This is actually the problem with the bad train infrastructures in the USA.
France has approximately 31,939 km, or 19,845 miles, of track. The USA has approximately 233,000 miles of track, or over twenty times the track that France has. But the USA is only about 17.7 times the volume of France.
The problem isn't that we haven't put effort into the rail system, the problem is that the continental US is so much larger than France. France is 543,965 sq kilometers; the USA is 9,629,091 square kilometers, or about 17.7 times the volume. By both rail-km and rail-volume, we actually have more track than France.
It just isn't enough -- nine million square kilometers is a huge area to serve, and it is area that developed at a rate that was different than the rate rail expanded. In addition, France's population density is hugely higher than the USA; you have 60 million people, about 110 per sq-km, while we have 300 million, about 31 per sq km (and actually, because we have very high density coasts, that number is way too high for the US interior and way too low for the coasts.)
France and the USA present two entirely different rail problems, and the same strategies can't be used to solve both. It's not practical to set up a rail grid that serves the USA in an equally distributed way -- it wouldn't save money, or fuel - it would lose money and waste fuel.
We would benefit a great deal by moving to dual-track on many routes (the US hiline is one good example... many trains sit and wait for hours in sidings because there is only one track in many locations) and of course, with all that area, hi-speed rail would be lovely - but again, with 17x the area to serve, the amount of funding we're talking about is simply staggering.
As a martial artist of many decades, I have learned to read Chinese. Both traditional characters and the nasty simplified ones. So I'm well aware of up side - the power, and even beauty, of high-speed recognition from a large symbol set.
But writing Chinese through a keyboard or a GUI has many cautionary lessons for us here that transfer directly to the idea of a many-symbol programming language. Take Python, for instance. A beautiful language in almost every way; visually well structured, minimalist in its core tools, yet so well thought out that it is almost unlimited in what can be done with it.
If you were, say, to create a symbol for each Python grammar atom, you'd soon have a symbol set equal to or surpassing that required for college in China... thousands of them. This takes your average Chinese person many years to learn, by the way -- and it's non-technical.
Now, assuming you've learned these in the first place, and stipulating that somehow, you've made them as beautiful and intuitive as the language itself, how do you select these symbols when programming? Therein lies the rub, and as no one yet has come up with a good answer for Chinese, I suspect the idea desert is just as dry for Python, or any other language one might like to turn into a concise symbolic tool.
Now, speech has very fast mapping (although you get into context a lot... for instance "ma" can mean quite a few different things) to Chinese symbols, and so one could reasonably assume that it could also have reasonably fast mapping to my hypothetical Python symbols, but speech recognition isn't ready for this yet; and a programmer speaking "Pythonese" into a microphone isn't going to be a very good cube-mate, either.
In the meantime, I'm quite convinced that ASCII is an excellent character set for programming, and that UNICODE belongs inside quotes for use in input and output parsing, no more, no less.
APL suffered from all of this. You needed a special keyboard, or a GUI or other mechanism to input the "simple" symbol. You had to learn the symbolic mapping. It really represents a huge extra load in aim of simplification. All of which is completely unnecessary if you simply use ASCII. And frankly... the time it takes me to type sin(x) is going to beat your mapped keyboard input time until you've been doing it for 50 years. In which time I will have leveraged my ASCII toolkit into innumerable languages, and your APL toolkit is still only enabling you to work in APL.
My point is that it *is* intuitive, and not due to any sort of education or actual understanding of the science.
...and my point was what I said: "People are *really* a lot better drivers when they can bring a realistic understanding of traction, inertia, kinetic energy and so forth to the driver's seat."
Realistic... Intuitive... as opposed to Realistic... Intellectual... you hear me now?
You either take the physics on the road with you, or you suck at driving, and there will be a whole raft of situations you have zero idea how to deal with. Because driving, among other things, consists of managing physics.
Having said that, everyone -- and I do mean everyone -- who drives would be better off if they had an ordered intellectual understanding of the relevant physics, because from this, plus driving, the intuitive understanding is likely to arise much faster.
You're less likely to try and take that on-ramp at speed in the rain; you're less likely to leave your seat belt off; you're less likely to let your tires wear excessively, or drive in ways that are only compatible with good tires if you have; you're less likely to prang your car while attempting to amuse the local neanderthals; you're less likely to get your arm broken by a suddenly inflating airbag; you're less likely to try stupid tricks like nose wheelies (at least until manufacturers radically change the builds of the front ends of sport motorcycles, anyway); you're less likely to set your fuel container on fire when you go to fill it; and so on.
This should be driven home by the sheer number of top class drivers/riders who are well and truly entrenched in their sports long before they learn anything meaningful about Physics.
You and I radically disagree on the definition of the term "meaningful."
The very idea of zipping along a track without that understanding burned in at the most intuitive level is amusing to me. I see nothing but flames and flying car parts. And people parts.
And then we could talk about how your average driver proceeds in the rain, as compared to racers, who can usually quote you chapter and verse on their specific tire tread, sidewall height, current front suspension setup, why they're carrying that setup, tire wear state, inflation pressure, etc., (as can I), and serve up an even longer lecture about what happens in the middle of the lane as opposed to the portion the tires normally track in. New street motorcyclists often learn this the (very) hard way.
NASCAR.... you made me spit coffee.:) Stop that. Bloody keyboards get really annoying when that happens.
You know, this was tried. It was called APL. It sucked, and I mean, like the environment outside the ISS.
We like our set of alphanumerics because it's easy to recognize, easy to compound into much more complex entities that are *also* easy to recognize, and it leverages an entire lifetime of familiarity with text.
So please. Go away. Go away yelling about glyphs, or go away quietly, but just... go away.
then paying rent for 20 years while you save up to pay cash for a home (assuming that you can ever save enough) could cost you more than the interest on a loan.
Rent? 20 years? WTF?
If you *plan* this, you'll be either paying no rent (parents, siblings, aunts, uncles are the obvious first-level support mechanism here (and obviously you should support them right back... learn to plumb, do electrical work, light contracting, etc.), 11...13 years worth, maybe less (or even a LOT less if you invest), (not 20!) for the 100k example... plus often they'll help financially if you show you're being responsible and they can afford it), or sharing your rent with like-minded roomies.
Also, if you're *in* the house, you'll be paying taxes (and probably a lot of them if its a 100k home on (at least) a normal lot), as well as upkeep and any improvements, as well as house insurance, buying lawn mowers, etc. Being in the house, while relieving you from paying rent, exposes you to quite a raft of other expenses, some of them quite substantial and many of them unanticipated. By the time you budget out for them, the difference between those costs and rent will narrow at an amazing rate.
No... instead, when you're ready to buy, you get right in there, you have NO mortgage payment, no risk of losing the home to the lender and almost none to the taxman, and you have the funds in pocket to deal with whatever comes up. You can also sell it at any time, and *all* of the equity goes right to you - whatever the market will bear. You can insure, or not, as you choose; because the lender is unable to tell you how to handle your affairs. Likewise, your taxes won't be taken in escrow, and as a side bonus, to the bank, instead of "that guy with the big home loan", first you're "that guy with a crapload of relative liquidity, and after that you're "that guy with 100% equity in his home." which, if you're smart, you'll leverage into getting them to hand you a higher interest rate on your money. And soon you'll be "that guy with a crapload of cash. Again. And all before your original 15-year loan would have been up.
No, I'm afraid there is no "get a loan" scenario that can beat simply saving money at approximately the payment rate, if you simply use your wits.
I will grant you that there are many ways to do it wrong, and many people seem to specialize in finding them, but if you do it right... you win, and the lenders never have a chance to get a chunk of you.
Lemme point out a simple number. We've been talking about putting away under a grand a month. That's $12,000 a year. As an IT guy, I'm just going to go ahead and assume that's less than 1/3 of your income. 1/3 would mean you were making 36k. There aren't too many IT folks making less than 36k on here, I hope. And if so, I'm sorry, really. But let's say that you make 36k. You save 12k. That leaves you with 24k a year to live on. Twenty-four thousand dollars.
Would you seriously take the position that you could not live on $24k? I'm not saying it'd be lovely and you'd eat crab every evening, I'm just asking you: Could you live on 24k, about $2000/month, for a decade? While enjoying the knowledge that your WORTH is zipping up towards $100,000.00?
Of course, that's assuming you're not a couple and have multiple incomes... then you should be able to save a LOT more and so the term should be a LOT shorter unless you make the choice of spawning early, and in that case... well. [hollow laughter.]
It *also* assumes you don't light up and work two jobs for a decade, while you're young and full of piss and vinegar. If you can put away $12,000 from your normal job, and another $10,000 from your burger-flipping 2nd job... you'll have your home very quickly indeed. And if you're a couple, and you *both* work two jobs... yeah, you get the idea. Should take about three years.
Another reason to do this when young is because not only are you probably in possession of mo
A 6% 15-year loan is a LOT cheaper than a 6.5% 30-year loan that you pay off in 15 years.
Whoosh! No matter what the term of your loan is, if you pay it off at the coupon rate, you're shooting yourself in the foot. Even getting a little ahead, early on, saves huge amounts of money later when the excess in the payment is applied to the principal. Try a few sample calculations and you'll see.
Looky here: 100k for 30 years at 6.5%; you pay 227,544.49 via monthly payments of $632.07; the lender gets $127,544.49 extra out of your ass because you "want it now."
But if you pay $100 extra a month ($732.07) - skip the DirectTV and the Starbucks, perhaps - you will come out $45,000.00 ahead, and the loan payments will end 9 years earlier.
If you can get your $100,000 at 6% for 15 years, you pay $151,894.23 via monthly payments of $843.86; the lender gets $51,894 extra because you want it now.
But if you pay $100 extra a month ($943.86) you will come out $9,115 ahead, and the loan payments will end 2 years, 4 mo. earlier.
So clearly, the higher your loan, the more that $100 per month will mean to you in the end. And of course, if you can bolster it with $1000 or $2500 here and there (instead of that flat screen TV or the down payment on that new car - and paid into the loan as early as possible) you'll save HUGE amounts more.
Also, people are a darned sight better off if they save their money until they have enough and then simply buy the house, cutting the lenders out entirely. In the above 30 year example, it is possible to avoid paying $127,544.49; putting away the exact same amount ($632.07) means you'll have your $100,000 in 13.x years - faster than your 15 year loan and $50,000 cheaper. If you can do it without starbucks and DirecTV ($732.07), you'll have your $100000 in 11.x years and still $50,000.00 cheaper.
Furthermore, if the individual saves their money and invests it (thus becoming a lender, rather than a borrower), they'll be even better off.
Mortgages are just like credit cards. The lenders dangle the "you can have it now" hook, and people will snap at that bait without ever thinking it through. It's the consumer mentality "gotta have it" destroying the "you'd be better off if you created, and followed, a plan that led to early financial security" fact.
And yes, I bought my home for cash; and yes, I'm far ahead of most people financially. What I didn't do was accept the idea that I "needed" to own a home when I didn't actually have the money. That's just bogus social conditioning that can be thrown off in any number of creative ways. Interest is only your friend if you are the lender. Otherwise, it is the single most corrosive financial technique in anyone's arsenal, barring the actual social conditioning that gets people suckered into paying it.
Probability would be great, but trig... it actually is very useful, day to day. I use it in estimating both map and real-world distance (also handy shortcuts like the diagonal of a square is sqrt(2) or 1.414... of a side); playing pool; all over the place in software design; and I use trig and algebra constantly in electrical engineering. Knowing that reflections are generally acos(theta) informs many things I do, from playing the aforementioned pool table to my appreciation of the ripples in a lake -- or generating them in a ray tracer. The thing is, I didn't know I was going to be doing those things until well after the best time in my life had passed to learn them.
Holy crap, if someone doesn't know what the effect of compound interest is, that's like not understanding that sharp objects can hurt you. Please take my money mr. moneylender.
Yes, but that's exactly the situation. That's why there are so many credit card users and mortgaged-to-the-hilt home"owners" in the US; because people really don't understand compound interest. Anyone who does and has even a lick of sense will never let a lender get into that kind of position over them... it's just a highly accelerated way to transfer your money to the already-rich.
You know how many people run a credit card up to the limit and then pay the minimum? Most of them. And that is a recipe for financial destruction. Which the banks are happy to cook up for anyone they can entice into the deal with access to a shiny new whatever.
Likewise, you know how many people get a mortgage and then pay only the suggested payment? Most of them. And how many about shit themselves when they find out they have very little equity when the payment book has half the coupons gone? Again, most of them.
It's basic math, and in this society (in the US, I mean), understanding these things before you get in trouble is usually one key difference between the haves and the have-nots.
If you'd made me choose at that age, I'd never have kept going in math. I *failed* Algebra I in eighth grade.
Yes, exactly. In my high school classes, the math teacher was going on about math (I presume) and I was thinking about tits and legs and what my band was going to practice that night.
A couple years later, I spent an entire summer studying math with a tutor, electronics (strictly because I was interested... and let me tell you, the missing math made itself felt, hence the tutor) and I really enjoyed myself. Which is not to say I didn't enjoy myself in math class -- I did. I just wasn't learning math.
Personally, I've always felt that schooling would be better off with basic schooling first, then a five (or so) year break from age 15 to 20 while your hormones rage, and then back to school until about 25. Of course, if you were so inclined, you could spend that five year break studying anything you liked, and certainly some would do that... but generally speaking, those years would be well spent, I think, outdoors, dating, and socializing - perhaps even working.
Teaching math isn't about teaching a specific skill that everyone will use, it's about teaching how to approach problems quantitatively.
It's even more than that. Without math, your ability to understand physics is compromised; and without physics basic and very practical things like your driving skills are going to suffer. People are *really* a lot better drivers when they can bring a realistic understanding of traction, inertia, kinetic energy and so forth to the driver's seat. But that's not all. Polls completely bewilder and mislead their readers without basic statistics; lotteries rob the probability-impaired (hence the joke, "lotteries are a tax for the math-impaired); people who don't have a good, intuitive understanding of what thousand, million, billion and trillion mean relative to each other are inherently incapable of forming useful opinions on federal budget issues (and consequently, are likely to vote in a random, haphazard manner more driven by crap like fox news than sense); it even leads to poor military strategy, an excellent example of which can presently be found in the Iraq war.
The pachyderm in the parlor, however, is the fact that if you take an IQ 100 person (or lower) and try to teach them math beyond the basics, you're not often going to get very far. People aren't born equal in capacity, and we can't fix that by applying more pressure to their foreheads, which is about what forced math classes do.
It's that whole thing about teaching pigs to dance. It wastes your time, and it annoys the pig.
Although if people understood probability, the lotteries would crash; and if people understood statistics the entire polling industry would crash. Both are based in the ignorance of the public, and offer very little (or negative) intrinsic value.
Yahoo bowed out of the game because they simply didn't have the money to compete anymore.
That's not really what happened at all. They shot themselves in the foot.
Yahoo should have stuck with their tree of reviewed, classed, verified sites. When they were actually putting some effort into it, it was extremely useful. Then they started with months long delays before sites would get listed (if they got listed), then they started charging for listings... it's entirely their own fault that they turned a golden goose, where tons of people would come to look for things, into a worthless, out of date pile of noise. And then they tried to replace it with search - which isn't the same thing at all, and doesn't provide the same utility unless used in an expert manner.
First, Google rates sites by "popularity", that is, the number of links to them. Unfortunately, this means the same kind of "rating" that has given us reality TV - popularity has never been much of a measure for anything but the mediocre, gossipy, and easily digested. The very algorithm that Google uses pushes the most worthwhile sites to the back pages, if indeed they show up at all.
Second, Google's recent push to require fast response in order to be high ranked again skews the results, this time towards deep pockets and away from the smaller websites, which indirectly (but dependably) silences minority views, esoteric subject matter, and the "little fellow's" blogs, etc.
Google's algorithms cannot actually evaluate content. Now, a searcher can get around this to some extent by clever / directed use of the extended search facilities, but this, too, tends to isolate high quality results to the subset of searchers that know how to, for want of a better phrase, "look deeply", and that certainly doesn't include your average Google client, who is unaware that a great deal of the Internet's deeper and more worthwhile content is being hidden from them.
We can point the finger at the average searcher's habit of only considering the first few results, or the first page, but it is not the searcher's fault that page is built with a mediocre bias. That responsibility is Google's.
you could also just buy the 3G iPad which requires no contract and lets you go month to month buying service if you like.
You mean, YOU can. I have a 3G/GPS iPad, and the 3G feature is useless, because ATT doesn't serve this area. Verizon does, but I have to tell you, at the rates they're charging for so little data with their widget (which I'd have no trouble slapping into our car), I'll stick to wifi anyway. Heck, even our McDonald's has free wifi, I just drive into the parking lot and I'm on, and with their blessings. Likewise a bunch of other places, and in front of my house where my network is locked down, but of course I can use it.
The phone companies are milking this 3G thing for far more than I value it, and as long as that goes on, it won't cost me a penny. What amazes me is that it seems like a lot of phone customers are putting up with it.
It just means charging it from other batteries. No mystery or difficulty here. Batteries are required anyway to load balance and hold demand to reasonable levels.
Yes, but if the home charging system has storage - and it will - then you only need enough svc to feed it that energy in 24 hours, and even that assumes you drive 300 miles a day. So this whole "omg house svc" thing is a strawman.
I'll take option C... wait for Apple to do the right thing. In the meantime, I have other apps that aren't emulations, and which enjoy large audiences. I'm very much convinced that the app store is the place to be. The 6809 emulation is more of a personal thing than a serious attempt to make money. Although you might be surprised at how many I've sold over the years, and to whom.:)
apple, I dont even know why developers deal with their bullshit.
Let me enlighten you, then.
Huge market
Really nice hardware
Device consistency is high
Beautiful display
Decent development tools
Great apps to entice new users
Users tend to be willing to spend
Distribution is Apple's task
I just get checks
Apple's future, and so iPads, looks very bright
I'm not in it for "control"
I'm in it to enjoy myself
It's not really any one factor there, it's the combination that I find compelling.
To be honest, I'm not even sure I really understand your objection. Control... you know, the moment an app ends up in someone else's hands -- in any market -- in many ways, you've lost control of it. As the lady says, perhaps the best approach here is relax and enjoy the inevitable. Yes... beat me with checks... bury me in money.. expose my app to a wide audience... now, do it again, only this time, wear the monkey suit!
I appreciate the suggestion, but I'm not really interested in the Blackberry. Apple's flaws aside (and they have plenty), the iPad audience is a far more interesting target for me, both because I'm one of those (I take my iPad everywhere as it is stuffed with software of considerable use to me, particularly in the areas of astrophotography and auroral activity), because of the display size, and because the app store has demonstrated that as a sales tool, it's easily top of the heap.
If Android makes any inroads on pad devices - IOW large displays - I might take a look at that. While it is amusing to have a tiny terminal display, it isn't particularly practical. In fact, if your eyes are as old and cranky as mine, it isn't practical at all.
no Stella for iPad unless/until Apple comes to their senses wrt 'emulated code'.
Yeah, I think they've kind of missed the target here... painting with too broad a brush. They should have said "no Flash" because that's what they're trying to prevent, really. It's a very "Jobsian" shooting of one's own foot -- trying to pretend there's a broad merit here that Flash simply "falls into", when anyone with half a brain can see that's not the case.
They might (stretching it) have legitimate concerns about applications that allow access to the device hardware, but again, the answer is to forbid that, not emulation in general.
Heck, I've written an artificial life app that evolves its own genes-as-code and then "runs" them on a per-creature basis... since those genes are specialized code and are executed by a supervisor, I'm sure this is forbidden under Apple's no-emulation restriction as well, and again, there's just no sense or benefit to it.
You're already building an incredibly niche product
That's true enough, but I'm not sure that the rest follows. The way it seems to me, is that with a small percentage interested, the largest market possible will see the most interest. I don't see jailbreakers as likely old salts, either; I'm definitely one of the latter, and I have absolutely no interest in the former. Definitive sample of one, y'know.:)
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France has approximately 31,939 km, or 19,845 miles, of track. The USA has approximately 233,000 miles of track, or over twenty times the track that France has. But the USA is only about 17.7 times the volume of France.
The problem isn't that we haven't put effort into the rail system, the problem is that the continental US is so much larger than France. France is 543,965 sq kilometers; the USA is 9,629,091 square kilometers, or about 17.7 times the volume. By both rail-km and rail-volume, we actually have more track than France.
It just isn't enough -- nine million square kilometers is a huge area to serve, and it is area that developed at a rate that was different than the rate rail expanded. In addition, France's population density is hugely higher than the USA; you have 60 million people, about 110 per sq-km, while we have 300 million, about 31 per sq km (and actually, because we have very high density coasts, that number is way too high for the US interior and way too low for the coasts.)
France and the USA present two entirely different rail problems, and the same strategies can't be used to solve both. It's not practical to set up a rail grid that serves the USA in an equally distributed way -- it wouldn't save money, or fuel - it would lose money and waste fuel.
We would benefit a great deal by moving to dual-track on many routes (the US hiline is one good example... many trains sit and wait for hours in sidings because there is only one track in many locations) and of course, with all that area, hi-speed rail would be lovely - but again, with 17x the area to serve, the amount of funding we're talking about is simply staggering.
As a martial artist of many decades, I have learned to read Chinese. Both traditional characters and the nasty simplified ones. So I'm well aware of up side - the power, and even beauty, of high-speed recognition from a large symbol set.
But writing Chinese through a keyboard or a GUI has many cautionary lessons for us here that transfer directly to the idea of a many-symbol programming language. Take Python, for instance. A beautiful language in almost every way; visually well structured, minimalist in its core tools, yet so well thought out that it is almost unlimited in what can be done with it.
If you were, say, to create a symbol for each Python grammar atom, you'd soon have a symbol set equal to or surpassing that required for college in China... thousands of them. This takes your average Chinese person many years to learn, by the way -- and it's non-technical.
Now, assuming you've learned these in the first place, and stipulating that somehow, you've made them as beautiful and intuitive as the language itself, how do you select these symbols when programming? Therein lies the rub, and as no one yet has come up with a good answer for Chinese, I suspect the idea desert is just as dry for Python, or any other language one might like to turn into a concise symbolic tool.
Now, speech has very fast mapping (although you get into context a lot... for instance "ma" can mean quite a few different things) to Chinese symbols, and so one could reasonably assume that it could also have reasonably fast mapping to my hypothetical Python symbols, but speech recognition isn't ready for this yet; and a programmer speaking "Pythonese" into a microphone isn't going to be a very good cube-mate, either.
In the meantime, I'm quite convinced that ASCII is an excellent character set for programming, and that UNICODE belongs inside quotes for use in input and output parsing, no more, no less.
APL suffered from all of this. You needed a special keyboard, or a GUI or other mechanism to input the "simple" symbol. You had to learn the symbolic mapping. It really represents a huge extra load in aim of simplification. All of which is completely unnecessary if you simply use ASCII. And frankly... the time it takes me to type sin(x) is going to beat your mapped keyboard input time until you've been doing it for 50 years. In which time I will have leveraged my ASCII toolkit into innumerable languages, and your APL toolkit is still only enabling you to work in APL.
So like I said... ASCII.
Realistic... Intuitive... as opposed to Realistic... Intellectual... you hear me now?
You either take the physics on the road with you, or you suck at driving, and there will be a whole raft of situations you have zero idea how to deal with. Because driving, among other things, consists of managing physics.
Having said that, everyone -- and I do mean everyone -- who drives would be better off if they had an ordered intellectual understanding of the relevant physics, because from this, plus driving, the intuitive understanding is likely to arise much faster.
You're less likely to try and take that on-ramp at speed in the rain; you're less likely to leave your seat belt off; you're less likely to let your tires wear excessively, or drive in ways that are only compatible with good tires if you have; you're less likely to prang your car while attempting to amuse the local neanderthals; you're less likely to get your arm broken by a suddenly inflating airbag; you're less likely to try stupid tricks like nose wheelies (at least until manufacturers radically change the builds of the front ends of sport motorcycles, anyway); you're less likely to set your fuel container on fire when you go to fill it; and so on.
You and I radically disagree on the definition of the term "meaningful."
The very idea of zipping along a track without that understanding burned in at the most intuitive level is amusing to me. I see nothing but flames and flying car parts. And people parts.
And then we could talk about how your average driver proceeds in the rain, as compared to racers, who can usually quote you chapter and verse on their specific tire tread, sidewall height, current front suspension setup, why they're carrying that setup, tire wear state, inflation pressure, etc., (as can I), and serve up an even longer lecture about what happens in the middle of the lane as opposed to the portion the tires normally track in. New street motorcyclists often learn this the (very) hard way.
NASCAR.... you made me spit coffee. :) Stop that. Bloody keyboards get really annoying when that happens.
You know, this was tried. It was called APL. It sucked, and I mean, like the environment outside the ISS.
We like our set of alphanumerics because it's easy to recognize, easy to compound into much more complex entities that are *also* easy to recognize, and it leverages an entire lifetime of familiarity with text.
So please. Go away. Go away yelling about glyphs, or go away quietly, but just... go away.
Rent? 20 years? WTF?
If you *plan* this, you'll be either paying no rent (parents, siblings, aunts, uncles are the obvious first-level support mechanism here (and obviously you should support them right back... learn to plumb, do electrical work, light contracting, etc.), 11...13 years worth, maybe less (or even a LOT less if you invest), (not 20!) for the 100k example... plus often they'll help financially if you show you're being responsible and they can afford it), or sharing your rent with like-minded roomies.
Also, if you're *in* the house, you'll be paying taxes (and probably a lot of them if its a 100k home on (at least) a normal lot), as well as upkeep and any improvements, as well as house insurance, buying lawn mowers, etc. Being in the house, while relieving you from paying rent, exposes you to quite a raft of other expenses, some of them quite substantial and many of them unanticipated. By the time you budget out for them, the difference between those costs and rent will narrow at an amazing rate.
No... instead, when you're ready to buy, you get right in there, you have NO mortgage payment, no risk of losing the home to the lender and almost none to the taxman, and you have the funds in pocket to deal with whatever comes up. You can also sell it at any time, and *all* of the equity goes right to you - whatever the market will bear. You can insure, or not, as you choose; because the lender is unable to tell you how to handle your affairs. Likewise, your taxes won't be taken in escrow, and as a side bonus, to the bank, instead of "that guy with the big home loan", first you're "that guy with a crapload of relative liquidity, and after that you're "that guy with 100% equity in his home." which, if you're smart, you'll leverage into getting them to hand you a higher interest rate on your money. And soon you'll be "that guy with a crapload of cash. Again. And all before your original 15-year loan would have been up.
No, I'm afraid there is no "get a loan" scenario that can beat simply saving money at approximately the payment rate, if you simply use your wits.
I will grant you that there are many ways to do it wrong, and many people seem to specialize in finding them, but if you do it right... you win, and the lenders never have a chance to get a chunk of you.
Lemme point out a simple number. We've been talking about putting away under a grand a month. That's $12,000 a year. As an IT guy, I'm just going to go ahead and assume that's less than 1/3 of your income. 1/3 would mean you were making 36k. There aren't too many IT folks making less than 36k on here, I hope. And if so, I'm sorry, really. But let's say that you make 36k. You save 12k. That leaves you with 24k a year to live on. Twenty-four thousand dollars.
Would you seriously take the position that you could not live on $24k? I'm not saying it'd be lovely and you'd eat crab every evening, I'm just asking you: Could you live on 24k, about $2000/month, for a decade? While enjoying the knowledge that your WORTH is zipping up towards $100,000.00?
Of course, that's assuming you're not a couple and have multiple incomes... then you should be able to save a LOT more and so the term should be a LOT shorter unless you make the choice of spawning early, and in that case... well. [hollow laughter.]
It *also* assumes you don't light up and work two jobs for a decade, while you're young and full of piss and vinegar. If you can put away $12,000 from your normal job, and another $10,000 from your burger-flipping 2nd job... you'll have your home very quickly indeed. And if you're a couple, and you *both* work two jobs... yeah, you get the idea. Should take about three years.
Another reason to do this when young is because not only are you probably in possession of mo
Whoosh! No matter what the term of your loan is, if you pay it off at the coupon rate, you're shooting yourself in the foot. Even getting a little ahead, early on, saves huge amounts of money later when the excess in the payment is applied to the principal. Try a few sample calculations and you'll see.
Looky here: 100k for 30 years at 6.5%; you pay 227,544.49 via monthly payments of $632.07; the lender gets $127,544.49 extra out of your ass because you "want it now."
But if you pay $100 extra a month ($732.07) - skip the DirectTV and the Starbucks, perhaps - you will come out $45,000.00 ahead, and the loan payments will end 9 years earlier.
If you can get your $100,000 at 6% for 15 years, you pay $151,894.23 via monthly payments of $843.86; the lender gets $51,894 extra because you want it now.
But if you pay $100 extra a month ($943.86) you will come out $9,115 ahead, and the loan payments will end 2 years, 4 mo. earlier.
So clearly, the higher your loan, the more that $100 per month will mean to you in the end. And of course, if you can bolster it with $1000 or $2500 here and there (instead of that flat screen TV or the down payment on that new car - and paid into the loan as early as possible) you'll save HUGE amounts more.
Also, people are a darned sight better off if they save their money until they have enough and then simply buy the house, cutting the lenders out entirely. In the above 30 year example, it is possible to avoid paying $127,544.49; putting away the exact same amount ($632.07) means you'll have your $100,000 in 13.x years - faster than your 15 year loan and $50,000 cheaper. If you can do it without starbucks and DirecTV ($732.07), you'll have your $100000 in 11.x years and still $50,000.00 cheaper.
Furthermore, if the individual saves their money and invests it (thus becoming a lender, rather than a borrower), they'll be even better off.
Mortgages are just like credit cards. The lenders dangle the "you can have it now" hook, and people will snap at that bait without ever thinking it through. It's the consumer mentality "gotta have it" destroying the "you'd be better off if you created, and followed, a plan that led to early financial security" fact.
And yes, I bought my home for cash; and yes, I'm far ahead of most people financially. What I didn't do was accept the idea that I "needed" to own a home when I didn't actually have the money. That's just bogus social conditioning that can be thrown off in any number of creative ways. Interest is only your friend if you are the lender. Otherwise, it is the single most corrosive financial technique in anyone's arsenal, barring the actual social conditioning that gets people suckered into paying it.
Probability would be great, but trig... it actually is very useful, day to day. I use it in estimating both map and real-world distance (also handy shortcuts like the diagonal of a square is sqrt(2) or 1.414... of a side); playing pool; all over the place in software design; and I use trig and algebra constantly in electrical engineering. Knowing that reflections are generally acos(theta) informs many things I do, from playing the aforementioned pool table to my appreciation of the ripples in a lake -- or generating them in a ray tracer. The thing is, I didn't know I was going to be doing those things until well after the best time in my life had passed to learn them.
Nor, perhaps, where you are? Compulsory.
Yes, but that's exactly the situation. That's why there are so many credit card users and mortgaged-to-the-hilt home"owners" in the US; because people really don't understand compound interest. Anyone who does and has even a lick of sense will never let a lender get into that kind of position over them... it's just a highly accelerated way to transfer your money to the already-rich.
You know how many people run a credit card up to the limit and then pay the minimum? Most of them. And that is a recipe for financial destruction. Which the banks are happy to cook up for anyone they can entice into the deal with access to a shiny new whatever.
Likewise, you know how many people get a mortgage and then pay only the suggested payment? Most of them. And how many about shit themselves when they find out they have very little equity when the payment book has half the coupons gone? Again, most of them.
It's basic math, and in this society (in the US, I mean), understanding these things before you get in trouble is usually one key difference between the haves and the have-nots.
Yes, exactly. In my high school classes, the math teacher was going on about math (I presume) and I was thinking about tits and legs and what my band was going to practice that night.
A couple years later, I spent an entire summer studying math with a tutor, electronics (strictly because I was interested... and let me tell you, the missing math made itself felt, hence the tutor) and I really enjoyed myself. Which is not to say I didn't enjoy myself in math class -- I did. I just wasn't learning math.
Personally, I've always felt that schooling would be better off with basic schooling first, then a five (or so) year break from age 15 to 20 while your hormones rage, and then back to school until about 25. Of course, if you were so inclined, you could spend that five year break studying anything you liked, and certainly some would do that... but generally speaking, those years would be well spent, I think, outdoors, dating, and socializing - perhaps even working.
It's even more than that. Without math, your ability to understand physics is compromised; and without physics basic and very practical things like your driving skills are going to suffer. People are *really* a lot better drivers when they can bring a realistic understanding of traction, inertia, kinetic energy and so forth to the driver's seat. But that's not all. Polls completely bewilder and mislead their readers without basic statistics; lotteries rob the probability-impaired (hence the joke, "lotteries are a tax for the math-impaired); people who don't have a good, intuitive understanding of what thousand, million, billion and trillion mean relative to each other are inherently incapable of forming useful opinions on federal budget issues (and consequently, are likely to vote in a random, haphazard manner more driven by crap like fox news than sense); it even leads to poor military strategy, an excellent example of which can presently be found in the Iraq war.
The pachyderm in the parlor, however, is the fact that if you take an IQ 100 person (or lower) and try to teach them math beyond the basics, you're not often going to get very far. People aren't born equal in capacity, and we can't fix that by applying more pressure to their foreheads, which is about what forced math classes do.
It's that whole thing about teaching pigs to dance. It wastes your time, and it annoys the pig.
Probability and statistics would be nice.
Although if people understood probability, the lotteries would crash; and if people understood statistics the entire polling industry would crash. Both are based in the ignorance of the public, and offer very little (or negative) intrinsic value.
That's not really what happened at all. They shot themselves in the foot.
Yahoo should have stuck with their tree of reviewed, classed, verified sites. When they were actually putting some effort into it, it was extremely useful. Then they started with months long delays before sites would get listed (if they got listed), then they started charging for listings... it's entirely their own fault that they turned a golden goose, where tons of people would come to look for things, into a worthless, out of date pile of noise. And then they tried to replace it with search - which isn't the same thing at all, and doesn't provide the same utility unless used in an expert manner.
First, Google rates sites by "popularity", that is, the number of links to them. Unfortunately, this means the same kind of "rating" that has given us reality TV - popularity has never been much of a measure for anything but the mediocre, gossipy, and easily digested. The very algorithm that Google uses pushes the most worthwhile sites to the back pages, if indeed they show up at all.
Second, Google's recent push to require fast response in order to be high ranked again skews the results, this time towards deep pockets and away from the smaller websites, which indirectly (but dependably) silences minority views, esoteric subject matter, and the "little fellow's" blogs, etc.
Google's algorithms cannot actually evaluate content. Now, a searcher can get around this to some extent by clever / directed use of the extended search facilities, but this, too, tends to isolate high quality results to the subset of searchers that know how to, for want of a better phrase, "look deeply", and that certainly doesn't include your average Google client, who is unaware that a great deal of the Internet's deeper and more worthwhile content is being hidden from them.
We can point the finger at the average searcher's habit of only considering the first few results, or the first page, but it is not the searcher's fault that page is built with a mediocre bias. That responsibility is Google's.
You mean, YOU can. I have a 3G/GPS iPad, and the 3G feature is useless, because ATT doesn't serve this area. Verizon does, but I have to tell you, at the rates they're charging for so little data with their widget (which I'd have no trouble slapping into our car), I'll stick to wifi anyway. Heck, even our McDonald's has free wifi, I just drive into the parking lot and I'm on, and with their blessings. Likewise a bunch of other places, and in front of my house where my network is locked down, but of course I can use it.
The phone companies are milking this 3G thing for far more than I value it, and as long as that goes on, it won't cost me a penny. What amazes me is that it seems like a lot of phone customers are putting up with it.
Most will not drive that distance in a day, so your math is FAR too conservative.
It just means charging it from other batteries. No mystery or difficulty here. Batteries are required anyway to load balance and hold demand to reasonable levels.
Yes, but if the home charging system has storage - and it will - then you only need enough svc to feed it that energy in 24 hours, and even that assumes you drive 300 miles a day. So this whole "omg house svc" thing is a strawman.
Why do you say that?
I'll take option C... wait for Apple to do the right thing. In the meantime, I have other apps that aren't emulations, and which enjoy large audiences. I'm very much convinced that the app store is the place to be. The 6809 emulation is more of a personal thing than a serious attempt to make money. Although you might be surprised at how many I've sold over the years, and to whom. :)
Let me enlighten you, then.
It's not really any one factor there, it's the combination that I find compelling.
To be honest, I'm not even sure I really understand your objection. Control... you know, the moment an app ends up in someone else's hands -- in any market -- in many ways, you've lost control of it. As the lady says, perhaps the best approach here is relax and enjoy the inevitable. Yes... beat me with checks... bury me in money.. expose my app to a wide audience... now, do it again, only this time, wear the monkey suit!
I appreciate the suggestion, but I'm not really interested in the Blackberry. Apple's flaws aside (and they have plenty), the iPad audience is a far more interesting target for me, both because I'm one of those (I take my iPad everywhere as it is stuffed with software of considerable use to me, particularly in the areas of astrophotography and auroral activity), because of the display size, and because the app store has demonstrated that as a sales tool, it's easily top of the heap.
If Android makes any inroads on pad devices - IOW large displays - I might take a look at that. While it is amusing to have a tiny terminal display, it isn't particularly practical. In fact, if your eyes are as old and cranky as mine, it isn't practical at all.
Yeah, I think they've kind of missed the target here... painting with too broad a brush. They should have said "no Flash" because that's what they're trying to prevent, really. It's a very "Jobsian" shooting of one's own foot -- trying to pretend there's a broad merit here that Flash simply "falls into", when anyone with half a brain can see that's not the case.
They might (stretching it) have legitimate concerns about applications that allow access to the device hardware, but again, the answer is to forbid that, not emulation in general.
Heck, I've written an artificial life app that evolves its own genes-as-code and then "runs" them on a per-creature basis... since those genes are specialized code and are executed by a supervisor, I'm sure this is forbidden under Apple's no-emulation restriction as well, and again, there's just no sense or benefit to it.
That's true enough, but I'm not sure that the rest follows. The way it seems to me, is that with a small percentage interested, the largest market possible will see the most interest. I don't see jailbreakers as likely old salts, either; I'm definitely one of the latter, and I have absolutely no interest in the former. Definitive sample of one, y'know. :)