No, it's just people like GP are sick of Obama apologists desperately trying in vain to argue that their guy is even a hair better than the last guy. In this particular instance, they're trying to argue that he's better because he doesn't torture, even though he's done worse things that the last guy didn't do, and GP is pointing out those particular things.
The bridge comment is then pointing to them that by being his supporter, they've already been suckered.
Well if you're experienced with firearms, you can usually spot the difference between a blank and live round when you're firing it going by both feel and sound (and if its a semi-automatic, the blank round more than likely will not cause the bolt to recoil as a live round would.)
Shatner himself identified (and I guess other people did the same) as a Shakespearean actor. Recall the original pilot episode featured a different captain (Pike) and only replaced him because the actor simply wasn't interested in doing more episodes (boy what a career buster - though he ended up dieing of natural causes at about the time the series ended.) I wouldn't be surprised if that is how much of it landed there, because Shakespear himself frequently revisited Greek and Roman literature and history, so Shatner would fit right in. It made sense that way: I don't think Kirk made a convincing gangster or cowboy outlaw, and it wouldn't surprise me if the writers thought the same. They did a lot of stuff like that to bend the writing to the actors; recall when Sulu became a samurai, and Scotty's drinking being used to outwit some nefarious aliens more than once. Likewise, Pike had this sort of "All American" feel to him, and the pilot episode was all about resisting oppressors.
On a related note, you know what I actually thought was funny was how several episodes suggested the crew of the Enterprise were Christian (how a marriage was done, the use of a cross in several instances, and then that one episode where they rejoiced at the end when they discovered that an alien civilization had just found Jesus) even though both Kirk and Spock were played by Jews. Of course this could have just been a way of giving the mainstream American audiences something to identify with (public school prayer having been outlawed only three years earlier with the majority of the population wanting it to remain.)
2. Freedom of assembly MUST mean that employees have a right to agree not to work with someone who isn't in the union - otherwise it isn't freedom of assembly;
Absolutely, and they have the right to quit their job if they don't like you, but forcing you to leave at their behest is definitely crossing the line. This is actually the basis upon which the first successful unions were formed in the 1800's - keeping Chinese laborers from taking their jobs, later extended to keeping blacks from taking their jobs.
The nice thing about a right to work state is that unions don't have the power to force you out of a job. If the union itself doesn't like it, it is free to leave. Unions can and do exist in right to work states, they even have strikes on occasion. In right to work states unions are focused on being a collective rather than being focused on having power over both their members and their employers. Some say unions are toothless in right to work states, and I would say that is also correct because they don't have the ability to bite their own members - nor should they anyways.
Because standing up to employers got you shot, unions started out as political organizations. OSHA and such wouldn't exist if unions didn't petition for them. Separating unions from politics is as easy as separating the Democrats or Republicans from politics.
Actually that's not how they started nor is it why. The first unions formed along racial lines by white people who were tired of minorities (mainly Chinese or "yellow" people) taking their jobs for lower wages:
Not surprisingly, therefore, black leader Booker T. Washington opposed unions all his life, and W. E. B. DuBois called unions the greatest enemy of the black working class. Another interesting fact: the “union label” was started in the 1880s to proclaim that a product was made by white rather than yellow (Chinese) hands. More generally, union wage rates, union-backed requirements for a license to practice various occupations, and union-backed labor regulations such as the minimum wage law and the Davis-Bacon Act continue to reduce opportunities for black youths, females, and other minorities.
And OSHA has never actually proven to be beneficial. Workplace accidents were on a very linear decline both before and after OSHA was formed, but merely because the trend continued, people in favor of OSHA just assumed that OSHA was the cause when in reality it was not. That trend began when employers for the most part realized that they could attract more talent if they would make their work environment safer. This started rather famously with the DuPont black powder manufacturing (which was very dangerous work) in the mid 1800's. There never was a government mandate for safety in that case; it was entirely a voluntary decision by a corporation (and we all know corporations are evil, right?)
If you sign a contract (in a right to work state) indicating that if the union votes to strike, you will strike, you should never be held to the contract you signed of your own free will? Why do you hate contracts?
To call that a straw man would be quite an understatement. That last bit aside: First, in a right to work state there is never a requirement to sign such a contract to begin with unless they want to, so nobody really does. Second, people can and do strike in right to work states (I remember Qwest doing that 8ish years ago here in Arizona) so it isn't as if you have to pay dues to some union boss just for the privilege of being able to do so.
And just by that last example alone, you can pretty plainly see that people don't have to answer to two separate bosses and forfeit part of their paycheck in order to seek redress against an employer that they see as being unfair. They can if they'd like to as well, by the way, as those workers did formalize a union and had another strike in 2012 (at this time the company was named CenturyLink.)
I don't think anybody wants unions to be illegal. My personal opinion is that you shouldn't be forced to contribute to their political lobbying (union dues invariably do this) as a condition of employment, nor should you be forced to strike if you as an individual don't want to.
Those two are freedom of speech and assembly respectively, yet not going along with them can cost you your job if you're in a union shop.
I think that if I were that obtuse, I wouldn't have cared for the first season of Game of Thrones. Sure it's got some fight scenes and mild CGI, but it mostly features people just talking, and if you don't pay attention to what they are saying then the action oriented scenes are rather meaningless.
You've really got to have a good mix of both though. For example, one of the Mortal Kombat movie sequels (I think it was the second one) was almost nothing but pure fight scenes, and was one of the most boring movies I've ever watched; however, the first one was watchable (though I've certainly seen better movies) and it had far less fighting.
The Matrix (first one) is also a good example. If you took out either the fighting or the philosophical elements it would have been kind of lame.
I didn't take it that way. They added that stuff in but it was intermixed. For example in the mirror episode (one which to this day receives very iconic lampooning via the infamous Spock gotee) was halfway through the airing and was obviously about the folly of Nazi style regimes, as well as the episode with the two aliens with opposite color skins was one of the last episodes, and it was clearly about social issues - i.e. race relations.
I think they just added the bumpy heads to the klingons because they wanted to make it more believably sci-fi. And it truly does add an element of depth to the story, otherwise it gets kind of annoying that all aliens look the same. Even in TNG they still kept that element that the Klingons weren't just bad guys to kill by adding Worf as a starfleet officer, and even explored their culture into heavy depth and had the Enterprise crew play a role in preventing a Klingon civil war. This was all done during the Roddenberry years, btw.
That wasn't just Dax, also Miles O'Brien, Bashir and a few others giving Worf a strange look all at once when they saw that and asked "those are Klingons?"
They actually addressed the difference in appearance in Enterprise with a three part episode, it was one of the ones in the last season. A very good episode(s) too, as well as another two part episode that revisited the mirror universe that was also good and came in around the same time. Enterprise was getting good right before it got axed.
But it does make sense when you are dealing with limited spectrum and/or limited bandwidth. Paris Hilton only has one vagina - you can maybe fit three in it if you really stretch it out, but people will have to start taking turns after that.
Cable in particular does have limits. My ISP sets a data cap which I regularly exceed, but in my case this is more of a guideline. They only actually enforce that cap if the node happens to be really saturated, and they don't bill you but give you the boot.
This doesn't bother me because as a network engineer I fully understand the fact that you can only fill a given physical link with so much data, and it isn't exactly cost effective in this case to create another link. The best thing to do is to replace it with fiber, but you can't do that without bribing the local politicians first.
I guess I'm a younger trek fan myself (started with TNG,) as I was never into the original series. I kind of forced myself to watch it while I was sick once (every episode) and didn't really think it was anything special.
Modern references to star trek make kirk out to be this player who always gets laid, getting into fights, and talking like he was in the middle of a stroke. I never saw the getting laid, and the fights weren't anything spectacular like the JJ Abrams movies, and while he did talk like he had a stroke on occasion it isn't as bad as they parody it. Could be one of those things where you just had to be alive during that era to appreciate it (I was born in the 80's,) as I guess the getting laid part would have to be implied in more subtle ways than they were able to do with e.g. Data and Tasha Yarr in TNG as it was probably illegal back then.
I did watch the first few minutes of this fan fic, and it does seem pretty true to the original. That said, I think if you're a fan of the original this is probably for you, but I couldn't remain interested for very long.
Brother seconded. My first one lasted for about 7 years (in fact even after I stopped using it, they still make new drivers for it) until one day I moved it and it started jamming on every third print. I don't really blame it though, it was in an auto shop most of its life full of dust and greasy mechanics always fiddling with it - I'm surprised anything could last that long there. My current printer is a Brother MFC-9325CW and it works great, it's on its second year with no signs of trouble.
I live in the US, I don't regularly watch the news, yet I know who David Cameron is. I also know who Francois Hollande is, Stephen Harper...I could go on.
These names are frequently mentioned in the news, though they stick out particularly well to me because of some of the silly things they say, like Hollande wanting a 75% tax on the rich, stupidly not realizing that these taxes have ruined his own country's economy (France even taxes you on money that you don't even have, which has driven a ton of businesses out of the country.)
I think the problem is most people don't even understand what I meant by that last statement, and many like it, so the news is pretty boring to them. So instead they watch The Daily Show for their news, which basically is just news about whatever gaffe somebody made that particular day, real or imagined (most people I talk to think Sarah Palin actually said she could see Russia from her house, as per the SNL skit.) Seriously, that is the actual news source for many people, I'm not joking.
Though that isn't to say national cable news is any good. Really it's mostly crap - if it isn't some piece about how crappy our lives are, or some new threat (killer bees, flu strain, terror threat, etc) then it's Hollywood celebrity gossip (the later of which I think is the most boring news ever - yet oddly enough most people seem to get a kick out of it.)
I don't think age has much to do with it. Linux is older than Windows. Remember the current incarnation of Windows is derived from NT, a completely separate set of code from regular Windows originally released in 1993, with Linux originally being released in 1991. Linux wasn't even intended to be a production OS either, it was originally written as a i386 learning experiment.
Yet Android, which runs on Linux, manages to do much better in battery life.
There is some waste to it. There are three information systems courses I've taken in fact that all seem to be pretty much the same thing. If I was paying for it I'd be pissed, but the university issued me a grant so it doesn't cost me anything, so I'm just annoyed instead.
I fit the demographic the article describes though; I'm getting a business management degree for the purpose of going into IT. That doesn't mean I intend to go into management (I don't really care whether or not I do in the end) rather I'm told that having a bachelors degree gives you much better leverage for...well...everything, and I'm getting it while I don't really need to work. Still though, the business courses themselves are valuable in my opinion, and I think I'd rather know how to turn information systems into a profit instead of being able to solve integrals (which I do know how to do, but I don't particularly care for it.)
I've already finished the IT related education, which was mainly a bunch of courses for vendor certifications (Cisco, VMware, Microsoft) with the Cisco courses being the ones I felt the most valuable.
Social Security would be a good start. It's actually designed from the ground up to never pay you anything unless you "beat the odds" so to speak. Literally. The government produced a propaganda video that somebody shoved in my face at slashdot which says its an insurance program that provides you benefits for when you retire, die, or become disabled. The reality is that it only really does one of those things. The death benefit is a WHOPPING $250 no matter how much you paid into it, and it only goes to your spouse if you were married at the time of death. No spouse? Spouse dead? Divorced? Well then no death benefit. Quite an amazing insurance policy when in the US it is basically illegal to handle a dead body without a license - you are forced by law to pay somebody amounts starting at $1,000 to carry the body from the coroner's office. And then of course, whatever happens after that costs even more (be it cremation, interment, etc.)
Age 65 was originally chosen because they expected most people to never actually live that long to retire. Even if they did, they wouldn't collect for very long. It's like going to a casino where the odds are always in favor of the house. The shitty thing is, you're required by law to gamble in this casino. Social security is now breaking though because people are living longer than the government intended.
Quite a good deal for the government anyways though, because it gets to keep $6 billion per year to keep the lights on in the social security administration offices, and if that is too much money then it just comes out of what the so called beneficiaries take in - the government gets its cut of the pie first.
Personally, because my health is what it is (renal failure) I fully anticipate that I'll never live past the age of retirement. I've also already been denied disability, even though it's hard to work because of complications of nephrotic syndrome. But, I still have to pay into social security anyways, knowing full well that it'll never pay me back. So not only will I call social security useless, I'll say it's just a downright drain. My dad paid at least $100k into it over his working career (he maxed it out for about 15 years or so, and came pretty damn close to maxing it out for another 10,) died at 55, and because he was divorced he received no death benefit. Social security gave absolutely nothing in return, neither to him nor his heirs - it's such a wonderful program.
No, you don't need modernmix. In fact, I don't even recommend that myself because that implies using the "apps". Simply replace the start menu with any one of the many of them out there, most of them being free. Almost all of them include options to disable the charms bars. In Windows 8.1, the right charms bar is no longer needed because you can shut down from the bottom left side.
The last time I paid for windows, by the way, was 95. I don't know about anybody else, but it always seems to me that getting free legitimate copies of windows has been rather easy. In my case they've come either through the intel retail edge program, dreamspark, or one of those Microsoft events (which I've found beneficial to go to anyways for networking.)
While I'm sure many here say just use linux instead, I just have to say that the year for linux on the desktop still hasn't come yet. Linux makes a wonderful server OS though.
I like how if you complain about government overreach, it's now fashionable for somebody to suggest somalia, as if there's nothing in between this mess and that mess.
Really you have to be a total moron to not be able to understand the difference between anarchists and libertarians. Libertarians want a government, the difference is they want a government that protects you from others rather than you from yourself. Liberals want the later, such as banning trans fats and soft drinks.
And this change for the sake of change is stupid. Personally, when I look at the prices for services that people pay for out of pocket, I notice how cheap yet good they are. Two months ago I paid $40 to get a full dental exam, x-rays, cleaning, and scaling. Meanwhile that same place bills insurance companies $250 for the same service. Why is that? Because when people shop around, they save. Insurance gets rid of the shopping around part because you don't even need to concern yourself with the cost.
Look in other areas traditionally not insured as well - some places offer Lasik for less than it costs to get a new pair of eyeglasses in some cases. I'm not eligible for Lasik (due to keratoconus) but an eye exam usually runs me about $30, whereas insurance companies typically pay about $50.
This is why health care costs are so expensive in the US - and the solution, according to people like you, is more insurance?
Yes, because a law that dramatically alters the way your insurance company will do business is just not going to change things for you.
Seriously how naive can you get? I've yet to meet a single person who works in the health care industry who told me that this plan isn't a train wreck in the making, one of them even intends on getting out of the business entirely.
Actually if you simply remove metro, Windows 8 is quite a marked improvement over 7 (mainly backend changes, but also some nifty things like being able to open an administrative shell to the current directory in explorer without the need for adding registry tweaks, in addition to the copy dialog box being probably the best of any OS I've seen to date in how it shows progress.) Fortunately you can do exactly that, though MS doesn't approve.
Except windows has been actually removing some network functionality as time goes by. For example, Windows Server 2008 R2 removed support for OSPF, ISIS was removed sometime before that, and I'm fairly certain that 2012 only supports RIP.
You could print your own books, but the materials would cost more than just buying it. 3D printing is likely to remove that particular rule for everyday items/tools, especially if you could 3D print steel and/or aluminum.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's just people like GP are sick of Obama apologists desperately trying in vain to argue that their guy is even a hair better than the last guy. In this particular instance, they're trying to argue that he's better because he doesn't torture, even though he's done worse things that the last guy didn't do, and GP is pointing out those particular things.
The bridge comment is then pointing to them that by being his supporter, they've already been suckered.
Well if you're experienced with firearms, you can usually spot the difference between a blank and live round when you're firing it going by both feel and sound (and if its a semi-automatic, the blank round more than likely will not cause the bolt to recoil as a live round would.)
Shatner himself identified (and I guess other people did the same) as a Shakespearean actor. Recall the original pilot episode featured a different captain (Pike) and only replaced him because the actor simply wasn't interested in doing more episodes (boy what a career buster - though he ended up dieing of natural causes at about the time the series ended.) I wouldn't be surprised if that is how much of it landed there, because Shakespear himself frequently revisited Greek and Roman literature and history, so Shatner would fit right in. It made sense that way: I don't think Kirk made a convincing gangster or cowboy outlaw, and it wouldn't surprise me if the writers thought the same. They did a lot of stuff like that to bend the writing to the actors; recall when Sulu became a samurai, and Scotty's drinking being used to outwit some nefarious aliens more than once. Likewise, Pike had this sort of "All American" feel to him, and the pilot episode was all about resisting oppressors.
On a related note, you know what I actually thought was funny was how several episodes suggested the crew of the Enterprise were Christian (how a marriage was done, the use of a cross in several instances, and then that one episode where they rejoiced at the end when they discovered that an alien civilization had just found Jesus) even though both Kirk and Spock were played by Jews. Of course this could have just been a way of giving the mainstream American audiences something to identify with (public school prayer having been outlawed only three years earlier with the majority of the population wanting it to remain.)
2. Freedom of assembly MUST mean that employees have a right to agree not to work with someone who isn't in the union - otherwise it isn't freedom of assembly;
Absolutely, and they have the right to quit their job if they don't like you, but forcing you to leave at their behest is definitely crossing the line. This is actually the basis upon which the first successful unions were formed in the 1800's - keeping Chinese laborers from taking their jobs, later extended to keeping blacks from taking their jobs.
The nice thing about a right to work state is that unions don't have the power to force you out of a job. If the union itself doesn't like it, it is free to leave. Unions can and do exist in right to work states, they even have strikes on occasion. In right to work states unions are focused on being a collective rather than being focused on having power over both their members and their employers. Some say unions are toothless in right to work states, and I would say that is also correct because they don't have the ability to bite their own members - nor should they anyways.
Because standing up to employers got you shot, unions started out as political organizations. OSHA and such wouldn't exist if unions didn't petition for them. Separating unions from politics is as easy as separating the Democrats or Republicans from politics.
Actually that's not how they started nor is it why. The first unions formed along racial lines by white people who were tired of minorities (mainly Chinese or "yellow" people) taking their jobs for lower wages:
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/LaborUnions.html
Not surprisingly, therefore, black leader Booker T. Washington opposed unions all his life, and W. E. B. DuBois called unions the greatest enemy of the black working class. Another interesting fact: the “union label” was started in the 1880s to proclaim that a product was made by white rather than yellow (Chinese) hands. More generally, union wage rates, union-backed requirements for a license to practice various occupations, and union-backed labor regulations such as the minimum wage law and the Davis-Bacon Act continue to reduce opportunities for black youths, females, and other minorities.
And OSHA has never actually proven to be beneficial. Workplace accidents were on a very linear decline both before and after OSHA was formed, but merely because the trend continued, people in favor of OSHA just assumed that OSHA was the cause when in reality it was not. That trend began when employers for the most part realized that they could attract more talent if they would make their work environment safer. This started rather famously with the DuPont black powder manufacturing (which was very dangerous work) in the mid 1800's. There never was a government mandate for safety in that case; it was entirely a voluntary decision by a corporation (and we all know corporations are evil, right?)
If you sign a contract (in a right to work state) indicating that if the union votes to strike, you will strike, you should never be held to the contract you signed of your own free will? Why do you hate contracts?
To call that a straw man would be quite an understatement. That last bit aside: First, in a right to work state there is never a requirement to sign such a contract to begin with unless they want to, so nobody really does. Second, people can and do strike in right to work states (I remember Qwest doing that 8ish years ago here in Arizona) so it isn't as if you have to pay dues to some union boss just for the privilege of being able to do so.
And just by that last example alone, you can pretty plainly see that people don't have to answer to two separate bosses and forfeit part of their paycheck in order to seek redress against an employer that they see as being unfair. They can if they'd like to as well, by the way, as those workers did formalize a union and had another strike in 2012 (at this time the company was named CenturyLink.)
I don't think anybody wants unions to be illegal. My personal opinion is that you shouldn't be forced to contribute to their political lobbying (union dues invariably do this) as a condition of employment, nor should you be forced to strike if you as an individual don't want to.
Those two are freedom of speech and assembly respectively, yet not going along with them can cost you your job if you're in a union shop.
IIRC the collar bone is the easiest one in your body to break due to a combination of how narrow it is and it isn't protected by fat.
I think that if I were that obtuse, I wouldn't have cared for the first season of Game of Thrones. Sure it's got some fight scenes and mild CGI, but it mostly features people just talking, and if you don't pay attention to what they are saying then the action oriented scenes are rather meaningless.
You've really got to have a good mix of both though. For example, one of the Mortal Kombat movie sequels (I think it was the second one) was almost nothing but pure fight scenes, and was one of the most boring movies I've ever watched; however, the first one was watchable (though I've certainly seen better movies) and it had far less fighting.
The Matrix (first one) is also a good example. If you took out either the fighting or the philosophical elements it would have been kind of lame.
I didn't take it that way. They added that stuff in but it was intermixed. For example in the mirror episode (one which to this day receives very iconic lampooning via the infamous Spock gotee) was halfway through the airing and was obviously about the folly of Nazi style regimes, as well as the episode with the two aliens with opposite color skins was one of the last episodes, and it was clearly about social issues - i.e. race relations.
I think they just added the bumpy heads to the klingons because they wanted to make it more believably sci-fi. And it truly does add an element of depth to the story, otherwise it gets kind of annoying that all aliens look the same. Even in TNG they still kept that element that the Klingons weren't just bad guys to kill by adding Worf as a starfleet officer, and even explored their culture into heavy depth and had the Enterprise crew play a role in preventing a Klingon civil war. This was all done during the Roddenberry years, btw.
That wasn't just Dax, also Miles O'Brien, Bashir and a few others giving Worf a strange look all at once when they saw that and asked "those are Klingons?"
They actually addressed the difference in appearance in Enterprise with a three part episode, it was one of the ones in the last season. A very good episode(s) too, as well as another two part episode that revisited the mirror universe that was also good and came in around the same time. Enterprise was getting good right before it got axed.
But it does make sense when you are dealing with limited spectrum and/or limited bandwidth. Paris Hilton only has one vagina - you can maybe fit three in it if you really stretch it out, but people will have to start taking turns after that.
Cable in particular does have limits. My ISP sets a data cap which I regularly exceed, but in my case this is more of a guideline. They only actually enforce that cap if the node happens to be really saturated, and they don't bill you but give you the boot.
This doesn't bother me because as a network engineer I fully understand the fact that you can only fill a given physical link with so much data, and it isn't exactly cost effective in this case to create another link. The best thing to do is to replace it with fiber, but you can't do that without bribing the local politicians first.
I guess I'm a younger trek fan myself (started with TNG,) as I was never into the original series. I kind of forced myself to watch it while I was sick once (every episode) and didn't really think it was anything special.
Modern references to star trek make kirk out to be this player who always gets laid, getting into fights, and talking like he was in the middle of a stroke. I never saw the getting laid, and the fights weren't anything spectacular like the JJ Abrams movies, and while he did talk like he had a stroke on occasion it isn't as bad as they parody it. Could be one of those things where you just had to be alive during that era to appreciate it (I was born in the 80's,) as I guess the getting laid part would have to be implied in more subtle ways than they were able to do with e.g. Data and Tasha Yarr in TNG as it was probably illegal back then.
I did watch the first few minutes of this fan fic, and it does seem pretty true to the original. That said, I think if you're a fan of the original this is probably for you, but I couldn't remain interested for very long.
Brother seconded. My first one lasted for about 7 years (in fact even after I stopped using it, they still make new drivers for it) until one day I moved it and it started jamming on every third print. I don't really blame it though, it was in an auto shop most of its life full of dust and greasy mechanics always fiddling with it - I'm surprised anything could last that long there. My current printer is a Brother MFC-9325CW and it works great, it's on its second year with no signs of trouble.
Then why did studios always keep the master copies on betamax instead of VHS (or even S-VHS)?
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just wondering.
They do edit it, actually, and for the worse. I've had some key details removed from some of my submissions when they were posted to the front page.
I live in the US, I don't regularly watch the news, yet I know who David Cameron is. I also know who Francois Hollande is, Stephen Harper...I could go on.
These names are frequently mentioned in the news, though they stick out particularly well to me because of some of the silly things they say, like Hollande wanting a 75% tax on the rich, stupidly not realizing that these taxes have ruined his own country's economy (France even taxes you on money that you don't even have, which has driven a ton of businesses out of the country.)
I think the problem is most people don't even understand what I meant by that last statement, and many like it, so the news is pretty boring to them. So instead they watch The Daily Show for their news, which basically is just news about whatever gaffe somebody made that particular day, real or imagined (most people I talk to think Sarah Palin actually said she could see Russia from her house, as per the SNL skit.) Seriously, that is the actual news source for many people, I'm not joking.
Though that isn't to say national cable news is any good. Really it's mostly crap - if it isn't some piece about how crappy our lives are, or some new threat (killer bees, flu strain, terror threat, etc) then it's Hollywood celebrity gossip (the later of which I think is the most boring news ever - yet oddly enough most people seem to get a kick out of it.)
I don't think age has much to do with it. Linux is older than Windows. Remember the current incarnation of Windows is derived from NT, a completely separate set of code from regular Windows originally released in 1993, with Linux originally being released in 1991. Linux wasn't even intended to be a production OS either, it was originally written as a i386 learning experiment.
Yet Android, which runs on Linux, manages to do much better in battery life.
There is some waste to it. There are three information systems courses I've taken in fact that all seem to be pretty much the same thing. If I was paying for it I'd be pissed, but the university issued me a grant so it doesn't cost me anything, so I'm just annoyed instead.
I fit the demographic the article describes though; I'm getting a business management degree for the purpose of going into IT. That doesn't mean I intend to go into management (I don't really care whether or not I do in the end) rather I'm told that having a bachelors degree gives you much better leverage for...well...everything, and I'm getting it while I don't really need to work. Still though, the business courses themselves are valuable in my opinion, and I think I'd rather know how to turn information systems into a profit instead of being able to solve integrals (which I do know how to do, but I don't particularly care for it.)
I've already finished the IT related education, which was mainly a bunch of courses for vendor certifications (Cisco, VMware, Microsoft) with the Cisco courses being the ones I felt the most valuable.
Social Security would be a good start. It's actually designed from the ground up to never pay you anything unless you "beat the odds" so to speak. Literally. The government produced a propaganda video that somebody shoved in my face at slashdot which says its an insurance program that provides you benefits for when you retire, die, or become disabled. The reality is that it only really does one of those things. The death benefit is a WHOPPING $250 no matter how much you paid into it, and it only goes to your spouse if you were married at the time of death. No spouse? Spouse dead? Divorced? Well then no death benefit. Quite an amazing insurance policy when in the US it is basically illegal to handle a dead body without a license - you are forced by law to pay somebody amounts starting at $1,000 to carry the body from the coroner's office. And then of course, whatever happens after that costs even more (be it cremation, interment, etc.)
Age 65 was originally chosen because they expected most people to never actually live that long to retire. Even if they did, they wouldn't collect for very long. It's like going to a casino where the odds are always in favor of the house. The shitty thing is, you're required by law to gamble in this casino. Social security is now breaking though because people are living longer than the government intended.
Quite a good deal for the government anyways though, because it gets to keep $6 billion per year to keep the lights on in the social security administration offices, and if that is too much money then it just comes out of what the so called beneficiaries take in - the government gets its cut of the pie first.
Personally, because my health is what it is (renal failure) I fully anticipate that I'll never live past the age of retirement. I've also already been denied disability, even though it's hard to work because of complications of nephrotic syndrome. But, I still have to pay into social security anyways, knowing full well that it'll never pay me back. So not only will I call social security useless, I'll say it's just a downright drain. My dad paid at least $100k into it over his working career (he maxed it out for about 15 years or so, and came pretty damn close to maxing it out for another 10,) died at 55, and because he was divorced he received no death benefit. Social security gave absolutely nothing in return, neither to him nor his heirs - it's such a wonderful program.
No, you don't need modernmix. In fact, I don't even recommend that myself because that implies using the "apps". Simply replace the start menu with any one of the many of them out there, most of them being free. Almost all of them include options to disable the charms bars. In Windows 8.1, the right charms bar is no longer needed because you can shut down from the bottom left side.
The last time I paid for windows, by the way, was 95. I don't know about anybody else, but it always seems to me that getting free legitimate copies of windows has been rather easy. In my case they've come either through the intel retail edge program, dreamspark, or one of those Microsoft events (which I've found beneficial to go to anyways for networking.)
While I'm sure many here say just use linux instead, I just have to say that the year for linux on the desktop still hasn't come yet. Linux makes a wonderful server OS though.
I like how if you complain about government overreach, it's now fashionable for somebody to suggest somalia, as if there's nothing in between this mess and that mess.
Really you have to be a total moron to not be able to understand the difference between anarchists and libertarians. Libertarians want a government, the difference is they want a government that protects you from others rather than you from yourself. Liberals want the later, such as banning trans fats and soft drinks.
And this change for the sake of change is stupid. Personally, when I look at the prices for services that people pay for out of pocket, I notice how cheap yet good they are. Two months ago I paid $40 to get a full dental exam, x-rays, cleaning, and scaling. Meanwhile that same place bills insurance companies $250 for the same service. Why is that? Because when people shop around, they save. Insurance gets rid of the shopping around part because you don't even need to concern yourself with the cost.
Look in other areas traditionally not insured as well - some places offer Lasik for less than it costs to get a new pair of eyeglasses in some cases. I'm not eligible for Lasik (due to keratoconus) but an eye exam usually runs me about $30, whereas insurance companies typically pay about $50.
This is why health care costs are so expensive in the US - and the solution, according to people like you, is more insurance?
Yes, because a law that dramatically alters the way your insurance company will do business is just not going to change things for you.
Seriously how naive can you get? I've yet to meet a single person who works in the health care industry who told me that this plan isn't a train wreck in the making, one of them even intends on getting out of the business entirely.
Actually if you simply remove metro, Windows 8 is quite a marked improvement over 7 (mainly backend changes, but also some nifty things like being able to open an administrative shell to the current directory in explorer without the need for adding registry tweaks, in addition to the copy dialog box being probably the best of any OS I've seen to date in how it shows progress.) Fortunately you can do exactly that, though MS doesn't approve.
Except windows has been actually removing some network functionality as time goes by. For example, Windows Server 2008 R2 removed support for OSPF, ISIS was removed sometime before that, and I'm fairly certain that 2012 only supports RIP.
You could print your own books, but the materials would cost more than just buying it. 3D printing is likely to remove that particular rule for everyday items/tools, especially if you could 3D print steel and/or aluminum.
http://slashdot.org/story/13/08/01/0019259/study-finds-3d-printers-pay-for-themselves-in-under-a-year