-loss suffering new touch nano can be raised as an exception, but it's not technically an iOS device and I hope it's not indicative of a trend.) People know the home button well. They know that you can leave a foreground app with a simple tap of the home button. Yes, it's gained more functionality in certain areas and is therefore a little more complex now, but the button still works largely the same way. Depriving users of that nearly universally known interface convention would create major problems for users and engender a metric ton of bad will among the modern Apple user base that is increasingly being lured by very good alternatives on other platforms. And the notion of replacing the Home button with a complex multi-touch screen gesture that no current user will be familiar with means Apple would be destroying the well established muscle memory of its customers for an essential device function. It's utterly ludicrous!
The Home button also has important functionality that can't be ripped out and replaced with some lame software-only, complex multitouch gesture. Even if the multitouch gesture is easy to perform, using five fingers to do something by way of software is still always going to be more difficult than using a single finger on a physical interface. Moreover, it would be a mistake of extreme, proportions - an epic, epic fail - to make going "Home" something you have to do by pressing the screen in an unusual way. My mind can't even fully wrap around all the usability problems such a scheme would introduce. It would complicate the user interface considerably. The screen and multi-touch paradigm are already used for so many different things in software. Also, have you ever seen how users interact with multitouch in certain apps? There are visualizer apps that encourage the user to use multiple fingers. Sometimes users will just play around with the device by placing all five fingers on the screen in various ways. Does Apple really think it's a good idea to make that into a home screen gesture? If the company does, I say look out, and buy stock in competing device manufacturers.
Anyway, I'm tired of writing on this topic. Apple may be experimenting with this concept, but I seriously doubt it will replace the Home button. However, it is true that the Home button can be a source of mechanical breakdown. We also know that Apple likes to replace physical buttons in unconventional ways (look at their modern Mac mouse and trackpad designs). It's very possible in my opinion that the Home button will be replaced in the future, but it won't be taken off the bottom of the device. The physical nature of the button may go away. They may change over to a pseudo click button like their modern desktop mouse/trackpad designs. Or, I don't see why Apple couldn't move to a fully non-mechanical capacitance based button like the iPod 3G had from way back when. I loved that iPod. The Home button may change in physical form, but unless Apple's designers and management have lost their minds it won't disappear from the bottom of the iDevices completely.
A truly erroneous hard-left outlook, but stupidity is fitting given your account name. Jihadists are very clear about their intentions. It has almost nothing to do with forcing our economies on them. The primary driver of jihad is the desire to subjugate the entire world to the dictates of Islamic dictatorship. Radical Muslims view the non-Muslim controlled parts of the globe as the world they are at war with, and the war they are waging is to impose their religion on all non-Muslims. Other justifications for jihad are at best secondary motivators. And shame on you for whitewashing and apologizing for the unquestionably evil, outrageously heinous campaign of misery and death waged by radical Islam.