Part of the problem with this whole debate is one of definitions. What is "middle class"? What is "well off"? What is "rich"? Using these terms may make your rhetoric sound good, but frankly, I don't know what you're talking about when you don't provide a point of reference, e.g. tax brackets.
Things being relative, I could double, maybe triple my income and I would certainly be better off but still consider myself middle class. I wouldn't consider myself "well off" or "rich" but somebody else might. Things depend on where you live also; if I lived in LA or San Francisco I might actually need to make 2-3 times my current income just to have the same standard of living I have where I currently live.
So Democrats may talk about being for the middle class, but when Charles Rangel says something to the effect that he would keep none of the tax cuts enacted during Bush's term, what is he really talking about? He's talking about raising taxes (from where they are now) across the board, on everyone. The addition of the 10% tax bracket, lowering the tax brackets, and the increase in child tax credit affects everyone, particularly families.
Like it or not, that is the reality, and it is easy to back up with numbers. We develop payroll software, so I have tax tables going back to 1998. For kicks, I checked to see what I would have had withheld in 1998, had I been earning then what I am earning now.
1998: $5928 annual withheld 2006: $4446 annual withheld (without the child tax credit, i.e. just the tax bracket changes) 2006: $1482 annual withheld (with child tax credit)
In 1998, I would have been in the 28% tax bracket. In 2006, I am still in the 15% tax bracket (just barely) and because rates have been reduced, the next step up is 25% not 28%.
People who assert that the tax cuts were "for" the rich, or that the rich and corporations are getting "all" of the benefits of the tax cuts, really need to go back and do the math, all the way up and down the tax brackets, then they need to specify who they are really talking about when they are talking about changing tax rates.
And in all fairness, Saddam was just keeping the documents around to donate to the Saddam Hussein Presidential Library for historical purposes when his term was up, he wasn't actually planning on using them to build any weapons down the line.
If memory serves, it was a general in the Iraqi Air Force. And I think he might have been hawking a book he wrote. So how reliable can he really be, making these claims on a fake news program.
Jeez, I see my original post was modded flamebait. I was just trying to be funny. I hope that doesn't hurt my karma. I guess you can't joke about this stuff.
Everyone knows Iraq didn't have WMDs and wasn't developing WMDs. These documents which supposedly show how to build an atomic weapon must have been planted by the evil Bush administration. They were never actually "recovered" in Iraq. Concerns that Iran might have used the information are overblown, because everyone knows that Iran is not building an atomic bomb either, their nuclear research is for peaceful power generation only. It just goes to show how stupid the Bush administration is, putting real nuclear knowhow on the web instead of putting the minimal effort into pulling a "Doc Brown" operation like the Clinton admin did with the plans for the nuclear bomb triggers they gave to the Iranians.
Next in the NYT: When mainstream media memes collide!
I did the same with the computer science AP test. What the heck, I figured? I was self taught etc. with a lot of experience in BASIC (I didn't know better at that point) and a bit of C. All I can remember about the test was there was a bunch Pascal code, and I hadn't had any exposure to Pascal before. I picked up what I could from the examples in terms of commands, structure and syntax to answer questions where they wanted to provide code. Ended up getting a 2.
Well at least the author of the story managed to get the video to play. I downloaded "The Enterprise Incident" and have not successfully been able to playback the episode in its entirety. At the 4:12 mark, the window goes black and the progress bar goes to the beginning. Amazon "support" has not been helpful at all. A Motley fool poster seems to have a simlilar problem. The Progress Bar doesn't work to jump to any point in the video.
The Unbox player may not be necessary to play back videos purchased through Amazon. It might just be a "wrapper" around WMP. I was able to play back the episode directly through Windows Media Player, and it stops at the 4:12 mark as well, but with an error message: "Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the file." Which is kind of an odd error to get in the middle of playback.
IIRC, my.mp3.com gave subscibers access to a library of CDs that they had ripped after you "showed" them that you had that CD. Somewhat like a music storage locker where you didn't need to rip and upload the content. On their system, there was one copy of each song. "Oh, you've got that CD? We'll let you stream it from our server." You put your CDs in your computer and their app identified them and granted you access. At least one of the legal issues IIRC was that mp3.com's ripping of the CDs was not covered under fair use.
The server based DVR is supposed to record a separate copy of each show for each customer. If 1000 people want the latest episode of "The Sopranos", then 1000 individual copies are made. Inefficient, but good if you're invested in hard drive manufacturer stock. So it is different in the sense that the users are initiating the copying, and they each have their own individual copy.
One article I read this morning suggested the price would be less than the current $9.95 standalone DVR fee. They are positioning this as a cost saving move; easier to manage a central data center that does all the work than to deliver, install, repair and replace individual DVR boxes at customer locations. Customers wouldn't stand for them saying they are cutting their costs while at the same time increasing costs for customers.
Well, the Social "Security" and Medicare make up the bulk of your taxes, really. When you are self employed, you have to pay both the employee and employer "shares" of these taxes, which is out to 15.3%.
There is no way to reduce or eliminate these taxes unfortunately. Unless Bush is reelected and he is able to get some kind of personal accounts legislation passed. But even then, all you will be able to do is take a portion of your social security taxes and save/invest it in some kind of retirement account. At least you will be keeping the money.
You may be doing something wrong, unless you are including some other taxes in that figure? I'm talking about federal income tax.
If you are single, no dependants, had a gross income of $20,000, your taxable income should be $12,200 (with a standard deduction of $4750 and one $3,050 exemption). Tax on $12,200 is $1,484 if I've read the chart right.
Paying $4K in taxes on an income of an AGI $20000 is absurd. That's 20%! You should be in a 15% tax bracket. That 25% income bracked doesn't even start until your taxable income hits $30,800 for single, $64,750 for married.
If you really payed that much, I'd look into seeing if you can file a corrected return and get that money back.
IIRC and FWIW, the child tax credit was first enacted under Clinton, but it was only $500. The original round of Bush tax cuts (2001?) had the child tax credit increasing gradually through the rest of the decade to $1000, and then because these changes weren't "permanent" the next year it went back down to $500 per child. This is part of the phase-in effect that pundits claim delayed the economic recovery--because the full tax cuts had not really taken effect, effects were limited. What happened in 2003 is that tax cuts were basically accelerated, so that they would have a more immediate impact.
So depending on the baseline you are working with, you have to figure different savings amounts. Accelerating the tax cuts that were already in place saved me $1600 in taxes over what I would have paid ($400 extra tax credit x 4 kids). From the Clinton-era baseline, I'm saving $2000 in income taxes ($500 extra tax credit x 4 kids).
Obviously these things are complex, and to come up with a generic phrase like "saves each middle-class family about $1,000" you probably rely on a series of assumptions that aren't spelled out. So here's a real life explanation/example:
The child tax credit is now $1000 per child. This is a credit towards your income tax, not a deduction from your wages when figuring total taxable income. Consequently, this can make a big difference on your tax owed, depending on how many children you have of course and what you are used to paying.
As an example, my total tax for 2003 was $4,411. In the summer of 2003 the feds issued checks to families as an "advance" on the child credit when it was changing from $600/child to $1000/child. So I got a check for $1200 ($400*3, having three kids reported on my 2002 return). In October my wife gave birth to our fourth child. So on my 2003 return I got to claim a total credit of $2800 ($1000 for the new guy, plus $600*3).
So yes, have a lot of kids, and you can get a nice break on your taxes. The trade off is, over time, you will lose your sanity. As long as your income stays below the phase-out levels for the child tax credit and/or you don't get hit by the AMT. With $4000 in total child tax credits, my taxes when from $4,411 to $411. I am one of those people who actually pays more--much more--in social security and Medicare taxes than in federal income taxes.
AFAIK I am in the so called "middle class". ($60K-70K annual income)
Obviously my case is an extreme example, but it's pretty easy to see where the $1,000 average savings comes from: if an "average" family has two kids, then the change in the child tax credit works out to an additional savings of $800. The balance probably is coming from the creation of the 10% tax bracket and reductions in the rates in the brackets above that.
I haven't tried this one personally, but it does have the ability of letting you use different back end databases. A demo copy is available for download. From the FAQ:
"Can this membership software database integrate with other databases?
Yes. The default database engine is dataflex, which has ODBC support. Other backend database engines are also available-at a cost. We support MS-SQL, Oracle, mySQL, Pervasive, IBM-DB2. The worst case scenario is to use the import/export functionality.
Further information on the database capabilities see http://www.dataaccess.com"
No doubt Gore was pro- Internet "back in the day" as some say. The Sept. 1991 issue of Scientific American carried an article of his entitled "Infrastucture for the Global Village"
(Is there something with left leaning politicians and the word "village"? Does it take a global village with infrastructure to raise a child? I digress...)
Subtitled "A high-capacity network will not be built without government investment"
He makes the argument that federal $$ were needed to seed a national network that would stimulate demand for the network (once people actually see how neato the national network is, they'll want it for themselves and the whole idea will take off). But without that initial federal funding to create demand, the infrastructure won't ever get built.
Now, not knowing the specifics, I'll leave it to others to debate the reasons for the Internet really taking off. I seem to recall that it opened to commerical activities at some point in the early 1990's which helped jump start it. Perhaps how much this helped the Internet vs. whatever government funding there was for a national network is worth debating. Or any of several other factors for that matter, like the Internet tax ban.
In other words, maybe Gore's push for federal funding wasn't absolutely necessary? Maybe once people realized how much porn was available on the Internet that spurred demand? Maybe there are other factors which were much more important in widespread Internet access adoption that Gore didn't foresee? His article is kinda heavy on the research and educational applications for the Internet, less so the commerical possiblities.... but one couldn't expect him to see the future precisely, he's just a politician.
But even back then he touted his work in Congress:
"For almost 15 years, I have been working to change federal policy so that as a nation we will invest in the critical infrstructure of information super-highways."
Dr. Who just seems so tame in comparison to what kids are exposed to now, e.g. the Jurassic Parks, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc. I mean I started my daugher on Jurassic Park when she was four, and although it scared her the first time she loved watching it again and again. I mean she could only watch Toy Story so many times before getting tired of it. And my son loves to shout "Off with his head!" (Alice in Wonderland) and laughs hysterically at the end of Fellowship when Aragon beheads the orc.
I guess maybe some parents just decide to desensitize their kids much later in life...
Incidentally, my sister acquired language at a much younger age than I did (she was forming complete, gramatically correct sentences at the age of 2)
That's nothing. At 1.5, my first daughter was swearing in gramatically complete sentences. True story! For whatever reason, she called her pacifier a "see see". We got in our car to go somewhere and as we are pulling out, a little voice from the back seat says "Dammit! I forgot my see see."
There are plenty of caveats with the Liquid Audio system. The one great thing about it though is "CDs" never have to go out of print again.
For some time I was looking for an obscure CD called "The Great Game" by Brother Sun Sister Moon (now called Luminous for their second release). Impossible to find on CD, and impossible to find on peer to peer networks (except one track as noted below, which helped get me hooked) I looked on. But it was on Liquid Audio, and despite my reservations about a proprietary file format, I plunked down the $10 for the entire digital album.
Download: There were problems downloading. As in the Liquid player crashed during download didn't recognize that the album had been partially downloaded (files were not there), and didn't let me re-download the missing files. Cleared up by customer service.
Audio quality: decent. I think I've read that the Liquid Audio is really mp3 @ 192kbps inside their "secure" wrapper.
Compatiblity: Bad. I use WinAmp, and hardly ever listened to the Liquid tracks because I couldn't listen to them in WinAmp.
Portability: Disappointing. Only playable on the machine you download them to without a MS Passport, or something like that.
Burnability: Good, once I got a CD-R drive in the computer I downloaded them to.
Security: Puzzling. What good is distributing music in "secure" files when the Liquid Audio software lets you burn them to an unprotected CD format? I ripped then of course into mp3 format (using a very high bitrate to avoid as much as possible problems with recompressing already compressed audio) and the results are not bad. Now I can listen to them in WinAmp! (nearly every day)
(btw, in case anyone out there is an Information Society fanatic, Paul Robb is one half of BSSM/Luminous. Definately worth checking out. The one song that I found on p2p was Bangkok, off some movie soundtrack if you want to have a listen first.)
One of our customers bought Dells only for his small LAN and was happy until a machine went down with a bad hard drive. The tech came out alright and replaced it, but he just got it booting to a C: prompt. Reinstalling Windows is the customer's responsibility. End result: Dell lost a customer.
Every article has a slightly different definition for Gen X. The way I look at it, if the baby boomers get 20 years (1945-1965), Xer's should at least get about the same, but I think a prerequisite though is to have some cultural consciousness of the 80's. 1966-1980 is a good range. Generation Y comes next from 1981-1995. Generation D (the Digital generation) comes after the Internet really took off.
Slashdot Mirror
Part of the problem with this whole debate is one of definitions. What is "middle class"? What is "well off"? What is "rich"? Using these terms may make your rhetoric sound good, but frankly, I don't know what you're talking about when you don't provide a point of reference, e.g. tax brackets.
Things being relative, I could double, maybe triple my income and I would certainly be better off but still consider myself middle class. I wouldn't consider myself "well off" or "rich" but somebody else might. Things depend on where you live also; if I lived in LA or San Francisco I might actually need to make 2-3 times my current income just to have the same standard of living I have where I currently live.
So Democrats may talk about being for the middle class, but when Charles Rangel says something to the effect that he would keep none of the tax cuts enacted during Bush's term, what is he really talking about? He's talking about raising taxes (from where they are now) across the board, on everyone. The addition of the 10% tax bracket, lowering the tax brackets, and the increase in child tax credit affects everyone, particularly families.
Like it or not, that is the reality, and it is easy to back up with numbers. We develop payroll software, so I have tax tables going back to 1998. For kicks, I checked to see what I would have had withheld in 1998, had I been earning then what I am earning now.
1998: $5928 annual withheld
2006: $4446 annual withheld (without the child tax credit, i.e. just the tax bracket changes)
2006: $1482 annual withheld (with child tax credit)
In 1998, I would have been in the 28% tax bracket. In 2006, I am still in the 15% tax bracket (just barely) and because rates have been reduced, the next step up is 25% not 28%.
People who assert that the tax cuts were "for" the rich, or that the rich and corporations are getting "all" of the benefits of the tax cuts, really need to go back and do the math, all the way up and down the tax brackets, then they need to specify who they are really talking about when they are talking about changing tax rates.
Otherwise it's just a bunch of noise.
No, your logic in infallible, o master of infallible logic. It is obvious to me now that Saddam was just a pack rat when he was in power.
But now that he's in jail, I seem to remember that he likes Cheetos.
If you think that is non-sensicle, just think about it a little more. A logic bomb of my own design.
Thank you!
I guess it helps to understand satire if you're a rocket scientist!
And in all fairness, Saddam was just keeping the documents around to donate to the Saddam Hussein Presidential Library for historical purposes when his term was up, he wasn't actually planning on using them to build any weapons down the line.
If memory serves, it was a general in the Iraqi Air Force. And I think he might have been hawking a book he wrote. So how reliable can he really be, making these claims on a fake news program.
Jeez, I see my original post was modded flamebait. I was just trying to be funny. I hope that doesn't hurt my karma. I guess you can't joke about this stuff.
Lighten up guys, it's just nuclear weapons stuff.
Everyone knows Iraq didn't have WMDs and wasn't developing WMDs. These documents which supposedly show how to build an atomic weapon must have been planted by the evil Bush administration. They were never actually "recovered" in Iraq. Concerns that Iran might have used the information are overblown, because everyone knows that Iran is not building an atomic bomb either, their nuclear research is for peaceful power generation only. It just goes to show how stupid the Bush administration is, putting real nuclear knowhow on the web instead of putting the minimal effort into pulling a "Doc Brown" operation like the Clinton admin did with the plans for the nuclear bomb triggers they gave to the Iranians.
Next in the NYT: When mainstream media memes collide!
I did the same with the computer science AP test. What the heck, I figured? I was self taught etc. with a lot of experience in BASIC (I didn't know better at that point) and a bit of C. All I can remember about the test was there was a bunch Pascal code, and I hadn't had any exposure to Pascal before. I picked up what I could from the examples in terms of commands, structure and syntax to answer questions where they wanted to provide code. Ended up getting a 2.
Well at least the author of the story managed to get the video to play. I downloaded "The Enterprise Incident" and have not successfully been able to playback the episode in its entirety. At the 4:12 mark, the window goes black and the progress bar goes to the beginning. Amazon "support" has not been helpful at all. A Motley fool poster seems to have a simlilar problem. The Progress Bar doesn't work to jump to any point in the video.
The Unbox player may not be necessary to play back videos purchased through Amazon. It might just be a "wrapper" around WMP. I was able to play back the episode directly through Windows Media Player, and it stops at the 4:12 mark as well, but with an error message: "Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the file." Which is kind of an odd error to get in the middle of playback.
At least I didn't pay for it.
IIRC, my.mp3.com gave subscibers access to a library of CDs that they had ripped after you "showed" them that you had that CD. Somewhat like a music storage locker where you didn't need to rip and upload the content. On their system, there was one copy of each song. "Oh, you've got that CD? We'll let you stream it from our server." You put your CDs in your computer and their app identified them and granted you access. At least one of the legal issues IIRC was that mp3.com's ripping of the CDs was not covered under fair use.
The server based DVR is supposed to record a separate copy of each show for each customer. If 1000 people want the latest episode of "The Sopranos", then 1000 individual copies are made. Inefficient, but good if you're invested in hard drive manufacturer stock. So it is different in the sense that the users are initiating the copying, and they each have their own individual copy.
One article I read this morning suggested the price would be less than the current $9.95 standalone DVR fee. They are positioning this as a cost saving move; easier to manage a central data center that does all the work than to deliver, install, repair and replace individual DVR boxes at customer locations. Customers wouldn't stand for them saying they are cutting their costs while at the same time increasing costs for customers.
Hopefully it will be like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Christmas special, which had nothing to do with Christmas.
Well, the Social "Security" and Medicare make up the bulk of your taxes, really. When you are self employed, you have to pay both the employee and employer "shares" of these taxes, which is out to 15.3%.
There is no way to reduce or eliminate these taxes unfortunately. Unless Bush is reelected and he is able to get some kind of personal accounts legislation passed. But even then, all you will be able to do is take a portion of your social security taxes and save/invest it in some kind of retirement account. At least you will be keeping the money.
You may be doing something wrong, unless you are including some other taxes in that figure? I'm talking about federal income tax.
If you are single, no dependants, had a gross income of $20,000, your taxable income should be $12,200 (with a standard deduction of $4750 and one $3,050 exemption). Tax on $12,200 is $1,484 if I've read the chart right.
Paying $4K in taxes on an income of an AGI $20000 is absurd. That's 20%! You should be in a 15% tax bracket. That 25% income bracked doesn't even start until your taxable income hits $30,800 for single, $64,750 for married.
If you really payed that much, I'd look into seeing if you can file a corrected return and get that money back.
IIRC and FWIW, the child tax credit was first enacted under Clinton, but it was only $500. The original round of Bush tax cuts (2001?) had the child tax credit increasing gradually through the rest of the decade to $1000, and then because these changes weren't "permanent" the next year it went back down to $500 per child. This is part of the phase-in effect that pundits claim delayed the economic recovery--because the full tax cuts had not really taken effect, effects were limited. What happened in 2003 is that tax cuts were basically accelerated, so that they would have a more immediate impact.
So depending on the baseline you are working with, you have to figure different savings amounts. Accelerating the tax cuts that were already in place saved me $1600 in taxes over what I would have paid ($400 extra tax credit x 4 kids). From the Clinton-era baseline, I'm saving $2000 in income taxes ($500 extra tax credit x 4 kids).
Obviously these things are complex, and to come up with a generic phrase like "saves each middle-class family about $1,000" you probably rely on a series of assumptions that aren't spelled out. So here's a real life explanation/example:
The child tax credit is now $1000 per child. This is a credit towards your income tax, not a deduction from your wages when figuring total taxable income. Consequently, this can make a big difference on your tax owed, depending on how many children you have of course and what you are used to paying.
As an example, my total tax for 2003 was $4,411. In the summer of 2003 the feds issued checks to families as an "advance" on the child credit when it was changing from $600/child to $1000/child. So I got a check for $1200 ($400*3, having three kids reported on my 2002 return). In October my wife gave birth to our fourth child. So on my 2003 return I got to claim a total credit of $2800 ($1000 for the new guy, plus $600*3).
So yes, have a lot of kids, and you can get a nice break on your taxes. The trade off is, over time, you will lose your sanity. As long as your income stays below the phase-out levels for the child tax credit and/or you don't get hit by the AMT. With $4000 in total child tax credits, my taxes when from $4,411 to $411. I am one of those people who actually pays more--much more--in social security and Medicare taxes than in federal income taxes.
AFAIK I am in the so called "middle class". ($60K-70K annual income)
Obviously my case is an extreme example, but it's pretty easy to see where the $1,000 average savings comes from: if an "average" family has two kids, then the change in the child tax credit works out to an additional savings of $800. The balance probably is coming from the creation of the 10% tax bracket and reductions in the rates in the brackets above that.
http://www.membershipadmin.com/
I haven't tried this one personally, but it does have the ability of letting you use different back end databases. A demo copy is available for download. From the FAQ:
"Can this membership software database integrate with other databases?
Yes. The default database engine is dataflex, which has ODBC support. Other backend database engines are also available-at a cost. We support MS-SQL, Oracle, mySQL, Pervasive, IBM-DB2. The worst case scenario is to use the import/export functionality.
Further information on the database capabilities see http://www.dataaccess.com"
I'm not sure what's sadder, the fact that there's 1041 comments at the moment, or the fact that I clicked on the link.
No doubt Gore was pro- Internet "back in the day" as some say. The Sept. 1991 issue of Scientific American carried an article of his entitled "Infrastucture for the Global Village"
(Is there something with left leaning politicians and the word "village"? Does it take a global village with infrastructure to raise a child? I digress...)
Subtitled "A high-capacity network will not be built without government investment"
He makes the argument that federal $$ were needed to seed a national network that would stimulate demand for the network (once people actually see how neato the national network is, they'll want it for themselves and the whole idea will take off). But without that initial federal funding to create demand, the infrastructure won't ever get built.
Now, not knowing the specifics, I'll leave it to others to debate the reasons for the Internet really taking off. I seem to recall that it opened to commerical activities at some point in the early 1990's which helped jump start it. Perhaps how much this helped the Internet vs. whatever government funding there was for a national network is worth debating. Or any of several other factors for that matter, like the Internet tax ban.
In other words, maybe Gore's push for federal funding wasn't absolutely necessary? Maybe once people realized how much porn was available on the Internet that spurred demand? Maybe there are other factors which were much more important in widespread Internet access adoption that Gore didn't foresee? His article is kinda heavy on the research and educational applications for the Internet, less so the commerical possiblities.... but one couldn't expect him to see the future precisely, he's just a politician.
But even back then he touted his work in Congress:
"For almost 15 years, I have been working to change federal policy so that as a nation we will invest in the critical infrstructure of information super-highways."
Do kids really do this sort of thing now a days?
Dr. Who just seems so tame in comparison to what kids are exposed to now, e.g. the Jurassic Parks, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc. I mean I started my daugher on Jurassic Park when she was four, and although it scared her the first time she loved watching it again and again. I mean she could only watch Toy Story so many times before getting tired of it. And my son loves to shout "Off with his head!" (Alice in Wonderland) and laughs hysterically at the end of Fellowship when Aragon beheads the orc.
I guess maybe some parents just decide to desensitize their kids much later in life...
Two editorials today get it right:
Opting Out of Hypermass
and this one, which ran in the printed edition but on the WSJ site is only for paid subscribers, but appears for free on Yahoo! (go figure)
0.2% For The Mouse
That's nothing. At 1.5, my first daughter was swearing in gramatically complete sentences. True story! For whatever reason, she called her pacifier a "see see". We got in our car to go somewhere and as we are pulling out, a little voice from the back seat says "Dammit! I forgot my see see."
This sounds like a classic story for Infoworld's Gripe Line column.
There are plenty of caveats with the Liquid Audio system. The one great thing about it though is "CDs" never have to go out of print again.
For some time I was looking for an obscure CD called "The Great Game" by Brother Sun Sister Moon (now called Luminous for their second release). Impossible to find on CD, and impossible to find on peer to peer networks (except one track as noted below, which helped get me hooked) I looked on. But it was on Liquid Audio, and despite my reservations about a proprietary file format, I plunked down the $10 for the entire digital album.
Download: There were problems downloading. As in the Liquid player crashed during download didn't recognize that the album had been partially downloaded (files were not there), and didn't let me re-download the missing files. Cleared up by customer service.
Audio quality: decent. I think I've read that the Liquid Audio is really mp3 @ 192kbps inside their "secure" wrapper.
Compatiblity: Bad. I use WinAmp, and hardly ever listened to the Liquid tracks because I couldn't listen to them in WinAmp.
Portability: Disappointing. Only playable on the machine you download them to without a MS Passport, or something like that.
Burnability: Good, once I got a CD-R drive in the computer I downloaded them to.
Security: Puzzling. What good is distributing music in "secure" files when the Liquid Audio software lets you burn them to an unprotected CD format? I ripped then of course into mp3 format (using a very high bitrate to avoid as much as possible problems with recompressing already compressed audio) and the results are not bad. Now I can listen to them in WinAmp! (nearly every day)
(btw, in case anyone out there is an Information Society fanatic, Paul Robb is one half of BSSM/Luminous. Definately worth checking out. The one song that I found on p2p was Bangkok, off some movie soundtrack if you want to have a listen first.)
One of our customers bought Dells only for his small LAN and was happy until a machine went down with a bad hard drive. The tech came out alright and replaced it, but he just got it booting to a C: prompt. Reinstalling Windows is the customer's responsibility. End result: Dell lost a customer.
Every article has a slightly different definition for Gen X. The way I look at it, if the baby boomers get 20 years (1945-1965), Xer's should at least get about the same, but I think a prerequisite though is to have some cultural consciousness of the 80's. 1966-1980 is a good range. Generation Y comes next from 1981-1995. Generation D (the Digital generation) comes after the Internet really took off.
YMMV