I've actually been looking at this one and the IOGear GPEN 200N...anybody have any experience with them?
I'm guessing any of these digital pens would get you better filesizes and formats than just copying stuff into the notebook and scanning them in later...though as somebody said above, transcribing your notes in LATER gives you a chance to study at the same time...
In related news, 8th graders petitioned their principal to drop math from the list of required classes, complaining that "it's hard" and would cause an extra 3 hours of homework per week.
Note that if an actual free market for broadband existed, we would have true competition, allowing customers to choose the provider that provided the best pricing, speed, and feature set. It could be as easy as allowing municipalities to maintain large bundles of fiber through a city, exactly the same way they do with roads. (But cheaper, since you don't need huge roadworking machines and tons of asphalt.)
Unfortunately, our elected officials are honest, so once they've been bribed they stay bribed.
Agreed; something like the Myvu Crystal with decent resolution (640 lines is NOT enough for everyone; double it and I'll buy it tomorrow) should be possible and wouldn't require a prescription (or eyedrops). For extra fun, add a couple of accelerometers for head-tracking and you can use the old X-windows "slide the viewport around" trick. Add a small bluetooth keyboard, and you've got a mini-office anywhere you've got a chair.
I want that so badly. I got an Android phone because it was easier to write apps for, but if the iPhone were more open I would want so badly to get a new iPhone, a set of Myvu Crystal glasses, and some sort of small bluetooth keyboard.
If Microsoft has its head on straight with the Zune HD, it might win in this regard, but the lack of phone/3G is probably a killer. But wouldn't it be awesome to just be wandering around and, if you need to get some work done, whip out a pair of Geordi-glasses and pound out some code? Then, when you're done, fold it all away and walk off?
Post-Iran, governments see that controlling the Internet is vital to controlling their population. ISPs can declare 3rd-party VOIP and other heavy-usage models as violating the filtering rules (whether that makes sense or not) and kick them off the network. Large businesses prefer that customers be reached through communication channels they control and understand. (TV, radio, print.)
Governments, ISPs, and businesses support it. Nobody important opposes it. (You are not important.) Why are we surprised that it is happening?
I cycle out that way, and I've never had a ride where I didn't have to fight the worst winds I've ever seen. There aren't any trees, Austin could definitely use the power, and there's not much development out that way. You'd be amazed how the wind just sweeps across a flat area where there isn't really enough water for good trees. It's nightmarish.
No, you don't have lots of reads on small numbers of cattle, depending on where you are. You're not their parents, and you don't care who they hang out with after class. If you're a large enough rancher to segregate groups of his cows, then you keep them segregated for that reason. (For example, you want to keep a group from breeding that season.) That group does not often change. Your main tagging duties are: 1: Calving. (Actually, probably during castrating time -- you've penned up half of that year's calves anyway. Pen the rest.) 2: Buying cattle: tag them as they come off the truck. 3: Selling cattle: new buyer tags them. 4: If you've got a very large herd, and you're controlling batches of them as above, then track them when you batch them. If you've batched them, you did it for a reason, and you're not going to change it more often than once per season. (If that often.) 5: Sure, you're out in the middle of nowhere with the cows, but we're not tracking them real-time by satellite. I guarantee you that even the smelliest hand goes to the bar on the weekend, and I've never known a bar without a phone. Seriously, they just hand the scanners to the boss that night, and he uses this bit of ancient technology called a modem -- at MOST every two weeks.
(Oh, and expense won't be a problem for small farms: they'll chip in and buy one for three or four farms and spend the next ten years blaming each other for losing it and everybody wanting it at the last minute, just like they do for everything else.)
I grew up on a small cattle farm, so I know what I'm talking about. You absolutely have to sterilize young bulls, or they'll challenge the older bulls, and you'll wind up with a bloody bullpen instead of a lot of happy, complaining cows. So that's 50% of each year's herd you have to spend at least 15 seconds of...intensely personal time with anyway.
Secondly, cows aren't cats, but if one person is herding a small group of cattle then he's doing it through a chute or with a small bucket of feed. Again, this is completely not a problem.
Small cattle ranches obey Sturgeon's Law exactly like any other small groups. They whiners are just complaining because they aren't going to be able to hide downer cows or sell the sick ones before anybody notices. (Which, by the way, is one reason we raised our own, until my brother and I went to college and there was no more farm help.)
If I were still on my parents' farm, I'd welcome this move 100%, even restricted to the 28.8Kbps modem my parents still use.
I guess the "Post Anonymously" box isn't going to help me now anyway.
I know it's an offhand comment, but it already doesn't help you./. still stores who you are; you can't moderate and post in the same story, even if you checked "post anonymously."
My G1 tethers just fine...but not by default. Unless you got an app I haven't seen, you had to get root, right? Start with an old image, flash to a new JF image to get the upgrades but keep root, and get the bluetooth connection working?
I actually have nothing against barriers; I miss the days of "you must be at least THIS smart to use the Internet". The 98% of the users who can't figure out how to tether can subsidize my bandwidth that way.
I'd love it. Bring it on -- the bigger and slower, the better. Ever since big, slow backup tapes stopped being significantly larger than the drives they backed up, keeping important info safe has been a nontrivial task. If you can back up an enterprise's 20GB-a-day data generation habit with an array of slow-but-reliable 10-20TB drives, then your life gets a lot easier.
First of all what you are describing is not cybersquating (sp) Ok... The domain has been registered by a domainer - a domain trader that buys premium domains treating them as an investment. That's the definition of a cybersquatter. Domainer is what cybersquatters call themselves -- it's like how mobsters call themselves "legitimate businessmen". it's no trademark, not a domain typo - there is no bad faith. That's just a subset of cybersquatter. I think we used to use the word "domain scalper" for these guys, but I'm not a real Internet anthropologist, just an old man.
You're usually spot on man, but in this case man, I think your name is apt. The amount of road we have is finite, so the addition of these large trucks is fine for a few, but once you start getting more than a handful of trucks on the road, all traffic is affect.(sp)
You're correct -- it's an infrastructure problem. However, taxpayers shelled out billions of dollars in subsidies from Congress to the telecoms for the equivalent of an 8-lane highway. The only reason these "big trucks" are causing congestion is because cable companies just added that money to their profit statements while contemplating lining the roads with snipers to take out the trucks.
When something holds up progress, you have two choices: whine about it being hard and expensive and that we're too rural (even in our dense cities, which never seemed right to me), or we can kick its ass and chew bubblegum. The countries that run out of bubblegum first will be the leaders in the 21st century.
Here's another good example of "correlation vs. causation." Extremely good runners have a very mechanically efficient stride and smooth foot action. Some of this is training, and some of it is related to how the feet and knees are aligned. Most people do not have perfect alignment. We will probably never become Olympic competitors or join the Stanford running team, but we can run for fun; I do the occasional road race, and I'm doing a triathlon next weekend.
Those of us who run for fun and who are not gifted with perfect alignment may overpronate or supinate our feet when we run. This action is less efficient, so we're less likely to be fast enough to join a college team. A small majority of people overpronate, somewhat less have a good neutral position, and a few people supinate. To look for overpronation, check out your old tennis shoes: if your shoes wear out first near the ball of the foot, chances are you're an overpronator. (If you have flat feet, you're also probably an overpronator. Try the "wet foot test": when you get out of the shower, step on a piece of paper and look at the prints you make.)
I'm a moderate overpronator, and shoes with a little extra cushion that compensate for my less-than-perfect foot position have kept my feet injury-free for five years.
No, a lot of first-job recent graduates are "libertarian leaning", because they get their first paychecks and ask "Who is FICA and why do they get all my money?"
They get told "you have to pay taxes to pay for all the roads and bridges", but they realize that all the money is spent playing GI Joe and saving banks that were run into the ground by gambling-addicted bankers who broke the world. War in Afghanistan got little support because it was difficult to spell, so we had to invade Iraq, as that fit more nicely on bumper-stickers.
They stop being libertarians a bit later when they realize that the only thing better than a world based on equality is being on top of a world based on inequality, and they begin donating to one of the political parties. (Doesn't matter; there are occasionally balance issues between Red Team and Blue Team, but Red got nerfed on the latest patch, so we'll see if that fixed it.)
Let's fight this, Austinites. My gf and I are engineers, and we VNC into work on weekends and for late nights, and we use more than 2GB/month just on that.
Here's the letter I'm sending to my senators and representatives. I need to figure out who to send it to at Time Warner and the Statesman. (The big newspaper, for out-of-towners.) I'm looking for advice and critique and sources for some of the arguments I've heard here. (Look for the [brackets])
Dear ________,
I am an electrical engineer with *company*, and like many engineers in the emerging high-tech center of Austin, I rely on high-speed Internet connections to my home. In these times of economic hardship, it is more important than ever for working professionals to be able to access work computers and other information quickly and economically.
Time Warner Cable has announced that they are implementing tight limits on the amount of information that they will provide to users of their cable modem services. While Austin's workers attempt to reach a compromise between work and family life by accessing critical business operations over the Internet, Time Warner plans to restrict their networks for these heavy users. They are instituting these caps in spite of the fact that a vast capacity of their fiber-optic lines remain unused, and in [year], Congress gave [millions] of dollars to cable companies to improve our nation's digital infrastructure.
For Time Warner to pocket this investment and make no improvements, then attempt to extort outrageous fees that infrastructure from Austin area workers, is outrageous. Only the fact that there is no significant competition for broadband access allows cable companies to unilaterally impose these restrictions on those of us who depend on the Internet for our livelihood. As Congress has given heavily to cable companies and has seen no improvements, I would urge you to closely examine the stranglehold this company has upon Austin's digital infrastructure and the abuse of monopoly power that this upcoming cap represents.
I look forward to your quick action in this matter, [and I anticipate supporting you in [your next election] (for elected officials) ].
They are however excellent when it comes to playing games at a fun volume and getting decent positional audio. And flattening my ears. That brings up a good point -- I've listened to a fair number of decent-to-good headphones owned by friends, and my ears always wind up physically squished. For the audiophiles in here who listen on big cans all day: do your ears automatically adjust? Are some more ear-friendly than others? I'm currently listening on a pair of Philips headphones, not because of the sound quality, but because my ears don't physically ache for the rest of the day.
My Nokia N-800 isn't bad. It's pocket-sized and has a decent web browser. I've switched now to an Android G1, so I don't know about recent developments. You do have to use the stylus to use the keyboard though. I've heard that the newer model has a pop-out keyboard, so that might be better.
It is a good joke, if taken in fun. The real joke is that this democratic system, in a slightly more elaborate, slightly more bot-resistant way, is basically how we elect our Presidents.
Right now, on my laptop, I have two VirtualBox sessions running images pretty close to the servers at work. I'm testing out some simulation. I've got slashdot open in Firefox, and I've got Adobe's PDF reader open to a reference manual.
The PDF reader is using more memory than the two virtual servers combined. That's a ridiculous amount of bloat, and it doesn't even count the "Adobe Updater" software that runs all the time.
I'm in the same boat -- I got a PRS-500 for reading papers on the shuttle bus to grad school. The screen was a bit small (or I'm a bit nearsighted, one), but other than that it worked great.
Now, a couple of years later, the non-(easily)-user-replaceable battery is dying, and I'm trying to decide whether to try to swap batteries, spring for a 505, spring for a 700, or get a Kindle 2. Thanks to earlier posters, I know I *don't* have to pay $0.10 to convert all my.pdfs over, so now I'm trying to decide which to get. (Or one of the other readers; call me crazy, but I read lots and LOTS of technical pdfs on the couch in my new job, and I always hanker for a slightly bigger screen. Or a stick to beat all the people who still insist on two-column format.)
For those of you who are at least in their 30s and lived in a University dorm, you may remember that phone service was expensive. You either used a calling card number or you paid the phone company big bucks per minute for your long-distance calls. Cell phones effectively killed that racket in universities, but I hear that the same racket persists in prison, with the added difficulty in obtaining a calling card while in jail.
Yet another "isolated incident" of law enforcement driven by money instead of justice. Nothing new here folks.
Additionally, feeding money into the top is a flawed strategy for the same reason that pushing a rope is a flawed strategy.
Banks issuing loans have updated their decision-making to account for the people who cannot repay their loans. By loaning $X to people with credit rating A and $Y to people with credit rating B, etc., they can maximize their profit. If you give the bank $10MM dollars, they now have more capital, but that does not change the fact that the maximum profit they believe they can achieve is to loan money according to their studies.
The additional money comes into play only when there are more people seeking loans than the bank has money. This is the definition of the credit crunch and why the companies want a "bailout". However, the Fed has lowered the federal funds rate (the rate at which it lends to banks) to a figure so low that the banks can borrow all the money they want with very little penalty. Giving money to banks does not encourage them to lend.
The root of the problem is that very nearly everything is overvalued, especially at the high end of the scale. Without a bailout, the monetary values of things would return to a sane level. This would allow more lower-middle and upper-middle-class people to afford ownership of companies (rescuing stock prices) and luxuries (improving consumer demand.) Or, in layman's terms: Nobody's buying things now because they're too expensive. The common-sense solution is to price them lower, while the current solution is to give people with money more money and hope they start buying things even though they're too expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
I've actually been looking at this one and the IOGear GPEN 200N...anybody have any experience with them?
I'm guessing any of these digital pens would get you better filesizes and formats than just copying stuff into the notebook and scanning them in later...though as somebody said above, transcribing your notes in LATER gives you a chance to study at the same time...
In related news, 8th graders petitioned their principal to drop math from the list of required classes, complaining that "it's hard" and would cause an extra 3 hours of homework per week.
Note that if an actual free market for broadband existed, we would have true competition, allowing customers to choose the provider that provided the best pricing, speed, and feature set. It could be as easy as allowing municipalities to maintain large bundles of fiber through a city, exactly the same way they do with roads. (But cheaper, since you don't need huge roadworking machines and tons of asphalt.)
Unfortunately, our elected officials are honest, so once they've been bribed they stay bribed.
Agreed; something like the Myvu Crystal with decent resolution (640 lines is NOT enough for everyone; double it and I'll buy it tomorrow) should be possible and wouldn't require a prescription (or eyedrops). For extra fun, add a couple of accelerometers for head-tracking and you can use the old X-windows "slide the viewport around" trick. Add a small bluetooth keyboard, and you've got a mini-office anywhere you've got a chair.
I want that so badly. I got an Android phone because it was easier to write apps for, but if the iPhone were more open I would want so badly to get a new iPhone, a set of Myvu Crystal glasses, and some sort of small bluetooth keyboard.
If Microsoft has its head on straight with the Zune HD, it might win in this regard, but the lack of phone/3G is probably a killer. But wouldn't it be awesome to just be wandering around and, if you need to get some work done, whip out a pair of Geordi-glasses and pound out some code? Then, when you're done, fold it all away and walk off?
...if you have a Cleric with a 5th-level spell slot open.
Post-Iran, governments see that controlling the Internet is vital to controlling their population.
ISPs can declare 3rd-party VOIP and other heavy-usage models as violating the filtering rules (whether that makes sense or not) and kick them off the network.
Large businesses prefer that customers be reached through communication channels they control and understand. (TV, radio, print.)
Governments, ISPs, and businesses support it. Nobody important opposes it. (You are not important.) Why are we surprised that it is happening?
I cycle out that way, and I've never had a ride where I didn't have to fight the worst winds I've ever seen. There aren't any trees, Austin could definitely use the power, and there's not much development out that way. You'd be amazed how the wind just sweeps across a flat area where there isn't really enough water for good trees. It's nightmarish.
Having owned cattle: it doesn't work that way.
No, you don't have lots of reads on small numbers of cattle, depending on where you are. You're not their parents, and you don't care who they hang out with after class. If you're a large enough rancher to segregate groups of his cows, then you keep them segregated for that reason. (For example, you want to keep a group from breeding that season.) That group does not often change. Your main tagging duties are:
1: Calving. (Actually, probably during castrating time -- you've penned up half of that year's calves anyway. Pen the rest.)
2: Buying cattle: tag them as they come off the truck.
3: Selling cattle: new buyer tags them.
4: If you've got a very large herd, and you're controlling batches of them as above, then track them when you batch them. If you've batched them, you did it for a reason, and you're not going to change it more often than once per season. (If that often.)
5: Sure, you're out in the middle of nowhere with the cows, but we're not tracking them real-time by satellite. I guarantee you that even the smelliest hand goes to the bar on the weekend, and I've never known a bar without a phone. Seriously, they just hand the scanners to the boss that night, and he uses this bit of ancient technology called a modem -- at MOST every two weeks.
(Oh, and expense won't be a problem for small farms: they'll chip in and buy one for three or four farms and spend the next ten years blaming each other for losing it and everybody wanting it at the last minute, just like they do for everything else.)
I grew up on a small cattle farm, so I know what I'm talking about. You absolutely have to sterilize young bulls, or they'll challenge the older bulls, and you'll wind up with a bloody bullpen instead of a lot of happy, complaining cows. So that's 50% of each year's herd you have to spend at least 15 seconds of...intensely personal time with anyway.
Secondly, cows aren't cats, but if one person is herding a small group of cattle then he's doing it through a chute or with a small bucket of feed. Again, this is completely not a problem.
Small cattle ranches obey Sturgeon's Law exactly like any other small groups. They whiners are just complaining because they aren't going to be able to hide downer cows or sell the sick ones before anybody notices. (Which, by the way, is one reason we raised our own, until my brother and I went to college and there was no more farm help.)
If I were still on my parents' farm, I'd welcome this move 100%, even restricted to the 28.8Kbps modem my parents still use.
Agreed; and humans do a lot of things that other animals would do if they could.
I mean, cats didn't evolve to eat food out of tins, but if your cat could work a can opener then he'd be done with you for good.
I guess the "Post Anonymously" box isn't going to help me now anyway.
I know it's an offhand comment, but it already doesn't help you. /. still stores who you are; you can't moderate and post in the same story, even if you checked "post anonymously."
My G1 tethers just fine...but not by default.
Unless you got an app I haven't seen, you had to get root, right? Start with an old image, flash to a new JF image to get the upgrades but keep root, and get the bluetooth connection working?
I actually have nothing against barriers; I miss the days of "you must be at least THIS smart to use the Internet". The 98% of the users who can't figure out how to tether can subsidize my bandwidth that way.
I'd love it. Bring it on -- the bigger and slower, the better. Ever since big, slow backup tapes stopped being significantly larger than the drives they backed up, keeping important info safe has been a nontrivial task. If you can back up an enterprise's 20GB-a-day data generation habit with an array of slow-but-reliable 10-20TB drives, then your life gets a lot easier.
First of all what you are describing is not cybersquating (sp)
Ok...
The domain has been registered by a domainer - a domain trader that buys premium domains treating them as an investment.
That's the definition of a cybersquatter. Domainer is what cybersquatters call themselves -- it's like how mobsters call themselves "legitimate businessmen".
it's no trademark, not a domain typo - there is no bad faith.
That's just a subset of cybersquatter. I think we used to use the word "domain scalper" for these guys, but I'm not a real Internet anthropologist, just an old man.
You're usually spot on man, but in this case man, I think your name is apt.
The amount of road we have is finite, so the addition of these large trucks is fine for a few, but once you start getting more than a handful of trucks on the road, all traffic is affect.(sp)
You're correct -- it's an infrastructure problem. However, taxpayers shelled out billions of dollars in subsidies from Congress to the telecoms for the equivalent of an 8-lane highway. The only reason these "big trucks" are causing congestion is because cable companies just added that money to their profit statements while contemplating lining the roads with snipers to take out the trucks.
When something holds up progress, you have two choices: whine about it being hard and expensive and that we're too rural (even in our dense cities, which never seemed right to me), or we can kick its ass and chew bubblegum. The countries that run out of bubblegum first will be the leaders in the 21st century.
Here's another good example of "correlation vs. causation." Extremely good runners have a very mechanically efficient stride and smooth foot action. Some of this is training, and some of it is related to how the feet and knees are aligned. Most people do not have perfect alignment. We will probably never become Olympic competitors or join the Stanford running team, but we can run for fun; I do the occasional road race, and I'm doing a triathlon next weekend.
Those of us who run for fun and who are not gifted with perfect alignment may overpronate or supinate our feet when we run. This action is less efficient, so we're less likely to be fast enough to join a college team. A small majority of people overpronate, somewhat less have a good neutral position, and a few people supinate. To look for overpronation, check out your old tennis shoes: if your shoes wear out first near the ball of the foot, chances are you're an overpronator. (If you have flat feet, you're also probably an overpronator. Try the "wet foot test": when you get out of the shower, step on a piece of paper and look at the prints you make.)
I'm a moderate overpronator, and shoes with a little extra cushion that compensate for my less-than-perfect foot position have kept my feet injury-free for five years.
No, a lot of first-job recent graduates are "libertarian leaning", because they get their first paychecks and ask "Who is FICA and why do they get all my money?"
They get told "you have to pay taxes to pay for all the roads and bridges", but they realize that all the money is spent playing GI Joe and saving banks that were run into the ground by gambling-addicted bankers who broke the world. War in Afghanistan got little support because it was difficult to spell, so we had to invade Iraq, as that fit more nicely on bumper-stickers.
They stop being libertarians a bit later when they realize that the only thing better than a world based on equality is being on top of a world based on inequality, and they begin donating to one of the political parties. (Doesn't matter; there are occasionally balance issues between Red Team and Blue Team, but Red got nerfed on the latest patch, so we'll see if that fixed it.)
Let's fight this, Austinites. My gf and I are engineers, and we VNC into work on weekends and for late nights, and we use more than 2GB/month just on that.
Here's the letter I'm sending to my senators and representatives. I need to figure out who to send it to at Time Warner and the Statesman. (The big newspaper, for out-of-towners.) I'm looking for advice and critique and sources for some of the arguments I've heard here. (Look for the [brackets])
Dear ________,
I am an electrical engineer with *company*, and like many engineers in the emerging high-tech center of Austin, I rely on high-speed Internet connections to my home. In these times of economic hardship, it is more important than ever for working professionals to be able to access work computers and other information quickly and economically.
Time Warner Cable has announced that they are implementing tight limits on the amount of information that they will provide to users of their cable modem services. While Austin's workers attempt to reach a compromise between work and family life by accessing critical business operations over the Internet, Time Warner plans to restrict their networks for these heavy users. They are instituting these caps in spite of the fact that a vast capacity of their fiber-optic lines remain unused, and in [year], Congress gave [millions] of dollars to cable companies to improve our nation's digital infrastructure.
For Time Warner to pocket this investment and make no improvements, then attempt to extort outrageous fees that infrastructure from Austin area workers, is outrageous. Only the fact that there is no significant competition for broadband access allows cable companies to unilaterally impose these restrictions on those of us who depend on the Internet for our livelihood. As Congress has given heavily to cable companies and has seen no improvements, I would urge you to closely examine the stranglehold this company has upon Austin's digital infrastructure and the abuse of monopoly power that this upcoming cap represents.
I look forward to your quick action in this matter, [and I anticipate supporting you in [your next election] (for elected officials) ].
*OpenGLFan*
They are however excellent when it comes to playing games at a fun volume and getting decent positional audio.
And flattening my ears.
That brings up a good point -- I've listened to a fair number of decent-to-good headphones owned by friends, and my ears always wind up physically squished. For the audiophiles in here who listen on big cans all day: do your ears automatically adjust? Are some more ear-friendly than others? I'm currently listening on a pair of Philips headphones, not because of the sound quality, but because my ears don't physically ache for the rest of the day.
My Nokia N-800 isn't bad. It's pocket-sized and has a decent web browser. I've switched now to an Android G1, so I don't know about recent developments. You do have to use the stylus to use the keyboard though. I've heard that the newer model has a pop-out keyboard, so that might be better.
It is a good joke, if taken in fun. The real joke is that this democratic system, in a slightly more elaborate, slightly more bot-resistant way, is basically how we elect our Presidents.
Adobe's particularly horrible implementation.
Right now, on my laptop, I have two VirtualBox sessions running images pretty close to the servers at work. I'm testing out some simulation. I've got slashdot open in Firefox, and I've got Adobe's PDF reader open to a reference manual.
The PDF reader is using more memory than the two virtual servers combined. That's a ridiculous amount of bloat, and it doesn't even count the "Adobe Updater" software that runs all the time.
I'm in the same boat -- I got a PRS-500 for reading papers on the shuttle bus to grad school. The screen was a bit small (or I'm a bit nearsighted, one), but other than that it worked great.
Now, a couple of years later, the non-(easily)-user-replaceable battery is dying, and I'm trying to decide whether to try to swap batteries, spring for a 505, spring for a 700, or get a Kindle 2. Thanks to earlier posters, I know I *don't* have to pay $0.10 to convert all my .pdfs over, so now I'm trying to decide which to get. (Or one of the other readers; call me crazy, but I read lots and LOTS of technical pdfs on the couch in my new job, and I always hanker for a slightly bigger screen. Or a stick to beat all the people who still insist on two-column format.)
For those of you who are at least in their 30s and lived in a University dorm, you may remember that phone service was expensive. You either used a calling card number or you paid the phone company big bucks per minute for your long-distance calls. Cell phones effectively killed that racket in universities, but I hear that the same racket persists in prison, with the added difficulty in obtaining a calling card while in jail.
Yet another "isolated incident" of law enforcement driven by money instead of justice. Nothing new here folks.
Additionally, feeding money into the top is a flawed strategy for the same reason that pushing a rope is a flawed strategy.
Banks issuing loans have updated their decision-making to account for the people who cannot repay their loans. By loaning $X to people with credit rating A and $Y to people with credit rating B, etc., they can maximize their profit. If you give the bank $10MM dollars, they now have more capital, but that does not change the fact that the maximum profit they believe they can achieve is to loan money according to their studies.
The additional money comes into play only when there are more people seeking loans than the bank has money. This is the definition of the credit crunch and why the companies want a "bailout". However, the Fed has lowered the federal funds rate (the rate at which it lends to banks) to a figure so low that the banks can borrow all the money they want with very little penalty. Giving money to banks does not encourage them to lend.
The root of the problem is that very nearly everything is overvalued, especially at the high end of the scale. Without a bailout, the monetary values of things would return to a sane level. This would allow more lower-middle and upper-middle-class people to afford ownership of companies (rescuing stock prices) and luxuries (improving consumer demand.) Or, in layman's terms: Nobody's buying things now because they're too expensive. The common-sense solution is to price them lower, while the current solution is to give people with money more money and hope they start buying things even though they're too expensive.