The stuff you said about inflation is wrong and bizarre. The world can consume a lot (like we did during World War Two) or it can save for future consumption or it can borrow against future production.
Not actually. What you're talking about is money, which is really just bookkeeping, which affects incentives and the distribution of wealth, but is not wealth. Things with actual utility - goods and services - are not all that durable, so production and consumption are nearly in lock-step. That's why printing more money just decreases the value of existing money instead of making everybody rich.
Imagine an isolated island with a steady population of 10 people in each generation. Then, one generation decides to spend their time making and saving lots of money instead of making children and investing in them. Fast-forward 40 years. The population of the island consists of 10 old people with big bank accounts, and two people working age. They have to do all the farming, all the hunting, all the home maintenance, all the elderly care. Regardless of whatever is written in the bank ledger, how wealthy can that society be? The value of the saved money will plummet as the "wealthy" out-bid each other to have the workers climb a tree and pick a banana for them, or fix their leaky roof. That is inflation too, and is more fundamental than money supply. Production and consumption have to stay in line with each other, and shifting demographics fundamentally change the ratio of production and consumption. The US is not as bad off as my fictional isolated island, but it's the same fundamentals.
Whether the ARM chip performance is even adequate for normal netbook applications (e.g. watching youtube) is an open question until somebody tries it. Sure, ARM threw out this number of 5x, which is a meaningless number until we get a better overall idea of how fast and slow it is on different tasks.
Second, even cutting the CPU power consumption to zero wouldn't give you anywhere near 40 hours of battery life in a netbook. The CPU is just one piece of it.
There is no savings. Social security and Medicare will be bankrupt decades before anyone who is "young" gets old enough to use it.
It will be there. It's not disappearing. Yes, it will have to be adjusted to come into line with changing demographics. Nothing can change that though. The world can only consume each year what it produces, regardless of however we do the bookkeeping. If everybody put their money into stocks or the bank instead of SS, then the changing demographic would manifest as salary inflation, thus decreasing the value of the savings.
Also, the old are the richest segment of the population and the young are the poorest. Obammacare will only further impoverish the young.
First, not true. Second, what changes in health care for the elderly do you foresee, given that they already have govt. provided healthcare? Workers are already taxed to pay for medicare.
That is exactly why we do need compulsory insurance. When people are young, with high productivity and low medical costs, do they want to prepare for later in life when they have high expenses and low productivity? No, of course not, they don't even want to think about it, or maybe they don't even acknowledge the situation.
This is why people get so upset about Social Security and Medicare: they fail to realize that this huge "transfer" of wealth is essentially from themselves (in their productive years), to themselves (in their later years, when their economic output is below their survival needs). What it really amounts to, for the most part, is forced savings.
If insurance rates are to vary between people, they should vary due to choices by the insured. There is no economic utility to incentivizing people for things beyond their control, such as their age, or birth defects, or whatever.
There's no politics involved and no one is forced to pay against his will. To some of us who value freedom, that's a feature.
Unfortunately people are not free to opt out of getting ill or injured; these are simply facts of life, unfortunately, and there are unavoidable associated expenses.
Sure, a healthy lifestyle reduces the risk to some degree, and a "fat tax" on obesity might be justified. The same logic also leads to an "adrenaline tax" for thrill-seekers, a "bachelor tax" since married people are generally more healthy (having less fun?)... but these are just differences of degree - choices do not eliminate risk. And ultimately everybody dies, which is usually expensive.
Perhaps as a stoic libertarian, your plan is to forego treatment and die of a curable illness. That's not a workable public policy. People actually faced with that situation do not go down with the ship, what they do is receive treatment and then declare bankruptcy. They are freeloaders.
Why should an insurance company want to pay for your child's existing illness? Insurance is to insure you against the risk of an expensive injury or illness. It's not a charity or a health care discount subscription plan.
I guess you missed Pres. Obama's address - the plan to remove consideration of pre-existing conditions is coupled with a mandate for everybody to carry health insurance, for exactly this reason.
The alternative is not requiring people to carry insurance, and not requiring insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions, but this has not worked out well. People end up receiving care anyways (just dumping car crash victims on the side of the road to die is thankfully not a realistic option any more), but since they haven't been paying into the system, they get financially ruined, they go bankrupt and their medical costs transfer to people who were responsible enough to buy coverage all along. Also those without coverage avoid preventative care which leads to higher overall costs long-term.
There's really no question smartphones should have applications on them. The question is whether there should still be non-smart phones, and standalone music players.
For me, emphatically yes for standalone music players. I use mine mostly for working out, where the criteria are small size, light weight, long battery life, and above all, cheap (since they occasionally get destroyed).
Non-smart phones don't make any sense IMHO. The hardware for a music player, at least, is already there. Might as well use it.
Somebody modded you flamebait, but I think you're right, even though I favor socialized medicine. This is a no-win situation. Refuse to buy people smartphones, and you'll get a NYT article slamming you for buying expensive special-purpose devices instead. Go ahead and cover the smartphones, and you'll get a NYT article slamming Medicare for wasting money by buying people iPhones, which (it is discovered) are used to look at pornography etc.
This is an important subject, though. The big issues are 1) will "netbooks" wipe out the notebook industry, 2) will "netbooks" become slaves to mobile phone companies, like handsets
I think miniaturisation and price reductions will continue, and netbooks are, at most, a minor milestone in that ongoing process. The migrations from mainframes to minis, from minis to desktops, and desktops to laptops were all more significant. Each shook up the industry, but progressively less so, since no generation completely kills off the last, and the stakes are getting smaller and smaller. Replacing a single mainframe with a minicomputer could save millions, whereas netbooks and cellphones are so cheap most individuals can own both. So, I'm not too worried about cellphone companies taking over personal computing, and dwindling prices for personal computers have been in force continuously since any of the current major players has existed (in other words, Dell can cope with low-end laptops / netbooks slipping into $200 territory).
Since very little is monitored LIVE because it is extremely expensive, retention time of email, logs, etc. is crucial.
I don't see why it is crucial. Phonecalls aren't recorded. Paper mail isn't steamed open and photocopied. I don't really mind if official emails are retained, but mostly what it does is decrease efficiency by steering people away from email even when it would be the most efficient means of communication.
GIMP and Cinelerra under Linux are heaps more stable than Photoshop and Premiere under Windows
What!? Cinelerra is the least stable program I've ever used, it dies every couple of minutes.
It crashes so much that the tutorial starts off: "Cinelerra is not perfect. Before long you will be familiar with the tendency it has to crash. This usually takes the form of all the windows suddenly disappearing. Thankfully this is not often a big problem because Cinelerra can recover from a crash very well. Simply restart it and select Load Backup from the File menu."
It crashes so much that the OpenSuse page on it has a section devoted to crashing, and running it within gdb as a matter of routine so it won't crash every time you close the "tip of the day" window.
Its support for codecs (that actually work) is so sparse that simply finding a single path from source material to product is like crossing a minefield.
Cinelerra is the perfect example of a program that never really converged to a useful state, it just slogs on like a zombie year after year, half dead, because there is no workable free alternative. Can I blame any of this on the fact that it's free and open? Not exactly, but if it were proprietary, it would have disappeared completely years and years ago.
Do you use youtube? It will lock up firefox for me pretty regularly, and closing it makes the window disappear but doesn't stop it. When you run again it says "firefox is already running but is not responding..." Then you either have to know to go to the shell and "killall firefox" or "killall firefox-bin", depending on the distro. I've always wondered how nontechnical users can tolerate this. On my home family setup, I put a "kill all firefox" button right on everybody's menu.
But why? 10 years ago I thought sharing an 8 CPU Sun with a big devel team was a privilege. Now any decent Dell workstation has that. What does SPARC have over Intel? (No vague claims of superior "throughput", please!)
"No officer lawman sir, That is not our terrorist message, and we don't have anything to do with it. All the messages belong to the person who wrote them."
Which is exactly how it should be. Wouldn't you agree?
the gaming press continues to fall for the contrived controversy to give the company exactly what it wants: coverage.
Submitter and the editor didn't actually see the ironic thing here?
You forgot to quote the following from the article: "No matter how upset a few groups may get, this has been a successful way to market the game; we're very much aware we're falling into the trap ourselves. The question is a simple one: are we sinking to EA's level, or is it the other way around?"
Well, of course, there is no UID mapping problem unless there are multiple filesystems involved. But say you're using a USB stick to boot your work PC to linux (leaving aside whether you're supposed to be doing that), it's pretty likely you want to access your files on the hard drive, e.g. editing files with OpenOffice instead of MS Word.
This is not a rare problem, it happens with network filesystems, removable drives, fixed drives migrated between computers, a dual-boot computer where OSs share a data partition, virtual machines accessing the host filesystem... I'm sure there are more.
Slashdot Mirror
Not actually. What you're talking about is money, which is really just bookkeeping, which affects incentives and the distribution of wealth, but is not wealth. Things with actual utility - goods and services - are not all that durable, so production and consumption are nearly in lock-step. That's why printing more money just decreases the value of existing money instead of making everybody rich.
Imagine an isolated island with a steady population of 10 people in each generation. Then, one generation decides to spend their time making and saving lots of money instead of making children and investing in them. Fast-forward 40 years. The population of the island consists of 10 old people with big bank accounts, and two people working age. They have to do all the farming, all the hunting, all the home maintenance, all the elderly care. Regardless of whatever is written in the bank ledger, how wealthy can that society be? The value of the saved money will plummet as the "wealthy" out-bid each other to have the workers climb a tree and pick a banana for them, or fix their leaky roof. That is inflation too, and is more fundamental than money supply. Production and consumption have to stay in line with each other, and shifting demographics fundamentally change the ratio of production and consumption. The US is not as bad off as my fictional isolated island, but it's the same fundamentals.
Porting Windows itself is almost irrelevant. The tens of thousands of apps in the Windows ecosystem still wouldn't work.
Second, even cutting the CPU power consumption to zero wouldn't give you anywhere near 40 hours of battery life in a netbook. The CPU is just one piece of it.
It will be there. It's not disappearing. Yes, it will have to be adjusted to come into line with changing demographics. Nothing can change that though. The world can only consume each year what it produces, regardless of however we do the bookkeeping. If everybody put their money into stocks or the bank instead of SS, then the changing demographic would manifest as salary inflation, thus decreasing the value of the savings.
First, not true. Second, what changes in health care for the elderly do you foresee, given that they already have govt. provided healthcare? Workers are already taxed to pay for medicare.
This is why people get so upset about Social Security and Medicare: they fail to realize that this huge "transfer" of wealth is essentially from themselves (in their productive years), to themselves (in their later years, when their economic output is below their survival needs). What it really amounts to, for the most part, is forced savings.
If insurance rates are to vary between people, they should vary due to choices by the insured. There is no economic utility to incentivizing people for things beyond their control, such as their age, or birth defects, or whatever.
Unfortunately people are not free to opt out of getting ill or injured; these are simply facts of life, unfortunately, and there are unavoidable associated expenses.
Sure, a healthy lifestyle reduces the risk to some degree, and a "fat tax" on obesity might be justified. The same logic also leads to an "adrenaline tax" for thrill-seekers, a "bachelor tax" since married people are generally more healthy (having less fun?)... but these are just differences of degree - choices do not eliminate risk. And ultimately everybody dies, which is usually expensive.
Perhaps as a stoic libertarian, your plan is to forego treatment and die of a curable illness. That's not a workable public policy. People actually faced with that situation do not go down with the ship, what they do is receive treatment and then declare bankruptcy. They are freeloaders.
I guess you missed Pres. Obama's address - the plan to remove consideration of pre-existing conditions is coupled with a mandate for everybody to carry health insurance, for exactly this reason.
The alternative is not requiring people to carry insurance, and not requiring insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions, but this has not worked out well. People end up receiving care anyways (just dumping car crash victims on the side of the road to die is thankfully not a realistic option any more), but since they haven't been paying into the system, they get financially ruined, they go bankrupt and their medical costs transfer to people who were responsible enough to buy coverage all along. Also those without coverage avoid preventative care which leads to higher overall costs long-term.
For me, emphatically yes for standalone music players. I use mine mostly for working out, where the criteria are small size, light weight, long battery life, and above all, cheap (since they occasionally get destroyed).
Non-smart phones don't make any sense IMHO. The hardware for a music player, at least, is already there. Might as well use it.
Jerry: Hey, you're not giving it to me, man. What's wrong?
Kramer: I just took a bath, Jerry. A bath?
Jerry: No good?
Kramer: It's disgusting. I'm sitting there in a tepid pool of my own filth.
All kinds of microscopic parasites and organisms having sex all around me.
http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheShowerhead.htm
Somebody modded you flamebait, but I think you're right, even though I favor socialized medicine. This is a no-win situation. Refuse to buy people smartphones, and you'll get a NYT article slamming you for buying expensive special-purpose devices instead. Go ahead and cover the smartphones, and you'll get a NYT article slamming Medicare for wasting money by buying people iPhones, which (it is discovered) are used to look at pornography etc.
No, it's "infeasible," Microsoft said so! Are you calling them a liar !?
The main problem with DSLRs isn't scaryness, it's size and weight.
I think miniaturisation and price reductions will continue, and netbooks are, at most, a minor milestone in that ongoing process. The migrations from mainframes to minis, from minis to desktops, and desktops to laptops were all more significant. Each shook up the industry, but progressively less so, since no generation completely kills off the last, and the stakes are getting smaller and smaller. Replacing a single mainframe with a minicomputer could save millions, whereas netbooks and cellphones are so cheap most individuals can own both. So, I'm not too worried about cellphone companies taking over personal computing, and dwindling prices for personal computers have been in force continuously since any of the current major players has existed (in other words, Dell can cope with low-end laptops / netbooks slipping into $200 territory).
Ha ha, just kidding. Welcome to America.
That's not new. Check out "The Rallying Problem" section from this 4-year old presentation.
I don't see why it is crucial. Phonecalls aren't recorded. Paper mail isn't steamed open and photocopied. I don't really mind if official emails are retained, but mostly what it does is decrease efficiency by steering people away from email even when it would be the most efficient means of communication.
Aren't all botnets remote control? I don't see how it matters what network protocol is used. What am I missing?
I'll bet a big tank of liquid metal could stay hot for weeks without cooling off very much, too, thus providing solar energy on demand, day or night.
What!? Cinelerra is the least stable program I've ever used, it dies every couple of minutes.
It crashes so much that the tutorial starts off: "Cinelerra is not perfect. Before long you will be familiar with the tendency it has to crash. This usually takes the form of all the windows suddenly disappearing. Thankfully this is not often a big problem because Cinelerra can recover from a crash very well. Simply restart it and select Load Backup from the File menu."
It crashes so much that the OpenSuse page on it has a section devoted to crashing, and running it within gdb as a matter of routine so it won't crash every time you close the "tip of the day" window.
It crashes on Ubuntu. It crashes on gentoo.
Its support for codecs (that actually work) is so sparse that simply finding a single path from source material to product is like crossing a minefield.
Cinelerra is the perfect example of a program that never really converged to a useful state, it just slogs on like a zombie year after year, half dead, because there is no workable free alternative. Can I blame any of this on the fact that it's free and open? Not exactly, but if it were proprietary, it would have disappeared completely years and years ago.
Do you use youtube? It will lock up firefox for me pretty regularly, and closing it makes the window disappear but doesn't stop it. When you run again it says "firefox is already running but is not responding..." Then you either have to know to go to the shell and "killall firefox" or "killall firefox-bin", depending on the distro. I've always wondered how nontechnical users can tolerate this. On my home family setup, I put a "kill all firefox" button right on everybody's menu.
But why? 10 years ago I thought sharing an 8 CPU Sun with a big devel team was a privilege. Now any decent Dell workstation has that. What does SPARC have over Intel? (No vague claims of superior "throughput", please!)
Which is exactly how it should be. Wouldn't you agree?
No, like this.
You forgot to quote the following from the article: "No matter how upset a few groups may get, this has been a successful way to market the game; we're very much aware we're falling into the trap ourselves. The question is a simple one: are we sinking to EA's level, or is it the other way around?"
So, no, you're not the only one who "gets" it.
This is not a rare problem, it happens with network filesystems, removable drives, fixed drives migrated between computers, a dual-boot computer where OSs share a data partition, virtual machines accessing the host filesystem... I'm sure there are more.