No offense intended, but apparently there are enough people willing (or stupid enough) to pay $600 for textbooks- it's a consumer problem, and the blame lies squarely at their feet. It's the same dynamic that provides the RIAA with funds it needs to continue its encroachment on fair use. Keep paying for it, and they'll keep doing it.
If you know of a way to pass college classes without buying the textbooks that professors require I'd like to hear it, especially if it's legal. We're not talking about luxury items like RIAA deals with.
then I'm for it. Seriously, why shouldn't textbooks be replaced with PDFs, HTML, or something similar? Publishers could charge a small semester/annual fee (make it a course fee for colleges), students would always have the current edition, it'd be a LOT cheaper... other advantages are just gravy.
I say this having just spent over $600 on books for college classes this semester. When the fsck did these things get so expensive? You could post the books on the class website for registered students to download and/or read online. The cost saved would balance out the expense of a good thin-and-light laptop (like this one) over 2-3 years and you'd have the laptop for word processing, Internet browsing and what not too.
Lamo broke into the NY Times computer and found out that all their news stories are ghost written by the CEOs of Haliburton, Bechtel and Enron.
It would be more likely that Lamo found evidence that the NYT really is run by former Soviet "useful idiots". We are talking about a paper that has its own Pulitzer prizewinning apologist for Stalin.
Though in all fairness the NYT is likely just another bunch of leftist hypocrits. They complain about high prision populations, police "brutality", the Patriot Act, AG Ashcroft, etc., but when some kid makes them look stupid they go running to the FBI. Pathetic.
1) Housing costs are way out of whack. With all this mechanization and automation we should be able to build cheap housing, but good luck trying to get it past the local zoning fascists (fascism: private ownership, government control), the Realtor lobby, carpenters and other unions, general NIMBYism, and what not. The perpetual money machine that luxury home builders appear to be (check their stock charts) is theoretically impossible without the government intervention that is most definitely happening. Anyhow, with cheap(er) manufactured housing (something more durable than "mobile homes") people could afford to drop out of the (paid) work force from time to time if they so chose, or at least not worry about ending up on welfare.
Problems with this idea? Sure. You're liable to have the ambitious, hard-working people segregate themselves from those less so. A lot of people won't live up to their potential without the pressure to work. But both of these things are already happening to some degree anyhow.
2) Genetic engineering. Another poster rightly asked what people on the left side of the bell curve will do. (Besides pr0n, if the spam I'm receiving is any indication. Geeze.) I think the genetic engineers will figure out how to fix that problem within a generation or two (blind guess). Yes, it's going to be messy politically, not to mention theologically, but it's going to happen. I'll pay good money to the genetic engineers after they've convinced me that it's reasonably safe, if only to fix my allergies and other quality-of-life things. The trick will be not creating a genetic monoculture in the process. It'll be interesting.
3) After #2 happens, colonization of space is pretty much inevitable.
(Brian imagines half of/. saying "Damn, and I thought I was geeky...)
The huge personal and dependent deductions shield lower-income taxpayers. You pay 17% (in most plans) on whatever is left, if anything. I've seen lots of Democrats slam the Flat Tax conveniently ignore the deductions, which grossly distorts the plan.
Is too. The most glaring example is with dividends: corporations pay them with aftertax income, investors pay taxes again on the dividends when they receive them. That's why dividend payouts plummeted and investors took the much riskier route of investing exclusively for share price appreciation, and we all know how that turned out. The dividend tax cut that was passed trimmed the double-tax problem but didn't eliminate it. It was enough to get Microsoft to start paying out dividends though, so now they can't torch all of their cash horde on things like the X-Box.
the best policy to achieve socially neutral taxation is to spread taxes around...
Which makes is VERY difficult for taxpayers to figure out just how badly we're getting screwed. It's better to have clear, easy-to-see tax bills so we can better keep tabs on Big Brother. Plus it helps keep the overhead of tax collection and compliance down. We're wasting hundreds of $billions on federal tax compliance, plus encouraging corruption by letting Congress sell tax loopholes to the clients of K Street lobbyists. Which is why Democrats like Sen. Minority Leader Tom Daschle and his corporate lobbyist wife go ballistic when someone proposes the Flat Income Tax.
It's too early for a dollar figure, but its members are not pleased to see more tax on their plates, says Simon. Should the rule go into effect, he adds, the state Legislature could step in.
So the Florida Dept. of Revenue cooked this up, for reasons that can only make sense to career bureaucrats. The Florida Legislature will smack it down in the unlikely event that the DoR actually tries to implement it.
What should scare people is the degree to which legislatures have deferred tax-writing power to unelected bureaucrats. They are shirking their constitutional responsibilities. It gives the state a way to raise revenue and the legislature a way to pass the buck. "Shucks, it wasn't *our* idea! Honest! We feel your pain..."
For the online quizzes for the class I'm taking now, the textbook publisher's website asks for the student's email address and the professor's email address. That's it. It then sends the results to those addresses and notes the correct answers to whatever was missed. Near as I can tell you can enter anything you want for those email addresses.
The instructor gets the usual username/password combo and he assumed that students had to set up accounts tied to his class because the publisher knows that students might be tempted to cheat, right?
In all fairness, maybe they just figured that securing an open book do-at-home quiz wasn't possible anyhow. But I'm honest, antisocial, and getting decent grades anyhow so I let the professor know.
To the guy who suggested selling higher grades to the football team or fraternities: forget that. Trade with the cheerleaders:-).
I got mine through State Farm, which acted as a broker for Fortis. Most independent insurance agents offer catastrophic health insurance policies from various companies. Golden Rule is supposedly one of the bigger insurers for individuals and small businesses. I chose what I did mostly because I get my other insurance from State Farm, who I've never filed a claim with. YMMV and all that.
Medical Savings Account plans are catastrophic insurance policies paired with a tax-deductable savings account. You use the account to pay your routine expenses. Golden Rule offers them. There's a substantial faction of the Republican Party that's pushed MSAs off and on over the past several years, but the Democrats have tied MSAs down with restrictions to the point that you probably don't qualify for them. If everyone could buy a MSA plan then there'd be a lot less demand for socialized medicine, and that would be bad for the nanny state. In the meantine, just get catastrophic insurance and put up with the tax hit you'll take paying routine expenses.
Get catastrophic health insurance. I'm paying about $75/month for a $2,000/year deductable ($500/year deductable for prescriptions). Basically, unless I get hit by a truck, get cancer, or some other catastrophy, I don't bother the insurance company and they don't bother me (or my docs, etc). The cost diff between that and Blue Cross is more than enough to pay routine expenses, even after having to pay them with aftertax dollars (which is the real reason why health insurance is employer paid: tax deduction).
2) Liability
Get the obligatory Nolo's Quick LLC book. Setting up a LLC will protect your personal assets. But yeah, there's a lot of lawsuit-happy morons out there. My homeowners association has been sued by a few fellow homeowners who don't realize that suing an association of 300 members that they are a part of is really, really self-defeating.
3) Accounting
I'm still working on that one. Actually, I'm working on getting a master's in accounting, now that the job market for software engineers is shot to hell. But my prof told me about how he just spent serious money getting someone from Rent-A-Geek (I kid you not, they drive around what appear to be repainted Slashdot Cruisers, remember those?) to fix his wireless network. $75 for them to come out plus over $100/hour on top of that. (The diagnosis? The Linksys WLAN card was DOA. Shock.) Since I was the guy that tech support came to when they got stuck on Wintel platform issues at my last job, doing home/small business freelance tech support sounds plausible to me. Maybe I'll give it a try.
So even thought things might look bad now in the 3rd world that is the USA, with countless homeless people,
The People's Republic of San Francisco gives ~$400/mo cash to their homeless, and their city government is perplexed as to why they have so many of them when they're spending so much money.
even more people living the poverty line, California and 5 other states recently bankrupt (failing to meet budget requirements) with a huge national deficit,
California reelected a crooked socialist governor. Really, really dumb move. Davis is almost certain to be recalled even though the state deserves to be stuck with him for his full term.
a shaky international reputation and lack of human rights.
Actually, I think we now have a pretty solid reputation as a nation you do NOT want to fsck with. This counts as an improvement over the years immediately prior to 2001. As for human rights, the fact that you can post such drivel with impunity speaks volumes.
Not to mention things are getting worse day by day. Perhaps The sates could use Estonia as a model to help pull them self out of their current slump. No one in the USSR saw it coming either, a lot of them were laughing at how bad the USA had it, and how lucky they were to be living in the greatest nation on earth. Guess things are just the same as always, the USA is 15 years or so behind Russia.
Some people will believe anything. It helped that the Soviet dictatorship rather severely limited access to foreign travel, had total legal control over the media, and "disappeared" people who disobeyed. 'Twas kinda hard to get an opposing viewport. OTOH, you could read Pravda over here. I remember seeing it at my local library (People's Republic of Ann Arbor, the main midwest base for the now Former Soviet Useful Idiots) when I was little.
As for why the Estonian and Russian economies are zipping along today, one major reason is that they've both passed flat income taxes. In Russia it's a 13% flat tax, not sure about Estonia. That wipes out most of the compliance overhead, it dramatically raises participation (not worth the risk to duck a 13% tax that's easy to audit), and it stops the economic distortion that occurs when people do otherwise stupid things to minimize their tax hit (like take out the biggest mortgage they possibly can to max out the interest deduction, thus fueling all those McMansionvilles). We really, really need to pass a Flat Tax here, it'd wipe out half the K Street lobbyists and accompanying corruption since there'd be no more tax loopholes to lobby for, but the socialists (er, Democrats) will scream bloody murder that The Rich(tm) wouldn't be paying their "fair share" (defined as "as much as we can get away with looting to buy the votes of the sheeple"), so there y'go. Word is that China is considering copying the Russian flat tax.
The nForce2 is a nice chipset but their Linux drivers leave much to be desired, like working audio and firewire.
I've been using ALSA for audio. Freshrpms.net has ALSA (and other goodies) in convenient RPMs. I haven't tried using the FireWire port but everything else works. And it's trivial to run 400MHz FSB, regardless of your CPUs official spec. I'm running a 1700+ at 7.5x404MHz. MemTest86 verified the configuration.
since AMD doesn't harrass/sue third-party chipset suppliers (like VIA) so no one can get away with playing games like Intel is doing with PAT. I prefer nVidia nForce2 chipset boards these days. YMMV.
For 471 large, the DoD could directly hire the most brilliant software minds in the country to create their own operating system and office suite and any other necessary software.
Well, yes, but so could GE and various other private sector folks, but they don't, so what makes you think the Army would be any smarter?
Really, just about any of the Forbes 100 corps could figure out which open source project was close enough to their needs (OpenOffice, etc), say "I need this-this-this added, who do I write a check to to get it done?", have the updated code in however many months, and tell Microsoft to take a flying leap. Especially now that there's lots of coders in need of employment. It'd be worth it just to get rid of the legal liability from closed source licensing.
The war was sold to the American public as an immediate, imminent threat to the USA by Iraq having WMD.
Given Saddam's nuclear weapons program, how its completion would be Bad, and how we had no way of knowing when that would be due to Saddam's interference with UN weapons inspectors, it was prudent to assume an "immediate, imminent" threat level. Out of the three "Axis of Evil" nations Iraq was the easiest one to deal with and gives us a staging area to deal with Evil #2 if need be (I'm still hopeful Iran will have a revolution and save us the trouble). Plus, this gets our troops out of Saudi Arabia, since we no longer have to defend them against Iraq.
In fact, he would have been overthrown, except that Ronny Raygun, Rumsfeld, and others backed Hussein during the 1980s when Hussein launched an aggressive war against Iran. If we had followed a moral foreign policy, the Iranians would have defeated Hussein and would have overthrown him during the Iran-Iraq war.
So we'd have one big honkin' Evil instead of two smaller ones? We gave Saddam enough help to keep Iraq from getting overrun but not enough to win. Under the circumstances that was the practical policy. The most moral policy would have been to send in troops and liberate both countries, but we simply didn't have the ability at the time and the people in the respective countries probably wouldn't have gone along anyhow.
I mean, we backed Bin Laden in Afghanistan
We backed the Mujahadeen because they were defending themselves against our shared enemy that invaded them. Some of the people we helped didn't appreciate it, but they got the job done. FDR backed Stalin to defeat Hitler. Backing the Afghans doesn't come close to that on the moral ambiguity scale, and both policies were right.
Interesting how you lefties claim to be so "sophisticated" but the complexities of world affairs sail right over your heads.
So never mind that Saddam had WMDs, as the Kurdish and Iranian survivors of his WMD attacks will attest. Never mind that he never let your UN pals do their weapon inspections unobstructed. Sometime between the Iran-Iraq war and now those WMDs magically disappeared and we should all take Saddams word for it. After all, Iraq is only as big as California, where could he hide the things?
And the ~300,000 Iraqis Saddam's dictatorship murdered? No mass destruction there, no sir. No need to worry about such a dictatorship developing nukes.
I guess you Former Soviet Useful Idiots really were desperate for new employment.
China probably threw in a few routers along with the fiber optic communications systems they sold Saddam to link up his antiaircraft radars. The ones in the no-fly zone we kept bombing, during both the Clinton and Bush administrations.
Really, it's not that difficult to break an embargo. We can't even keep illicit white powder out of this country. You can dramatically trim the quantity of goods traded but never stop all of them. (Especially when the target nation is friends with France.) Embargos against hostile regimes are just stopgaps until either there's an internal revolution or America decides to play Whack-a-Dictator.
The sad thing is that Forbes was the first business mag to put Linus Torvalds on its cover. They really appeared to "get it". Ad revenue wasn't so hard to come by in those blissful dot-com days, though.
Re:alternatives and cultural rant ahead...
on
Working with ADHD?
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· Score: 1
Simple sugar question - what is your sugar substitute?
Mostly I just switched from sugared soft drinks to diet (Nutrasweet) and stopped buying candy/etc. Eliminating those major items from my diet was enough. I used to go through several cans/bottles of Coke, Mountain Dew, and/or Jolt a day, which was, in retrospect, insane.
I've also tried to eliminate MSG (monosodium glutemate) since I'm very suspicious of it. Would you believe they put MSG in Doritos? Bastards. Cool Ranch Doritos are the best.
Re:alternatives and cultural rant ahead...
on
Working with ADHD?
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· Score: 2, Informative
I have found that the most effective treatment is just to get outside in the fresh air and get a bit of excersize every day.
This appears to be working for me. I've been getting out for walks every other day recently, just worked my way up to ~30 minute walks (brisk pace, keep the blood moving), and today I was able to stay focused enough to get a LOT of reading done. It's too soon to say whether this is going to be a lasting effect, but at the very least I'm getting in better physical shape. I chose every other day so I'd have a day to heal, probably don't need that at this point.
Another helpful change I made a couple years ago: I eliminated the major sources of refined sugar from my diet. Refined sugar feeds things that should not be fed. I don't feel sleepy all the time anymore, I don't get sick stomach all the time anymore, and the excess weight I put on after college melted away without the help of exercise. And don't even think about those "reduced fat" cookies and crap: they put in extra sugar to compensate. Check the labels.
Don't neglect getting your allergies dealt with too if you have those. Trying to think when your sinuses are swollen up is pretty difficult. See an allergist, get tested, and if need be take the antigen shots.
(2) Work in Defense. If you are writing software for the Tomahawk Cruise Missile, administering the UNIX cluster at the local Air Force Base or cranking out Code for the F-22 at Boeing/Lockheed Martin, rest assured, your job isn't going to be outsourced to a shop in Bangalore - even if they promise to do it for free!
Nope. My former employer has/had lots of defense customers and they aren't buying squat either. I'm not sure whats going on. I'm guessing that there's been no big pickup in defense orders and the civilian sections of those companies are getting hammered from the mess the airline industry is in (terrorism, SARS hype).
Adding an external antenna to your notebook's WiFi card helps too. This one works well for me and it's not too obtrusive. The antennas on my APs were good enough for my purposes so I left them alone.
BTW, if anyone has an ORiNOCO WiFi card and is wonder why it works great under Linux but craps out periodically on WinXP SP1, this Microsoft patch is likely the culprit. If you stop the Wireless Zero Configuration service after you boot up it'll work around the problem, but it's best to not install the patch in the first place, at least until the Lucent/Agere refugees working at Proxim release new firmware/drivers that are Windows brain damage compliant.
(Hint for Proxim: release Linux drivers for your 802.11a/b/g cards and put external antenna connectors on them and I'll upgrade. Otherwise, I'm more than happy to save my money with cheap 802.11b gear.)
Slashdot Mirror
No offense intended, but apparently there are enough people willing (or stupid enough) to pay $600 for textbooks- it's a consumer problem, and the blame lies squarely at their feet. It's the same dynamic that provides the RIAA with funds it needs to continue its encroachment on fair use. Keep paying for it, and they'll keep doing it.
If you know of a way to pass college classes without buying the textbooks that professors require I'd like to hear it, especially if it's legal. We're not talking about luxury items like RIAA deals with.
then I'm for it. Seriously, why shouldn't textbooks be replaced with PDFs, HTML, or something similar? Publishers could charge a small semester/annual fee (make it a course fee for colleges), students would always have the current edition, it'd be a LOT cheaper... other advantages are just gravy.
I say this having just spent over $600 on books for college classes this semester. When the fsck did these things get so expensive? You could post the books on the class website for registered students to download and/or read online. The cost saved would balance out the expense of a good thin-and-light laptop (like this one) over 2-3 years and you'd have the laptop for word processing, Internet browsing and what not too.
Lamo broke into the NY Times computer and found out that all their news stories are ghost written by the CEOs of Haliburton, Bechtel and Enron.
It would be more likely that Lamo found evidence that the NYT really is run by former Soviet "useful idiots". We are talking about a paper that has its own Pulitzer prizewinning apologist for Stalin.
Though in all fairness the NYT is likely just another bunch of leftist hypocrits. They complain about high prision populations, police "brutality", the Patriot Act, AG Ashcroft, etc., but when some kid makes them look stupid they go running to the FBI. Pathetic.
1) Housing costs are way out of whack. With all this mechanization and automation we should be able to build cheap housing, but good luck trying to get it past the local zoning fascists (fascism: private ownership, government control), the Realtor lobby, carpenters and other unions, general NIMBYism, and what not. The perpetual money machine that luxury home builders appear to be (check their stock charts) is theoretically impossible without the government intervention that is most definitely happening. Anyhow, with cheap(er) manufactured housing (something more durable than "mobile homes") people could afford to drop out of the (paid) work force from time to time if they so chose, or at least not worry about ending up on welfare.
/. saying "Damn, and I thought I was geeky...)
Problems with this idea? Sure. You're liable to have the ambitious, hard-working people segregate themselves from those less so. A lot of people won't live up to their potential without the pressure to work. But both of these things are already happening to some degree anyhow.
2) Genetic engineering. Another poster rightly asked what people on the left side of the bell curve will do. (Besides pr0n, if the spam I'm receiving is any indication. Geeze.) I think the genetic engineers will figure out how to fix that problem within a generation or two (blind guess). Yes, it's going to be messy politically, not to mention theologically, but it's going to happen. I'll pay good money to the genetic engineers after they've convinced me that it's reasonably safe, if only to fix my allergies and other quality-of-life things. The trick will be not creating a genetic monoculture in the process. It'll be interesting.
3) After #2 happens, colonization of space is pretty much inevitable.
(Brian imagines half of
Maybe you should try actually doing the math.
The huge personal and dependent deductions shield lower-income taxpayers. You pay 17% (in most plans) on whatever is left, if anything. I've seen lots of Democrats slam the Flat Tax conveniently ignore the deductions, which grossly distorts the plan.
there is no such concept as "double taxation"
Is too. The most glaring example is with dividends: corporations pay them with aftertax income, investors pay taxes again on the dividends when they receive them. That's why dividend payouts plummeted and investors took the much riskier route of investing exclusively for share price appreciation, and we all know how that turned out. The dividend tax cut that was passed trimmed the double-tax problem but didn't eliminate it. It was enough to get Microsoft to start paying out dividends though, so now they can't torch all of their cash horde on things like the X-Box.
the best policy to achieve socially neutral taxation is to spread taxes around...
Which makes is VERY difficult for taxpayers to figure out just how badly we're getting screwed. It's better to have clear, easy-to-see tax bills so we can better keep tabs on Big Brother. Plus it helps keep the overhead of tax collection and compliance down. We're wasting hundreds of $billions on federal tax compliance, plus encouraging corruption by letting Congress sell tax loopholes to the clients of K Street lobbyists. Which is why Democrats like Sen. Minority Leader Tom Daschle and his corporate lobbyist wife go ballistic when someone proposes the Flat Income Tax.
It's too early for a dollar figure, but its members are not pleased to see more tax on their plates, says Simon. Should the rule go into effect, he adds, the state Legislature could step in.
So the Florida Dept. of Revenue cooked this up, for reasons that can only make sense to career bureaucrats. The Florida Legislature will smack it down in the unlikely event that the DoR actually tries to implement it.
What should scare people is the degree to which legislatures have deferred tax-writing power to unelected bureaucrats. They are shirking their constitutional responsibilities. It gives the state a way to raise revenue and the legislature a way to pass the buck. "Shucks, it wasn't *our* idea! Honest! We feel your pain..."
as of late last night, which is when the large number of port 135 hits to my Linux server abruptly stopped. Good for Comcast!
For the online quizzes for the class I'm taking now, the textbook publisher's website asks for the student's email address and the professor's email address. That's it. It then sends the results to those addresses and notes the correct answers to whatever was missed. Near as I can tell you can enter anything you want for those email addresses.
:-).
The instructor gets the usual username/password combo and he assumed that students had to set up accounts tied to his class because the publisher knows that students might be tempted to cheat, right?
In all fairness, maybe they just figured that securing an open book do-at-home quiz wasn't possible anyhow. But I'm honest, antisocial, and getting decent grades anyhow so I let the professor know.
To the guy who suggested selling higher grades to the football team or fraternities: forget that. Trade with the cheerleaders
I got mine through State Farm, which acted as a broker for Fortis. Most independent insurance agents offer catastrophic health insurance policies from various companies. Golden Rule is supposedly one of the bigger insurers for individuals and small businesses. I chose what I did mostly because I get my other insurance from State Farm, who I've never filed a claim with. YMMV and all that.
Medical Savings Account plans are catastrophic insurance policies paired with a tax-deductable savings account. You use the account to pay your routine expenses. Golden Rule offers them. There's a substantial faction of the Republican Party that's pushed MSAs off and on over the past several years, but the Democrats have tied MSAs down with restrictions to the point that you probably don't qualify for them. If everyone could buy a MSA plan then there'd be a lot less demand for socialized medicine, and that would be bad for the nanny state. In the meantine, just get catastrophic insurance and put up with the tax hit you'll take paying routine expenses.
1) Health Insurance
Get catastrophic health insurance. I'm paying about $75/month for a $2,000/year deductable ($500/year deductable for prescriptions). Basically, unless I get hit by a truck, get cancer, or some other catastrophy, I don't bother the insurance company and they don't bother me (or my docs, etc). The cost diff between that and Blue Cross is more than enough to pay routine expenses, even after having to pay them with aftertax dollars (which is the real reason why health insurance is employer paid: tax deduction).
2) Liability
Get the obligatory Nolo's Quick LLC book. Setting up a LLC will protect your personal assets. But yeah, there's a lot of lawsuit-happy morons out there. My homeowners association has been sued by a few fellow homeowners who don't realize that suing an association of 300 members that they are a part of is really, really self-defeating.
3) Accounting
I'm still working on that one. Actually, I'm working on getting a master's in accounting, now that the job market for software engineers is shot to hell. But my prof told me about how he just spent serious money getting someone from Rent-A-Geek (I kid you not, they drive around what appear to be repainted Slashdot Cruisers, remember those?) to fix his wireless network. $75 for them to come out plus over $100/hour on top of that. (The diagnosis? The Linksys WLAN card was DOA. Shock.) Since I was the guy that tech support came to when they got stuck on Wintel platform issues at my last job, doing home/small business freelance tech support sounds plausible to me. Maybe I'll give it a try.
So even thought things might look bad now in the 3rd world that is the USA, with countless homeless people,
The People's Republic of San Francisco gives ~$400/mo cash to their homeless, and their city government is perplexed as to why they have so many of them when they're spending so much money.
even more people living the poverty line, California and 5 other states recently bankrupt (failing to meet budget requirements) with a huge national deficit,
California reelected a crooked socialist governor. Really, really dumb move. Davis is almost certain to be recalled even though the state deserves to be stuck with him for his full term.
a shaky international reputation and lack of human rights.
Actually, I think we now have a pretty solid reputation as a nation you do NOT want to fsck with. This counts as an improvement over the years immediately prior to 2001. As for human rights, the fact that you can post such drivel with impunity speaks volumes.
Not to mention things are getting worse day by day. Perhaps The sates could use Estonia as a model to help pull them self out of their current slump.
No one in the USSR saw it coming either, a lot of them were laughing at how bad the USA had it, and how lucky they were to be living in the greatest nation on earth.
Guess things are just the same as always, the USA is 15 years or so behind Russia.
Some people will believe anything. It helped that the Soviet dictatorship rather severely limited access to foreign travel, had total legal control over the media, and "disappeared" people who disobeyed. 'Twas kinda hard to get an opposing viewport. OTOH, you could read Pravda over here. I remember seeing it at my local library (People's Republic of Ann Arbor, the main midwest base for the now Former Soviet Useful Idiots) when I was little.
As for why the Estonian and Russian economies are zipping along today, one major reason is that they've both passed flat income taxes. In Russia it's a 13% flat tax, not sure about Estonia. That wipes out most of the compliance overhead, it dramatically raises participation (not worth the risk to duck a 13% tax that's easy to audit), and it stops the economic distortion that occurs when people do otherwise stupid things to minimize their tax hit (like take out the biggest mortgage they possibly can to max out the interest deduction, thus fueling all those McMansionvilles). We really, really need to pass a Flat Tax here, it'd wipe out half the K Street lobbyists and accompanying corruption since there'd be no more tax loopholes to lobby for, but the socialists (er, Democrats) will scream bloody murder that The Rich(tm) wouldn't be paying their "fair share" (defined as "as much as we can get away with looting to buy the votes of the sheeple"), so there y'go. Word is that China is considering copying the Russian flat tax.
There are only two industries that call their customers "users".
The nForce2 is a nice chipset but their Linux drivers leave much to be desired, like working audio and firewire.
I've been using ALSA for audio. Freshrpms.net has ALSA (and other goodies) in convenient RPMs. I haven't tried using the FireWire port but everything else works. And it's trivial to run 400MHz FSB, regardless of your CPUs official spec. I'm running a 1700+ at 7.5x404MHz. MemTest86 verified the configuration.
since AMD doesn't harrass/sue third-party chipset suppliers (like VIA) so no one can get away with playing games like Intel is doing with PAT. I prefer nVidia nForce2 chipset boards these days. YMMV.
The tilt feature would make the PDAs completely useless while driving on Michigan's moon-crater-surface roadways.
It might work better in states without such extreme freeze/thaw cycles though.
For 471 large, the DoD could directly hire the most brilliant software minds in the country to create their own operating system and office suite and any other necessary software.
Well, yes, but so could GE and various other private sector folks, but they don't, so what makes you think the Army would be any smarter?
Really, just about any of the Forbes 100 corps could figure out which open source project was close enough to their needs (OpenOffice, etc), say "I need this-this-this added, who do I write a check to to get it done?", have the updated code in however many months, and tell Microsoft to take a flying leap. Especially now that there's lots of coders in need of employment. It'd be worth it just to get rid of the legal liability from closed source licensing.
The war was sold to the American public as an immediate, imminent threat to the USA by Iraq having WMD.
Given Saddam's nuclear weapons program, how its completion would be Bad, and how we had no way of knowing when that would be due to Saddam's interference with UN weapons inspectors, it was prudent to assume an "immediate, imminent" threat level. Out of the three "Axis of Evil" nations Iraq was the easiest one to deal with and gives us a staging area to deal with Evil #2 if need be (I'm still hopeful Iran will have a revolution and save us the trouble). Plus, this gets our troops out of Saudi Arabia, since we no longer have to defend them against Iraq.
In fact, he would have been overthrown, except that Ronny Raygun, Rumsfeld, and others backed Hussein during the 1980s when Hussein launched an aggressive war against Iran. If we had followed a moral foreign policy, the Iranians would have defeated Hussein and would have overthrown him during the Iran-Iraq war.
So we'd have one big honkin' Evil instead of two smaller ones? We gave Saddam enough help to keep Iraq from getting overrun but not enough to win. Under the circumstances that was the practical policy. The most moral policy would have been to send in troops and liberate both countries, but we simply didn't have the ability at the time and the people in the respective countries probably wouldn't have gone along anyhow.
I mean, we backed Bin Laden in Afghanistan
We backed the Mujahadeen because they were defending themselves against our shared enemy that invaded them. Some of the people we helped didn't appreciate it, but they got the job done. FDR backed Stalin to defeat Hitler. Backing the Afghans doesn't come close to that on the moral ambiguity scale, and both policies were right.
Interesting how you lefties claim to be so "sophisticated" but the complexities of world affairs sail right over your heads.
So never mind that Saddam had WMDs, as the Kurdish and Iranian survivors of his WMD attacks will attest. Never mind that he never let your UN pals do their weapon inspections unobstructed. Sometime between the Iran-Iraq war and now those WMDs magically disappeared and we should all take Saddams word for it. After all, Iraq is only as big as California, where could he hide the things?
And the ~300,000 Iraqis Saddam's dictatorship murdered? No mass destruction there, no sir. No need to worry about such a dictatorship developing nukes.
I guess you Former Soviet Useful Idiots really were desperate for new employment.
China probably threw in a few routers along with the fiber optic communications systems they sold Saddam to link up his antiaircraft radars. The ones in the no-fly zone we kept bombing, during both the Clinton and Bush administrations.
Really, it's not that difficult to break an embargo. We can't even keep illicit white powder out of this country. You can dramatically trim the quantity of goods traded but never stop all of them. (Especially when the target nation is friends with France.) Embargos against hostile regimes are just stopgaps until either there's an internal revolution or America decides to play Whack-a-Dictator.
Here's hoping for an internal revolution in Iran.
The sad thing is that Forbes was the first business mag to put Linus Torvalds on its cover. They really appeared to "get it". Ad revenue wasn't so hard to come by in those blissful dot-com days, though.
Oh well.
Speaking of conspiracies: Is the mainstream IT media in Intel's pocket?
Simple sugar question - what is your sugar substitute?
Mostly I just switched from sugared soft drinks to diet (Nutrasweet) and stopped buying candy/etc. Eliminating those major items from my diet was enough. I used to go through several cans/bottles of Coke, Mountain Dew, and/or Jolt a day, which was, in retrospect, insane.
I've also tried to eliminate MSG (monosodium glutemate) since I'm very suspicious of it. Would you believe they put MSG in Doritos? Bastards. Cool Ranch Doritos are the best.
I have found that the most effective treatment is just to get outside in the fresh air and get a bit of excersize every day.
This appears to be working for me. I've been getting out for walks every other day recently, just worked my way up to ~30 minute walks (brisk pace, keep the blood moving), and today I was able to stay focused enough to get a LOT of reading done. It's too soon to say whether this is going to be a lasting effect, but at the very least I'm getting in better physical shape. I chose every other day so I'd have a day to heal, probably don't need that at this point.
Another helpful change I made a couple years ago: I eliminated the major sources of refined sugar from my diet. Refined sugar feeds things that should not be fed. I don't feel sleepy all the time anymore, I don't get sick stomach all the time anymore, and the excess weight I put on after college melted away without the help of exercise. And don't even think about those "reduced fat" cookies and crap: they put in extra sugar to compensate. Check the labels.
Don't neglect getting your allergies dealt with too if you have those. Trying to think when your sinuses are swollen up is pretty difficult. See an allergist, get tested, and if need be take the antigen shots.
Gotta love these multivariable problems.
(2) Work in Defense. If you are writing software for the Tomahawk Cruise Missile, administering the UNIX cluster at the local Air Force Base or cranking out Code for the F-22 at Boeing/Lockheed Martin, rest assured, your job isn't going to be outsourced to a shop in Bangalore - even if they promise to do it for free!
Nope. My former employer has/had lots of defense customers and they aren't buying squat either. I'm not sure whats going on. I'm guessing that there's been no big pickup in defense orders and the civilian sections of those companies are getting hammered from the mess the airline industry is in (terrorism, SARS hype).
Adding an external antenna to your notebook's WiFi card helps too. This one works well for me and it's not too obtrusive. The antennas on my APs were good enough for my purposes so I left them alone.
BTW, if anyone has an ORiNOCO WiFi card and is wonder why it works great under Linux but craps out periodically on WinXP SP1, this Microsoft patch is likely the culprit. If you stop the Wireless Zero Configuration service after you boot up it'll work around the problem, but it's best to not install the patch in the first place, at least until the Lucent/Agere refugees working at Proxim release new firmware/drivers that are Windows brain damage compliant.
(Hint for Proxim: release Linux drivers for your 802.11a/b/g cards and put external antenna connectors on them and I'll upgrade. Otherwise, I'm more than happy to save my money with cheap 802.11b gear.)