For a while people were posting links to NYT articles that didn't require registration using some kind of partner link. Does anyone know if this still works and how it was done? I tried reading the article off of Google News but couldn't because it only lets you read the first page.
Actually the land owners don't own the spectrum and never had. That's why the FCC was set up.
IANAL but my understanding is:
When someone starts using land they have the rights to everything they need to use it in the manner they want. Tresspass and nusance laws prevent people from interfering with your use of the land. So you can't have someone walk through your yard because it is physically invasive to your property, but you can have someone broadcast radio through the airwaves or fly a plane way overhead because neither of those impeades your use of the property in anyway.
In all likelyhood radio would have developed a similar set of common laws (this was all getting worked out in the courts). Where the first radio station in a region was allowed to use the band they were broadcasting on and could sue anyone emitting harmful interferance. However Congress became concerned that the legal costs would hold the industry back (there were concerns that radio companies could even make money), so they made the FCC.
Except what is the expected benefit is likely to be an even bigger debate. Furthermore you calculation ignores the future opportunity cost to the citizens of repaying such borrowed money.
e.g. Many slashdotters may see an expected benefit in having the government pay to send men to mars. I am of the oppinion that such a venture is just a giant feel good political stunt that solves no practical issues.
Yes there is a trading deficit with China but that's not what the poster was talking about. He is repeating a faulty fact: China is the major holder of US National debt.
Most of what I've read has said that totaled up, all of the private investment dwarfed the foreign government investment. If you've got a link that shows otherwise, I'd like to see it.
> Secondly, a stable middle east is foundational to the survival of the western world and thus space exploration.
Well that was the same arguement Bush I used when he decided to keep Sadam in power. What we could have done then was to eliminate, that is kill, the Elite Republican Gaurd units which were the base of Sadam's power. This would have created a power vacuum and led to a revolution. However Bush I worried that the vaccuum that resulted would colapse the entire region.
The middle east is much like Europe pre-Thirty Year's war. What's keeping such a war from breaking out is that western nations (and to a lesser extent, the Israelis) have imposed relative stability in the region. In doing so they have provided a rallying point for a bunch of nations that normally would be fighting each other instead of working together.
My opinion is that we could have spent the money we spent blasting Sadam on better border security and on extricating ourselves from the region entirely.
Hold yer Horses! The $400 billion to pay for Iraq was borrowed money. Are you saying we should borrow money to do all of those wonderous things leaving future generations to pay for what we did? If so, technically the government could do all those things independantly and reguardless of what happens in Iraq. Personally I'd much rather have just not borrow money it in the first place.
That China has a massive portion of our debt is a misconsception. They are the largest single holder but that doesn't mean much. China pulling out is only going to drive up interst rates a tiny bit. As a percentage of the debt they hold a relatively small amount. American individuals as a group hold the bulk of the debt, and if you throw in banks, trusts, and other organizations based in the US. You have the bulk of the debt.
The national debt is not good for the country but the situation isn't nearly as grim as some commentors are making it out to be.
The problems with having the government run anything outweigh any good it can possibly do. As soon as you inject politics and bueracracy and massive overhead the entire thing goes to shit and doesn't work anymore. What the government can do is more important: stop medling (this includes fixing our poor tort laws)!
If a private org is better suited, why hasn't an entrepreneur done it yet
Because running a charity is something you do because you are a nice person. The work is harder and you don't get rich. Put simply: it's a labor of love. The attitude in this coutry right now is that such things are for the government to take care of therefore everyone spends time lobbying Congress and running add campains. If everyone who felt like you did got together and donated money and spent the time on charity instead it would work. Doing that involves changing some attitides first though.
> I think we agree that the government role in buying healthcare should be somewhere between "none" and "requiring minimum wages for caring for poor patients".
You'd be wrong. The government's role in healthcare is EXACTLY "none". I'm with T.J.; the government has one purpose: to protect the individual rights of the citizens with minimal use of power.
> Perhaps we could also agree that the government could offer resold insurance to everyone
Why? There are companies and non-profits that do a fine job of that already. There's even a chain of discount health centers cropping up in major cities.
> improving the health of Americans by overseeing the American medical industry
The politicians in Washington are so wise that they know what's best for the entire country's healthcare and can predict with cirtainty that the market distortions they introduce won't do more harm then good? WOW!!
the best investment is producing more supply of healthcare for the increasing demand, simply lowering prices
Except healthcare doesn't work that way. Take a miro-economics class sometimes. "Healthcare" doesn't meet any of the assumptions of the simple perfectly competative marketplace you are using to model the results of your action. It can't be stored or transported. The supplier is distinguishable, and the quality is non-uniform. The product is not homogenous, the demand is inelastic, and bariers to entry are high. All of that adds up to result in your idea making the situation worse not better; in all likelyhood the total cost of healthcare to society will go up not down.
> the benefits to the economy (taxable) and society (the purpose of government)
You seem to think the government has some higher mission and exists to improve society and the people in it. Let's set historic evidence that shows how this doesn't work aside and look at this from the concept of a government.
Unless you are a Marxist, you accept the concept property rights. You probably also agree with the Constituion and the Declaration of Independance that personal rights, including property rights, are inalienable and that government's first job is to protect them. You work hard and you probably feel that the government should keep people from robbing you and taking your money by force.
Now the plan you propose, or any government supported plan for that matter, need to be paid for. How does the government get the money? By taking it by force from people, also known as taxes.
So, when people are saying they want a government program to pay for something, what they are really saying is that they either won't or can't pay for it and want somone else to bear the burden instead. But, they don't want to feel guilty about robbing that rich guy up the street, so they come up with a way to steal that money and still sleep at night: the government program.
You cannot logically both support having private property and mandatory, government run social programs. The ideals are incompatable.
> You might not be aware that the recent $500B+ (and counting) prescription drug law *prohibits* the government from collective bargaining with drug companies.
I'm aware. That law is one of the worst pieces of legislation ever written and should be scrapped.
> community hospitals that I worked with were all under the most pressure from stingy HMOs
Perhaps it's a different situation, the community hospitals out in rural areas service mostly people on medicare and medicaid. The prices the government sets practially runs them out of business.
> there are more medical students in the US than ever before
There are also more people then ever before, the increase in doctors, particualarly certain specialists, has not tracked with the increase in population.
> prices set by the government [...] are high enough to make most doctors rich
That's not true. The cash flows of most medical professionals, doctors included, place them squarely in the middle class and as you have pointed out, the prices of malpractice insurace threated to alter their cash flow so that they are techically working class.
The reason doctor's salaries seem so high is because you are overly discounting the costs of medical school and for continuing education. You are also neglecting the opportunity costs of choosing to be a doctor.
Because the government only pays about 10-20% of what the doctor would normally bill for patiants on medicare or medicaid, and the doctors are required by law to accept it, doctors have raised their fees to be able to make a living they find acceptable by shifting their fixed cost base to the people who don't get government help. This situation doesn't happen when the doctors deal with HMOs and insurance companies. When they are doing business with HMO's they negociate a group rate in exchange for the referals; theoretically both sides come out ahead. Most insurance companies pay the doctor full price on medical service (but have a negotiated discount with the hospital that the doctor is associated with so the fees for X-Rays, blood work, etc are lower).
> [Your plan to deal with costs]
You don't need the government to do that. You could set up a charity to do that and get started today.
Not a creationist, but I did sleep at a Holiday Inn Express!
Seriously, here's an educated guess: The Bible spends quit a bit of time on family geneologies. Because of that you know how many generations of people were born between Adam and the end of the end of the biblical period (a date we know). Making an estimate for the time span per generation would yeild something in the 5000-8000 year neighborhood.
"Homeless" - This is as close as you are going to get to poor in the States. Estimates show that the number of homeless people is at most 50,000. That's only about.01% of the population. Many of them suffer from mental illness or substance abuse problems and many refuse to accept help when it is offered. Almost every city in the country has some non-profit organizations set up to help the homeless. There are soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and free rehab and mental health clinics. Thanks to the good will and hard work of many Americans, everyone who want's to get their life in order has the opportunity to. Even if you look at the homeless who don't get help, they are better nourished and in better health then people in many third world countries.
Rural Appalachia - been their, it's quite nice and yes people there live very comforatable lives compared to the third world.
Inuit village - seen one, havn't spent much time there. The Inuit are also better off then third worlders although not as much better off as the people in rural appalachia.
New Orleans - been there tons. The city is a little dirty and the cops are mostly crooks. Quality of life is way higher then any third world country.
I'll give you that you can generally consider the homeless poor, but they are well into statistical noise and have plenty of opportunities to get help. As for the rest, you are nuts if you think any of those situations are anything like third world countries, where there simply isn't enough food for everyone, doctors are next to impossible to find, people are living in shanty towns or exposed to the elements wallowing in their own filth because that's as good as it gets, and the economy is so bad there isn't a job for them even though they want one. It's a sad sight. Fortuneately for you, there is plenty you can do to help. A large number of well run charities can use your time and your money to help these countries improve and get these people back on their feet.
Now as for the AIDS drug: This is just treatment for a disease you already have, it isn't going to stop the spread, it just slows down your eventual death. The problem with so-called "collective-bargaining" done by governments is that they really arn't bargaining at all, the government decides what it will pay and the health provider's have to go along, effectively someone, somewhere else must bear the remaining costs.
In the case of drugs, the drug companies have a large fixed cost base that needs to get covered to keep the pipeline of new drugs full. They also have a relatively low marginal cost of production. What has happened is that countries like Canada which have socialized medicine, have agreed to pay enough to cover the marginal costs but not the fixed costs. This forces the drug makers to shift those fixed costs onto the now smaller group of free market buyers. Once you factor in inflation, and increased development costs (which are both relatively minor), the bulk of the increase in drugs here in the US can be shown to coorelate with the spread of socialized medicine. Right now the US is one of the last countries that has a free market so we get stuck covering all of the development costs. In economics this is called the free-rider problem. One solution I've heard proposed is to require, for US patent protection, a floor on the price that drug companies "agree" to charge in collective bargining schemes with foreign governments. i.e. They can "agree" to charge no less then the cheapest price they charge in the states adjusted for median income. This would end the free rider problem by forcing the drug companies to negotiate high enough to cover all costs and would also require that they make any low margin deals available here in the States.
In the States, we already have a form of collective bargining for basic health coverage. The government sets the price it is going to pay for certian procedures and that's all doctors can get. They have t
You are ignoring the large fixed cost base that Eli Lilly must cover to develop new drugs. If everyone paid the price canada did, drug reasearch would slow to a crawl. I've got nothing against collective bargaining as long as it's truely bargaining. However, the type of bargaining that governments tend to engage in goes like this: "You're going to charge x, just enough to cover marginal costs, or we are going to change the laws to screw you."
I think you don't understand my point. The airline itself has the power to require its passengers to not use those devices under the same rules the FAA sets or their own rules that they deam safer. Having the government also create and enforce rules is redundant and creates hidden costs. There is no benefit provided to consumers by the government regulation. None of what you have said changes this. All of the problems you pretend will suddenly crop up exist today: government regulation doesn't magically make engineering schools teach EMC, make electronics less noisy, and make testing easier. These costs should be properly borne by those who choose to fly, not by all taxpayers.
They do serve no purpose. The airlines can just as easily make rules prohibiting their use, and the electronics companices can make properly sheilded devices. Putting the government in the loop only slows the feedback process down.
Also was a teenager who spent a lot of time in my room and around the house (online, video games, reading).
Once I got a car, I had no curfew. My folks just expected me to do the right thing and keep them informed about my life. Since they respected me, we never went throught some rebelious phase.
My parents and I talked about school but doing schoolwork was my responsibility and I got decent grades.
My parent's attitude was that as long as I acted responsibly, they let me have wide freedom.
To the OP, if your kids are being responsible with their life, I'd say no worries, they're better off then 90% of the people out there. OTOH, if they are being generally irresponsible by measureable means (failing classes, perpetually getting in late at night, not doing important housework), you should talk to them and figure out why they arn't living up to your expectations. Assuming the computer causes the problems is unproductive and may result in adressing the symptom instead of the cause. In general, trust your kids until they give you reason not to.
I second the incorporate idea. You should be able to write off all of your "benefits":
Your car, your insurance, your retirement, your healthcare ( I strongly recomend Blue Cross/Blue Shield ), can all be written off. A good accountant will be able to help with this.
Since you are the only one owning the company, you want to keep your "salary" as low as possible (to cover what the company can't legally provide you with) that way you will pay lower taxes.
Again make friends with the local accountant. Pay him for tax consulting and doing the big parts of your books. He can probably even help you come up with a rate formula tailored to your business.
Next, for your retirement, since you arn't a finance guy and finding a good one is tough and expensive, just invest in a Wilkshire 5000 tracking fund, one with low fees and admin costs. This will gaurentee that you'll do better then almost everyone else out there and your performance will track with the economy; this will protect your money from inflation and let you appriciate some capital, early on you want to put as much money as you can into this because of compounding factors. Invest regularly reguardless of market conditions and put a fixed amount of money into your account at scheduled intervals. As you get older, you'll want to reduce your exposure to market risk (which is short term, but that doesn't help you if you die in the short term). Start to move your savings into government bonds and ladder them, this will provide you with a gaurenteed income stream for your retirement, but it will not provide you with appriciation and is still some what vulnerable to inflation. About 25% bonds once you hit your late 30s is a decent goal. By the time you retire, you want to have your bonds providing you with equal income to what you made as a contractor, so as you age, you'll want to move more and more money from stocks to bonds. You want to keep at least 25% in the market if you can though, not having stocks is more likely to cost you money then it is to save you money. Optimally, the bond interest income and stock dividends would cover your entire cost of living, allowing you to keep your principle and pass it on to your children.
The problem with AI was that Spielberg didn't do a good job finishing Kubrick's movie. You can easily pick out which scenes Kubrick planed and which ones Speilberg hacked on.
How many more drivers does Linux have? It can't be that big, and even if it's 8 or 9M (I doubt it), that's nothing on a modern system. You can even free up the memory that the non-hotswapable drivers would use if they arn't detected.
As for X, the autodetect feature seems to work better on BSD then on Linux (I could never get it to work on Linux, but I've never had it fail on BSD). I can't think of why though.
Slashdot Mirror
Even his sig is a troll!
What are you talking about? Static typing is a linking issue and has nothing to do with whether or not the memory cell requires an electric refresh.
512Mb = 64MB assuming an 8b word-size. If you use 32b word size 512Mb = 16MB.
For a while people were posting links to NYT articles that didn't require registration using some kind of partner link. Does anyone know if this still works and how it was done? I tried reading the article off of Google News but couldn't because it only lets you read the first page.
IANAL but my understanding is:
When someone starts using land they have the rights to everything they need to use it in the manner they want. Tresspass and nusance laws prevent people from interfering with your use of the land. So you can't have someone walk through your yard because it is physically invasive to your property, but you can have someone broadcast radio through the airwaves or fly a plane way overhead because neither of those impeades your use of the property in anyway.
In all likelyhood radio would have developed a similar set of common laws (this was all getting worked out in the courts). Where the first radio station in a region was allowed to use the band they were broadcasting on and could sue anyone emitting harmful interferance. However Congress became concerned that the legal costs would hold the industry back (there were concerns that radio companies could even make money), so they made the FCC.
e.g. Many slashdotters may see an expected benefit in having the government pay to send men to mars. I am of the oppinion that such a venture is just a giant feel good political stunt that solves no practical issues.
Most of what I've read has said that totaled up, all of the private investment dwarfed the foreign government investment. If you've got a link that shows otherwise, I'd like to see it.
Pretty sure that's correct.
> Secondly, a stable middle east is foundational to the survival of the western world and thus space exploration.
Well that was the same arguement Bush I used when he decided to keep Sadam in power. What we could have done then was to eliminate, that is kill, the Elite Republican Gaurd units which were the base of Sadam's power. This would have created a power vacuum and led to a revolution. However Bush I worried that the vaccuum that resulted would colapse the entire region.
The middle east is much like Europe pre-Thirty Year's war. What's keeping such a war from breaking out is that western nations (and to a lesser extent, the Israelis) have imposed relative stability in the region. In doing so they have provided a rallying point for a bunch of nations that normally would be fighting each other instead of working together.
My opinion is that we could have spent the money we spent blasting Sadam on better border security and on extricating ourselves from the region entirely.
Hold yer Horses! The $400 billion to pay for Iraq was borrowed money. Are you saying we should borrow money to do all of those wonderous things leaving future generations to pay for what we did? If so, technically the government could do all those things independantly and reguardless of what happens in Iraq. Personally I'd much rather have just not borrow money it in the first place.
The national debt is not good for the country but the situation isn't nearly as grim as some commentors are making it out to be.
I'd be interested to hear about them. The method I discribed above isn't terribly convincing.
If a private org is better suited, why hasn't an entrepreneur done it yet
Because running a charity is something you do because you are a nice person. The work is harder and you don't get rich. Put simply: it's a labor of love. The attitude in this coutry right now is that such things are for the government to take care of therefore everyone spends time lobbying Congress and running add campains. If everyone who felt like you did got together and donated money and spent the time on charity instead it would work. Doing that involves changing some attitides first though.
> I think we agree that the government role in buying healthcare should be somewhere between "none" and "requiring minimum wages for caring for poor patients".
You'd be wrong. The government's role in healthcare is EXACTLY "none". I'm with T.J.; the government has one purpose: to protect the individual rights of the citizens with minimal use of power.
> Perhaps we could also agree that the government could offer resold insurance to everyone
Why? There are companies and non-profits that do a fine job of that already. There's even a chain of discount health centers cropping up in major cities.
> improving the health of Americans by overseeing the American medical industry
The politicians in Washington are so wise that they know what's best for the entire country's healthcare and can predict with cirtainty that the market distortions they introduce won't do more harm then good? WOW!!
the best investment is producing more supply of healthcare for the increasing demand, simply lowering prices
Except healthcare doesn't work that way. Take a miro-economics class sometimes. "Healthcare" doesn't meet any of the assumptions of the simple perfectly competative marketplace you are using to model the results of your action. It can't be stored or transported. The supplier is distinguishable, and the quality is non-uniform. The product is not homogenous, the demand is inelastic, and bariers to entry are high. All of that adds up to result in your idea making the situation worse not better; in all likelyhood the total cost of healthcare to society will go up not down. > the benefits to the economy (taxable) and society (the purpose of government)
You seem to think the government has some higher mission and exists to improve society and the people in it. Let's set historic evidence that shows how this doesn't work aside and look at this from the concept of a government.
Unless you are a Marxist, you accept the concept property rights. You probably also agree with the Constituion and the Declaration of Independance that personal rights, including property rights, are inalienable and that government's first job is to protect them. You work hard and you probably feel that the government should keep people from robbing you and taking your money by force.
Now the plan you propose, or any government supported plan for that matter, need to be paid for. How does the government get the money? By taking it by force from people, also known as taxes. So, when people are saying they want a government program to pay for something, what they are really saying is that they either won't or can't pay for it and want somone else to bear the burden instead. But, they don't want to feel guilty about robbing that rich guy up the street, so they come up with a way to steal that money and still sleep at night: the government program.
You cannot logically both support having private property and mandatory, government run social programs. The ideals are incompatable.
I'm aware. That law is one of the worst pieces of legislation ever written and should be scrapped.
> community hospitals that I worked with were all under the most pressure from stingy HMOs
Perhaps it's a different situation, the community hospitals out in rural areas service mostly people on medicare and medicaid. The prices the government sets practially runs them out of business.
> there are more medical students in the US than ever before
There are also more people then ever before, the increase in doctors, particualarly certain specialists, has not tracked with the increase in population.
> prices set by the government [...] are high enough to make most doctors rich
That's not true. The cash flows of most medical professionals, doctors included, place them squarely in the middle class and as you have pointed out, the prices of malpractice insurace threated to alter their cash flow so that they are techically working class.
The reason doctor's salaries seem so high is because you are overly discounting the costs of medical school and for continuing education. You are also neglecting the opportunity costs of choosing to be a doctor.
Because the government only pays about 10-20% of what the doctor would normally bill for patiants on medicare or medicaid, and the doctors are required by law to accept it, doctors have raised their fees to be able to make a living they find acceptable by shifting their fixed cost base to the people who don't get government help. This situation doesn't happen when the doctors deal with HMOs and insurance companies. When they are doing business with HMO's they negociate a group rate in exchange for the referals; theoretically both sides come out ahead. Most insurance companies pay the doctor full price on medical service (but have a negotiated discount with the hospital that the doctor is associated with so the fees for X-Rays, blood work, etc are lower).
> [Your plan to deal with costs]
You don't need the government to do that. You could set up a charity to do that and get started today.
Seriously, here's an educated guess: The Bible spends quit a bit of time on family geneologies. Because of that you know how many generations of people were born between Adam and the end of the end of the biblical period (a date we know). Making an estimate for the time span per generation would yeild something in the 5000-8000 year neighborhood.
I'll give you that you can generally consider the homeless poor, but they are well into statistical noise and have plenty of opportunities to get help. As for the rest, you are nuts if you think any of those situations are anything like third world countries, where there simply isn't enough food for everyone, doctors are next to impossible to find, people are living in shanty towns or exposed to the elements wallowing in their own filth because that's as good as it gets, and the economy is so bad there isn't a job for them even though they want one. It's a sad sight. Fortuneately for you, there is plenty you can do to help. A large number of well run charities can use your time and your money to help these countries improve and get these people back on their feet.
Now as for the AIDS drug: This is just treatment for a disease you already have, it isn't going to stop the spread, it just slows down your eventual death. The problem with so-called "collective-bargaining" done by governments is that they really arn't bargaining at all, the government decides what it will pay and the health provider's have to go along, effectively someone, somewhere else must bear the remaining costs.
In the case of drugs, the drug companies have a large fixed cost base that needs to get covered to keep the pipeline of new drugs full. They also have a relatively low marginal cost of production. What has happened is that countries like Canada which have socialized medicine, have agreed to pay enough to cover the marginal costs but not the fixed costs. This forces the drug makers to shift those fixed costs onto the now smaller group of free market buyers. Once you factor in inflation, and increased development costs (which are both relatively minor), the bulk of the increase in drugs here in the US can be shown to coorelate with the spread of socialized medicine. Right now the US is one of the last countries that has a free market so we get stuck covering all of the development costs. In economics this is called the free-rider problem. One solution I've heard proposed is to require, for US patent protection, a floor on the price that drug companies "agree" to charge in collective bargining schemes with foreign governments. i.e. They can "agree" to charge no less then the cheapest price they charge in the states adjusted for median income. This would end the free rider problem by forcing the drug companies to negotiate high enough to cover all costs and would also require that they make any low margin deals available here in the States.
In the States, we already have a form of collective bargining for basic health coverage. The government sets the price it is going to pay for certian procedures and that's all doctors can get. They have t
You are ignoring the large fixed cost base that Eli Lilly must cover to develop new drugs. If everyone paid the price canada did, drug reasearch would slow to a crawl. I've got nothing against collective bargaining as long as it's truely bargaining. However, the type of bargaining that governments tend to engage in goes like this: "You're going to charge x, just enough to cover marginal costs, or we are going to change the laws to screw you."
In case you havn't realized, here in the US there arn't any truely poor people. If you want to see poverty go to a third world country.
I think you don't understand my point. The airline itself has the power to require its passengers to not use those devices under the same rules the FAA sets or their own rules that they deam safer. Having the government also create and enforce rules is redundant and creates hidden costs. There is no benefit provided to consumers by the government regulation. None of what you have said changes this. All of the problems you pretend will suddenly crop up exist today: government regulation doesn't magically make engineering schools teach EMC, make electronics less noisy, and make testing easier. These costs should be properly borne by those who choose to fly, not by all taxpayers.
Someone mod the parent and GP up, they are correctly answering the question but are AC (and currently at zero).
They do serve no purpose. The airlines can just as easily make rules prohibiting their use, and the electronics companices can make properly sheilded devices. Putting the government in the loop only slows the feedback process down.
Turbines have much higher efficiencies then internal combustion engines.
My parents and I talked about school but doing schoolwork was my responsibility and I got decent grades.
My parent's attitude was that as long as I acted responsibly, they let me have wide freedom.
To the OP, if your kids are being responsible with their life, I'd say no worries, they're better off then 90% of the people out there. OTOH, if they are being generally irresponsible by measureable means (failing classes, perpetually getting in late at night, not doing important housework), you should talk to them and figure out why they arn't living up to your expectations. Assuming the computer causes the problems is unproductive and may result in adressing the symptom instead of the cause. In general, trust your kids until they give you reason not to.
Your car, your insurance, your retirement, your healthcare ( I strongly recomend Blue Cross/Blue Shield ), can all be written off. A good accountant will be able to help with this.
Since you are the only one owning the company, you want to keep your "salary" as low as possible (to cover what the company can't legally provide you with) that way you will pay lower taxes.
Again make friends with the local accountant. Pay him for tax consulting and doing the big parts of your books. He can probably even help you come up with a rate formula tailored to your business.
Next, for your retirement, since you arn't a finance guy and finding a good one is tough and expensive, just invest in a Wilkshire 5000 tracking fund, one with low fees and admin costs. This will gaurentee that you'll do better then almost everyone else out there and your performance will track with the economy; this will protect your money from inflation and let you appriciate some capital, early on you want to put as much money as you can into this because of compounding factors. Invest regularly reguardless of market conditions and put a fixed amount of money into your account at scheduled intervals. As you get older, you'll want to reduce your exposure to market risk (which is short term, but that doesn't help you if you die in the short term). Start to move your savings into government bonds and ladder them, this will provide you with a gaurenteed income stream for your retirement, but it will not provide you with appriciation and is still some what vulnerable to inflation. About 25% bonds once you hit your late 30s is a decent goal. By the time you retire, you want to have your bonds providing you with equal income to what you made as a contractor, so as you age, you'll want to move more and more money from stocks to bonds. You want to keep at least 25% in the market if you can though, not having stocks is more likely to cost you money then it is to save you money. Optimally, the bond interest income and stock dividends would cover your entire cost of living, allowing you to keep your principle and pass it on to your children.
The problem with AI was that Spielberg didn't do a good job finishing Kubrick's movie. You can easily pick out which scenes Kubrick planed and which ones Speilberg hacked on.
As for X, the autodetect feature seems to work better on BSD then on Linux (I could never get it to work on Linux, but I've never had it fail on BSD). I can't think of why though.