Your problem there is that the $10 violation is still illegal, it's just not criminal. So the software you're creating - NETActster, or SafteyTorrent, or whatever you'd call it, would be very specifically designed to break the law, so they'd come after you for creating that tool.
The users of it would still be protected from criminal prosecution, though not civil lawsuits, which is what RIAA and MPAA have been using so far anyway.
Well, the way I read it, if you copy [new hit CD], they'll say that's a retail value of $15. If you illegally download, for personal use, 100 CDs, that's now a $1,500 value, so the whole downloading process can be seen as an act in violation of the law. Ditto for if you distributed that one CD to 100 different people. Even if you aren't charging money for it, the law is based on the retail value, so that distribution is a violation.
Now you could argue "Fair Use", which would serve to exempt your copying or distribution from prosecution, but the decision as to what constitutes "Fair Use" is kind of hazy right now, and is usually the key issue in the major file-sharing cases these days. There's no law that explicitly states "Sharing music via 'Network Neighborhood' in a LAN with your friends is fair use, but P2P networking isn't", though a judge hearing your case might reach that conclusion.
Awesome, regardless of the actual features of something like this, just the fact that they're using IPv6 helps to push it towards the beginnings of acceptance.
We're a long way from critical mass, but it's a nice step forward.
But the way it is now, if I burn a copyrighted CD and just plain give it to you, the FBI could make a federal case out of that.
NET Act, Section 2, Criminal Infringement, sub a: "(2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $ 1,000 shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, United States Code. For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement.'"
So unless that's a really valuable CD, you're in the clear. Same goes for computer software. Your warez copy of Doom 3 isn't a criminal offense, but if you're stealing Enterprise licenses for Photoshop or Windows 2003, you might be in trouble.
I'm pretty sick of this dumb explanation, which nobody ever bothers to refute, because it's cool to hate the mainstream. I'll likely be modded down for defending Starbucks, since every time they come up here on slashdot I see ten "+5 Insightful" comments that are little more than "Starbuckses coffee is the sux0r."
First of all, Starbucks isn't only popular because it's popular. That fails to explain how it became so popular in the first place. They started as a really small company in Seattle, and they grew so large because they were doing so well.
The point that 90% of the geeks here miss about Starbucks is that regular drip coffee is not their core competency. The thing that made Starbucks who they are was the espresso bar. They saw the culture in Europe (particularly Italy) focused on espresso and espresso drinks (lattes, mochas, cappucinos, etc...) not drip. Starbucks brought that espresso bar to America, and they did (and still do) a great job with it. The phrase "grande latte" is part of the American vocabulary now because of Starbucks.
You didn't go to Starbucks because their cup 'o joe tasted 10% better than Dunkin' Donuts' cup 'o joe - it doesn't. You went there because they'd make you a half-caf mocha with whip cream, or a soy latte, or whatever you could come up with. It's a lot like going to a bar and ordering a cocktail instead of a beer. It's not that the bartender there serves better Budweiser than at the next-door bar, he doesn't. It's that he mixes you whatever drink you want, using high-quality ingredients, and you can enjoy it in a nice atmosphere. That was what Starbucks had, and still has.
I've been to Dunkin' Donuts, and I've been to five or six different smaller coffee stores, and I've never been anywhere that served me a better grande mocha than Starbucks. Sure, Starbucks drip coffee is roasted too much and not very good. But I don't care, 'cause that's not what I drink there.
Considering that, I think there are a few people who will buy this self-heating latte, (it's a latte, not drip coffee) but it's not gonna be that much of a threat to Starbucks.
Encrypting the wireless link layer doesn't mean avoiding upper-layer security protocols like SSL or PGP, they solve two entirely different problems. You can still use SSL and PGP on top of your WEP/WPA layer.
Even if WEP was perfect, it wouldn't protect your traffic on the distribution system that your access-point connects to. The hubs, switches, and routers that your traffic flows through on the way to its destination are still carrying your traffic unencrypted, and it is subject to interception at those points. That's where upper-layer encryption comes in handy.
But those protocols still require secure connection or handshaking procedures between endpoints for all conversations. If you're on some corporate LAN where users are expected to be able to share their files via SMB, or IM each other, you don't require SSL and PGP authentication for every single network transaction. But that doesn't mean you want outsiders to be able to listen in on all your traffic by pointing an antenna at the building. The link between your workstation and the access-point is a wide-open vulnerability, and it's important that the hole be closed. WEP was an important attempt to close that hole, but a massively flawed one. The solution is to fix those flaws, not to require layer 7 authentication for all network traffic.
That's a fine principal when you're selling soda or cleaning products, but many of the people you're trying to reach don't even know what a "web browser" is.
There are tons of people who "click on the 'e'" or "go into the Internet" or "use the Internet Explorer to get to Google"
These people don't even realize that "web browser" is a product they use, made by multiple companies. If you're lucky, they remember Netscape. If they read "Firefox 1.0!" in a newspaper, they skim past it just like they skim past "Blade-servers" and "Middleware". These are words that don't relate to their lives, so the words slide right off their minds.
You need to catch their attention with something they recognize, something that relates to them, like "Microsoft Internet Explorer is bad!" or "Hate pop-up windows?", then you explain to them that they can use Firefox instead.
Firefox not mentioning IE is like alternative energy providers not mentioning coal or oil for fear that it might raise awareness of coal and oil. Everybody is already aware, you need to accept that and use it.
And, to add just a little to the parent, more cache is one of the best ways to improve your performance.
If you're working on a 2 Meg file and you only have a 256K cache, then your CPU has to work on a little bit of it, then swap the cache to main memory to work on some more, then again, then again. Each of those swaps takes time, and main memory is way slower than cache. So if you can store most of your work in cache and save the trips to memory, your get much faster speed.
So a webserver with a 2 GHz processor and 8 MB of cache is likely to outperform a 3 GHz processor with 512 KB of cache. Bottom line: bigger, smaller cache is a very good thing.
Our media gets too excited with itself and plays things up to be big deals which really aren't. I know this, I expect it. It's the natural consequence of people looking to their news to also be entertainment, and the news giving them what they want.
It sounds like your news is guilty of the same indulgence. The situation over here is really nothing like you paint it in your first and third paragraphs. If you had decent coverage of our last election, you wouldn't say "These staunch republicans and scared democrats are looking at the president, and seeing an infallible figure. Someone who unquestioningly represents good and their best interests." Nor would you say "Bush's grip on the US through this manufactured 'time of peril' is iron-tight, with all dissent swiftly removed"
President Bush won reelection by a very small margin, amidst a level of dissent that seems shockingly high to me. The vast pool of bile here in response to the Bush Administration was so powerful that it managed to produce a 49% vote for John Kerry, a candidate who nobody, not even John Kerry, could get all that excited about.
People at protests and on IRC are not a very good data pool for rational analysis. I realize you don't have the luxury of walking the streets of NYC, or Detroit, or Randomtown Ohio to get some perspective, but if you did you would find that half the people are as pissed at Bush as you are, and the other half are not mindless fanatics brainwashed by fear-rhetoric, but rather ordinary people who simply agree with Bush on more issues than they agree with Kerry on (even if they disagree with both candidates on lots of issues).
Other big issues in the campaign were health insurance, Social Security, abortion, same-sex marriage, and stem-cell research. Regardless of your view on those issues, and regardless of how you personally feel about Bush and his values, the image you paint of the US is as ridiculously simplistic and black-and-white as the "evil-doers" rhetoric coming from the Bush Administration itself.
The US is a big, complicated place. I've met people who sounded like you, and I've met people who sounded like the mindless Bush-drones you mentioned, but about 90% of all the people I've ever met here feel that the Presidential election represents picking the best of two very mediocre choices, not the enthusiastic endorsement of an "infallible figure".
I'm afraid that ship has sailed. Sorry you weren't invited to the meeting where that term was selected, back in 1990 or so, but it's here and in people's heads, so it's probably not leaving anytime soon. You getting over it is a lot easier and more likely to happen than people selecting a better term.
But if you want to keep complaining that you don't like their terminology, why don't you toss in a hackers vs. crackers speech, while you're at it?
And this is why, as a human being with money, I'd rather buy products or services from the author (who takes the mentality of "I am being paid to create something that works for my customer") rather than you and the parent poster, who take the mentality of "I'll make something. It will do some things. If they like it, great, if not, too bad. If it doesn't perform to their expectations, they should change their expectations, instead of me changing my product."
His points are about design principles. If your design principle is "The user is in charge and should be free to carry out any activity at any time without fear of reprisals" then you have a really high bar to work towards, and you probably never get there, but you produce something that your users will really like. If your design principle is "Users must learn how their devices work and be responsible for their misuse" then you fail Design 101. People will only want your devices if that first guy didn't make a competing product.
Again, the purpose is to preserve working data, not to continue functioning. It doesn't matter if the monitor dies, so long as your memory makes its way to the hard drive before the computer dies.
The power issue is a spec issue. Your power supply has a Wattage rating - 480W is pretty high, but you can buy higher. Whatever your power supply, it should be able to provide that wattage, at whatever time it takes to hibernate. My laptop takes about 7 seconds to hibernate, but if you have a lot more RAM and a much slower hard drive, maybe push that to 45 seconds or a minute. So you spec the device to hold X Watts for 60 seconds, then multiply by some safety factor. This is neither terribly difficult, nor terribly expensive.
I think current Mac OS hardware is more robust in this area, but this is not really a fault of the computer or the OS. No power, no computer worky. Sorry.
But his complaint isn't that computers don't run without power, it's that when they lose power they lose your work. Hibernate (write memory to hard drive, then power off) exists. UPSes exist. If your only demand is that the UPS last long enough to hibernate, it shouldn't be that expensive. The cost would be fairly small, and the benefit would be large. I think he got this one right.
If you designed a system in such a way that it has harmful behavior which could be easily remedied by a cheap alteration to the design, that qualifies as a "design flaw".
Either on the Power-Supply or the Motherboard, add a UPS with about two minutes of capacity, and with a data connection into the system (probably USB, but it doesn't take much). It just has to alert the operating system somehow, and give it enough time to flash an alert and hibernate.
You can call it whiny, but most of the things you consider absolute necessity today were unthinkable luxuries 80 years ago. Make Stuff Better. It sucks when your computer loses power for a second and all your work in progress dies. It's not that hard to fix. Fix it. Make Stuff Better.
I did rougher math, coming up with: 600B/year div 300M citizens = $2,000/year/citizen.
I pay more in student loans than that. Plus progressive tax structure shifts that so it's more like $100/citizen for the poor, $1,500/citizen for the middle class, and $50,000/citizen for the rich.
Lastly, "$8,283.87 was how much bush cost you for his first term" is inaccurate. The deficit doesn't represent how much "Bush cost me". It's how much he spent on stuff, in my name, which I will then be paying interest on. The actual cost to me would be something like: the interest on $2,000/year + cost of the inefficiency of government spending (ie - he bought me stuff that I don't want)
Still not insignificant, but hardly the backbreaking cost you make it out to be. In physical reality, Bush made me money, rather than costing me money. My "tax relief" was greater than my "share" of the deficit.
All the same, I'd rather see that deficit eliminated, even if it costs me a bit of money or services.
"Calculate your share of the National Deficit" "You owe $25,286.35"
No, he said Deficit, not Debt. You can (and should) blame President Bush for this year's huge deficit, but you can't pin the whole debt on him. That was established by all the administrations that came before him.
And despite that huge debt, we managed to win two "World Wars" and the Cold War, and become the one remaining superpower. Maybe being in debt isn't the worst thing for a country.
As far as material success is concerned, we're doing okay.
No, you misunderstand me. They're not actually blocking it, they're just saying it's against the rules, then letting everyone do it. Then when they want to bust you for any reason at all, they can say you were already breaking the rules.
I wonder how the TOS nazis plan to handle P2P apps like BT?
It will be prohibited by broad language, then not enforced.
The best way to gain control over your subjects, whether you're a school, an ISP, or a government, is to establish lots of ridiculously restrictive laws, then rarely enforce them. Since you aren't busting many people, they won't oppose you, but when you want to get your way, you have a mechanism already in place.
Example: one of the senior directors at the college I went to stated, when pressed at an open meeting, that double-clicking "Network Neighborhood" in Windows was a violation of the AUP, since it constituted examining and accessing the computers of other people without their express consent. Obviously, they didn't bust everyone who did this, but when they found someone they didn't like, this was a useful tool.
Why does it take so long to build a super computer and why do they seem to be redesigned each time a new one is desired?
Well, are we talking about actual supercomputers, not just clusters? 'Cause if you're just trying to break these Teraflops records, you can just cram a ton of existing computers together into a cluster, and voila! lots of operations per second.
But it's rare that someone foots the bill for all those machines just to break a record. Los Alamos, IBM, NASA, etc. want the computer to do serious work when it's done, and a real supercomputer will beat the crap out of a commodity cluster at most of that real work. Which is why they spend so much time designing new ones. Because supercomputers aren't just regular computers with more power. With an Intel/AMD/PowerPC CPU, jamming four of them together doesn't do four times as much work, because there's overhead and latency involved in dividing up the work and exchanging the data between the CPUs. That's where the supercomputers shine: in the coordination and communication between the multiple procs.
So the reason so much time and effort goes into designing new supercomputers is that if you need something twice as powerful as today's supercomputer, you can't just take two and put them together. You have to make new architecture that is even better at handing vast numbers of procs first.
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Your problem there is that the $10 violation is still illegal, it's just not criminal. So the software you're creating - NETActster, or SafteyTorrent, or whatever you'd call it, would be very specifically designed to break the law, so they'd come after you for creating that tool.
The users of it would still be protected from criminal prosecution, though not civil lawsuits, which is what RIAA and MPAA have been using so far anyway.
Well, the way I read it, if you copy [new hit CD], they'll say that's a retail value of $15. If you illegally download, for personal use, 100 CDs, that's now a $1,500 value, so the whole downloading process can be seen as an act in violation of the law. Ditto for if you distributed that one CD to 100 different people. Even if you aren't charging money for it, the law is based on the retail value, so that distribution is a violation.
Now you could argue "Fair Use", which would serve to exempt your copying or distribution from prosecution, but the decision as to what constitutes "Fair Use" is kind of hazy right now, and is usually the key issue in the major file-sharing cases these days. There's no law that explicitly states "Sharing music via 'Network Neighborhood' in a LAN with your friends is fair use, but P2P networking isn't", though a judge hearing your case might reach that conclusion.
Awesome, regardless of the actual features of something like this, just the fact that they're using IPv6 helps to push it towards the beginnings of acceptance.
We're a long way from critical mass, but it's a nice step forward.
Ah, the NET Act! Good cite!
But you got it wrong.
But the way it is now, if I burn a copyrighted CD and just plain give it to you, the FBI could make a federal case out of that.
NET Act, Section 2, Criminal Infringement, sub a:
"(2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $ 1,000 shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, United States Code. For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement.'"
So unless that's a really valuable CD, you're in the clear. Same goes for computer software. Your warez copy of Doom 3 isn't a criminal offense, but if you're stealing Enterprise licenses for Photoshop or Windows 2003, you might be in trouble.
I'm pretty sick of this dumb explanation, which nobody ever bothers to refute, because it's cool to hate the mainstream. I'll likely be modded down for defending Starbucks, since every time they come up here on slashdot I see ten "+5 Insightful" comments that are little more than "Starbuckses coffee is the sux0r."
First of all, Starbucks isn't only popular because it's popular. That fails to explain how it became so popular in the first place. They started as a really small company in Seattle, and they grew so large because they were doing so well.
The point that 90% of the geeks here miss about Starbucks is that regular drip coffee is not their core competency. The thing that made Starbucks who they are was the espresso bar. They saw the culture in Europe (particularly Italy) focused on espresso and espresso drinks (lattes, mochas, cappucinos, etc...) not drip. Starbucks brought that espresso bar to America, and they did (and still do) a great job with it. The phrase "grande latte" is part of the American vocabulary now because of Starbucks.
You didn't go to Starbucks because their cup 'o joe tasted 10% better than Dunkin' Donuts' cup 'o joe - it doesn't. You went there because they'd make you a half-caf mocha with whip cream, or a soy latte, or whatever you could come up with. It's a lot like going to a bar and ordering a cocktail instead of a beer. It's not that the bartender there serves better Budweiser than at the next-door bar, he doesn't. It's that he mixes you whatever drink you want, using high-quality ingredients, and you can enjoy it in a nice atmosphere. That was what Starbucks had, and still has.
I've been to Dunkin' Donuts, and I've been to five or six different smaller coffee stores, and I've never been anywhere that served me a better grande mocha than Starbucks. Sure, Starbucks drip coffee is roasted too much and not very good. But I don't care, 'cause that's not what I drink there.
Considering that, I think there are a few people who will buy this self-heating latte, (it's a latte, not drip coffee) but it's not gonna be that much of a threat to Starbucks.
Encrypting the wireless link layer doesn't mean avoiding upper-layer security protocols like SSL or PGP, they solve two entirely different problems. You can still use SSL and PGP on top of your WEP/WPA layer.
Even if WEP was perfect, it wouldn't protect your traffic on the distribution system that your access-point connects to. The hubs, switches, and routers that your traffic flows through on the way to its destination are still carrying your traffic unencrypted, and it is subject to interception at those points. That's where upper-layer encryption comes in handy.
But those protocols still require secure connection or handshaking procedures between endpoints for all conversations. If you're on some corporate LAN where users are expected to be able to share their files via SMB, or IM each other, you don't require SSL and PGP authentication for every single network transaction. But that doesn't mean you want outsiders to be able to listen in on all your traffic by pointing an antenna at the building. The link between your workstation and the access-point is a wide-open vulnerability, and it's important that the hole be closed. WEP was an important attempt to close that hole, but a massively flawed one. The solution is to fix those flaws, not to require layer 7 authentication for all network traffic.
That's a fine principal when you're selling soda or cleaning products, but many of the people you're trying to reach don't even know what a "web browser" is.
There are tons of people who "click on the 'e'" or "go into the Internet" or "use the Internet Explorer to get to Google"
These people don't even realize that "web browser" is a product they use, made by multiple companies. If you're lucky, they remember Netscape. If they read "Firefox 1.0!" in a newspaper, they skim past it just like they skim past "Blade-servers" and "Middleware". These are words that don't relate to their lives, so the words slide right off their minds.
You need to catch their attention with something they recognize, something that relates to them, like "Microsoft Internet Explorer is bad!" or "Hate pop-up windows?", then you explain to them that they can use Firefox instead.
Firefox not mentioning IE is like alternative energy providers not mentioning coal or oil for fear that it might raise awareness of coal and oil. Everybody is already aware, you need to accept that and use it.
They're calling Windows XP a Linux "rival"?
If you're really itching to do a Windows vs. Linux comparison, you should at least be looking at Windows 2000 or Windows 2003.
And, to add just a little to the parent, more cache is one of the best ways to improve your performance.
If you're working on a 2 Meg file and you only have a 256K cache, then your CPU has to work on a little bit of it, then swap the cache to main memory to work on some more, then again, then again. Each of those swaps takes time, and main memory is way slower than cache. So if you can store most of your work in cache and save the trips to memory, your get much faster speed.
So a webserver with a 2 GHz processor and 8 MB of cache is likely to outperform a 3 GHz processor with 512 KB of cache. Bottom line: bigger, smaller cache is a very good thing.
Our media gets too excited with itself and plays things up to be big deals which really aren't. I know this, I expect it. It's the natural consequence of people looking to their news to also be entertainment, and the news giving them what they want.
It sounds like your news is guilty of the same indulgence. The situation over here is really nothing like you paint it in your first and third paragraphs. If you had decent coverage of our last election, you wouldn't say "These staunch republicans and scared democrats are looking at the president, and seeing an infallible figure. Someone who unquestioningly represents good and their best interests." Nor would you say "Bush's grip on the US through this manufactured 'time of peril' is iron-tight, with all dissent swiftly removed"
President Bush won reelection by a very small margin, amidst a level of dissent that seems shockingly high to me. The vast pool of bile here in response to the Bush Administration was so powerful that it managed to produce a 49% vote for John Kerry, a candidate who nobody, not even John Kerry, could get all that excited about.
People at protests and on IRC are not a very good data pool for rational analysis. I realize you don't have the luxury of walking the streets of NYC, or Detroit, or Randomtown Ohio to get some perspective, but if you did you would find that half the people are as pissed at Bush as you are, and the other half are not mindless fanatics brainwashed by fear-rhetoric, but rather ordinary people who simply agree with Bush on more issues than they agree with Kerry on (even if they disagree with both candidates on lots of issues).
Other big issues in the campaign were health insurance, Social Security, abortion, same-sex marriage, and stem-cell research. Regardless of your view on those issues, and regardless of how you personally feel about Bush and his values, the image you paint of the US is as ridiculously simplistic and black-and-white as the "evil-doers" rhetoric coming from the Bush Administration itself.
The US is a big, complicated place. I've met people who sounded like you, and I've met people who sounded like the mindless Bush-drones you mentioned, but about 90% of all the people I've ever met here feel that the Presidential election represents picking the best of two very mediocre choices, not the enthusiastic endorsement of an "infallible figure".
Mummified?
Do you also have a tiny Egyptian tribe living in your toilet?
Did you follow the last election?
If Americans gear up with torches and pitchforks, they'll be fighting each other before they even get to Washington.
It's not that politicians are failing to give the people what they want, it's that they can't even agree on what they want.
I'm afraid that ship has sailed. Sorry you weren't invited to the meeting where that term was selected, back in 1990 or so, but it's here and in people's heads, so it's probably not leaving anytime soon. You getting over it is a lot easier and more likely to happen than people selecting a better term.
But if you want to keep complaining that you don't like their terminology, why don't you toss in a hackers vs. crackers speech, while you're at it?
And this is why, as a human being with money, I'd rather buy products or services from the author (who takes the mentality of "I am being paid to create something that works for my customer") rather than you and the parent poster, who take the mentality of "I'll make something. It will do some things. If they like it, great, if not, too bad. If it doesn't perform to their expectations, they should change their expectations, instead of me changing my product."
His points are about design principles. If your design principle is "The user is in charge and should be free to carry out any activity at any time without fear of reprisals" then you have a really high bar to work towards, and you probably never get there, but you produce something that your users will really like. If your design principle is "Users must learn how their devices work and be responsible for their misuse" then you fail Design 101. People will only want your devices if that first guy didn't make a competing product.
Again, the purpose is to preserve working data, not to continue functioning. It doesn't matter if the monitor dies, so long as your memory makes its way to the hard drive before the computer dies.
The power issue is a spec issue. Your power supply has a Wattage rating - 480W is pretty high, but you can buy higher. Whatever your power supply, it should be able to provide that wattage, at whatever time it takes to hibernate. My laptop takes about 7 seconds to hibernate, but if you have a lot more RAM and a much slower hard drive, maybe push that to 45 seconds or a minute. So you spec the device to hold X Watts for 60 seconds, then multiply by some safety factor. This is neither terribly difficult, nor terribly expensive.
Yes.
After all that hype, it turned out to only be the best selling console.
I imagine Sony is hoping for the same kind of dismal failure that you saw in the PS 2.
I think current Mac OS hardware is more robust in this area, but this is not really a fault of the computer or the OS. No power, no computer worky. Sorry.
But his complaint isn't that computers don't run without power, it's that when they lose power they lose your work. Hibernate (write memory to hard drive, then power off) exists. UPSes exist. If your only demand is that the UPS last long enough to hibernate, it shouldn't be that expensive. The cost would be fairly small, and the benefit would be large. I think he got this one right.
If you designed a system in such a way that it has harmful behavior which could be easily remedied by a cheap alteration to the design, that qualifies as a "design flaw".
Either on the Power-Supply or the Motherboard, add a UPS with about two minutes of capacity, and with a data connection into the system (probably USB, but it doesn't take much). It just has to alert the operating system somehow, and give it enough time to flash an alert and hibernate.
You can call it whiny, but most of the things you consider absolute necessity today were unthinkable luxuries 80 years ago. Make Stuff Better. It sucks when your computer loses power for a second and all your work in progress dies. It's not that hard to fix. Fix it. Make Stuff Better.
I did rougher math, coming up with:
600B/year div 300M citizens = $2,000/year/citizen.
I pay more in student loans than that. Plus progressive tax structure shifts that so it's more like $100/citizen for the poor, $1,500/citizen for the middle class, and $50,000/citizen for the rich.
Lastly, "$8,283.87 was how much bush cost you for his first term" is inaccurate. The deficit doesn't represent how much "Bush cost me". It's how much he spent on stuff, in my name, which I will then be paying interest on. The actual cost to me would be something like:
the interest on $2,000/year + cost of the inefficiency of government spending (ie - he bought me stuff that I don't want)
Still not insignificant, but hardly the backbreaking cost you make it out to be. In physical reality, Bush made me money, rather than costing me money. My "tax relief" was greater than my "share" of the deficit.
All the same, I'd rather see that deficit eliminated, even if it costs me a bit of money or services.
"Calculate your share of the National Deficit"
"You owe $25,286.35"
No, he said Deficit, not Debt.
You can (and should) blame President Bush for this year's huge deficit, but you can't pin the whole debt on him. That was established by all the administrations that came before him.
And despite that huge debt, we managed to win two "World Wars" and the Cold War, and become the one remaining superpower. Maybe being in debt isn't the worst thing for a country.
As far as material success is concerned, we're doing okay.
Yeah, but that won't happen until the widespread market acceptance of PR-UD-DVD2 (Purple-Ray UltraDisc, DVD version 2)
No, you misunderstand me.
They're not actually blocking it, they're just saying it's against the rules, then letting everyone do it. Then when they want to bust you for any reason at all, they can say you were already breaking the rules.
I wonder how the TOS nazis plan to handle P2P apps like BT?
It will be prohibited by broad language, then not enforced.
The best way to gain control over your subjects, whether you're a school, an ISP, or a government, is to establish lots of ridiculously restrictive laws, then rarely enforce them. Since you aren't busting many people, they won't oppose you, but when you want to get your way, you have a mechanism already in place.
Example: one of the senior directors at the college I went to stated, when pressed at an open meeting, that double-clicking "Network Neighborhood" in Windows was a violation of the AUP, since it constituted examining and accessing the computers of other people without their express consent. Obviously, they didn't bust everyone who did this, but when they found someone they didn't like, this was a useful tool.
Did I miss anything?
I believe you left out "Natalie Portman and hot grits."
Why does it take so long to build a super computer and why do they seem to be redesigned each time a new one is desired?
Well, are we talking about actual supercomputers, not just clusters? 'Cause if you're just trying to break these Teraflops records, you can just cram a ton of existing computers together into a cluster, and voila! lots of operations per second.
But it's rare that someone foots the bill for all those machines just to break a record. Los Alamos, IBM, NASA, etc. want the computer to do serious work when it's done, and a real supercomputer will beat the crap out of a commodity cluster at most of that real work. Which is why they spend so much time designing new ones. Because supercomputers aren't just regular computers with more power. With an Intel/AMD/PowerPC CPU, jamming four of them together doesn't do four times as much work, because there's overhead and latency involved in dividing up the work and exchanging the data between the CPUs. That's where the supercomputers shine: in the coordination and communication between the multiple procs.
So the reason so much time and effort goes into designing new supercomputers is that if you need something twice as powerful as today's supercomputer, you can't just take two and put them together. You have to make new architecture that is even better at handing vast numbers of procs first.