It's not quite true... Due to inflation, increase in GDP, etc., the debt from N years ago becomes irrelevant, where N isn't all that large.
I am waiting for interest rates to go up--I hope, a LOT, maybe 7% or 15%--before I buy another, larger, much nicer house.
High interest rates are advantageous to consumers. Extremely high interest rates do not affect home values as is commonly stated in economic discussions; home values only move with inflation and other market pressure. Home sale prices change. A $350k house at a very low interest rate for a 30 year mortgage may cost you $400k. If the interest rates suddenly increase over a period of three years, that $350k house will cost you $1.2M. Since most people who would buy these houses cannot afford the $5000/mo payments, there is now a sharp decrease in demand. The home price drops to $100k, and will cost $400k for a 30 year mortgage--again. This is still a $400k home.
So at a low interest rate, your first payment may be 50% interest and 50% principal (at 15 years it may be 30% interest). The truth of this is you start with a balance of $SALE_PRICE and it accrues $INTEREST over 1 month; you make a payment, you subtract $INTEREST, call the rest $PRINCIPAL, and the difference between your loan balance after this payment versus the last is by $PRINCIPAL dollars. There is no such thing as "loan principal" and "loan interest," these are not separate accounts or separate piles of money. If you 'pay extra principal', you pay less interest--commonly people are explained that they pay the loan off faster and so pay less interest, but this is untrue; if you were to pay half the loan in the first 1 year, and then reduce your payments and stretch it out for the remainder of term, you would pay SUBSTANTIALLY less because you are accruing interest on less money.
All of that is less than totally relevant. What is important is that 'principal' and 'interest' are not real things, but rather meta-terms. I will introduce new financial meta-concepts now.
When you make your $300 payment, $250 of the first payment is Interest and $50 is Principal. The second payment is close, maybe $50.02 is Principal. After 10 payments you pay in roughly $500, but the cost is $2500 in Interest--a total of $3000.
Now for a meta-concept. Let's say you pay a first payment of $750. You wind up paying $250 Interest and $500 Principal. Your loan balance is at exactly where it would be after 10 payments costing you $3000, but you only paid $750. Your next payment will be identical to your eleventh--same amount of accrued interest, same ending loan balance.
In essence, you have just made 10 payments. For a normal payment of $Y with $I interest, and an actual payment of $M, you are making $P = ($M - $I) / ($Y - $I) total payments. As it's well known that the earlier payments account for the bulk of interest paid, even a modest increase in early payments made causes a staggering decrease in interest paid. I have an interest rate of 2.875% for a 15 year mortgage and an extra $500 produces a $P of 2.5 for my first payment. The overall effect of this is a 72% decrease in the amount of interest paid. Doing this for just 2.5 years reduces my total interest paid by over 50%.
For comparison, a $150k house at 14% interest over 30 years has a payment of $1777. Total purchase price after 30 years is $640k! An additional $500/mo payment ($2277/mo) produces a $287k total purchase price. A $500 additional payment for 2 years makes purchase $392k (paying about 49% as much interest). Paying an extra $223 ($2000 payments) makes this $358k total to buy. DOUBLING payments (as I did) nets the house in $207k; double payments for two years does it in $250k.
The same effect can be achieved with a large down payment; however this may be infeasible. If your income exceeds your expenses (which it should), you can pay additional into your mortgage; you may not be able to lump down $50k into down payment. If your mort
Now see here you drunkard, go lie in a ditch somewhere. I pay my taxes, the public welfare system takes care of you, wot obligation have I now to give you a dime? Take your sign and your ratty clothes and get off the street side so us drivers who own our cars and houses don't have to lookit yer ugly unwashed mug while we're on our way to our office jobs wot get us our money to pay our taxes so you can collect welfare!
this is one of the biggest misconceptions about how the middle class benefits. of COURSE you benefit, and in one huge way: economic stability.
The biggest misconception ever is recognizing there is a tangible benefit to something and not recognizing the cost versus the size of the benefit. For example: there is a huge benefit to public healthcare, but not to a public comprehensive healthcare system. The cost of public clinical care--treatment for everything from colds and sprains to infections, in-care monitoring post-trauma (heart attack etc), but no major surgery or excessively expensive above-baseline care--is minimal. The benefit is a reduction in the spread of diseases (flu and polio right up to STDs) and a preservation of the viable workforce (consider that an untreated sprain can produce a permanent physical disability). The cost of a comprehensive system is high and the benefit is just feel-good "we need to save more human lives," with complete ignorance of the pain and suffering caused by the economic damage done--nobody wants to live with the knowledge of the child of Omelas.
People understand the rich need to be taxed properly and there needs to be a sort of safety net for the poor, a welfare system. Yes. Unfortunately they want the world--they want welfare to be comfortable, not livable (people get off welfare after years and complain it's terrible and 'not livable' because it's so horrible being on welfare). They need to shut it.
Some folks just won't make it. We need to take a reasonable approach to the problem, not burn the homes of a thousand families to keep one pathetic child warm for a night.
It sounds like the government entitlement programs have destroyed your life. You took out a bunch of money at a very poor ROI. I never did that... went to college on my own dime, granted we cannot escape government money--almost all local colleges have some form of government money pumped into them, that's why in-state tuition costs like a quarter as much as out-of-state--but I didn't take any student loans. Didn't go past Associates degree.
I bought a house I"ll pay off in 3 years. I'll be out of debt within 5 years and comfortably bringing in 7 times more than needed to cover my mandatory expenses. I make around $60k. I am not awesome--oh, I kick all kinds of ass, but I'm continuously faced with people who are vastly more skilled and have better problem solving abilities than I do. I would expect I'm easy enough to replace.
How's it feel knowing you'll spend more money paying off your student loans than I've spent in my life, and yet I live in utter luxury and own a house and really will be out of debt--no mortgage, no rent, blank credit cards, no car loan--by the time I'm 30?
Those food stamps? The government saved you? Sword cuts both ways--look how you got where you are.
I've met people like that. They don't understand tax brackets, and think when you move past $90k you suddenly get taxed 10% more, so the guy making $90k is taking home less. Thing is you get taxed like 30% on $89,99.99 and then 40% on 1 penny. (Hell, you get taxed 20% on the first $30k and 30% on the next $30k and then 40% above $90k, really. Or something like that.)
That's why pre-tax benefits and write-offs are so great for high earners: they're spending the government's money--you make $110k and you divert $20k to 401(k), you pay 30% up to $90k and 40% above $90k? Guess what? You just divert $12k to 401(K) and $8k is government tax money you wouldn't have taken anyway. If you're making $80k and paying 30%, what you take home is $14k less, and you divert $6k of what would have been taxes anyway to your 401(k). Same for Health Savings Accounts, write-offs, charitable donations, the like.
Essentially, the progressive tax system allows rich people to heavily leverage government money. Rich conservatives making $10M/year paying 92% taxes (pre-Reagan number, actually, 92% of anything above $250k) could fund anti-gay organizations. Every $1M they donate to Kill All Faggots would be $80k of their money and $920k of the money they would normally pay to the Government in taxes--so for $80k they can donate almost a million dollars of government money to Kill All Faggots registered not-for-profit charity Inc. instead of letting the Government take it for dirty poor peoples' health care and food stamp entitlements.
Likewise, rich liberals get to divert tons of Government funds to pro-abortion clinics and groups that seek to suppress religion under the guise of "improving Science education in America"--groups that, rather than being comprised of educators as most such groups are, are comprised of American Atheists club members who strangely spend less time complaining that science books are inaccurate and classroom teaching methods suck and instead spend more time arguing that "we need to take the word God off the Pledge of Allegiance because it teaches children to believe in non-scientific superstition!"
All kinds of lobbying can be done, all kinds of organizations can be set up. Hell, rich folk can create the organizations, with the cover they want, with the agenda they want, and then donate money to their own invented charity.
That doesn't invalidate that the people on the bottom are actively trying to play the same game, voting to take all the rich folk money and buy them cadillacs if they could get that as a government amenity.
Actually it's well-known that Chinese written language was a huge mistake. The Chinese created a multi-tens-of-thousands-of-symbol language which, while revolutionary in that it expressed discrete language instead of vague thought (heiroglyphics are ideas, not language), was impossibly complex and difficult to learn. Women were considered too stupid to learn, although in some countries (Japan) where China brought the language, they learned a small subset. In modern times, those learning Chinese writing as Chinese or Kanji learn small amounts over years: Japan standardizes on some 2000 by the end of middle school, and first graders sure as hell can't read fluently in China.
Japan's first response was to decide women were too stupid for this. The immediate response of Japanese women was to extract simple portions of Chinese characters that produce a single syllable and create a much simpler syllabary of around 50 characters--a huge advancement since it can be taught to both the intelligent and the significantly mentally retarded with relative expedience and ease. Korean Hangul is a syllabary that combines parts--a particular pattern indicates a consonant, another indicates a matching vowel, and by lining these up in a grid you can construct the entire Hangul syllabary. The only disadvantage Hangul has relative to Hiragana and Katakana is it is less interesting to write in, for those of us who care about such things (MANY people who practice writing such as calligrahpy and even many who simply learn to write in other languages find Japanese writing to be extremely pleasant, for unknown reasons; I see no technical superiority that should exist outside personal preference).
Japan kept Kanji because it is expensive to learn Kanji, which in old times meant that the rich and powerful could flaunt how rich and cultured they were to know the written art of Kanji. China has syllabaric written language, but they won't use it because Chinese writing is a huge part of their culture and it would negatively impact their self-identity.
The Imperial system is based on highly arbitrary shit. The length of a small, large, and medium nut of a certain tree placed side by side; the stretch from the chin to the end of the arm; the length of the forearm; and so on. Historically these were difficult to standardize; and historically dry and wet volumetric measures were different, as well as varied weight measures depending on the material being weighed. Conversions are mathematically complex--inches to feet to yards to miles, how many inches in a mile? The Metric system relies instead on an arbitrary base which is then expanded upon mathematically, making it a much more ordered system and thus more advanced; its practical impact may be less interesting than the practical impact of Chinese language versus syllabaric and alphabetic.
In principle we call anyone over 18 in Pakistan "militants" and we call folks whose names show up during investigation of a terrorist sect or known terrorist operative "suspected terrorists," and claim victory when they die in drone strikes. Suspect = criminal, adult = enemy combatant. And both sides love the drone strikes, so Fox and CNN both refuse to call out our administration for this bunglefuck shit. They get all angry when "a 14 year old girl" who may in fact be a fucking sociopathic mass-murder craving killer goes on a "death list" because she's young and female and cute, but they don't say a whisper of a word about the blatant manipulative accounting of our government's continuous incidental and intentional murders of plain civilians.
To be clear, most users don't identify which OS/UI is in use, they just want to run the programs they want to run.
Except for Gnome-Shell users, for which the OS actually applies itself in a natural, minimal, and very POWERFUL way. Alt+F2 brings a run dialog. Windows key (Meta) or a top-left tab brings up the Activities view which shows desktops, icons, running applications expanded out, a search menu, and the system status bar. From within the Activities view you can move windows between desktops, run new tasks, search for applications, and view and respond to waiting notifications. Also, you can log out. Outside of that, the UI is basically out of your way. I mean, there's a clock at the top of the screen, and you can bring down the system menu from the top right to log out.
Too bad the alt+tab behavior is task-based instead of window-based. I hate composing an E-mail in thunderbird, hitting Alt+Tab, and it takes me to Chromium on another desktop instead of back to the Thunderbird main window I was just in before opening the New E-Mail window. I don't remember the last actual program I was using; I remember the last window. Fast swapping between two windows is useful. This task logic is not; it just deprecates alt-tab as a method of navigation.
AMD is turning into the chip for Linux this round. Bulldozer has a big, mixed TLB for any size page; while Linux allows you to set automatic defragmentation and consolidation of RAM to make transparent huge pages. This means instead of reading a bunch of TLB entries for 4KiB pages and yanking 32MB of RAiM just to read 1GiB of RAM and having a 64 entry TLB that has to constantly rotate out cache because you're all over the place, Linux will automatically take 2MiB or 4MiB (or on some platforms a very wide range, 2MiB 4MiB 8MiB 16MiB) of VMA and clear out a 2MB aligned contiguous physical RAM space, move the VMA mappings there, and then map those as one big page. Upon swapping or freeing or whatnot, Linux will remap the whole thing as a bunch of smaller pages--on multi-size archs (i.e. where you have not just 4MiB huge pages, but also 2MiB and 8MiB and such), it'll break them down into smaller huge pages; anything that doesn't work out that way, it'll break into 4096 byte pages.
64KiB instead of 32MiB of data to read to access those pages; and there's as low as 256 entries instead of 4096 entries, so even if you're all over the place it's a lot less TLB faulting and a much higher chance of finding the same entry in cache. Redhat's worst case benchmark was an 8% speed gain using automatic transparent huge page.
Intel added support for 1GB huge pages, but didn't add a mixed TLB that takes an entry for any size page. AMD's TLB on Bulldozer (this is entirely internal and its structure is not known by the OS) marks down the page size; Intel has a separate TLB to handle a few huge pages, and you can only use one size.
Why? If these companies start trying to give a pork injection of evil, Linus and Andy will just reject their submissions and maintain the code themselves.
People saw Windows 8 and went, "Holy shit, computers have jumped the shark, I guess the fad is over" and bought an iPhone. Meanwhile the Galaxy S3 and Nexus 4 are kicking the iPhone 5's ass, but fads don't work on merit.
Where have you seen a quad-core 1.9GHz ARM running Linux on SSD to cold-start LibreOffice Writer? That's a Tegra 3 with 2GB RAM, unfortunately not enough for today's RAM-heavy desktops but I think a straight boot into Unity or Gnome-Shell leaves 2/3 of that free to immediately load LOW. I bet it would start in 5 seconds off SSD.
it'll take you a month to learn to touch type. Do it with QWERTY first, just because that's what everything uses. After a year, come back and spend a month learning to touch-type Dvorak. I do 72wpm on QWERTY and 125 on Dvorak.
To buy that thing, one has to order it via Amazon - and fact is that, even today, not many people know how to order stuffs from Amazon.
Actually, if you look, the machines are low-spec machines for $350-$500. These are dual-core Celerons with 4GB RAM and a 16GB SSD. The Chromebox particularly, a $450, 16GB SSD, 4GB RAM, Celeron 2x1.9GHz, no peripherals, compares to a $550 home-built box on a $150 Shuttle with a $200 Intel Core i5 2405S at 4x3.2GHz, $100 128GB SSD drive, and $100 16GB RAM. That is to say, it's a piece of junk worth about $100, sold for what you'd pay for a machine that can touch the specs of some servers from the last five years (hell, at those specs, I could run a dozen servers in VMWare on it for a large enterprise network--Exchange excluded, but a large Web server hosting hundreds of sites sure).
Well thank you Mr. Engineer. Can you think of one that isn't insanely complex, still allows rapid reloading, and will hold up to explosions happening inside of it??
They're not even useful for anything. Slow typing and everything is handled on my phone just as well, except maybe playing Go... except Godroid does that fine. Kindle is better for reading, because eInk display rocks; though I've read books on my phone too, with the Kindle app.
Back with Microsoft Transcriber/Calligrapher, handwriting recognition was ridiculously accurate... then Samsung made a concerted effort to get rid of the stylus because "consumers hate the stylus" (biggest mistake ever), and now they're pushing the Note with a new breed of stylus. Still, their little stunt crippled the development of handwriting recognition software--apparently everything out there is now crap, nobody likes it, and the Note isn't very popular, and is the only thing with a stylus-alike anyway. There's no competent office suites like Pocket Office (where is my LibreOffice.android?), I guess for chicken-and-egg between no physical keyboard and no good handwriting recognition anymore which has been encouraged because there's no real reason to have a physical keyboard since you won't type much at all.
Tablets don't easily fit in your pocket. If they do fit in your pocket, the screen is tiny--your cell phone already does that. Tablets have to be lugged under one arm to operate if they're fairly large and weighty, or somehow manipulated in the fingers by a death grip "it only weighs 11 ounces!" on your wrist. Like an oversized cell phone, the damn things are useless without some kind of wireless network connectivity. Except maybe for playing portable Solitaire, which you could do on your fucking phone.
The most popular tablet is the iPad, precisely because it's shiny. Android phones have caught on like crazy, but non-Apple tablets haven't. Why? Because people who aren't Apple-philes aren't generally drooling over the shiny, shiny new Android tablets to feed their Androphilia. A lot of us are standing around going, "These are awesome but I have no use for one." I hear this story a lot. A lot of "I GOT AN IPAD!!!" versus "I want a Nexus 7 but I don't have a use for it" or "The Asus Transformer is awesome but I have a laptop that does more."
Ubiquitous and cheap like high-end Turtle Audio sound cards.
Apple will fold, LiveScribe pens will never catch on, those flexible phone things will finally be dismissed as bullshit, tablets will again vanish because they're stupid.
The thinking that "GUN = SCARY KILLING DEVICE" is the other half of the problem. It's what makes people jump to try to ban guns, or implement massive control, or panic at the idea that someone might have a gun, and thus leave society weak and unarmed. Then we have police that can't get there in 3 seconds.
Stop trying to add attributes to tools. A gun is a weapon. A weapon is a tool. Like any tool, it is both ineffective and dangerous if not handled, treated, maintained, used, and stored properly. You can injure yourself with a pneumatic drill. You can kill yourself inflating a tire. Your car is a lethal machine. Before you buy a gun, determine what realistic purpose it has for you, and how you are going to maintain it and your skill. Are you going to carry it for the purpose of defending yourself and others from criminals? Are you going to keep it in your house for the purpose of home defense? Is it a hunting implement? Have you taken the appropriate safety (firearms, hunting) and handling (defense, hunting, general marksmanship) courses? Do you have time and money to continue to train your marksmanship and maintain your weapon?
Have you seen the injuries that can result from a slipping gear in a pneumatic frame nailer, or from an idiot using it without any clue what he's doing?
No, a semi-automatic weapon is an automatic weapon. There is also fully-automatic. Depending on who you ask (different regulatory boards, manufacturers, the military, in different countries), the definition floats around a bit--in America the standard term for "automatic" specifically requires that gas from firing the rifle eject the bullet, and largely that it also reload the chamber and fire again. Of course in America we legally term these "Machine Guns" as well, as a separate term--"machine gun" means "Fully Automatic". Weird.
Some countries in Europe term semi-autos as "automatic". A bolt-action shotgun is not automatic, but repeating. A double-action revolver is both repeating and (semi)-automatic. An Uzi is fully-automatic. Depending on who you ask, in what agency, and in what country, someone will tell you a revolver is automatic. Depending on who you ask, someone will tell you a fully-auto pistol would be vastly inferior to a semi-auto.
And those aren't uninformed stereotypes, those are real events. This is how teenagers get shot with guns. They shoot each other or their parents are morons. Brother Brittypants was unclear as to how anyone manages to "accidentally" get shot--the answer is by being morons. People who handle guns properly do not accidentally shoot themselves unless someone's dog bites them in the ass while they're reloading; that only leaves the stupid, of which America is full.
Plenty of the stupid buy guns "for defense" and don't bother to learn to use them. It happens. I don't know why. My parents got guns without going through any kind of training course to use them--dad was military, mom has never handled a gun in her life but now owns two Rugers registered in her name with zero training. She wanted them so she can defend herself against home intruders. I have watched both these morons point them around the house with their fingers right on the triggers, not realizing bullets will go through interior walls and egress windows, claiming they're not loaded so it's okay to wave them around like that. Developing terrible habits.
The last time I picked up a gun, I got yelled at because it was loaded and it was a real pistol... I was trying to elevate it from its position on the end of a table, about 3 feet away from direct reach of an 11 year old who thought guns were awesome and liked to point empty (real, by the way--his parents gave him real, unloaded firearms as toys) guns at people and pull the trigger and make pew-pew sounds while they went click click click.
These are the people that you find around "accidental shootings." This is how they happen.
Accidental deaths occur in the US because people are morons. We have teenagers who find their dad's gun and wave it around trying to look cool, with their finger on the trigger. Never point a gun at something you don't intend to shoot; keep your finger off the trigger until you intend to fire (resting it next to the trigger, not contacting, allows you to fire nearly as fast but prevents a twitch or bump from tugging your finger on the trigger). Waving your gun around at people with your finger on the trigger puts a lot of momentum in a heavy chunk of metal, which eventually leads to that heavy chunk slipping slightly, possibly toward your finger as your hand changes direction (see: waving the gun around), causing the trigger to pull, putting a bullet in your mate's head.
There's the "Hey watch this" crowd who don't know how shit works. Load a magazine, pull the slide to cock the gun, so totally cool I got my dad's gun huh? Drop the clip out so it's now unloaded, put the gun in your mouth, pull the trigger, die. See, when you cock the gun, a bolt or a door moves out of the way and a spring in the magazine pushes the stack of bullets upwards. This leaves a vacated cavity in which a bullet moves into, which is then closed. Now you drop the clip, the bullet remains in the chamber, and you shoot yourself.
Find a gun, assume it's not loaded, point it at your friend and pull the trigger. Because you didn't load it, so it must not be loaded. Guns aren't supposed to be kept unloaded because they can accidentally fire (that's impossible with i.e. a Glock, which has the hammer half-cocked so it can't detonate a bullet's primer, plus a bar in the way of the hammer, plus a retracted firing pin, plus a door between the hammer and the cartridge, all of which shifts out of the way and into place when you pull the trigger); they're supposed to be kept unloaded because morons find your gun and assume it's not loaded.
People load a gun, cock it, and then stick it in their pocket or in their belt or something instead of an appropriate holster. Juggling it around that way eventually sets it off.
People fail to realize that almost every firearm they're likely to find in the US is both automatic and repeating. They pull the trigger. It fires. They don't remember cocking it. Somebody gets shot.
Americans are bigger pussies than Brits, and will get a gun just before some event--say the husband is going away for a two day trip, or they just moved to a black neighborhood and they're white. Yes this is how Americans think--black people mean crime, I get that lecture from my dumb parents every time I move to a black neighborhood. Someone comes home late at night, people freak out, grab the gun, go investigating, and shoot their kid who came home at 1 in the morning because he didn't turn the lights on and had a baseball cap so they couldn't see his face. Seriously, just 'cause someone's in your house and you can't identify them, that's terrifying to an American, so we shoot them. And you thought the British would stop their tough-guy talk and wet themselves the second they sense danger, huh? Americans fire off every round in the gun while screaming and crying, then continue to scream and cry and talk about how scared they are.
Guns don't kill people. Murderers and idiots kill people. A gun does not pick itself up, make a dorky face, shout "hey watch this!", and then point itself at the nearest person's head and pull its own trigger. Everyone wants an SUV because they know they'll hit about 50 cars, bicycles, and telephone poles a year and they want some kind of tank to protect them. Naturally, we kill each other here quite regularly by driving vehicles at 80mph past elementary schools while kids are trying to cross the streets. That's when we're not trying to impress our friends by drinking Purell Hand Sanitizer, eating broken glass, swallowing marbles, trying to ingest more drugs in one sitting than the next guy (I TOLD U I WUZ HARDCORE), burning our arms with car cigarette lighters,setting our pants on fire trying to ignite our farts, and whatever the hell else we can come up with.
No, "character growth" in games is related to stat growth. I think it's derived from Dungeons and Dragons, where "character" is defined as a set of numbers used as variables in mathematical equations, and thus "growth" normally happens from collected experience altering--typically, increasing--these values.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not quite true... Due to inflation, increase in GDP, etc., the debt from N years ago becomes irrelevant, where N isn't all that large.
I am waiting for interest rates to go up--I hope, a LOT, maybe 7% or 15%--before I buy another, larger, much nicer house.
High interest rates are advantageous to consumers. Extremely high interest rates do not affect home values as is commonly stated in economic discussions; home values only move with inflation and other market pressure. Home sale prices change. A $350k house at a very low interest rate for a 30 year mortgage may cost you $400k. If the interest rates suddenly increase over a period of three years, that $350k house will cost you $1.2M. Since most people who would buy these houses cannot afford the $5000/mo payments, there is now a sharp decrease in demand. The home price drops to $100k, and will cost $400k for a 30 year mortgage--again. This is still a $400k home.
So at a low interest rate, your first payment may be 50% interest and 50% principal (at 15 years it may be 30% interest). The truth of this is you start with a balance of $SALE_PRICE and it accrues $INTEREST over 1 month; you make a payment, you subtract $INTEREST, call the rest $PRINCIPAL, and the difference between your loan balance after this payment versus the last is by $PRINCIPAL dollars. There is no such thing as "loan principal" and "loan interest," these are not separate accounts or separate piles of money. If you 'pay extra principal', you pay less interest--commonly people are explained that they pay the loan off faster and so pay less interest, but this is untrue; if you were to pay half the loan in the first 1 year, and then reduce your payments and stretch it out for the remainder of term, you would pay SUBSTANTIALLY less because you are accruing interest on less money.
All of that is less than totally relevant. What is important is that 'principal' and 'interest' are not real things, but rather meta-terms. I will introduce new financial meta-concepts now.
When you make your $300 payment, $250 of the first payment is Interest and $50 is Principal. The second payment is close, maybe $50.02 is Principal. After 10 payments you pay in roughly $500, but the cost is $2500 in Interest--a total of $3000.
Now for a meta-concept. Let's say you pay a first payment of $750. You wind up paying $250 Interest and $500 Principal. Your loan balance is at exactly where it would be after 10 payments costing you $3000, but you only paid $750. Your next payment will be identical to your eleventh--same amount of accrued interest, same ending loan balance.
In essence, you have just made 10 payments. For a normal payment of $Y with $I interest, and an actual payment of $M, you are making $P = ($M - $I) / ($Y - $I) total payments. As it's well known that the earlier payments account for the bulk of interest paid, even a modest increase in early payments made causes a staggering decrease in interest paid. I have an interest rate of 2.875% for a 15 year mortgage and an extra $500 produces a $P of 2.5 for my first payment. The overall effect of this is a 72% decrease in the amount of interest paid. Doing this for just 2.5 years reduces my total interest paid by over 50%.
For comparison, a $150k house at 14% interest over 30 years has a payment of $1777. Total purchase price after 30 years is $640k! An additional $500/mo payment ($2277/mo) produces a $287k total purchase price. A $500 additional payment for 2 years makes purchase $392k (paying about 49% as much interest). Paying an extra $223 ($2000 payments) makes this $358k total to buy. DOUBLING payments (as I did) nets the house in $207k; double payments for two years does it in $250k.
The same effect can be achieved with a large down payment; however this may be infeasible. If your income exceeds your expenses (which it should), you can pay additional into your mortgage; you may not be able to lump down $50k into down payment. If your mort
Now see here you drunkard, go lie in a ditch somewhere. I pay my taxes, the public welfare system takes care of you, wot obligation have I now to give you a dime? Take your sign and your ratty clothes and get off the street side so us drivers who own our cars and houses don't have to lookit yer ugly unwashed mug while we're on our way to our office jobs wot get us our money to pay our taxes so you can collect welfare!
this is one of the biggest misconceptions about how the middle class benefits. of COURSE you benefit, and in one huge way: economic stability.
The biggest misconception ever is recognizing there is a tangible benefit to something and not recognizing the cost versus the size of the benefit. For example: there is a huge benefit to public healthcare, but not to a public comprehensive healthcare system. The cost of public clinical care--treatment for everything from colds and sprains to infections, in-care monitoring post-trauma (heart attack etc), but no major surgery or excessively expensive above-baseline care--is minimal. The benefit is a reduction in the spread of diseases (flu and polio right up to STDs) and a preservation of the viable workforce (consider that an untreated sprain can produce a permanent physical disability). The cost of a comprehensive system is high and the benefit is just feel-good "we need to save more human lives," with complete ignorance of the pain and suffering caused by the economic damage done--nobody wants to live with the knowledge of the child of Omelas.
People understand the rich need to be taxed properly and there needs to be a sort of safety net for the poor, a welfare system. Yes. Unfortunately they want the world--they want welfare to be comfortable, not livable (people get off welfare after years and complain it's terrible and 'not livable' because it's so horrible being on welfare). They need to shut it.
Some folks just won't make it. We need to take a reasonable approach to the problem, not burn the homes of a thousand families to keep one pathetic child warm for a night.
It sounds like the government entitlement programs have destroyed your life. You took out a bunch of money at a very poor ROI. I never did that... went to college on my own dime, granted we cannot escape government money--almost all local colleges have some form of government money pumped into them, that's why in-state tuition costs like a quarter as much as out-of-state--but I didn't take any student loans. Didn't go past Associates degree.
I bought a house I"ll pay off in 3 years. I'll be out of debt within 5 years and comfortably bringing in 7 times more than needed to cover my mandatory expenses. I make around $60k. I am not awesome--oh, I kick all kinds of ass, but I'm continuously faced with people who are vastly more skilled and have better problem solving abilities than I do. I would expect I'm easy enough to replace.
How's it feel knowing you'll spend more money paying off your student loans than I've spent in my life, and yet I live in utter luxury and own a house and really will be out of debt--no mortgage, no rent, blank credit cards, no car loan--by the time I'm 30?
Those food stamps? The government saved you? Sword cuts both ways--look how you got where you are.
I've met people like that. They don't understand tax brackets, and think when you move past $90k you suddenly get taxed 10% more, so the guy making $90k is taking home less. Thing is you get taxed like 30% on $89,99.99 and then 40% on 1 penny. (Hell, you get taxed 20% on the first $30k and 30% on the next $30k and then 40% above $90k, really. Or something like that.)
That's why pre-tax benefits and write-offs are so great for high earners: they're spending the government's money--you make $110k and you divert $20k to 401(k), you pay 30% up to $90k and 40% above $90k? Guess what? You just divert $12k to 401(K) and $8k is government tax money you wouldn't have taken anyway. If you're making $80k and paying 30%, what you take home is $14k less, and you divert $6k of what would have been taxes anyway to your 401(k). Same for Health Savings Accounts, write-offs, charitable donations, the like.
Essentially, the progressive tax system allows rich people to heavily leverage government money. Rich conservatives making $10M/year paying 92% taxes (pre-Reagan number, actually, 92% of anything above $250k) could fund anti-gay organizations. Every $1M they donate to Kill All Faggots would be $80k of their money and $920k of the money they would normally pay to the Government in taxes--so for $80k they can donate almost a million dollars of government money to Kill All Faggots registered not-for-profit charity Inc. instead of letting the Government take it for dirty poor peoples' health care and food stamp entitlements.
Likewise, rich liberals get to divert tons of Government funds to pro-abortion clinics and groups that seek to suppress religion under the guise of "improving Science education in America"--groups that, rather than being comprised of educators as most such groups are, are comprised of American Atheists club members who strangely spend less time complaining that science books are inaccurate and classroom teaching methods suck and instead spend more time arguing that "we need to take the word God off the Pledge of Allegiance because it teaches children to believe in non-scientific superstition!"
All kinds of lobbying can be done, all kinds of organizations can be set up. Hell, rich folk can create the organizations, with the cover they want, with the agenda they want, and then donate money to their own invented charity.
You can't win.
That doesn't invalidate that the people on the bottom are actively trying to play the same game, voting to take all the rich folk money and buy them cadillacs if they could get that as a government amenity.
Actually it's well-known that Chinese written language was a huge mistake. The Chinese created a multi-tens-of-thousands-of-symbol language which, while revolutionary in that it expressed discrete language instead of vague thought (heiroglyphics are ideas, not language), was impossibly complex and difficult to learn. Women were considered too stupid to learn, although in some countries (Japan) where China brought the language, they learned a small subset. In modern times, those learning Chinese writing as Chinese or Kanji learn small amounts over years: Japan standardizes on some 2000 by the end of middle school, and first graders sure as hell can't read fluently in China.
Japan's first response was to decide women were too stupid for this. The immediate response of Japanese women was to extract simple portions of Chinese characters that produce a single syllable and create a much simpler syllabary of around 50 characters--a huge advancement since it can be taught to both the intelligent and the significantly mentally retarded with relative expedience and ease. Korean Hangul is a syllabary that combines parts--a particular pattern indicates a consonant, another indicates a matching vowel, and by lining these up in a grid you can construct the entire Hangul syllabary. The only disadvantage Hangul has relative to Hiragana and Katakana is it is less interesting to write in, for those of us who care about such things (MANY people who practice writing such as calligrahpy and even many who simply learn to write in other languages find Japanese writing to be extremely pleasant, for unknown reasons; I see no technical superiority that should exist outside personal preference).
Japan kept Kanji because it is expensive to learn Kanji, which in old times meant that the rich and powerful could flaunt how rich and cultured they were to know the written art of Kanji. China has syllabaric written language, but they won't use it because Chinese writing is a huge part of their culture and it would negatively impact their self-identity.
The Imperial system is based on highly arbitrary shit. The length of a small, large, and medium nut of a certain tree placed side by side; the stretch from the chin to the end of the arm; the length of the forearm; and so on. Historically these were difficult to standardize; and historically dry and wet volumetric measures were different, as well as varied weight measures depending on the material being weighed. Conversions are mathematically complex--inches to feet to yards to miles, how many inches in a mile? The Metric system relies instead on an arbitrary base which is then expanded upon mathematically, making it a much more ordered system and thus more advanced; its practical impact may be less interesting than the practical impact of Chinese language versus syllabaric and alphabetic.
In principle we call anyone over 18 in Pakistan "militants" and we call folks whose names show up during investigation of a terrorist sect or known terrorist operative "suspected terrorists," and claim victory when they die in drone strikes. Suspect = criminal, adult = enemy combatant. And both sides love the drone strikes, so Fox and CNN both refuse to call out our administration for this bunglefuck shit. They get all angry when "a 14 year old girl" who may in fact be a fucking sociopathic mass-murder craving killer goes on a "death list" because she's young and female and cute, but they don't say a whisper of a word about the blatant manipulative accounting of our government's continuous incidental and intentional murders of plain civilians.
To be clear, most users don't identify which OS/UI is in use, they just want to run the programs they want to run.
Except for Gnome-Shell users, for which the OS actually applies itself in a natural, minimal, and very POWERFUL way. Alt+F2 brings a run dialog. Windows key (Meta) or a top-left tab brings up the Activities view which shows desktops, icons, running applications expanded out, a search menu, and the system status bar. From within the Activities view you can move windows between desktops, run new tasks, search for applications, and view and respond to waiting notifications. Also, you can log out. Outside of that, the UI is basically out of your way. I mean, there's a clock at the top of the screen, and you can bring down the system menu from the top right to log out.
Too bad the alt+tab behavior is task-based instead of window-based. I hate composing an E-mail in thunderbird, hitting Alt+Tab, and it takes me to Chromium on another desktop instead of back to the Thunderbird main window I was just in before opening the New E-Mail window. I don't remember the last actual program I was using; I remember the last window. Fast swapping between two windows is useful. This task logic is not; it just deprecates alt-tab as a method of navigation.
AMD is turning into the chip for Linux this round. Bulldozer has a big, mixed TLB for any size page; while Linux allows you to set automatic defragmentation and consolidation of RAM to make transparent huge pages. This means instead of reading a bunch of TLB entries for 4KiB pages and yanking 32MB of RAiM just to read 1GiB of RAM and having a 64 entry TLB that has to constantly rotate out cache because you're all over the place, Linux will automatically take 2MiB or 4MiB (or on some platforms a very wide range, 2MiB 4MiB 8MiB 16MiB) of VMA and clear out a 2MB aligned contiguous physical RAM space, move the VMA mappings there, and then map those as one big page. Upon swapping or freeing or whatnot, Linux will remap the whole thing as a bunch of smaller pages--on multi-size archs (i.e. where you have not just 4MiB huge pages, but also 2MiB and 8MiB and such), it'll break them down into smaller huge pages; anything that doesn't work out that way, it'll break into 4096 byte pages.
64KiB instead of 32MiB of data to read to access those pages; and there's as low as 256 entries instead of 4096 entries, so even if you're all over the place it's a lot less TLB faulting and a much higher chance of finding the same entry in cache. Redhat's worst case benchmark was an 8% speed gain using automatic transparent huge page.
Intel added support for 1GB huge pages, but didn't add a mixed TLB that takes an entry for any size page. AMD's TLB on Bulldozer (this is entirely internal and its structure is not known by the OS) marks down the page size; Intel has a separate TLB to handle a few huge pages, and you can only use one size.
Why? If these companies start trying to give a pork injection of evil, Linus and Andy will just reject their submissions and maintain the code themselves.
People saw Windows 8 and went, "Holy shit, computers have jumped the shark, I guess the fad is over" and bought an iPhone. Meanwhile the Galaxy S3 and Nexus 4 are kicking the iPhone 5's ass, but fads don't work on merit.
Where have you seen a quad-core 1.9GHz ARM running Linux on SSD to cold-start LibreOffice Writer? That's a Tegra 3 with 2GB RAM, unfortunately not enough for today's RAM-heavy desktops but I think a straight boot into Unity or Gnome-Shell leaves 2/3 of that free to immediately load LOW. I bet it would start in 5 seconds off SSD.
Ah, Finland, the country that had to be rescued from starvation by Portugal.
it'll take you a month to learn to touch type. Do it with QWERTY first, just because that's what everything uses. After a year, come back and spend a month learning to touch-type Dvorak. I do 72wpm on QWERTY and 125 on Dvorak.
To buy that thing, one has to order it via Amazon - and fact is that, even today, not many people know how to order stuffs from Amazon.
Actually, if you look, the machines are low-spec machines for $350-$500. These are dual-core Celerons with 4GB RAM and a 16GB SSD. The Chromebox particularly, a $450, 16GB SSD, 4GB RAM, Celeron 2x1.9GHz, no peripherals, compares to a $550 home-built box on a $150 Shuttle with a $200 Intel Core i5 2405S at 4x3.2GHz, $100 128GB SSD drive, and $100 16GB RAM. That is to say, it's a piece of junk worth about $100, sold for what you'd pay for a machine that can touch the specs of some servers from the last five years (hell, at those specs, I could run a dozen servers in VMWare on it for a large enterprise network--Exchange excluded, but a large Web server hosting hundreds of sites sure).
Well thank you Mr. Engineer. Can you think of one that isn't insanely complex, still allows rapid reloading, and will hold up to explosions happening inside of it??
They're not even useful for anything. Slow typing and everything is handled on my phone just as well, except maybe playing Go... except Godroid does that fine. Kindle is better for reading, because eInk display rocks; though I've read books on my phone too, with the Kindle app.
Back with Microsoft Transcriber/Calligrapher, handwriting recognition was ridiculously accurate... then Samsung made a concerted effort to get rid of the stylus because "consumers hate the stylus" (biggest mistake ever), and now they're pushing the Note with a new breed of stylus. Still, their little stunt crippled the development of handwriting recognition software--apparently everything out there is now crap, nobody likes it, and the Note isn't very popular, and is the only thing with a stylus-alike anyway. There's no competent office suites like Pocket Office (where is my LibreOffice.android?), I guess for chicken-and-egg between no physical keyboard and no good handwriting recognition anymore which has been encouraged because there's no real reason to have a physical keyboard since you won't type much at all.
Tablets don't easily fit in your pocket. If they do fit in your pocket, the screen is tiny--your cell phone already does that. Tablets have to be lugged under one arm to operate if they're fairly large and weighty, or somehow manipulated in the fingers by a death grip "it only weighs 11 ounces!" on your wrist. Like an oversized cell phone, the damn things are useless without some kind of wireless network connectivity. Except maybe for playing portable Solitaire, which you could do on your fucking phone.
The most popular tablet is the iPad, precisely because it's shiny. Android phones have caught on like crazy, but non-Apple tablets haven't. Why? Because people who aren't Apple-philes aren't generally drooling over the shiny, shiny new Android tablets to feed their Androphilia. A lot of us are standing around going, "These are awesome but I have no use for one." I hear this story a lot. A lot of "I GOT AN IPAD!!!" versus "I want a Nexus 7 but I don't have a use for it" or "The Asus Transformer is awesome but I have a laptop that does more."
Ubiquitous and cheap like high-end Turtle Audio sound cards.
Apple will fold, LiveScribe pens will never catch on, those flexible phone things will finally be dismissed as bullshit, tablets will again vanish because they're stupid.
The thinking that "GUN = SCARY KILLING DEVICE" is the other half of the problem. It's what makes people jump to try to ban guns, or implement massive control, or panic at the idea that someone might have a gun, and thus leave society weak and unarmed. Then we have police that can't get there in 3 seconds.
Stop trying to add attributes to tools. A gun is a weapon. A weapon is a tool. Like any tool, it is both ineffective and dangerous if not handled, treated, maintained, used, and stored properly. You can injure yourself with a pneumatic drill. You can kill yourself inflating a tire. Your car is a lethal machine. Before you buy a gun, determine what realistic purpose it has for you, and how you are going to maintain it and your skill. Are you going to carry it for the purpose of defending yourself and others from criminals? Are you going to keep it in your house for the purpose of home defense? Is it a hunting implement? Have you taken the appropriate safety (firearms, hunting) and handling (defense, hunting, general marksmanship) courses? Do you have time and money to continue to train your marksmanship and maintain your weapon?
Have you seen the injuries that can result from a slipping gear in a pneumatic frame nailer, or from an idiot using it without any clue what he's doing?
No, a semi-automatic weapon is an automatic weapon. There is also fully-automatic. Depending on who you ask (different regulatory boards, manufacturers, the military, in different countries), the definition floats around a bit--in America the standard term for "automatic" specifically requires that gas from firing the rifle eject the bullet, and largely that it also reload the chamber and fire again. Of course in America we legally term these "Machine Guns" as well, as a separate term--"machine gun" means "Fully Automatic". Weird.
Some countries in Europe term semi-autos as "automatic". A bolt-action shotgun is not automatic, but repeating. A double-action revolver is both repeating and (semi)-automatic. An Uzi is fully-automatic. Depending on who you ask, in what agency, and in what country, someone will tell you a revolver is automatic. Depending on who you ask, someone will tell you a fully-auto pistol would be vastly inferior to a semi-auto.
And those aren't uninformed stereotypes, those are real events. This is how teenagers get shot with guns. They shoot each other or their parents are morons. Brother Brittypants was unclear as to how anyone manages to "accidentally" get shot--the answer is by being morons. People who handle guns properly do not accidentally shoot themselves unless someone's dog bites them in the ass while they're reloading; that only leaves the stupid, of which America is full.
Plenty of the stupid buy guns "for defense" and don't bother to learn to use them. It happens. I don't know why. My parents got guns without going through any kind of training course to use them--dad was military, mom has never handled a gun in her life but now owns two Rugers registered in her name with zero training. She wanted them so she can defend herself against home intruders. I have watched both these morons point them around the house with their fingers right on the triggers, not realizing bullets will go through interior walls and egress windows, claiming they're not loaded so it's okay to wave them around like that. Developing terrible habits.
The last time I picked up a gun, I got yelled at because it was loaded and it was a real pistol... I was trying to elevate it from its position on the end of a table, about 3 feet away from direct reach of an 11 year old who thought guns were awesome and liked to point empty (real, by the way--his parents gave him real, unloaded firearms as toys) guns at people and pull the trigger and make pew-pew sounds while they went click click click.
These are the people that you find around "accidental shootings." This is how they happen.
Accidental deaths occur in the US because people are morons. We have teenagers who find their dad's gun and wave it around trying to look cool, with their finger on the trigger. Never point a gun at something you don't intend to shoot; keep your finger off the trigger until you intend to fire (resting it next to the trigger, not contacting, allows you to fire nearly as fast but prevents a twitch or bump from tugging your finger on the trigger). Waving your gun around at people with your finger on the trigger puts a lot of momentum in a heavy chunk of metal, which eventually leads to that heavy chunk slipping slightly, possibly toward your finger as your hand changes direction (see: waving the gun around), causing the trigger to pull, putting a bullet in your mate's head.
There's the "Hey watch this" crowd who don't know how shit works. Load a magazine, pull the slide to cock the gun, so totally cool I got my dad's gun huh? Drop the clip out so it's now unloaded, put the gun in your mouth, pull the trigger, die. See, when you cock the gun, a bolt or a door moves out of the way and a spring in the magazine pushes the stack of bullets upwards. This leaves a vacated cavity in which a bullet moves into, which is then closed. Now you drop the clip, the bullet remains in the chamber, and you shoot yourself.
Find a gun, assume it's not loaded, point it at your friend and pull the trigger. Because you didn't load it, so it must not be loaded. Guns aren't supposed to be kept unloaded because they can accidentally fire (that's impossible with i.e. a Glock, which has the hammer half-cocked so it can't detonate a bullet's primer, plus a bar in the way of the hammer, plus a retracted firing pin, plus a door between the hammer and the cartridge, all of which shifts out of the way and into place when you pull the trigger); they're supposed to be kept unloaded because morons find your gun and assume it's not loaded.
People load a gun, cock it, and then stick it in their pocket or in their belt or something instead of an appropriate holster. Juggling it around that way eventually sets it off.
People fail to realize that almost every firearm they're likely to find in the US is both automatic and repeating. They pull the trigger. It fires. They don't remember cocking it. Somebody gets shot.
Americans are bigger pussies than Brits, and will get a gun just before some event--say the husband is going away for a two day trip, or they just moved to a black neighborhood and they're white. Yes this is how Americans think--black people mean crime, I get that lecture from my dumb parents every time I move to a black neighborhood. Someone comes home late at night, people freak out, grab the gun, go investigating, and shoot their kid who came home at 1 in the morning because he didn't turn the lights on and had a baseball cap so they couldn't see his face. Seriously, just 'cause someone's in your house and you can't identify them, that's terrifying to an American, so we shoot them. And you thought the British would stop their tough-guy talk and wet themselves the second they sense danger, huh? Americans fire off every round in the gun while screaming and crying, then continue to scream and cry and talk about how scared they are.
Guns don't kill people. Murderers and idiots kill people. A gun does not pick itself up, make a dorky face, shout "hey watch this!", and then point itself at the nearest person's head and pull its own trigger. Everyone wants an SUV because they know they'll hit about 50 cars, bicycles, and telephone poles a year and they want some kind of tank to protect them. Naturally, we kill each other here quite regularly by driving vehicles at 80mph past elementary schools while kids are trying to cross the streets. That's when we're not trying to impress our friends by drinking Purell Hand Sanitizer, eating broken glass, swallowing marbles, trying to ingest more drugs in one sitting than the next guy (I TOLD U I WUZ HARDCORE), burning our arms with car cigarette lighters,setting our pants on fire trying to ignite our farts, and whatever the hell else we can come up with.
So, any revolver?
No, "character growth" in games is related to stat growth. I think it's derived from Dungeons and Dragons, where "character" is defined as a set of numbers used as variables in mathematical equations, and thus "growth" normally happens from collected experience altering--typically, increasing--these values.
Yes, extra hearts, new weapons, defense, attack, the like.