1) Resource consumption is variable. When oil prices shot up, people cut back on their oil usage, higher efficiency engines were developed, and all that. $100/bbl oil never happened. When the need to reduce resource consumption arises, it'll happen, complaints notwithstanding.
2) Notice how the US tax code is rigged to favor massive mortgage debt? Notice all those McMansions going up? (Hell of a lot of them where I live, ~$500K each, give or take.) Of course, to qualify for that mortgage so you can claim your tax deduction, you pretty much have to have two high incomes... so you end up with this massive unproductive asset and very few kids. It's not just the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses McMansions, tho, it's the $40K SUVs, nice shiny stuff to fill the McMansions, dumping cash into the stock market... which are nice and all, but doesn't do much to raise the next generation. Seriously messed up incentive system.
3) Feminism. Way too many women have been brainwashed into believing they *must* have careers. I think this has just about run its course now that there are enough 30+ year old single women wondering what happened to serve as warnings to the next generation, but I could be wrong.
3a) The least intelligent women with no good career choices are the ones most interested in marriage and families. Mix in the welfare state and low birth rates in the upper-IQ quintile and you have a really disturbing situation from a Darwinian perspective.
4) Colonization. As in Mars. It'll happen. And be practical within the next century. But the main incentive to migrate there will be to get away from the repressive governments on Earth.
Course of action? Nuke the welfare state, pass the Flat Tax (no more behavior-distorting rules), learn that time and not material goods is the most scarce resource, nuke the zoning boards that make it next to impossible to build high-density housing, break the government education monopoly with its leftist political indoctrination...
A tad rambling, but I'm in a free association kinda mood.
CNN did a story on this a couple of months ago. Cl ick here.
The FEC comes off sounding very fascistic. They hope that a few high-profile prosecutions of "miscreants" will get their message across.
For another example of the Clinton Administration's anti-free-speech attitude, see this link.
Summary: companies (and individuals?) defending themselves in public against government accusations may be charged with civil racketeering if Big Brother decides the advertising/research/etc is "untrue". Do we want the folks who don't know what the definition of "is" is to fine or throw people in jail for defending themselves?
See this article in National Review for the non-WSJ right-wing point of view, from clear back in June '98. There is a lot of overlap with Bryan Pfaffenberger's article, with the exception of the professional organization nonsense.
Re unemployed hardware engineers: this happened mostly because the Defense Department procurement budget was gutted by the Bush/Clinton administrations and the pre-11/94 Democrat congress. So far the post-11/94 Republican congress has failed to correct the damage, courtesy of Clinton's veto pen. Decimate the biggest market for those engineers and yes, salaries and employability go all to hell. Throw in the technophobic attitudes towards nuclear power for good measure. (Had an interesting conversation with a disgruntaled nuke-tech a while back...)
Re don't spend the future: ditto. I'm keeping my debt level in check, even tho the U.S. federal tax code is rigged to encourage massive mortgage debt (best tax deduction on the books). All these folks with their heavily mortgaged McMansions and nice debt-fueled stock portfolios are going to look real stupid when/if the market tanks and their debt level doesn't. (This is what Greenspan is really worried about when he talks about "irrational exuberance", but he hasn't found the right words. Nuking the deductions in favor of a dramatically lower tax rate, as the Flat Tax proposed by Steve Forbes does would correct this serious economic instability.) I'm not saying don't have a little fun, and certainly not saying don't buy stocks, just watch that debt!
Let's suppose that we did things Singer's way, and children born "defective" could be legally killed.
Let's also suppose that health care in this country will be eventually nationalized. (I hope not, but we're headed that way.) The State will have a very strong incentive to "minimize costs" by encouraging the destruction of the "defective" children as well as children with significantly sub-par IQs. Worst case, children perceived as being predisposed to threaten the State could be targeted.
And under such a scenario, what will happen when people realize that a disproportionate number of the terminated children are non-white? (Why do you think the left keeps pushing "family planning" so heavily?)
Odds are folks will note the precedent set by the National Socialists (started out killing handicappers, ended up killing anyone they didn't like) and this won't go anywhere. This is an *extremely* dangerous slippery slope Singer is treading on.
Let's suppose that we did things Singer's way, and children born "defective" could be legally killed.
Let's also suppose that health care in this country will be eventually nationalized. (I hope not, but we're headed that way.) The State will have a very strong incentive to "minimize costs" by encouraging the destruction of the "defective" children as well as children with significantly sub-par IQs. Worst case, children perceived as being predisposed to threaten the State could be targeted.
And under such a scenario, what will happen when people realize that a disproportionate number of the terminated children are non-white? (Why do you think the left keeps pushing "family planning" so heavily?)
Odds are folks will note the precedent set by the National Socialists (started out killing handicappers, ended up killing anyone they didn't like) and this won't go anywhere. This is an *extremely* dangerous slippery slope Singer is treading on.
C-Net didn't do a very good job with their "spot check" for Athlon boxes. AMD owns the *retail box* market, thus the first IBM/Compaq Athlons are going disproportionately to the retail stores, not the mail order shops C-Net checked (tho egghead.com had IBM Athlon 500MHz machines in stock the other day). I just got back from my local Best Buy and CompUSA. Best Buy had at least several IBM Athlon boxes in stock (couldn't see the labels on most of the boxes), including 650MHz machines (fat profit margins). CompUSA had a much smaller selection of Compaq boxes, but the salescritter I talked to said they'd already sold 3-4 of 'em, not bad for a recent arrival they're not advertising. http://www.thechipmerchant.com is advertising 500-600MHz Athlon CPUs and *four* different Athlon motherboards; CPU prices are already dropping in anticipation of this week's price cuts.
Anyhow, it looks like AMD is ramping up production on schedule, they have a *great* product, and at 1% of Intel's market cap, their stock looks like a screaming bargain. (Which is why I've dumped what little cash I have into it.) Only wildcards are how big a disruption the Taiwan quake will cause in motherboard production and if the Dresden 0.18 micron fab will ramp OK. AMD reports earnings on Wednesday. If they shoved enough CPUs out the door in time to meet the quarter's cutoff, things should get interesting, especially given Intel's recent 820/Xeon stumbles.
Yeah, I want the multiprocessor Athlon Ultras (ships next year) too. If they can come up with a reasonably inexpensive 4 CPU board... (drool). But until Dresden ramps up they don't have any reason to push multiprocessor systems anyhow.
L0pht does themselves a disservice by going along with the comparison to Ralph Nader. Nader is a lawyer-happy parasite, more interested in publicity and money than anything else. Doesn't sound like L0pht.
I don't buy the notion of computers and humans merging (Kurzweil, etc), at least much beyond your basic communications devices, and even then it's doubtful (rather painful upgrade process...). It makes much more sense to tweak human DNA for higher intelligence, better eyesight, more strength, more endurance, and all that other good stuff. That's *really* playing God, and it will happen, well within our lifetimes.
Of course, then we'll have to deal with a bunch of ultraintelligent grandchildren. And guard against Big Brother requiring behavioral modification (genetic predisposition for obedience?). But we'll deal. Should be fun. If they figure out how to tweak adult DNA, I'm signing up.
Microsoft can only put out products and hope people buy. Only Big Brother has the power to force We The People to do things at the point of a gun. This open invitation for the government to regulate the software market is SUICIDE!
Want to know the Democrats interest in all this? They saw a big, fat, rich target to EXTORT money from. They figured that Bill Gates, like nearly every other Big Business leader, would roll over and throw cash their way (roughly half of Big Business PAC $$$ goes to Democrats, give or take a little depending who they think will win in a given year). They didn't figure a registered Democrat like Bill Gates (the guy even gave money to population control groups) would fight back, and they're at least a little nervous that they've royally pissed off the richest man in the world.
Microsoft has been blessed with largely incompetent competitors for years (Apple, pre-Jobs; Wordperfect, after Novell ran them into the ground; etc). Now they have Linux to deal with, and their usual strategy of going for market share by undercutting the competition won't work anymore. But it'll be a hollow victory if we have to rely on Big Brother to win.
Again, read "Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal" by Ayn Rand for a good description of why government coercion over the economy is Bad.
The military developed the Internet for its own internal practical use. The rest of us seized the good idea after the fact. Otherwise we'd just be using some other network varient (remember Fidonet and all those other primitive nets that were evolving before the Internet took over?).
> Do you suppose we should just write off those > kids unlucky enough to be born to irresponsible > parents?
Yes, some parents are idiots. Idiots are the base of the Democratic Party. Who protects us from idiot bureaucrats?
> As for your assertion that you didn't use > federal student loans, congratulations for > having well-off parents. For those of us who are > not born of the manor however, student > loans/state universities are often the > difference b/w a good job and working at the > cannery. And even if you went to a private > college you were still the indirect beneficiary > of a lot of governmental largesse via federal > grants.
Yeah, I'm from a real rich family. Only people making more money than my dad were public school teachers (snort). I went to a local university, lived with my parents, WORKED, and otherwise kept my expenses under control until I graduated. Sure would've been nice to have had those SocSec taxes to apply towards tuition, but apparently I can't be trusted to make that decision. Big Brother knows how to manage finances so much better than you or I.
> Our taxes are the lowest in the industrialized > world. Get over it already.
Just because everyone else is more screwed up than America means I have no right to complain? Just because Big Brother only confiscates half my labor at gunpoint means I should be thankful?
Forget transaction taxes. They're too cumbersome, and it's *way* too difficult for taxpayers to figure out how much of their labor has been confiscated every year. States are going to have to wean themselves off sales taxes, period. Property taxes and income taxes only, and those should be as simple to calculate as possible.
On the national level, the Flat Income Tax plan proposed by Steve Forbes is the way to go. 17% of income above a five-figure personal deduction ($13K per worker plus $5300 per dependent), no more screwing over renters who lack the mortgage interest deduction, no more loopholes for special interests to buy and corrupt the system. One nice, simple, high-profile bill you can calculate on a postcard. And no government bureaucrats fussing over each and every transaction you've done (and where and with whom). Sure, it'll put hundreds of thousands of accountants, lawyers, and lobbyists out of work, but isn't it worth it?
YES YES YES! I want to see this too. I want to see just how this Federation "working for the benefit of the species" utopian crap actually works. Going from bombed-out WWIII wasteland to Federation utopia leaves an awful lot of unanswered questions. I can see the part about the discovery of an alien race uniting the world, but beyond that, ?
I tried out Visual J++ after acquiring Visual Studio 6. After about an hour of trying to figure out how to build Java apps that would run on non-Windows platforms (you can't), I gave up, cursed whatever moron came up with the idea of building a non-portable Java mutation, and bought Borland JBuilder 3 Professional (*infinitely* better, be sure you have 128megs RAM). I hadn't bought a Borland product since BC++ 5. Maybe this is all a secret plot to rescue Borland?
When I was getting my CompSci degree at Eastern Michigan University (class of '94, 60%+ female majority at the 25,000 student campus), we tried to encourage more women to sign up for CompSci (all but 1-2 of the handful of existing women were older or foreign students). Invariably, they'd wrinkle up their noses and say "I don't like computers". Mind you, some of these women were in other hard sciences (chemisty, etc). It was rare for 400-level classes to have any women students.
Now that I've been in the working world for a few years, I've noticed a much greater number of women in the workforce than my experience at EMU would suggest (3 of the 6 programmers at my first job), tho a disproportionate number of them are 40-something and in management.
Dunno what to do about this. Don't really consider it a "problem", maybe an annoyance. Really can't figure out what the dropoff between 40-something and 20-something women in the field is all about.
Get catastrophic (high-deductable) coverage. That's what I did ('til I went back to full-time work), $2,500 deductable but with a very nice hospitalization rider, cost me a bit over $50/mo (cheaper than Mediscare taxes). You can get a lower deductable for more money. Routine stuff (checkups, prescriptions and what not, up to the deductable) gets paid out-of-pocket. It would be even cheaper if MSA (Medical Savings Account) legislation gets passed (pairs catastrophic insurance with a savings account for those routine expenses and tax deducts the whole lot), but as this would give people a good deal and a lot of freedom the Clinton Administration is fighting it in favor of heavily regulated fascist HMOs (just a short hop from socialized medicine). Steve Forbes is the lead proponent of MSAs in the current crop of presidential candidates.
a) The vast majority of journalists are liberal. b) Geeks are becoming "in". c) Therefore, geeks must be liberal.
The recurring theme seems to be resistence to controls. For me, liberals have been screwing up my life since childhood, therefore I associate liberals with control. Attend your government assigned school, hand over half your labor in taxes, don't say anything we object to or you're a n -ist (racist/sexist/...), etc.
Republicans are much more geek-friendly. Steve Forbes is a geek. How are we supposed to buy the technotoys we need to survive if the left enslaves us with taxes?
In a lot of ways, I feel like Hal's right-wing counterpart: roughly the same age, people say I'm smarter than I think I am (if I can do it, how difficult can it be?), rather like the idea of "retiring" as young as possible... only here in Ann Arbor, there aren't a whole lot of stock option millionaires (starting to change, watch for BlueGill's IPO in a year or two), if my employer gets bought out it'll just mean that we can get a *full* T1 feed and replace the antiquated Sparc 10's (equiv. of 486's), and I know how to manage my money. And I have bitter hatred for the parasites who wrote the taxes that confiscate half of whatever annual pay raises I get (same as the rest of y'all in the 28% bracket that kicks in at $25K/year). Liberal Democrats keep people poor. Poor/stupid and rich/guilty are their symbiotic constituencies. (Including Bill Gates, 'til he got mugged by reality...)
I have two alternative plans, the relavent one being to retire by 40, having paid off the mortgage on my small but comfortable condo and live off investment income. I'll hack code for fun, do the occassional consulting job to slow my cash burn rate, write (I'm actually good at writing, want to get back to that)... and play Alpha Centauri and what not too much along the way, no doubt. If my investments go better than expected (or I manage to acquire AOL-calibre stock options), I might try angel investing.
I absolutely would not wonder what I did to deserve success. Everyone gets chances, few can execute them. Screw up, learn, try again, and don't hate the folks who are already there. Do fight the looters trying to hold you down, and never try to arbitrate what people "deserve".
We're having similar discussions in Ann Arbor, Michigan (home of the University of Michigan, lots of software companies, very tech-friendly, cable modems), tho on a much smaller scale. Lots of people moving in, lots of farmland in surrounding townships being built up, housing prices appreciating 10% or so a year, traffic getting to be a problem. Still, our definition of "insane" housing prices is California's definition of affordable, average house is $170K. I did the math and decided to stay put, commuting 3 miles from my condo to my current job.
Problems? The usual suspects: idiot socialists running city government, cranking up property taxes (approaching $5K/year on that $170K house, tho much less in the townships), driving developers nuts with arbitrary rulings and delays, density restrictions, and what not. City Council is spending $$$ on consultants to help address the "affordable housing crisis" (hello, see property tax rates). Some parts of some townships mandate huge lots (10 acres!), which gobbles up ridiculous amounts of land. Lots of $400K McMansions being built to take advantage of the mortgage interest deduction (replacing that with a 5-figure personal deduction, as the Flat Tax proposed by House Majority Leader Dick Armey and Presidential Candidate Steve Forbes would do, would do a lot to curb the speculative excesses of the housing market). Putting up high-rises (well, 12 floors?) in downtown Ann Arbor would make a lot of sense (tear down some crappy run-down student ghetto housing to make room), the one high-rise they did manage to build is supposed to be very nice (built back in the '60s), but again, local gov. gets in the way. (Used to work downtown, lots of software companies there, including Outrage Entertainment, lots of great restaurants, some loft apartments, hub of the first-rate bus system so you don't absolutely need a car. I took the bus to work. Borders flagship store is there too. Really miss that and the restaurants.) Nice thing about high property values is that it makes land-efficient (high rise) housing economical, but government gets in the way of this obvious free-market counterweight to runaway costs, so away we go.
I keep waiting for big SV companies to build well-equipped high-density studio apartment housing for their (single) employees on company land, maybe add on a couple floors to office buildings, wire 'em up real well (direct Ethernet to the company's Internet feed), nice appliances and all that. Land cost is not a problem in this arrangement. Of course, the socialist legislature in the Peoples Republic of California (and their trial lawyer patrons) would probably get in the way. (Another nice thing about Michigan, state taxes are half that of California. Too bad the weather sucks 75% of the year...)
Getting Big Brother's attention
on
GEEK Unions?
·
· Score: 1
This is a variant of the theme of "Atlas Shrugged": all the smart people go on strike until the unwashed masses get a clue. Here's how we could get it to work:
Set up nonprofit (read: tax deductable) organizations to fund research and construction of off-world (lunar, Mars) colonies. All geeks willing to join would have their employers send their paychecks, or a portion thereof, to their chosen org. (Has to be done at the employer level to duck SocSec/Mediscare and employer-side taxes. Simple for self-employed folks, quite a bit trickier for the rest of us.) Figure that, here in America, we geeks are facing a 50% marginal tax rate on our income beyond $30-$40K/year, so redirecting a month or two per year of labor (on average) in this manner would be enough to really screw up the federal government. (Guess where the alleged budget surplus is coming from?) Plus, we'd be making the very overt threat that if the powers-that-be don't back off, we're outta here, literally. We could probably get more than a few doctors, pro atheletes, and other high-paid professionals to join in, too. I bet the folks at Microsoft might *really* go for this.
At the very least, this qualifies as the most "out there" post of the day:-).
Would it be practical to use diskless workstations as Beowulf cluster nodes? Say, dual P3-450's (or hacked Celerons), 256MB of RAM (128meg DIMMs are under $100 apiece!), 100Mbit Ethernet (dumb hubs are cheap), booting off floppy, and not much else. Would this work for raytracing, SETI@Home, decryption, and similar tasks? You could build dual P3 nodes for not much more than a grand, and dual Celeron nodes for substantially less. Abit's upcoming dual Socket 370 board would be perfect for this.
Bah, I can beat that. One ex-employer convinced me to ignore reality (I'd made it known that I was not happy about my job being severely misrepresented to me) and stay by giving me a near-glowing performence review and a nice raise, then one month later the out-of-state PHB-in-charge decided to cut costs to cover his idiocy by downsizing engineers with the least seniority. I should have trusted my instincts and bailed, especially after I found out the multi-$billion company was cofounded by a statist Democrat senator (I kid you not, the bastard is still in office too).
Life's too short to put up with PHBs. If it takes four or five tries to find a good job, so be it. Just make sure you line up your new job before bailing out of the old one. And don't forget to consider contracting.
Ditto. Losing 12.4% to SocSec, 2.9% to Mediscare, 28% to Federal income, 4.4% to State (which provides the bulk of the services I actually use, so I don't mind), plus property, sales, unemployment, and whatever else Big Brother comes up with, is most annoying. Plus having to fund ye olde 401k so I'll have something to live on after SocSec goes kaboom. (Screw reform, just phase it out!)
Back to the topic at hand: I'm paying $35/mo to MediaOne for one-way cable modem access, and when the two-way upgrade is done (parts of the city already have it) the cost might, *might* go up to $50/mo. That's T1-equivalent bandwidth, at least to the home, and that's what Gingrich was talking about. Given that I lose about four months per year to the taxman on less than what the average local public schoolteacher makes, and that it'll cost my employer $2 for every extra $1 they put in my pocket at review time, it wouldn't take much of a tax cut to cover the $50/mo cost of a cable modem.
Didn't we throw out the English kings for less than what Big Brother subjects us to?
Slashdot Mirror
1) Resource consumption is variable. When oil prices shot up, people cut back on their oil usage, higher efficiency engines were developed, and all that. $100/bbl oil never happened. When the need to reduce resource consumption arises, it'll happen, complaints notwithstanding.
2) Notice how the US tax code is rigged to favor massive mortgage debt? Notice all those McMansions going up? (Hell of a lot of them where I live, ~$500K each, give or take.) Of course, to qualify for that mortgage so you can claim your tax deduction, you pretty much have to have two high incomes... so you end up with this massive unproductive asset and very few kids. It's not just the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses McMansions, tho, it's the $40K SUVs, nice shiny stuff to fill the McMansions, dumping cash into the stock market... which are nice and all, but doesn't do much to raise the next generation. Seriously messed up incentive system.
3) Feminism. Way too many women have been brainwashed into believing they *must* have careers. I think this has just about run its course now that there are enough 30+ year old single women wondering what happened to serve as warnings to the next generation, but I could be wrong.
3a) The least intelligent women with no good career choices are the ones most interested in marriage and families. Mix in the welfare state and low birth rates in the upper-IQ quintile and you have a really disturbing situation from a Darwinian perspective.
4) Colonization. As in Mars. It'll happen. And be practical within the next century. But the main incentive to migrate there will be to get away from the repressive governments on Earth.
Course of action? Nuke the welfare state, pass the Flat Tax (no more behavior-distorting rules), learn that time and not material goods is the most scarce resource, nuke the zoning boards that make it next to impossible to build high-density housing, break the government education monopoly with its leftist political indoctrination...
A tad rambling, but I'm in a free association kinda mood.
The FEC comes off sounding very fascistic. They hope that a few high-profile prosecutions of "miscreants" will get their message across.
For another example of the Clinton Administration's anti-free-speech attitude, see this link.
Summary: companies (and individuals?) defending themselves in public against government accusations may be charged with civil racketeering if Big Brother decides the advertising/research/etc is "untrue". Do we want the folks who don't know what the definition of "is" is to fine or throw people in jail for defending themselves?
Re unemployed hardware engineers: this happened mostly because the Defense Department procurement budget was gutted by the Bush/Clinton administrations and the pre-11/94 Democrat congress. So far the post-11/94 Republican congress has failed to correct the damage, courtesy of Clinton's veto pen. Decimate the biggest market for those engineers and yes, salaries and employability go all to hell. Throw in the technophobic attitudes towards nuclear power for good measure. (Had an interesting conversation with a disgruntaled nuke-tech a while back...)
Re don't spend the future: ditto. I'm keeping my debt level in check, even tho the U.S. federal tax code is rigged to encourage massive mortgage debt (best tax deduction on the books). All these folks with their heavily mortgaged McMansions and nice debt-fueled stock portfolios are going to look real stupid when/if the market tanks and their debt level doesn't. (This is what Greenspan is really worried about when he talks about "irrational exuberance", but he hasn't found the right words. Nuking the deductions in favor of a dramatically lower tax rate, as the Flat Tax proposed by Steve Forbes does would correct this serious economic instability.) I'm not saying don't have a little fun, and certainly not saying don't buy stocks, just watch that debt!
Let's suppose that we did things Singer's way, and children born "defective" could be legally killed.
Let's also suppose that health care in this country will be eventually nationalized. (I hope not, but we're headed that way.) The State will have a very strong incentive to "minimize costs" by encouraging the destruction of the "defective" children as well as children with significantly sub-par IQs. Worst case, children perceived as being predisposed to threaten the State could be targeted.
And under such a scenario, what will happen when people realize that a disproportionate number of the terminated children are non-white? (Why do you think the left keeps pushing "family planning" so heavily?)
Odds are folks will note the precedent set by the National Socialists (started out killing handicappers, ended up killing anyone they didn't like) and this won't go anywhere. This is an *extremely* dangerous slippery slope Singer is treading on.
Let's suppose that we did things Singer's way, and children born "defective" could be legally killed.
Let's also suppose that health care in this country will be eventually nationalized. (I hope not, but we're headed that way.) The State will have a very strong incentive to "minimize costs" by encouraging the destruction of the "defective" children as well as children with significantly sub-par IQs. Worst case, children perceived as being predisposed to threaten the State could be targeted.
And under such a scenario, what will happen when people realize that a disproportionate number of the terminated children are non-white? (Why do you think the left keeps pushing "family planning" so heavily?)
Odds are folks will note the precedent set by the National Socialists (started out killing handicappers, ended up killing anyone they didn't like) and this won't go anywhere. This is an *extremely* dangerous slippery slope Singer is treading on.
C-Net didn't do a very good job with their "spot check" for Athlon boxes. AMD owns the *retail box* market, thus the first IBM/Compaq Athlons are going disproportionately to the retail stores, not the mail order shops C-Net checked (tho egghead.com had IBM Athlon 500MHz machines in stock the other day). I just got back from my local Best Buy and CompUSA. Best Buy had at least several IBM Athlon boxes in stock (couldn't see the labels on most of the boxes), including 650MHz machines (fat profit margins). CompUSA had a much smaller selection of Compaq boxes, but the salescritter I talked to said they'd already sold 3-4 of 'em, not bad for a recent arrival they're not advertising. http://www.thechipmerchant.com is advertising 500-600MHz Athlon CPUs and *four* different Athlon motherboards; CPU prices are already dropping in anticipation of this week's price cuts.
Anyhow, it looks like AMD is ramping up production on schedule, they have a *great* product, and at 1% of Intel's market cap, their stock looks like a screaming bargain. (Which is why I've dumped what little cash I have into it.) Only wildcards are how big a disruption the Taiwan quake will cause in motherboard production and if the Dresden 0.18 micron fab will ramp OK. AMD reports earnings on Wednesday. If they shoved enough CPUs out the door in time to meet the quarter's cutoff, things should get interesting, especially given Intel's recent 820/Xeon stumbles.
Yeah, I want the multiprocessor Athlon Ultras (ships next year) too. If they can come up with a reasonably inexpensive 4 CPU board... (drool). But until Dresden ramps up they don't have any reason to push multiprocessor systems anyhow.
L0pht does themselves a disservice by going along with the comparison to Ralph Nader. Nader is a lawyer-happy parasite, more interested in publicity and money than anything else. Doesn't sound like L0pht.
I don't buy the notion of computers and humans merging (Kurzweil, etc), at least much beyond your basic communications devices, and even then it's doubtful (rather painful upgrade process...). It makes much more sense to tweak human DNA for higher intelligence, better eyesight, more strength, more endurance, and all that other good stuff. That's *really* playing God, and it will happen, well within our lifetimes.
Of course, then we'll have to deal with a bunch of ultraintelligent grandchildren. And guard against Big Brother requiring behavioral modification (genetic predisposition for obedience?). But we'll deal. Should be fun. If they figure out how to tweak adult DNA, I'm signing up.
Want to know the Democrats interest in all this? They saw a big, fat, rich target to EXTORT money from. They figured that Bill Gates, like nearly every other Big Business leader, would roll over and throw cash their way (roughly half of Big Business PAC $$$ goes to Democrats, give or take a little depending who they think will win in a given year). They didn't figure a registered Democrat like Bill Gates (the guy even gave money to population control groups) would fight back, and they're at least a little nervous that they've royally pissed off the richest man in the world.
Microsoft has been blessed with largely incompetent competitors for years (Apple, pre-Jobs; Wordperfect, after Novell ran them into the ground; etc). Now they have Linux to deal with, and their usual strategy of going for market share by undercutting the competition won't work anymore. But it'll be a hollow victory if we have to rely on Big Brother to win.
Again, read "Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal" by Ayn Rand for a good description of why government coercion over the economy is Bad.
The military developed the Internet for its own internal practical use. The rest of us seized the good idea after the fact. Otherwise we'd just be using some other network varient (remember Fidonet and all those other primitive nets that were evolving before the Internet took over?).
> Do you suppose we should just write off those
> kids unlucky enough to be born to irresponsible
> parents?
Yes, some parents are idiots. Idiots are the base of the Democratic Party. Who protects us from idiot bureaucrats?
> As for your assertion that you didn't use
> federal student loans, congratulations for
> having well-off parents. For those of us who are
> not born of the manor however, student
> loans/state universities are often the
> difference b/w a good job and working at the
> cannery. And even if you went to a private
> college you were still the indirect beneficiary
> of a lot of governmental largesse via federal
> grants.
Yeah, I'm from a real rich family. Only people making more money than my dad were public school teachers (snort). I went to a local university, lived with my parents, WORKED, and otherwise kept my expenses under control until I graduated. Sure would've been nice to have had those SocSec taxes to apply towards tuition, but apparently I can't be trusted to make that decision. Big Brother knows how to manage finances so much better than you or I.
> Our taxes are the lowest in the industrialized
> world. Get over it already.
Just because everyone else is more screwed up than America means I have no right to complain? Just because Big Brother only confiscates half my labor at gunpoint means I should be thankful?
On the national level, the Flat Income Tax plan proposed by Steve Forbes is the way to go. 17% of income above a five-figure personal deduction ($13K per worker plus $5300 per dependent), no more screwing over renters who lack the mortgage interest deduction, no more loopholes for special interests to buy and corrupt the system. One nice, simple, high-profile bill you can calculate on a postcard. And no government bureaucrats fussing over each and every transaction you've done (and where and with whom). Sure, it'll put hundreds of thousands of accountants, lawyers, and lobbyists out of work, but isn't it worth it?
YES YES YES! I want to see this too. I want to see just how this Federation "working for the benefit of the species" utopian crap actually works. Going from bombed-out WWIII wasteland to Federation utopia leaves an awful lot of unanswered questions. I can see the part about the discovery of an alien race uniting the world, but beyond that, ?
I tried out Visual J++ after acquiring Visual Studio 6. After about an hour of trying to figure out how to build Java apps that would run on non-Windows platforms (you can't), I gave up, cursed whatever moron came up with the idea of building a non-portable Java mutation, and bought Borland JBuilder 3 Professional (*infinitely* better, be sure you have 128megs RAM). I hadn't bought a Borland product since BC++ 5. Maybe this is all a secret plot to rescue Borland?
When I was getting my CompSci degree at Eastern Michigan University (class of '94, 60%+ female majority at the 25,000 student campus), we tried to encourage more women to sign up for CompSci (all but 1-2 of the handful of existing women were older or foreign students). Invariably, they'd wrinkle up their noses and say "I don't like computers". Mind you, some of these women were in other hard sciences (chemisty, etc). It was rare for 400-level classes to have any women students.
Now that I've been in the working world for a few years, I've noticed a much greater number of women in the workforce than my experience at EMU would suggest (3 of the 6 programmers at my first job), tho a disproportionate number of them are 40-something and in management.
Dunno what to do about this. Don't really consider it a "problem", maybe an annoyance. Really can't figure out what the dropoff between 40-something and 20-something women in the field is all about.
Get catastrophic (high-deductable) coverage. That's what I did ('til I went back to full-time work), $2,500 deductable but with a very nice hospitalization rider, cost me a bit over $50/mo (cheaper than Mediscare taxes). You can get a lower deductable for more money. Routine stuff (checkups, prescriptions and what not, up to the deductable) gets paid out-of-pocket. It would be even cheaper if MSA (Medical Savings Account) legislation gets passed (pairs catastrophic insurance with a savings account for those routine expenses and tax deducts the whole lot), but as this would give people a good deal and a lot of freedom the Clinton Administration is fighting it in favor of heavily regulated fascist HMOs (just a short hop from socialized medicine). Steve Forbes is the lead proponent of MSAs in the current crop of presidential candidates.
a) The vast majority of journalists are liberal.
b) Geeks are becoming "in".
c) Therefore, geeks must be liberal.
The recurring theme seems to be resistence to controls. For me, liberals have been screwing up my life since childhood, therefore I associate liberals with control. Attend your government assigned school, hand over half your labor in taxes, don't say anything we object to or you're a n -ist (racist/sexist/...), etc.
Republicans are much more geek-friendly. Steve Forbes is a geek. How are we supposed to buy the technotoys we need to survive if the left enslaves us with taxes?
In a lot of ways, I feel like Hal's right-wing counterpart: roughly the same age, people say I'm smarter than I think I am (if I can do it, how difficult can it be?), rather like the idea of "retiring" as young as possible... only here in Ann Arbor, there aren't a whole lot of stock option millionaires (starting to change, watch for BlueGill's IPO in a year or two), if my employer gets bought out it'll just mean that we can get a *full* T1 feed and replace the antiquated Sparc 10's (equiv. of 486's), and I know how to manage my money. And I have bitter hatred for the parasites who wrote the taxes that confiscate half of whatever annual pay raises I get (same as the rest of y'all in the 28% bracket that kicks in at $25K/year). Liberal Democrats keep people poor. Poor/stupid and rich/guilty are their symbiotic constituencies. (Including Bill Gates, 'til he got mugged by reality...)
I have two alternative plans, the relavent one being to retire by 40, having paid off the mortgage on my small but comfortable condo and live off investment income. I'll hack code for fun, do the occassional consulting job to slow my cash burn rate, write (I'm actually good at writing, want to get back to that)... and play Alpha Centauri and what not too much along the way, no doubt. If my investments go better than expected (or I manage to acquire AOL-calibre stock options), I might try angel investing.
I absolutely would not wonder what I did to deserve success. Everyone gets chances, few can execute them. Screw up, learn, try again, and don't hate the folks who are already there. Do fight the looters trying to hold you down, and never try to arbitrate what people "deserve".
We're having similar discussions in Ann Arbor, Michigan (home of the University of Michigan, lots of software companies, very tech-friendly, cable modems), tho on a much smaller scale. Lots of people moving in, lots of farmland in surrounding townships being built up, housing prices appreciating 10% or so a year, traffic getting to be a problem. Still, our definition of "insane" housing prices is California's definition of affordable, average house is $170K. I did the math and decided to stay put, commuting 3 miles from my condo to my current job.
Problems? The usual suspects: idiot socialists running city government, cranking up property taxes (approaching $5K/year on that $170K house, tho much less in the townships), driving developers nuts with arbitrary rulings and delays, density restrictions, and what not. City Council is spending $$$ on consultants to help address the "affordable housing crisis" (hello, see property tax rates). Some parts of some townships mandate huge lots (10 acres!), which gobbles up ridiculous amounts of land. Lots of $400K McMansions being built to take advantage of the mortgage interest deduction (replacing that with a 5-figure personal deduction, as the Flat Tax proposed by House Majority Leader Dick Armey and Presidential Candidate Steve Forbes would do, would do a lot to curb the speculative excesses of the housing market). Putting up high-rises (well, 12 floors?) in downtown Ann Arbor would make a lot of sense (tear down some crappy run-down student ghetto housing to make room), the one high-rise they did manage to build is supposed to be very nice (built back in the '60s), but again, local gov. gets in the way. (Used to work downtown, lots of software companies there, including Outrage Entertainment, lots of great restaurants, some loft apartments, hub of the first-rate bus system so you don't absolutely need a car. I took the bus to work. Borders flagship store is there too. Really miss that and the restaurants.) Nice thing about high property values is that it makes land-efficient (high rise) housing economical, but government gets in the way of this obvious free-market counterweight to runaway costs, so away we go.
I keep waiting for big SV companies to build well-equipped high-density studio apartment housing for their (single) employees on company land, maybe add on a couple floors to office buildings, wire 'em up real well (direct Ethernet to the company's Internet feed), nice appliances and all that. Land cost is not a problem in this arrangement. Of course, the socialist legislature in the Peoples Republic of California (and their trial lawyer patrons) would probably get in the way. (Another nice thing about Michigan, state taxes are half that of California. Too bad the weather sucks 75% of the year...)
This is a variant of the theme of "Atlas Shrugged": all the smart people go on strike until the unwashed masses get a clue. Here's how we could get it to work:
:-).
Set up nonprofit (read: tax deductable) organizations to fund research and construction of off-world (lunar, Mars) colonies. All geeks willing to join would have their employers send their paychecks, or a portion thereof, to their chosen org. (Has to be done at the employer level to duck SocSec/Mediscare and employer-side taxes. Simple for self-employed folks, quite a bit trickier for the rest of us.) Figure that, here in America, we geeks are facing a 50% marginal tax rate on our income beyond $30-$40K/year, so redirecting a month or two per year of labor (on average) in this manner would be enough to really screw up the federal government. (Guess where the alleged budget surplus is coming from?) Plus, we'd be making the very overt threat that if the powers-that-be don't back off, we're outta here, literally. We could probably get more than a few doctors, pro atheletes, and other high-paid professionals to join in, too. I bet the folks at Microsoft might *really* go for this.
At the very least, this qualifies as the most "out there" post of the day
Would it be practical to use diskless workstations as Beowulf cluster nodes? Say, dual P3-450's (or hacked Celerons), 256MB of RAM (128meg DIMMs are under $100 apiece!), 100Mbit Ethernet (dumb hubs are cheap), booting off floppy, and not much else. Would this work for raytracing, SETI@Home, decryption, and similar tasks? You could build dual P3 nodes for not much more than a grand, and dual Celeron nodes for substantially less. Abit's upcoming dual Socket 370 board would be perfect for this.
Bah, I can beat that. One ex-employer convinced me to ignore reality (I'd made it known that I was not happy about my job being severely misrepresented to me) and stay by giving me a near-glowing performence review and a nice raise, then one month later the out-of-state PHB-in-charge decided to cut costs to cover his idiocy by downsizing engineers with the least seniority. I should have trusted my instincts and bailed, especially after I found out the multi-$billion company was cofounded by a statist Democrat senator (I kid you not, the bastard is still in office too).
Life's too short to put up with PHBs. If it takes four or five tries to find a good job, so be it. Just make sure you line up your new job before bailing out of the old one. And don't forget to consider contracting.
Best 'o luck, Raster...
Ditto. Losing 12.4% to SocSec, 2.9% to Mediscare, 28% to Federal income, 4.4% to State (which provides the bulk of the services I actually use, so I don't mind), plus property, sales, unemployment, and whatever else Big Brother comes up with, is most annoying. Plus having to fund ye olde 401k so I'll have something to live on after SocSec goes kaboom. (Screw reform, just phase it out!)
Back to the topic at hand: I'm paying $35/mo to MediaOne for one-way cable modem access, and when the two-way upgrade is done (parts of the city already have it) the cost might, *might* go up to $50/mo. That's T1-equivalent bandwidth, at least to the home, and that's what Gingrich was talking about. Given that I lose about four months per year to the taxman on less than what the average local public schoolteacher makes, and that it'll cost my employer $2 for every extra $1 they put in my pocket at review time, it wouldn't take much of a tax cut to cover the $50/mo cost of a cable modem.
Didn't we throw out the English kings for less than what Big Brother subjects us to?