It depends on the statistic. The proportion of the population that owns at least one gun is down. However, the average number of guns per gun owner happens to be way up and climbing.
It would still be kind of nice to have a 2160 pixel high monitor that's not over 3 feet wide. That's my problem with the 27" 2560x1440 monitors - they are just too damn big and anything less than 27" in 16:9 is 1080p at best. Meanwhile you can get a 1600x1200 20" 4:3 monitor, at least while they still make them.
The problem is that companies never seem to give raises that match the employee's increasing skill set and experience. Employees find that they've been doing a job for several years, but the company thinks they can still pay them their starting wage (plus perhaps some meager cost of living increases) whereas people that level of experience are getting hired at considerably higher wages on the job market. Then the company acts all surprised when the employee jumps ship. Pay your employees what they are worth and companies might find that employees are more likely to stick around.
That's total bullshit. You get hit with capital gain taxes when you sell something for more than you paid for it. Buy low, sell high. For a stock, that means you bought stock from someone, and then sold it to someone else. Any money you gain came from the person you sold the stock to, and not the company that issued the stock. That money was not earned by the company that issued the stock and was not taxed at the corporate rate, but was earned by whoever bought the stock from you (and was taxed in accordance to however they earned that money).
Maybe you're thinking of dividends, which are payments made by the company that issued the stock and paid to the stock holders. However, that falls under a different set of tax rules than capital gains.
You're forgetting laptops like the IBM Thinkpad X-series, which was a high-end, high-performance, compact laptop that you used to have to pay dearly for. Those are what Ultrabooks were before they were called Ultrabooks.
I've never heard of a factory radio being stolen from a car, DIN-style or not. If they take the entire car and chop it up, then maybe they'll bother with it. Factory radios are really only valuable to someone who has the same model car, so they are much harder to fence. A pawn shop isn't going to want to bother with a radio that only fits a '03-'06 Toyota. For that reason the junkies will just pass them over in favor of a car with an aftermarket system.
I believe that some of the most basic trim lines of the lowest-end vehicles can still be had without power windows, such as the Chevy Sonic and Colorado. I know that the Chevy Aveo was available without power windows all the way to the end (2011). Generally speaking though, you may not have a lot of luck finding those vehicles on dealer lots as they use the low MSRP to lure you in, but they want to sell you on a more expensive model so they may only have one or two of the stripper model, if any. You can't even count on ex-rental cars nowadays, as the rental companies have figured out that the cost of ordering options on their fleet cars can be less than the bump in resell value when they dump the cars later, so sometimes you'll find that they are surprisingly nicely equipped.
And how long will they support these older units? Can you still get updates for a GPS from 2003?
Quite frankly, given the quality of some of these offerings, you'd be lucky if that infotainment system still functions in 10 years. The quality of the electronics doesn't seem much better than typical consumer electronics, and 10 years is a long time for a lot of consumer electronics. If it's dead and you're lucky that just means you just lose the radio, but if you lose climate control and the defrosters then that can be a significant safety issue. It wouldn't surprise me in 10 years to see otherwise perfectly good vehicles in the scrapyard because the in-dash electronics quit and aren't economical to repair.
Yeah, this explains why sales of V8-powered cars are through the roof these days, while sales of Toyota Corollas and Ford Focuses are in the toilet.
Oh, wait, no, that's backwards. Practicality has been winning over power for the last decade or so. Even former SUV buyers are choosing four-cylinder crossovers now.
That's because modern I4's generate around 200 HP or more, and V6's are up to around 300-250HP, Compare to "malaise-era" cars 30-25 years ago where the V8 gave you maybe 150HP.
That's one of the big disappointments with cars nowadays. The manufacturers took all the efficiency gains over the past few decades and instead of building more fuel efficient cars, they build ridiculously overpowered cars that get the same fuel economy as 20 years ago.
On a lot of cars, it's now standard. Or because of the way they do options in packages, if you don't want the infotainment system you better be okay with the base engine, no adaptive cruise control, and cloth interior.
Those things are rare. It's too bad that no one except for IBM made 2048x1536 screens (that I know of), except for some uber-expensive medical displays. It's even more sad you can get that resolution in a tablet but it's pretty much unobtainium for a desktop.
It would be a good replacement, I suppose, for two 1280x1024 displays. But for 1200 vertical pixels I guess you'll have to hold out for the 2800x1200 model. Even then, you'll lose a few horizontal pixels. Maybe they'll make a 3360x1440 21:9 display?
It's not the lack of a kitchen, it's lack of available/affordable/reliable transportation to get to market that has the inexpensive fresh fruit and vegetables. A lot of people will take for granted a car and the ability to shop around to find the best prices and food. For poor people, the options can be a lot more limited and they may have to rely on a small corner grocer instead of being about to drive to a warehouse store or to the farmers' market.
That may work if you can pay 1960's prices (inflation adjusted) for that 900 square foot home. Sure, nowadays you can get a 30 year mortgage on that home so maybe the payment may be low enough that you can pull it off with a single income - but you're still taking decades to pay off that house when in 1960 you'd have it paid off in a few years, leaving money to do things like save for retirement or buying a new car every few years (which was quite common back in the day, as your typical car didn't last as long as a modern car). And don't forget the payments on the student loan, because without that college degree you're a lot less likely to get a job that'll make those house payments and support a family (yes, I know there are exceptions).
On the upside though, your TV will cost a fraction of the 1960's TV and be far, far better.
Heck, Microsoft was still selling licenses of Windows 3.1 up to November 1st, 2008, and OS they stopped releasing patches for sometime in the mid-90's.
You should be able to, in theory, run those applications on the 32-bit versions of Windows Vista/7/8. Though I have found applications like that tend to not like the security model that Microsoft introduced with Vista.
Good idea, but say that a previous civilization did just that. What would the chances be that we would have discovered it by now? We've really only explored a tiny fraction of the moon's surface in any kind of detail.
Unlike the Pioneer craft, the Voyager craft aren't spin stabilized and they have thrusters with a finite fuel supply (combined with gyroscopes) to keep themselves pointed at Earth. However, for both Voyager 1 and 2 it's projected that their atomic batteries are going to run out long before they would run out of fuel.
Think of a light sabre, that's implausible, as you can't plausibly get light to stop in mid air, the Star Wars was written as a story, set in space, therefore it falls under fantasy.
I always figured that lightsabers were supposed to be some kind of superheated plasma with a containment field of some sort to form it into a blade. "Lightsaber" was just the name people called them, presumably because it looks like the blade is made of light. They obviously aren't actually made of light as two lightsabers can't pass though each other which would be the case if they were really just "light".
Along the same lines, you don't think that photon torpedoes are actually made of photons, do you?
They probably whacked some shell corporation that had no assets and immediately declared bankruptcy and folded without actually paying a dime. The next day I'm sure a brand new shell corporation was operating with the exact same people behind it doing exactly the same thing.
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It depends on the statistic. The proportion of the population that owns at least one gun is down. However, the average number of guns per gun owner happens to be way up and climbing.
It would still be kind of nice to have a 2160 pixel high monitor that's not over 3 feet wide. That's my problem with the 27" 2560x1440 monitors - they are just too damn big and anything less than 27" in 16:9 is 1080p at best. Meanwhile you can get a 1600x1200 20" 4:3 monitor, at least while they still make them.
The problem is that companies never seem to give raises that match the employee's increasing skill set and experience. Employees find that they've been doing a job for several years, but the company thinks they can still pay them their starting wage (plus perhaps some meager cost of living increases) whereas people that level of experience are getting hired at considerably higher wages on the job market. Then the company acts all surprised when the employee jumps ship. Pay your employees what they are worth and companies might find that employees are more likely to stick around.
That's total bullshit. You get hit with capital gain taxes when you sell something for more than you paid for it. Buy low, sell high. For a stock, that means you bought stock from someone, and then sold it to someone else. Any money you gain came from the person you sold the stock to, and not the company that issued the stock. That money was not earned by the company that issued the stock and was not taxed at the corporate rate, but was earned by whoever bought the stock from you (and was taxed in accordance to however they earned that money).
Maybe you're thinking of dividends, which are payments made by the company that issued the stock and paid to the stock holders. However, that falls under a different set of tax rules than capital gains.
It's no longer a US embassy since (if I recall correctly) 1961. The US Government still owns the building, but it's currently housing a museum.
While not a National Park, look at what happened to those that decided to trash the World Trade Center. Or Pearl Harbor.
Lilo and Stitch?
You're forgetting laptops like the IBM Thinkpad X-series, which was a high-end, high-performance, compact laptop that you used to have to pay dearly for. Those are what Ultrabooks were before they were called Ultrabooks.
I've never heard of a factory radio being stolen from a car, DIN-style or not. If they take the entire car and chop it up, then maybe they'll bother with it. Factory radios are really only valuable to someone who has the same model car, so they are much harder to fence. A pawn shop isn't going to want to bother with a radio that only fits a '03-'06 Toyota. For that reason the junkies will just pass them over in favor of a car with an aftermarket system.
I believe that some of the most basic trim lines of the lowest-end vehicles can still be had without power windows, such as the Chevy Sonic and Colorado. I know that the Chevy Aveo was available without power windows all the way to the end (2011). Generally speaking though, you may not have a lot of luck finding those vehicles on dealer lots as they use the low MSRP to lure you in, but they want to sell you on a more expensive model so they may only have one or two of the stripper model, if any. You can't even count on ex-rental cars nowadays, as the rental companies have figured out that the cost of ordering options on their fleet cars can be less than the bump in resell value when they dump the cars later, so sometimes you'll find that they are surprisingly nicely equipped.
And how long will they support these older units? Can you still get updates for a GPS from 2003?
Quite frankly, given the quality of some of these offerings, you'd be lucky if that infotainment system still functions in 10 years. The quality of the electronics doesn't seem much better than typical consumer electronics, and 10 years is a long time for a lot of consumer electronics. If it's dead and you're lucky that just means you just lose the radio, but if you lose climate control and the defrosters then that can be a significant safety issue. It wouldn't surprise me in 10 years to see otherwise perfectly good vehicles in the scrapyard because the in-dash electronics quit and aren't economical to repair.
That's because modern I4's generate around 200 HP or more, and V6's are up to around 300-250HP, Compare to "malaise-era" cars 30-25 years ago where the V8 gave you maybe 150HP.
That's one of the big disappointments with cars nowadays. The manufacturers took all the efficiency gains over the past few decades and instead of building more fuel efficient cars, they build ridiculously overpowered cars that get the same fuel economy as 20 years ago.
On a lot of cars, it's now standard. Or because of the way they do options in packages, if you don't want the infotainment system you better be okay with the base engine, no adaptive cruise control, and cloth interior.
You can do a lot more as a non-administrator on Vista than you can on XP...
If I was you I'd pick up some Dell 2007FP's before Dell decides to discontinue them.
Those things are rare. It's too bad that no one except for IBM made 2048x1536 screens (that I know of), except for some uber-expensive medical displays. It's even more sad you can get that resolution in a tablet but it's pretty much unobtainium for a desktop.
It would be a good replacement, I suppose, for two 1280x1024 displays. But for 1200 vertical pixels I guess you'll have to hold out for the 2800x1200 model. Even then, you'll lose a few horizontal pixels. Maybe they'll make a 3360x1440 21:9 display?
It's not the lack of a kitchen, it's lack of available/affordable/reliable transportation to get to market that has the inexpensive fresh fruit and vegetables. A lot of people will take for granted a car and the ability to shop around to find the best prices and food. For poor people, the options can be a lot more limited and they may have to rely on a small corner grocer instead of being about to drive to a warehouse store or to the farmers' market.
That may work if you can pay 1960's prices (inflation adjusted) for that 900 square foot home. Sure, nowadays you can get a 30 year mortgage on that home so maybe the payment may be low enough that you can pull it off with a single income - but you're still taking decades to pay off that house when in 1960 you'd have it paid off in a few years, leaving money to do things like save for retirement or buying a new car every few years (which was quite common back in the day, as your typical car didn't last as long as a modern car). And don't forget the payments on the student loan, because without that college degree you're a lot less likely to get a job that'll make those house payments and support a family (yes, I know there are exceptions).
On the upside though, your TV will cost a fraction of the 1960's TV and be far, far better.
Heck, Microsoft was still selling licenses of Windows 3.1 up to November 1st, 2008, and OS they stopped releasing patches for sometime in the mid-90's.
You should be able to, in theory, run those applications on the 32-bit versions of Windows Vista/7/8. Though I have found applications like that tend to not like the security model that Microsoft introduced with Vista.
Good idea, but say that a previous civilization did just that. What would the chances be that we would have discovered it by now? We've really only explored a tiny fraction of the moon's surface in any kind of detail.
Unlike the Pioneer craft, the Voyager craft aren't spin stabilized and they have thrusters with a finite fuel supply (combined with gyroscopes) to keep themselves pointed at Earth. However, for both Voyager 1 and 2 it's projected that their atomic batteries are going to run out long before they would run out of fuel.
I always figured that lightsabers were supposed to be some kind of superheated plasma with a containment field of some sort to form it into a blade. "Lightsaber" was just the name people called them, presumably because it looks like the blade is made of light. They obviously aren't actually made of light as two lightsabers can't pass though each other which would be the case if they were really just "light".
Along the same lines, you don't think that photon torpedoes are actually made of photons, do you?
They probably whacked some shell corporation that had no assets and immediately declared bankruptcy and folded without actually paying a dime. The next day I'm sure a brand new shell corporation was operating with the exact same people behind it doing exactly the same thing.