When Nokia made their deal with Microsoft, they basically told the world "Don't buy any of our current phones because we're orphaning them."
Remember, they said that they would be switching ALL their phones to WP7. Would you lock yourself into a long-term contract for an orphan phone?
Microsoft wasn't stupid - they could foresee that Nokia share value would collapse - by next year, they'll be able to buy Nokia outright for a lot less than the money they gave them.
"Coming soon - The Microsoft X-Phone - it works great with your X-Box!"
Windows 95 was internally labelled as Windows 3.95 because too much softwaare broke in testing when they had it report as Windows 4.0. Also keep in mind that it ran atop DOS 7.0, so they didn't "do away" with the numbering system. It's always been there, through 95, 98, ME, XP, NT, W7.
Quebec is a net importer of electricity from Ontario in the winter, when demand is higher (electric heating) and capacity is lower (low reservoir levels - it doesn't rain in the winter - unless you count ice storms).
Also, the history of the James Bay project is instructive - it was supposed to cost under $4 billion, not $16.7 billion. If it hadn't been for the energy crisis, James Bay would have been a white elephant.
So now Charest (Quebec premier) wants to propose an $80 billion northern development? Quebec's economy lags almost every province and state in North America already (hint: it ranks 53rd out of 60 - even Newfies make more money per capita). Tax rates to support this are already the highest in North America (hint #2 - a quebecer making minimum wage pays as much tax to Quebec as an ontarioan making $50k a year pays to Ontario).
The money simply isn't there. The solution is simple: Kick Quebec out of confederation and revert the borders of Quebec to what they were at confederation, well before the Feds gave control of northern Quebec to the province. This ends the $8 billion a year equalization payments fiasco as well. It also ends the problem of politicians sucking up to separatists (like Layton in the last election).
[_] This is nothing new. I know someone who has claimed for more than a DECADE that their TV is spying on them.
[_] Like men will ever give up control of the remote!
[_] "Excuse me, but why is it every time YOU walk into the room the TV ask if we want to switch to pay-per-view porn?"
[_] I'd rather have a TV that lets me keep an eye on the scum who think that watching me is a good idea.
[_] That scream you heard was all those "In Soviet Russia TV watches YOU" jokes dying.
[_] It doesn't matter - he'll still spend the evening clicking from one channel to the next every commercial.
[_] Just when you thought you couldn't come up with another reason not to watch TV...
[_] Duct Tape Lesson # 2,389,042 - Did you know that you can use duct tape to cover the sensors to keep your TV from spying on you?
[_] You know that they'll soon be charging extra for a TV that doesn't watch you.
[_] Mess with them - stick a computer monitor with The Sims having awesome double-back-monkey sex for hours at a time in front of the sensor. Bonus points is you screen "Faces of Death" with the monkey-brain-eating scene instead.
[_] Sue them for "producing and distributing under-age porn" because your under-18 daughter walked in front of the TV while running from the shower to her bedroom.
[_] mumble mumble remote when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
This is an analyst's guess as to what's in the deal between Microsoft and HTC. The timing is very suspicious - it comes a day after investors are calling for Ballmer's head on a pike, specifically because of Microsofts' failures in the mobile phone space.
Who knows - maybe Nokia wasn't the first time Microsoft paid a handset maker a huge chunk of cash to make a deal?
Maybe in return, Microsoft charges HTC less for each WinPhone license - or even pays HTC?
If you believed every convenient rumour from every analyst, your head would already have exploded. This sounds like a very convenient astroturf story to try to take attention away from the Nokiasoft and Skype fiascoes, and Microsoft being passed by IBM in value.
It would be far from the first time that an analyst released a paid opinion (remember - the courts have ruled that they can say pretty much anything they want, without facts to back it up, because they're "just opinions").
I think you're confusing the job of an editor with the task of correcting errors in spelling and grammar, which would be done by a proof-reader, not an editor.
Writers shouldn't require that their editors do proof-reading, instead concentrating on other aspects of what they write, such as relevance to the target market and recommending which parts need to be tightened up, re-arranged, or dropped entirely.
Spell checking and basic grammar are properly the responsibility of the writer. If you can't be bothered to proof-read your own stuff, then maybe you deserve to be haunted by the (grammar|spelling|style) nazis
I used to think the same thing, but not any more. I can see several good reasons for the editors leaving story submissions intact, including leaving in the obvious typos and grammatical faux pas (and since this *is* a story about the legal problems of IP, this post is actually sort of on-topic)
1. The notice at the bottom of every page: "Trademarks property of their respective owners. Comments owned by the poster." Slashdot benefits from a "safe harbor" by not editing comments. The same is true for story submissions.
2. Editing it, even by one word, might change the meaning. "Woman and child" is a lot different than "Woman with child", for example.
When the US and the Russians were going at it head-to-head, one Russian leader said something, and his translator "cleaned it up." The Russian noticed they didn't react as expected ("We disagree" is not the same as "We will f*ck you and sh*t on your grave"), and ordered "Now, tell them EXACTLY what I said."
Words make a difference. Editing them, without getting the original posters' agreement that that is what they actually submitted, can cause problems.
3. If anything, not editing a submission with bad grammar is more a reflection on the submitter than on the editors. If you don't want to look like an ignorant/(bas|f*ck|re|slash)tard/, it's not that hard - after all, you HAVE to hit preview at least once before you can submit a story.
If he's the sole employee of his own contracting company, and he's been working for the startup for a year, then the IRS will challenge his independent contractor status, same as any other contractor who is tied to closely to one employer.
About the 27 inch monitor... I actually just got that. I had a 22 inch and I'll probably go back to it. The 27 is the same resolution so my stuff just looks bigger which is not an advantage.
Wait a few years - your eyes will want your stuff to look bigger.
(the last I looked, nobody's getting any younger)
for the doubters, more monitors take some time to get used to. The first day with a26", I was "wow, this is almost tooooo big!". When I bought a second, it was again "this is almost toooo much of a good thing." Now? Both of them + a 17" laptop, and I really would like a 3rd 26".
Screen area is like ram or cpu or hard disk space - every time you upgrade, you figure "Now I have more than I'll ever need...", and eventually you find more ways to use it, until one day you're thinking "I really could use more".
Plus, with the higher resolution, I often write my constructors and short functions one per line. That's another thing that takes getting used to - your eyes and brain need to learn to accept a different format - but it makes for a lot less vertical scrolling.
If he's his only employee and they're his only "client", the IRS will say that he's an employee and that the contractor relationship is a ruse to avoid withholding.
Either he or the employer can ask for a determination by filing this form with the IRS.
Depending on his jurisdiction, he may not be a contractor, but an employee, and both him and his boss are looking at substantial tax penalties and fines.
And no, having a written contract saying you're an independent contractor means next to nothing when compared to the rest of the evidence.
Behavioral: Does the company control or have the right to control what the worker does and how the worker does his or her job?
Financial: Are the business aspects of the worker's job controlled by the payer? (these include things like how worker is paid, whether expenses are reimbursed, who provides tools/supplies, etc.)
Type of Relationship: Are there written contracts or employee type benefits (i.e. pension plan, insurance, vacation pay, etc.)? Will the relationship continue and is the work performed a key aspect of the business?
If they set your hours, your workplace, your work environment, pay you weekly instead of by deliverables, there's no specific "the contract is now complete" condition, and it's a key part of the business (and you have indicated yes several of these), you're an employee, not a contractor.
The real issue is that to build a high-performance site, you have to have a good understanding of the underlying platform - you can't just "farm it out" because it will influence how you write your code.
However, for just starting up, get a cheapie shared hosting account from a place like iweb for $2 to $6 a month. 600 gigs of storage should be enough for you to start, since you've indicated that your main concern is LARGE amounts of code:-)
link ... and if or when it grows, move to your own server for under $100 a month. This way, you can do the learning curve thing and experiment at your own pace.
"The cloud" is not for you at this point. Not when you can get your own server with 10 TB of bandwidth and 500 gigs of mirrored raid for $89 a month. Or using the option of creating one virtual server spanning 1 or more physical servers (and pooling the bandwidth), you can easily have 20TB, 30TB, etc.
Anyone who says "I foresee each step of the way (setting up a domain; SQL-Server, etc) as a slow, risky process" really isn't going to be comfortable even with a managed server - they need to find a partner with at least a bit of experience.
That said, this whole thing sounds like pie-in-the-sky. No, your groupon clone or whatever is not going to get millions of hits a day. Ever.
LinkedIn is filled with professionals. That isn't your everyday farmville-playing soccer moms or pirates who just have free content and who have little market value. These are people who's value is highly over that and they can be offered professional, high paying services and advertising. This is very valuable user base.
Maybe 5 years ago, but since then it's become a useless collection of unemployed strangers giving referrals to other unemployed strangers, and a collection of spam posters.
Almost nobody keeps their profile up to date, because the vast majority of its "users" don't even bother to use it any more.
The more I look at everything, the more I've come to realize that society simply optimizes outcomes for the "average" and the mediocre.
Average intelligence, average curiosity, average motivation, average honesty. It's why we see white-collar crooks walk. Why people say they admire whistle-blowers, but won't hire one - because they're not that honest. Why avarice and greed are rewarded - people ARE greedy.
It's easy to get ahead - just drop your ethics, lie, cheat, steal, and believe that you're entitled to the rewards because it's hard work making lying, cheating and stealing look like it's semi-honest, both to yourself, and to the rest of the world.
If you have to make a choice in today's market, you choose cpu speed. Most laptops come with 4 to 6 gigs standard nowadays - maxing it out to 8 gigs isn't going to make much - if any - difference. (I'm focusing on laptops because desktop sales are expected to continue following the same eventual nose-dive pattern as netbook sales, but it applies to desktops as well).
By addressing the RAM side of the equation and not mentioning CPU cycles, you're in essence agreeing with the rule-- by admitting that RAM is more important than CPU cycles, which the rule mentions and you don't.
By suggesting that users can and should upgrade RAM during a computer's life, you give further support to the notion that RAM is more important than CPU cycles, since you don't suggest CPU upgrades.
Absolutely not what I implied in any shape, manner or form, so please don't try to make an argument by lying about what I said. It's not Troll Tuesday yet:-)
Increased cpu benefits everything, from program load speeds to data transfers between the gpu and cpu, etc. Increased ram has fewer benefits - you swap less. Most machines nowadays don't even need swap with their default ram configuration, and you can actually free up more real ram by removing swap (linux, bsd) or making it as small as possible (windows), since it takes real ram to manage virtual memory.
For the "pay for speed, not channels" argument, I pointed out the basic flaw - that neither of them is a valid option if you have a serious bandwidth cap - and a lot of people do. So neither option was any more valid than saying "which do you prefer for breakfast - raw oatmeal or raw pancakes" - while ignoring the need for a stove.
As for maintenance - most cars just don't break down that much any more, at least not in the first 100,000 miles. So while Brand A may be better than Brand B, saving $5000 in maintenance over the life of the vehicle isn't worth spending $10,000 more on fuel. Comparing future costs based on today's fuel prices is silly - over the next 10 years, they're going to do the same as the previous 10 years - they'll triple, partly because of supply and demand, partly because of the weakening dollar.
And no, my example wan't hypothetical - check other users' comments. Even your own example is flawed:
However, when I did out the calculation at the expected cost of fuel plus a reasonable increase, my expected usage, and the expected lifetime of the vehicle, it would be about ten years before the more fuel efficient vehicle would make back it's higher price, and this was longer than I expected to own and operate the vehicle.
You forgot the decrease in resale value because it's less fuel efficient. This is no longer a marginal thing - for months after Katrina, dealers were refusing all SUV trade-ins because they couldn't move them, even at half price.
$10 a gallon gas will be here by 2020, unless there's a global economic collapse, which means the price of gas could be a buck and it wouldn't matter - nobody would have the cash.
Why is compensation for penis size the canonical example?
Nobody specified "penis". Do you have "issues"?:-)
It doesn't take an idiot to not upgrade your own ram. If your time is worth more than a certain amount, it isn't even worth looking up how to do it. It is cheaper to just click the little "Upgrade RAM" button on the HP or Dell website and have them do it for you.
The article was about which choice was better - ram or cpu. Not the same thing at as as what you're talking about, which assumes that you don't have to make such a trade-off - just order whatever you want. Want more ram? Just add it. Want more cpu? Just add it.
A lot of us have to make trade-offs. Others may not have to, but may decide that it's the smarter thing to do anyways. Ram is easily upgradeable, and you can always find a home for your old ram. Cpus are less upgradeable (esp. in laptops, which sell a lot more than desktops). If you have to make a choice, more cpu is simply the smart move at the time of purchase.
"The threat of these gas prices here because legislators will seek to raise gas taxes is actually wrong/misleading in today's world. Here in WA State our legislators are considering MOVING AWAY FROM A GAS TAX to pay for road projects under the belief that hybrid/electric/high-efficiency owners aren't paying their fair share of road taxes if that is ONLY from gas taxes."
I'd like to point out two things:
1. It's only a proposal - they haven't yet moved to taxing your car based on the number of miles you drive, and they won't for a long time, simply because it would take a long time to get the majority of vehicles on the road ready for such a move;
2. Even if they do, that won't stop gas prices from going up. Increasing demand meeting diminishing (or more expensive to recover) supplies will force prices up anyway.
If you read what I actually wrote, you'd see that I said most people.
There's always going to be some guy whose macho ego is going to be threatened by taking advice from a kid, or who thinks that spending $300.00 on $25 worth of cables somehow compensates for a certain lack elsewhere.
Just like there's a market for red convertible sportscars for 50-year-old men, and Donald Trump can convince himself that going around with a marmotte on his head is a good idea.
I'm not saying that women are immune - but when was the last time a man asked for directions?
Slashdot Mirror
You might want to check the last election results. The BQ got wiped out by the NDP.
Me, obviously!!! :-)
When Nokia made their deal with Microsoft, they basically told the world "Don't buy any of our current phones because we're orphaning them."
Remember, they said that they would be switching ALL their phones to WP7. Would you lock yourself into a long-term contract for an orphan phone?
Microsoft wasn't stupid - they could foresee that Nokia share value would collapse - by next year, they'll be able to buy Nokia outright for a lot less than the money they gave them.
"Coming soon - The Microsoft X-Phone - it works great with your X-Box!"
Windows 95 was internally labelled as Windows 3.95 because too much softwaare broke in testing when they had it report as Windows 4.0. Also keep in mind that it ran atop DOS 7.0, so they didn't "do away" with the numbering system. It's always been there, through 95, 98, ME, XP, NT, W7.
Quebec is a net importer of electricity from Ontario in the winter, when demand is higher (electric heating) and capacity is lower (low reservoir levels - it doesn't rain in the winter - unless you count ice storms).
Also, the history of the James Bay project is instructive - it was supposed to cost under $4 billion, not $16.7 billion. If it hadn't been for the energy crisis, James Bay would have been a white elephant.
So now Charest (Quebec premier) wants to propose an $80 billion northern development? Quebec's economy lags almost every province and state in North America already (hint: it ranks 53rd out of 60 - even Newfies make more money per capita). Tax rates to support this are already the highest in North America (hint #2 - a quebecer making minimum wage pays as much tax to Quebec as an ontarioan making $50k a year pays to Ontario).
The money simply isn't there. The solution is simple: Kick Quebec out of confederation and revert the borders of Quebec to what they were at confederation, well before the Feds gave control of northern Quebec to the province. This ends the $8 billion a year equalization payments fiasco as well. It also ends the problem of politicians sucking up to separatists (like Layton in the last election).
POLL TIME!
[_] This is nothing new. I know someone who has claimed for more than a DECADE that their TV is spying on them. ...
[_] Like men will ever give up control of the remote!
[_] "Excuse me, but why is it every time YOU walk into the room the TV ask if we want to switch to pay-per-view porn?"
[_] I'd rather have a TV that lets me keep an eye on the scum who think that watching me is a good idea.
[_] That scream you heard was all those "In Soviet Russia TV watches YOU" jokes dying.
[_] It doesn't matter - he'll still spend the evening clicking from one channel to the next every commercial.
[_] Just when you thought you couldn't come up with another reason not to watch TV
[_] Duct Tape Lesson # 2,389,042 - Did you know that you can use duct tape to cover the sensors to keep your TV from spying on you?
[_] You know that they'll soon be charging extra for a TV that doesn't watch you.
[_] Mess with them - stick a computer monitor with The Sims having awesome double-back-monkey sex for hours at a time in front of the sensor. Bonus points is you screen "Faces of Death" with the monkey-brain-eating scene instead.
[_] Sue them for "producing and distributing under-age porn" because your under-18 daughter walked in front of the TV while running from the shower to her bedroom.
[_] mumble mumble remote when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
1. It takes at least until version 3 to get (most of) the bugs out.
2. Any version that ends in point-zero is a disaster - wait until the next point release (DOS 4.0, DOS 6.0, Windows 3.0, KDE 4.0)
3. People will now start asking if this means that this will finally be the year of linux on the desktop.
This is an analyst's guess as to what's in the deal between Microsoft and HTC. The timing is very suspicious - it comes a day after investors are calling for Ballmer's head on a pike, specifically because of Microsofts' failures in the mobile phone space.
Who knows - maybe Nokia wasn't the first time Microsoft paid a handset maker a huge chunk of cash to make a deal?
Maybe in return, Microsoft charges HTC less for each WinPhone license - or even pays HTC?
If you believed every convenient rumour from every analyst, your head would already have exploded. This sounds like a very convenient astroturf story to try to take attention away from the Nokiasoft and Skype fiascoes, and Microsoft being passed by IBM in value.
It would be far from the first time that an analyst released a paid opinion (remember - the courts have ruled that they can say pretty much anything they want, without facts to back it up, because they're "just opinions").
It also removes the international flavour (notice the English as opposed to American spelling of flavour vs lavor)?
"Fixing" story submissions is simply neither a reason to further homogenize the net, nor justifiable from a legal standpoint.
I think you're confusing the job of an editor with the task of correcting errors in spelling and grammar, which would be done by a proof-reader, not an editor.
Writers shouldn't require that their editors do proof-reading, instead concentrating on other aspects of what they write, such as relevance to the target market and recommending which parts need to be tightened up, re-arranged, or dropped entirely.
Spell checking and basic grammar are properly the responsibility of the writer. If you can't be bothered to proof-read your own stuff, then maybe you deserve to be haunted by the (grammar|spelling|style) nazis
I used to think the same thing, but not any more. I can see several good reasons for the editors leaving story submissions intact, including leaving in the obvious typos and grammatical faux pas (and since this *is* a story about the legal problems of IP, this post is actually sort of on-topic)
1. The notice at the bottom of every page: "Trademarks property of their respective owners. Comments owned by the poster." Slashdot benefits from a "safe harbor" by not editing comments. The same is true for story submissions.
2. Editing it, even by one word, might change the meaning. "Woman and child" is a lot different than "Woman with child", for example.
When the US and the Russians were going at it head-to-head, one Russian leader said something, and his translator "cleaned it up." The Russian noticed they didn't react as expected ("We disagree" is not the same as "We will f*ck you and sh*t on your grave"), and ordered "Now, tell them EXACTLY what I said."
Words make a difference. Editing them, without getting the original posters' agreement that that is what they actually submitted, can cause problems.
3. If anything, not editing a submission with bad grammar is more a reflection on the submitter than on the editors. If you don't want to look like an ignorant /(bas|f*ck|re|slash)tard/, it's not that hard - after all, you HAVE to hit preview at least once before you can submit a story.
If he's the sole employee of his own contracting company, and he's been working for the startup for a year, then the IRS will challenge his independent contractor status, same as any other contractor who is tied to closely to one employer.
One thing I notice nobody is factoring in - "What is the cost of one bug avoided because the documentation is on a separate screen?"
Not paying for time wasted tracking one bug down before shipping can easily pay for the second monitor.
The cost of a shipped bug? Depending on the bug, the sky's the limit.
A second or third monitor is cheap insurance.
Wait a few years - your eyes will want your stuff to look bigger.
(the last I looked, nobody's getting any younger)
for the doubters, more monitors take some time to get used to. The first day with a26", I was "wow, this is almost tooooo big!". When I bought a second, it was again "this is almost toooo much of a good thing." Now? Both of them + a 17" laptop, and I really would like a 3rd 26".
Screen area is like ram or cpu or hard disk space - every time you upgrade, you figure "Now I have more than I'll ever need ...", and eventually you find more ways to use it, until one day you're thinking "I really could use more".
Plus, with the higher resolution, I often write my constructors and short functions one per line. That's another thing that takes getting used to - your eyes and brain need to learn to accept a different format - but it makes for a lot less vertical scrolling.
Either he or the employer can ask for a determination by filing this form with the IRS.
Depending on his jurisdiction, he may not be a contractor, but an employee, and both him and his boss are looking at substantial tax penalties and fines.
From your current situation, it sounds like the IRS will want a word with you
And no, having a written contract saying you're an independent contractor means next to nothing when compared to the rest of the evidence.
If they set your hours, your workplace, your work environment, pay you weekly instead of by deliverables, there's no specific "the contract is now complete" condition, and it's a key part of the business (and you have indicated yes several of these), you're an employee, not a contractor.
Thanks for replying :-)
The real issue is that to build a high-performance site, you have to have a good understanding of the underlying platform - you can't just "farm it out" because it will influence how you write your code.
However, for just starting up, get a cheapie shared hosting account from a place like iweb for $2 to $6 a month. 600 gigs of storage should be enough for you to start, since you've indicated that your main concern is LARGE amounts of code :-)
... and if or when it grows, move to your own server for under $100 a month. This way, you can do the learning curve thing and experiment at your own pace.
link
"The cloud" is not for you at this point. Not when you can get your own server with 10 TB of bandwidth and 500 gigs of mirrored raid for $89 a month. Or using the option of creating one virtual server spanning 1 or more physical servers (and pooling the bandwidth), you can easily have 20TB, 30TB, etc.
Of course, you can also use Amazon's free tier.
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
Anyone who says "I foresee each step of the way (setting up a domain; SQL-Server, etc) as a slow, risky process" really isn't going to be comfortable even with a managed server - they need to find a partner with at least a bit of experience.
That said, this whole thing sounds like pie-in-the-sky. No, your groupon clone or whatever is not going to get millions of hits a day. Ever.
Maybe 5 years ago, but since then it's become a useless collection of unemployed strangers giving referrals to other unemployed strangers, and a collection of spam posters.
Almost nobody keeps their profile up to date, because the vast majority of its "users" don't even bother to use it any more.
The more I look at everything, the more I've come to realize that society simply optimizes outcomes for the "average" and the mediocre.
Average intelligence, average curiosity, average motivation, average honesty. It's why we see white-collar crooks walk. Why people say they admire whistle-blowers, but won't hire one - because they're not that honest. Why avarice and greed are rewarded - people ARE greedy.
It's easy to get ahead - just drop your ethics, lie, cheat, steal, and believe that you're entitled to the rewards because it's hard work making lying, cheating and stealing look like it's semi-honest, both to yourself, and to the rest of the world.
A. Miguel.
"Xamarin" - because "Ximian" was already taken.
By addressing the RAM side of the equation and not mentioning CPU cycles, you're in essence agreeing with the rule-- by admitting that RAM is more important than CPU cycles, which the rule mentions and you don't.
By suggesting that users can and should upgrade RAM during a computer's life, you give further support to the notion that RAM is more important than CPU cycles, since you don't suggest CPU upgrades.
Absolutely not what I implied in any shape, manner or form, so please don't try to make an argument by lying about what I said. It's not Troll Tuesday yet :-)
Increased cpu benefits everything, from program load speeds to data transfers between the gpu and cpu, etc. Increased ram has fewer benefits - you swap less. Most machines nowadays don't even need swap with their default ram configuration, and you can actually free up more real ram by removing swap (linux, bsd) or making it as small as possible (windows), since it takes real ram to manage virtual memory.
For the "pay for speed, not channels" argument, I pointed out the basic flaw - that neither of them is a valid option if you have a serious bandwidth cap - and a lot of people do. So neither option was any more valid than saying "which do you prefer for breakfast - raw oatmeal or raw pancakes" - while ignoring the need for a stove.
As for maintenance - most cars just don't break down that much any more, at least not in the first 100,000 miles. So while Brand A may be better than Brand B, saving $5000 in maintenance over the life of the vehicle isn't worth spending $10,000 more on fuel. Comparing future costs based on today's fuel prices is silly - over the next 10 years, they're going to do the same as the previous 10 years - they'll triple, partly because of supply and demand, partly because of the weakening dollar.
And no, my example wan't hypothetical - check other users' comments. Even your own example is flawed:
However, when I did out the calculation at the expected cost of fuel plus a reasonable increase, my expected usage, and the expected lifetime of the vehicle, it would be about ten years before the more fuel efficient vehicle would make back it's higher price, and this was longer than I expected to own and operate the vehicle.
You forgot the decrease in resale value because it's less fuel efficient. This is no longer a marginal thing - for months after Katrina, dealers were refusing all SUV trade-ins because they couldn't move them, even at half price.
$10 a gallon gas will be here by 2020, unless there's a global economic collapse, which means the price of gas could be a buck and it wouldn't matter - nobody would have the cash.
Why is compensation for penis size the canonical example?
Nobody specified "penis". Do you have "issues"? :-)
It doesn't take an idiot to not upgrade your own ram. If your time is worth more than a certain amount, it isn't even worth looking up how to do it. It is cheaper to just click the little "Upgrade RAM" button on the HP or Dell website and have them do it for you.
The article was about which choice was better - ram or cpu. Not the same thing at as as what you're talking about, which assumes that you don't have to make such a trade-off - just order whatever you want. Want more ram? Just add it. Want more cpu? Just add it.
A lot of us have to make trade-offs. Others may not have to, but may decide that it's the smarter thing to do anyways. Ram is easily upgradeable, and you can always find a home for your old ram. Cpus are less upgradeable (esp. in laptops, which sell a lot more than desktops). If you have to make a choice, more cpu is simply the smart move at the time of purchase.
"The threat of these gas prices here because legislators will seek to raise gas taxes is actually wrong/misleading in today's world. Here in WA State our legislators are considering MOVING AWAY FROM A GAS TAX to pay for road projects under the belief that hybrid/electric/high-efficiency owners aren't paying their fair share of road taxes if that is ONLY from gas taxes."
I'd like to point out two things:
1. It's only a proposal - they haven't yet moved to taxing your car based on the number of miles you drive, and they won't for a long time, simply because it would take a long time to get the majority of vehicles on the road ready for such a move;
2. Even if they do, that won't stop gas prices from going up. Increasing demand meeting diminishing (or more expensive to recover) supplies will force prices up anyway.
If you read what I actually wrote, you'd see that I said most people.
There's always going to be some guy whose macho ego is going to be threatened by taking advice from a kid, or who thinks that spending $300.00 on $25 worth of cables somehow compensates for a certain lack elsewhere.
Just like there's a market for red convertible sportscars for 50-year-old men, and Donald Trump can convince himself that going around with a marmotte on his head is a good idea.
I'm not saying that women are immune - but when was the last time a man asked for directions?
Occam's Razor - it's the simplest explanation that fits the observable facts.