I think it works like this (I'm a Kansas Christian evolutionist). Most Kansas Christians (which are a majority here) that are conservatives care about 2 issues, good education for a low cost, and sex education (abstinence). A few radical fundamentalists, who believe that creationism vs. evolutionist is an important topic, run for positions with a platform that agrees with the majority of Kansas Christians, not advertising their support for creationism. When they got in a few years ago, they got a majority of the board, and got their way with the standards. We the voters just got our chance to vote these bums out, but now have to worry that we'll have to be concerned that the sex education standards will go to far the other way. Fortunately for me and my wife, we'll be sending our kids to Catholic schools, where things like evolution were taught, and creationism never was.
Webmail (Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail, etc.) services are interactive webpages, so I should think they'd technically be included in this ban. We should also include regular email too, since kids might get pornographic span or solicitations from child molesters in their school email accounts.
To any who don't know, pennies made in '82 were made in both ways, some are mostly copper and others are mostly zinc. The way to tell is drop the penny on a surface and listen to the noise it makes. A pre-'82 penny and '82 copper will have a ring to the noise. A post '82 penny and an '82 zinc will have a flat clanking noise. If you have an older and newer penny, you can test this out without finding '82 pennies.
That said, I'll like the government to dump the penny, nickel, and the quarter, and push a combination of a dime and half piece. I don't know if I like coins enough to have dollars primarily being a coin yet. I say give that one another 10 years.
That would be great. Then the Windows machines would jump about $50 to offset the money OEMs get for including this software, and the alternative OS-free machines would then have a $50 price advantage, which could be a real boon to Linux adoption.
1) The stores around my house have PS3's sitting around now. I don't believe it's because Sony caught up to demand. I believe that the demand shifted to the Wii because they were available. Also, since Christmas is over, parents are out of the running for camping stores for their stock. I don't think demand shifted from PS3 to Nintendo because of availability. I read several accounts of how hundreds of people were waiting in line for a small shipment of Wiis with only a few in the same line for a similar sized shipment of PS3s, before Christmas, and units of the PS3 were starting to be generally available hours after shipments were out. The way things are going right now, Sony is going to have to slow production, or start to move units faster, because having a dozen units at almost every retail outlet in the country with only a million units out the door is very, very bad news. They need to sell units faster, and the bad thing for them, is that there is no reason for their to be units sitting on the shelf except for disinterest, because it's not like when the 360 came out, and many people waited to see what Sony and Nintendo was coming out with. There is nothing else coming, so everybody who wants a 360 or PS3 pretty much has them, where as Nintendo might have 30 million people willing to buy, but can't yet, due to Wii availability. I'm one of the Wii-waiters myself. I'm probably going to wait until the spring game shows are over to make sure Nintendo doesn't have any surprise announcements (upgraded system, etc.), and start looking for a unit soon after.
I have a DVR with (I think) a 160 GB drive, at 4.6 quality (480p?). It holds 72 hours of content. Now, to have high def quality, even with better compression, I'd probably only have 20 or 30 hours of space. I could fill that in a month.
In 5 years, when I'm ready to go high def, I'll have to replace my DVR, and I'd like to be able to rip movies for my kids to the drive so they don't have to EVER handle the disks. If I have 30 times the space, I should be able to store every Disney/Pixar/other cartoons and TV shows we decide they can watch on the machine, and they'll never need to handle the disks. Hit the library button, scroll to the program they want, hit enter or play, and they'll be watching their show in 30 seconds from when then machine turns on (this is what I have on my current machine), much faster than finding the disk from the DVD shelf, getting the box open, getting the machine open, waiting for the disk to load, wait for the FBI warning, previews, and finally the menu, and 5 minutes later, getting to the start of the program.
As for my desktop computer, I've been storing collecting photos for just over a year now with one child, and we've got about 1.5 GB of content. I can imagine that collection approaching 100GB easy, and maybe more. Video could easily by 100s of times larger, although we haven't done any yet, and haven't really decided if we want our kids living in the past watching videos of themselves all the time, but when it comes to multimedia content, I can definitely see where someone would be capable of filling these drives over time.
Besides, there is little profit in the hard drive market, and they can charge more for the higher capacity for little additional cost. The price difference between a 250GB drive and a 500GB drive is more profitable than the initial cost of the 250GB drive, because they've already taken into account all of the physical components such as the casing, drive electronics, motor, head, and half the platters. Also, the hard drive manufacturers can only differentiate themselves on 4 factors: price, reliability, performance, and size. Most consumers don't care about or understand performance or reliability in computer parts, and that leaves size and price. That's what the companies have to advertise on, and since the prices can only go so low, sizes have to go up. If one company chooses not to compete, soon the others will be selling a drive 2-4 times the size at the same price, and they'll have no customers. This is the competitive hard drive industry, and we'll continue to see better products at lower prices, and we'll continue to like it. OEM shipped PCs will have TB disks if this is true.
A few months back, Cringley wrote (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20 061026_001143.html) that he knows some people in the industry, and that platters were about to be replaced by much stronger materials, that would bring about lighter and thinner platters, which would allow 3 times as many platters, lower powered motors to drive the platters, less energy, and these drives would have higher reliability than current models, and the cost would go down significantly. I wonder if this article is referring to the same transition that he was getting at.
Anyway, I look forward to a future where I'll have a file server the size of a deck of cards, and holds every movie and picture my family owns. It will be a great time to be a computer geek.
It would be nice to have the option to use either. And if everybody in your organization is using OOo-old-gui or OOo-new-gui, everyone should be saving in ODF, and everyone should be happy with having a gui they like.
The point of this will be downloading magazines and your daily paper via wifi while you're on the bus (with near zero distribution costs, most papers could go free since the ads will make them more money), and having your favorite reference materials at hand, plus a book or two would be a real boon. I'd probably even start to read again away from the computer.
The thing is, the cost of content will have to drop. If I no longer get a physical copy, I shouldn't have to pay for the printing process, and all the overhead that implies. Lower prices might well mean a higher readership because more people would buy more books if they were cheaper and they had the time to read more than they currently do. Well known authors wouldn't have to go to a publisher anymore. They'd write their book, pay an editor out of pocket, and Amazon will let you sell a book download for 3-5 bucks, and take 2 or 3 dollars for themselves. Amazon could host a million books in the size of a small data center, and each book would pay for itself in Amazon's eyes in the first 10 copies. A hundred thousand in sales would be a quarter of a million in profit for the author. Dozens of niche authors would come out of the woodwork because the cost of self publishing would drop through the floor, and we would see an American Idol type of situation in literature, because there are all kinds of talent out waiting to be found. Further, in episodic type literature, an author might even let you download the first 2 books of a series to entice you to read books 3-4 after the first couple have been out a few years, since your downloading the first two books would cost him nothing. Hopefully, this sort of situation would yield higher quality material as well, since the author's current and ongoing sales outlook would depend directly on the number of units sold instead of getting a large contract up front before the book is even written.
Obviously, I've been looking forward to electronic paper for a while now. Just a while longer until it's really affordable.
From La Leche League's website: Breastfeeding has been shown to be protective against many illnesses, including painful ear infections, upper and lower respiratory ailments, allergies, intestinal disorders, colds, viruses, staph, strep and e coli infections, diabetes, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, many childhood cancers, meningitis, pneumonia, urinary tract infections, salmonella, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome(SIDS) as well as lifetime protection from Crohn's Disease, ulcerative colitis, some lymphomas, insulin dependent diabetes, and for girls, breast and ovarian cancer.
The difference between 616 and 666 might be explained from the difference between the way the numbers and math matched up differently between the Hebrew (616) vs. Greek and Latin (both 666) languages when referring to Nero, who predated the writing of the Book of Revelations. John, the writer of the book, was probably saying that someone Nero-like in his treatment of Christians would be coming into power, a second coming along the lines of the second coming of the Christ, except a different person. When the text was translated, it is possible that the translators wanted to maintain the tie between the number and the name, and so changed the number to match the language of the translation.
Christianity does, because the Bible says the earth is 6500 years old (don't argue with me about interpretation; that's the interpretation than Christians believe in).
Bzzzztttt.
Not even a quarter of US Christians believe that. I think most Methodists, Presbyterians, Catholics and Lutherans don't believe in the six days of Creation. Those beliefs belong to the Baptists, and other varieties of Christianity that fall under the umbrella of Fundamentalism. However, since I agree with the Fundamentalists on abortion, cloning, gay marriage, stem cell research, and sex education, (and for now, those are the only issues I vote on) I vote for the same candidates as they do. As soon as the Democrats start running candidates I can agree with on those issues, and have good scientific, fiscal, educational, and ecological positions to go with them, I'll start voting for them.
It doesn't necessarily need to be a right now plan. But the above plan is what it takes to get there when you're ready to try. That said, you can do your best to minimize expenses, and save as much as you can, and then when you're ready to make your move and kick start your plan, you'll hopefully have a few thousand saved ready to pay your closing costs and down payment on your first property.
That said, I have a hard time not being miserly, and I do complain a bit about not having enough income to do more now, but I have to step back and recognize that that won't change in the next five years, due to the fact that we'll have a couple more children before we're done paying off this house, and that will stretch things a bit, but then we'll get some of our money back by paying less taxes (the current tax credit for children in the US is nice, you get money back even if you paid none in in the first place).
Check magazinepricesearch.com for great deals on magazines. They search dozens of other magazine sites. I find that I can get subscriptions there for a fraction of the price of the inserts that you find in the magazine itself.
I was reading a book recently on wealth accumulation (checked out free at the library). The author recommended writing down everything you spend everyday for a month, consolidate your similar expenses into categories, then see if there is anything you could reduce or eliminate to find a way to save some of what you make.
He told about how he went on a radio show, gave this advice, and was ridiculed by the talk show host, who admitted he was shoe stringing it on $100k/year in New York. The talk show host finally gave in and did this. He found he was spending $16,000/year eating out. Some people spend a couple thousand a year on coffee-like substances, when inexpensive or home-brewed varieties can be had for a couple hundred or less. Any regular expense that you incur that doesn't relate directly to running your house or car should be viewed in a similar manner, and decide which is a bigger priority, having that item today or setting the money aside to invest and turn into 5 or 10 times as much money later.
I can imagine paying 3 or 4 thousand a year to cook (excellent meals) for myself and my wife (and soon our children), and finding a much better use of the other 12k dollars. And, actually we do similarly, instead of paying rent and eating out, we eat at home and bought a house three years ago when interest rates were really low. In less than 10 years, we'll own our house debt free, and what we were paying on house payments (or would otherwise be spending on rent), about $7100, will be money we can use to do things we consider fun or invest for retirement, or buy our next house. We'll probably do more of the last two, but some of the former too. Keep in mind that when we executed our house purchase, my average expected income for the next 8 years was around $35,000 in the mid-USA, and we bought a house for $110,000, with my wife quiting her job (planned) to stay at home with our children. I got an unexpected promotion and nearly 40% raise this year, which is making things much easier. I expect that in 30 years, we'll have $5 million in assets divided between 401k, real estate, RothIRA (we pay little in taxes currently, and I'd rather avoid the taxes I can't predict in 30-40 years) and other stock market investments.
In the end, people make their own decisions about their priorities, and choose not to spend a couple dozen hours figuring out how to do more with less, thus making themselves wealthy in the end. The book I was looking at was The Automatic Millionaire: A Powerful One-Step Plan to Live and Finish Rich, available for about $10 on Amazon, but it really comes down to a few simple steps.
1: Eliminate unnecessary expenses, set aside that money, and put it to work for you. 2: Buy a place to live, paying rent makes others rich at your expense, owning your place will be your foundation to future wealth. 3: Have a certain portion of your paycheck directly diverted to your retirement/investment program, and plan the rest of your budget like that money doesn't exist. (This can be done manually, if you have discipline, but it must happen) 4: Profit!!! (sorry, couldn't resist)
As for the grandparent post, houses in New York for very modest places rent for thousands depending on the area/building, I could get a similar place for 1/4 the cost or less in less urban areas. And when you rent, that becomes nothing as far as your balance sheet is concerned, when you are paying on the mortgage, that expense you pay on the principle becomes an asset.
When SED technology comes out, take a look at that. It should have better picture, use less electricity, and will have a similar slim size that makes LCD and Plasma attractive, and after a few years, it could be as cheap as a CRT, because it might be able to take advantage of print manufacturing similar to OLED.
The 4 major American sports (NBA, MLB, NFL, auto racing) each have over 50 million fans in North America, yet baseball and basketball are nearly non-existant on TV unless you want to pay or live in the right locations. Football is a bit better off because there are at least 4 TV games a week (25% of the action) on broadcast TV from the first week of the season through the 2nd week of the playoffs. And yet ABC has been so disappointed with the Monday night ratings that they moved them to ESPN.
Most video games sell at most 5 million copies, capping the number of fans around 20 million. If the networks have the option of airing sports with a potential 50 million fans or 20 million, you're going to have a hard time convincing them to go after the smaller market.
I've played a lot of games, but I don't plan on watching on TV. It'd be like watching chess without the suspense. There is just no way to make it into good TV. It might be another thing to sit with my pals and enjoy watching two of them duke it out at some game we all like, because I know I'll get my chance at the winner, but I have no interest in watching people I don't know play video games.
I'm a Christian, and while I disagree with the way both creationists and atheists behave on this issue.
I say atheists, because some who advocate on behalf of evolution want to disprove Christianity through science. In Discover magazine recently, there was an article about Sir Richard Dawkins, refered to as Darwin's rottweiler, who uses evolution to attempt to disprove Christianity, even to scientists who believe in both evolution and God.
Frankly, science and religion have little in common, other than the search for truth that was talked about in the movie Contact. I believe that science's purpose is to explain the natural (physical) world, but that it cannot say anything about the spiritual world. Religion/faith is about who we are in relation to the natural and spiritual world, and is suppose to show us how to fulfill our potential as human beings.
"Missing" implies that it's location is unknown, not that there isn't anything there. When the keys are missing, it's not that they don't exist, it that I can't locate them. When a piece of the evolutional chain is missing, it's not that there is a problem with the theory, its that we haven't located fossiles of various intermediate stages yet.
An article published on April 1st by an Ars staff member that he had played 12 maps from the game, compiled from a series of disks that he'd recieved as part of a promotional kit. The article was a three page review of the game that said, while fun, it's not going to knock anybody's socks off.
The interesting thing then becomes, if robots ever get voting rights, do the makers of the company start mass producing voters to "buy" elections for the highest bidder, at least until the party with less money decides to outlaw the practice? Except, then you'd have to be able to override the robot vote to disenfranchise the robots.
Another thing you can try is stuffing the blank application in the mail and returning it since it's label "No postage necessary if mailed in the US" and I've heard they'll get the picture. This might work with non-credit businesses as well.
If you really like the postal service or want to keep the price of stamps down, you can send it back without the application, I'm sure the Service will gladly take their money, and the company would probably keep sending you envelopes to mail back.
A company is still ultimately answerable to and must look after the interests of the shareholders. If it doesn't, the shareholders can boot the board of directors, and from there replace rebuild the company from the top down, although that is not always the best way to do such a thing.
What they are doing is putting their immediate or short term emphasis on the customer, which helps the company build a good name and customer relationships which should ultimately help build the best quality company in the long term, which means that this is just a different, but hopefully a more customer-centric model of delivering profits to the shareholders. This is something I learned in my management classes in college. Unfortunately many business people never learned this, and chose to use shortsighted methods that might yield the most money next week, but not necessarily for 10 years down the road.
Incorrect, according to both Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, the host bread and wine becomes the body and blood of Christ spiritually and physically in all regards except in appearance. The distinction that the matter can look like wine and bread and physically be flesh and blood is based upon the philosophical work of the Aristotle.
God has proven the point on a few occasions, as the appearance has changed as well, and the priest was left holding a piece of flesh in his hand and a chalace of blood with testable DNA on the altar. Some instances of this can be found at http://www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/mir/a3.htm l
Or even not employers, you get a criminal eliment that tells people to vote a certain way or they'll have to take a swim with concrete shoes. Also consider that ID thieves might attempt to profit by registering as multiple people, and get someone to buy their votes. This opens up considerable methods of abuse.
Nero's name gives the number 666. John was predicting another emperor as bad as Nero, the worst of the rulers that persecuted the Christians for the first century. I'm not sure if this was ever considered to be fulfilled, but my guess would have been Trajan given what I know off the top of my head, plus he came to power less than 10 years after the earliest date John is supposed to have written Revelations.
While many Christians have often predicted the end times, few have done any spectacular about it. One early group (led by a bishop as I may have mistakenly remembered), around the 200th anniversary of Jesus' death, predicted the return of Christ on a certain date, and marched into the desert to meet him, where they all died. After that, the early churches developed a wait and see approach on the return of the messiah, telling their members to focus on the "be ready" as opposed to the "I will return" part of Jesus' message. This has the added benefit of getting Christians to spend their time aiding others instead of trying to make headlines by telling everyone that the last catastrophe was the fault of those stricken because of their sinfulness.
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I think it works like this (I'm a Kansas Christian evolutionist). Most Kansas Christians (which are a majority here) that are conservatives care about 2 issues, good education for a low cost, and sex education (abstinence). A few radical fundamentalists, who believe that creationism vs. evolutionist is an important topic, run for positions with a platform that agrees with the majority of Kansas Christians, not advertising their support for creationism. When they got in a few years ago, they got a majority of the board, and got their way with the standards. We the voters just got our chance to vote these bums out, but now have to worry that we'll have to be concerned that the sex education standards will go to far the other way. Fortunately for me and my wife, we'll be sending our kids to Catholic schools, where things like evolution were taught, and creationism never was.
Webmail (Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail, etc.) services are interactive webpages, so I should think they'd technically be included in this ban. We should also include regular email too, since kids might get pornographic span or solicitations from child molesters in their school email accounts.
That said, I'll like the government to dump the penny, nickel, and the quarter, and push a combination of a dime and half piece. I don't know if I like coins enough to have dollars primarily being a coin yet. I say give that one another 10 years.
That would be great. Then the Windows machines would jump about $50 to offset the money OEMs get for including this software, and the alternative OS-free machines would then have a $50 price advantage, which could be a real boon to Linux adoption.
In 5 years, when I'm ready to go high def, I'll have to replace my DVR, and I'd like to be able to rip movies for my kids to the drive so they don't have to EVER handle the disks. If I have 30 times the space, I should be able to store every Disney/Pixar/other cartoons and TV shows we decide they can watch on the machine, and they'll never need to handle the disks. Hit the library button, scroll to the program they want, hit enter or play, and they'll be watching their show in 30 seconds from when then machine turns on (this is what I have on my current machine), much faster than finding the disk from the DVD shelf, getting the box open, getting the machine open, waiting for the disk to load, wait for the FBI warning, previews, and finally the menu, and 5 minutes later, getting to the start of the program.
As for my desktop computer, I've been storing collecting photos for just over a year now with one child, and we've got about 1.5 GB of content. I can imagine that collection approaching 100GB easy, and maybe more. Video could easily by 100s of times larger, although we haven't done any yet, and haven't really decided if we want our kids living in the past watching videos of themselves all the time, but when it comes to multimedia content, I can definitely see where someone would be capable of filling these drives over time.
Besides, there is little profit in the hard drive market, and they can charge more for the higher capacity for little additional cost. The price difference between a 250GB drive and a 500GB drive is more profitable than the initial cost of the 250GB drive, because they've already taken into account all of the physical components such as the casing, drive electronics, motor, head, and half the platters. Also, the hard drive manufacturers can only differentiate themselves on 4 factors: price, reliability, performance, and size. Most consumers don't care about or understand performance or reliability in computer parts, and that leaves size and price. That's what the companies have to advertise on, and since the prices can only go so low, sizes have to go up. If one company chooses not to compete, soon the others will be selling a drive 2-4 times the size at the same price, and they'll have no customers. This is the competitive hard drive industry, and we'll continue to see better products at lower prices, and we'll continue to like it. OEM shipped PCs will have TB disks if this is true.
A few months back, Cringley wrote (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20 061026_001143.html) that he knows some people in the industry, and that platters were about to be replaced by much stronger materials, that would bring about lighter and thinner platters, which would allow 3 times as many platters, lower powered motors to drive the platters, less energy, and these drives would have higher reliability than current models, and the cost would go down significantly. I wonder if this article is referring to the same transition that he was getting at.
Anyway, I look forward to a future where I'll have a file server the size of a deck of cards, and holds every movie and picture my family owns. It will be a great time to be a computer geek.
It would be nice to have the option to use either. And if everybody in your organization is using OOo-old-gui or OOo-new-gui, everyone should be saving in ODF, and everyone should be happy with having a gui they like.
The point of this will be downloading magazines and your daily paper via wifi while you're on the bus (with near zero distribution costs, most papers could go free since the ads will make them more money), and having your favorite reference materials at hand, plus a book or two would be a real boon. I'd probably even start to read again away from the computer.
The thing is, the cost of content will have to drop. If I no longer get a physical copy, I shouldn't have to pay for the printing process, and all the overhead that implies. Lower prices might well mean a higher readership because more people would buy more books if they were cheaper and they had the time to read more than they currently do. Well known authors wouldn't have to go to a publisher anymore. They'd write their book, pay an editor out of pocket, and Amazon will let you sell a book download for 3-5 bucks, and take 2 or 3 dollars for themselves. Amazon could host a million books in the size of a small data center, and each book would pay for itself in Amazon's eyes in the first 10 copies. A hundred thousand in sales would be a quarter of a million in profit for the author. Dozens of niche authors would come out of the woodwork because the cost of self publishing would drop through the floor, and we would see an American Idol type of situation in literature, because there are all kinds of talent out waiting to be found. Further, in episodic type literature, an author might even let you download the first 2 books of a series to entice you to read books 3-4 after the first couple have been out a few years, since your downloading the first two books would cost him nothing. Hopefully, this sort of situation would yield higher quality material as well, since the author's current and ongoing sales outlook would depend directly on the number of units sold instead of getting a large contract up front before the book is even written.
Obviously, I've been looking forward to electronic paper for a while now. Just a while longer until it's really affordable.
From La Leche League's website: Breastfeeding has been shown to be protective against many illnesses, including painful ear infections, upper and lower respiratory ailments, allergies, intestinal disorders, colds, viruses, staph, strep and e coli infections, diabetes, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, many childhood cancers, meningitis, pneumonia, urinary tract infections, salmonella, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome(SIDS) as well as lifetime protection from Crohn's Disease, ulcerative colitis, some lymphomas, insulin dependent diabetes, and for girls, breast and ovarian cancer.
The difference between 616 and 666 might be explained from the difference between the way the numbers and math matched up differently between the Hebrew (616) vs. Greek and Latin (both 666) languages when referring to Nero, who predated the writing of the Book of Revelations. John, the writer of the book, was probably saying that someone Nero-like in his treatment of Christians would be coming into power, a second coming along the lines of the second coming of the Christ, except a different person. When the text was translated, it is possible that the translators wanted to maintain the tie between the number and the name, and so changed the number to match the language of the translation.
Christianity does, because the Bible says the earth is 6500 years old (don't argue with me about interpretation; that's the interpretation than Christians believe in).
Bzzzztttt.
Not even a quarter of US Christians believe that. I think most Methodists, Presbyterians, Catholics and Lutherans don't believe in the six days of Creation. Those beliefs belong to the Baptists, and other varieties of Christianity that fall under the umbrella of Fundamentalism. However, since I agree with the Fundamentalists on abortion, cloning, gay marriage, stem cell research, and sex education, (and for now, those are the only issues I vote on) I vote for the same candidates as they do. As soon as the Democrats start running candidates I can agree with on those issues, and have good scientific, fiscal, educational, and ecological positions to go with them, I'll start voting for them.
It doesn't necessarily need to be a right now plan. But the above plan is what it takes to get there when you're ready to try. That said, you can do your best to minimize expenses, and save as much as you can, and then when you're ready to make your move and kick start your plan, you'll hopefully have a few thousand saved ready to pay your closing costs and down payment on your first property. That said, I have a hard time not being miserly, and I do complain a bit about not having enough income to do more now, but I have to step back and recognize that that won't change in the next five years, due to the fact that we'll have a couple more children before we're done paying off this house, and that will stretch things a bit, but then we'll get some of our money back by paying less taxes (the current tax credit for children in the US is nice, you get money back even if you paid none in in the first place).
Check magazinepricesearch.com for great deals on magazines. They search dozens of other magazine sites. I find that I can get subscriptions there for a fraction of the price of the inserts that you find in the magazine itself.
I was reading a book recently on wealth accumulation (checked out free at the library). The author recommended writing down everything you spend everyday for a month, consolidate your similar expenses into categories, then see if there is anything you could reduce or eliminate to find a way to save some of what you make.
He told about how he went on a radio show, gave this advice, and was ridiculed by the talk show host, who admitted he was shoe stringing it on $100k/year in New York. The talk show host finally gave in and did this. He found he was spending $16,000/year eating out. Some people spend a couple thousand a year on coffee-like substances, when inexpensive or home-brewed varieties can be had for a couple hundred or less. Any regular expense that you incur that doesn't relate directly to running your house or car should be viewed in a similar manner, and decide which is a bigger priority, having that item today or setting the money aside to invest and turn into 5 or 10 times as much money later.
I can imagine paying 3 or 4 thousand a year to cook (excellent meals) for myself and my wife (and soon our children), and finding a much better use of the other 12k dollars. And, actually we do similarly, instead of paying rent and eating out, we eat at home and bought a house three years ago when interest rates were really low. In less than 10 years, we'll own our house debt free, and what we were paying on house payments (or would otherwise be spending on rent), about $7100, will be money we can use to do things we consider fun or invest for retirement, or buy our next house. We'll probably do more of the last two, but some of the former too. Keep in mind that when we executed our house purchase, my average expected income for the next 8 years was around $35,000 in the mid-USA, and we bought a house for $110,000, with my wife quiting her job (planned) to stay at home with our children. I got an unexpected promotion and nearly 40% raise this year, which is making things much easier. I expect that in 30 years, we'll have $5 million in assets divided between 401k, real estate, RothIRA (we pay little in taxes currently, and I'd rather avoid the taxes I can't predict in 30-40 years) and other stock market investments.
In the end, people make their own decisions about their priorities, and choose not to spend a couple dozen hours figuring out how to do more with less, thus making themselves wealthy in the end. The book I was looking at was The Automatic Millionaire: A Powerful One-Step Plan to Live and Finish Rich, available for about $10 on Amazon, but it really comes down to a few simple steps.
1: Eliminate unnecessary expenses, set aside that money, and put it to work for you.
2: Buy a place to live, paying rent makes others rich at your expense, owning your place will be your foundation to future wealth.
3: Have a certain portion of your paycheck directly diverted to your retirement/investment program, and plan the rest of your budget like that money doesn't exist. (This can be done manually, if you have discipline, but it must happen)
4: Profit!!! (sorry, couldn't resist)
As for the grandparent post, houses in New York for very modest places rent for thousands depending on the area/building, I could get a similar place for 1/4 the cost or less in less urban areas. And when you rent, that becomes nothing as far as your balance sheet is concerned, when you are paying on the mortgage, that expense you pay on the principle becomes an asset.
When SED technology comes out, take a look at that. It should have better picture, use less electricity, and will have a similar slim size that makes LCD and Plasma attractive, and after a few years, it could be as cheap as a CRT, because it might be able to take advantage of print manufacturing similar to OLED.
Most video games sell at most 5 million copies, capping the number of fans around 20 million. If the networks have the option of airing sports with a potential 50 million fans or 20 million, you're going to have a hard time convincing them to go after the smaller market.
I've played a lot of games, but I don't plan on watching on TV. It'd be like watching chess without the suspense. There is just no way to make it into good TV. It might be another thing to sit with my pals and enjoy watching two of them duke it out at some game we all like, because I know I'll get my chance at the winner, but I have no interest in watching people I don't know play video games.
I say atheists, because some who advocate on behalf of evolution want to disprove Christianity through science. In Discover magazine recently, there was an article about Sir Richard Dawkins, refered to as Darwin's rottweiler, who uses evolution to attempt to disprove Christianity, even to scientists who believe in both evolution and God.
Frankly, science and religion have little in common, other than the search for truth that was talked about in the movie Contact. I believe that science's purpose is to explain the natural (physical) world, but that it cannot say anything about the spiritual world. Religion/faith is about who we are in relation to the natural and spiritual world, and is suppose to show us how to fulfill our potential as human beings.
"Missing" implies that it's location is unknown, not that there isn't anything there. When the keys are missing, it's not that they don't exist, it that I can't locate them. When a piece of the evolutional chain is missing, it's not that there is a problem with the theory, its that we haven't located fossiles of various intermediate stages yet.
An article published on April 1st by an Ars staff member that he had played 12 maps from the game, compiled from a series of disks that he'd recieved as part of a promotional kit. The article was a three page review of the game that said, while fun, it's not going to knock anybody's socks off.
The interesting thing then becomes, if robots ever get voting rights, do the makers of the company start mass producing voters to "buy" elections for the highest bidder, at least until the party with less money decides to outlaw the practice? Except, then you'd have to be able to override the robot vote to disenfranchise the robots.
If you really like the postal service or want to keep the price of stamps down, you can send it back without the application, I'm sure the Service will gladly take their money, and the company would probably keep sending you envelopes to mail back.
What they are doing is putting their immediate or short term emphasis on the customer, which helps the company build a good name and customer relationships which should ultimately help build the best quality company in the long term, which means that this is just a different, but hopefully a more customer-centric model of delivering profits to the shareholders. This is something I learned in my management classes in college. Unfortunately many business people never learned this, and chose to use shortsighted methods that might yield the most money next week, but not necessarily for 10 years down the road.
God has proven the point on a few occasions, as the appearance has changed as well, and the priest was left holding a piece of flesh in his hand and a chalace of blood with testable DNA on the altar. Some instances of this can be found at http://www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/mir/a3.htm l
Or even not employers, you get a criminal eliment that tells people to vote a certain way or they'll have to take a swim with concrete shoes. Also consider that ID thieves might attempt to profit by registering as multiple people, and get someone to buy their votes. This opens up considerable methods of abuse.
Nero's name gives the number 666. John was predicting another emperor as bad as Nero, the worst of the rulers that persecuted the Christians for the first century. I'm not sure if this was ever considered to be fulfilled, but my guess would have been Trajan given what I know off the top of my head, plus he came to power less than 10 years after the earliest date John is supposed to have written Revelations. While many Christians have often predicted the end times, few have done any spectacular about it. One early group (led by a bishop as I may have mistakenly remembered), around the 200th anniversary of Jesus' death, predicted the return of Christ on a certain date, and marched into the desert to meet him, where they all died. After that, the early churches developed a wait and see approach on the return of the messiah, telling their members to focus on the "be ready" as opposed to the "I will return" part of Jesus' message. This has the added benefit of getting Christians to spend their time aiding others instead of trying to make headlines by telling everyone that the last catastrophe was the fault of those stricken because of their sinfulness.