Sure maybe the hardware is more reliable, but the software is terrible.
Software was one of the categories, with the Blackberry having a 3% failure rate in the first year and the iPhone having a 1%. Unless there was a serious problem with their methodology, it look like their study trounces your anecdote. Not that I care since I can't afford either right now.
Perhaps I am inferring too much but you seem to think that you have to spend as much in buying a house as you do a in renting. That is NOT the case. If you rent only what you actually NEED then the difference saved can be significant and with the magic of compounding will set you on a path to financial independence.
I'm paying a hundred bucks less a month for my house than I was paying in rent for a place barely big enough for myself and my girlfriend. Additionally, most of that money I'm spending is going to an invest in equity in the house (savings) not wasted as it is in renting. Add onto that the fact that I can subtract the remaining amount from my taxes and yeah, it is a better move than renting, even if my rent was only $1 a month. Get it?
What do you consider to be a good long term investment?
Long term investments are ones with low risk for good return, as opposed to my higher risk investments in stocks and commodities.
Ummmm, okay if you say so
I do, as does almost every economist in the world. I don't know where you went to school but we covered this in econ 101 and it is clearly explained in most economics textbooks.
So how does progressive taxation bring the system back into balance?
Progressive taxation takes more from the wealthy than the poor, proportional to their incomes. This means although you started out with a million dollars more than I, you're also taxed more heavily in an amount that evens out how much wealth you'll accumulate simply due to wealth condensation. It further means if you want to make significant amounts of money more (instead of just living off your inheritance at a steady level) you actually have to get a job and contribute to society to increase your wealth. This prevents money from automatically concentrating into fewer and fewer hands and allows for merit to be a major factor in how wealth accumulates. That means rich or poor, additional wealth will come from what you do, not your initial station in life.
Just take a look at countries with the highest standards of living in the world, lowest levels of poverty and violent crime, best education, etc. Notice they all have more progressive tax systems than the US currently does? Note that previous to the Bush administration we had more progressive taxes and violent crime was dropping and the economy was stable and growing?
'Socialism' is a bad word in the US due to the propaganda campaign against the soviets, but the US is just as socialist as europe is. Our socialism is just directed more towards the military and taxes the poor more heavily, in comparison. Public schools, police, roads, social security, NASA, is all socialism. Every economy in the world is socialist to some degree, just as they are capitalist to some degree. It is balance that makes for a stable economy and extremism that undermines it; extremism in either direction.
Please, with the tax advantages I'm making more money in the long term by buying a house than I am renting anything, even a small apartment. It is by far the best financial move as any advisor will tell you.
That is one of the great fallacies that perpetuates the confusion of want over need. Renting a room in a house from some old lady for $200/month and putting the $800+ into savings or even better safe and sound investments will likely pay off way better than a house ever would.
Are you joking? The opportunity costs are quite clear and paying into a mortgage instead of just losing that money to rent is almost always a net win. It sure is in my case.
Over the last decade housing has been a great investment (until about 2 years ago) long term it tends to run about even with inflation.
Housing is a long term investment and the recent downturn only really effects those pressured to sell in the short term. It is still a good long term investment for people looking for something conservative.
Having been a "creative" real estate investor several years ago, I know from first hand experience that there are quite a few landlords out there that were not born with it. In some cases they borrowed their way to ownership and in others they own it free and clear.
Irrelevant. In general, having money allows you to make money and money is consolidating by all accounts.
As for the $100 analogy why is it unsustainable?
You don't see a few percent of the population owning larger and larger shares of the country's wealth as unsustainable? It ends up with a few basically owning everything and then a depression or rebellion to forcibly redistribute the wealth. It wasn't called the "new deal" because the wealth stays in the same hands. The deal was, we don't kill the wealthy and they take a larger share of theory taxes to provide public works and the money goes back to the poorer part of the populace.
The average person does not have less and less the average person decides to max his credit cards out to try and out-jones the joneses.
The average person does have less and less, relative to the very rich. If you bothered to study sociology it is you'd know it is wealth disparity and not overall wealth levels that has the most influence on society. And it doesn't matter if you max out your credit if you have no real hope of ever having any net positive wealth.
And this is probably the biggest problem yet with the "average" person. Instead of slowly building wealth the are all convinced the way to do it is by taking big risks and getting lucky.
FAIL. Sorry, but being lucky is what it takes to become wealthy if you aren't born that way in the US. Take a look at the numbers. If you aren't born in the ultra rich class you have basically no chance of achieving that status through hard work. The vast majority of wealth is transferred via inheritance and interest, not though entrepreneurship. This is simply the reality of economics and if you want to claim otherwise you better have some pretty extraordinary evidence to the contrary.
Go ahead spend all your extra money on Megamillions each week - consider it an investment in your future.
No thanks. I can do math. That's why I also recognize the realities of the chances of normal people to advance economically in the US, compared to more progressive societies. Extreme capitalism is just as doomed as extreme socialism as even Greenspan has admitted now. You may not like the truth, but that's the way it is. A balanced economy is the only route to stability and our current economy is anything but. It needs correction and that means compensating for wealth condensation with sufficient levels of progressive taxation to bring the system back into balance.
While I do not doubt that for an equivalent home buying is going to be cheaper than renting plus you get the benefit of building equity. That said, I sincerely doubt that you could not find a room to rent that would be significantly less than the cost of buying a home.
Please, with the tax advantages I'm making more money in the long term by buying a house than I am renting anything, even a small apartment. It is by far the best financial move as any advisor will tell you. The point is, even making this best financial move, I'm making a lot of money for someone else who just happens to have started life wealthier than I am. Statistically speaking, this is how most wealth is transferred among people, by people who inherited it leveraging that wealth against those born with less. The "american dream" idea of a meritocracy is a dream, not a practical reality in the general case.
It seems that you have been convinced that you HAVE to have certain things and that you HAVE to borrow in order to obtain them.
Not at all. I just recognize that borrowing is sometimes the best financial option among many bad options. Investing in a good education that has allowed me to profit later in life has been a great financial move for me. I may still meet my goal of being a millionaire before I retire. That said, people who have done nothing but loan me part of their disproportionate inheritance are benefiting financially from my hard work as much or more than I am. That's the reality and that situation has been becoming more and more extreme over the last eight years.
If the US was represented by a population of 20 and our wealth by $100, one guy would start out life with $50 of those dollars and end up with $55 they pass on to their kid, despite having done nothing but loan that money to some of the 10 people who started life with no money at all or one of the 8 people who started with $5. The problem being, this isn't sustainable and we're rapidly approaching an economic collapse because the average person has less and less and so spends less and less. Heck the only reason we've lasted as long as we have without a collapse is because of the absurd credit being provided to people who will probably never pay it back. Now it's coming to a head and people changing they way they live will have little or no effect upon the average distribution of wealth, because while there is some opportunity for smart, hard workers like myself, it's an uneven playing field from the start and those who succeed because of their efforts are exceptions.
Wealth can be earned in this country no matter how much you start out with - that is what makes it great.
Sure it can. You can win money in the slot machines at Vegas too. The problem is, on average, most people don't win and the money slowly accumulates with the house... or in this case with the ultra wealthy who already have incomes in the millions each year.
It just means living within your means and planning for the future instead of borrowing from your future and living in the now.
No, it generally means taking big risks and getting lucky as well as wasting a lot of your effort digging yourself out of an economic hole where you start out with less wealth and power than a few percent of the population simply due to circumstances of birth.
Why couldn't I take of an isolated bubble of atmospheric air, and examine the breakdown from CO2 to N2 and 02 as the C-14 decayed into N-14?
I don't know, other than the difficulty of finding an isolated bubble of air and testing it without contamination. What you suggest may be possible, but I suspect if it is, getting good results would be iffy.
...but other than plants providing a method of fixation, why would they have to supple to only one?
Your last sentence there is a bit garbled. If I get your meaning, well, they don't supply the only radio dating isotope, just the most common and reliable one for recent history.
Why do they "have to borrow"? Isn't it amazing how so many in this country believe that they "have" to borrow the money so they can buy a new car.
Here's an example from my life. I bought a house. My choices were to pay rent or buy a home and the latter option is a much smarter financial move since my mortgage payments are less than rent in this area and I build equity in a home at the same time (savings). Either way, however, I end up paying money to someone who has more wealth to start out with... either because they own a rental or because they have the capital to lend me to buy a home. Do you recommend I live on the streets until I can afford to buy a home outright? You see how it works? It's not the only situation or the sort, investing in an education requires borrowing for most people and medical care requires borrowing for many.
I agree that credit card debt and the attitudes towards spending in this country are a problem, but even were it solved that does nothing to address the larger and more serious issue I mention. Wealth condensation is real and is runaway just as it was before the great depression and that is not the fault of the 50% of americans who start and end life with no wealth at all.
So, you're not really bothered by the notion that he thinks it should be funded at the same scale as the military, without mentioning where he thought that cash might come from?
We know where he plans to get the cash, increased taxes on the top end of society, you know that 5% of the country who have 50% of the wealth and who have been having their taxes lowered for the last 8 years? You know, the same people McCain doesn't want to tax in favor of just borrowing more from China and driving the country deeper into debt?
On a totally different note, why would carbon dating only work on things that were once living? Assuming that carbon got into the blade (through the process of making the steel or as air bubbles trapped within it) why wouldn't it work?
Carbon dating doesn't use just any carbon, but the carbon-14 isotope. Plants fix atmospheric carbon while alive so the level of the isotope will be the same as the atmosphere when the plant dies (or when an animal that consumed the plant dies). Every year after that, the remains will have decreasing amount of the carbon-14 isotope as it decays into nitrogen-14. The rate of decay is known, so the quantities can demonstrate how long since a sample containing carbon was alive, up to about 60,000 years.
This means you can't use it to date carbon that was never part of a plant. You can, however, use it to date swords and other steel artifacts, since the carbon used to make steel is generally from charcoal, made from wood that died during the same period the sword was constructed. A quick google search will turn up plenty of swords dated using this method.
Why do we have to raise taxes to pay down the debt? Why not cut other spending?
There are two reasons for this. First, budget cuts can only go so far and neither candidate will cut enough to make a dent in the debt. Republicans say they are for smaller government for every state but their own, and make no mistake it is the poorer Republican states benefiting from richer, Democrat states currently. It is political suicide for congresscritters to actually vote for smaller government in pretty much any state.
Second, progressive taxes are required for a stable economy. Any reputable economist will tell you about the wealth condensation principal. Basically, the more money you have the more money you make. Without higher taxes on the wealthy than on the poor, wealth concentrates into fewer and fewer hands in a capitalist system and eventually the middle class disappears and you have feudalism or a revolution or a depression. Over the last eight years, taxes on the very wealthy have gone down compared to taxes on the rest of society and wealth has consolidated dangerously. This wealth disparity is strongly correlative with violent crime and many other societal ills. Raising taxes on the high end and lowering them significantly on the low end, as Obama proposes, reverses this trend and stabilizes the economy.
Lowering taxes for all and cutting spending is great in theory, but realistically such a plan just results in paying for programs with borrowing, which increases the national debt. It also does noting to stabilize the economy in the long term and stop the increasing wealth disparity. In short, Joe the plumber is no economist and holds the common belief that our society is a meritocracy. In truth, most accumulated wealth is the result of inheritance, not hard work. He doesn't think people should be punished for being successful, but he takes it on faith that said success is the result of merit, which is simply not true (statistically speaking). The bottom 50% of our country has no net wealth and spends huge portions of their resources paying interest on money they have to borrow from those who started out with more in life. Those on the top don't have to work, they can just let their wealth work for them, loaning it to the poor and collecting interest. Without progressive taxes, that bottom 50% will grow until even greater portions of our society spend ever greater portions of their effort paying off debt until they simply can't take it any more and the economy collapses into a depression, just like it did during the great depression.
But, true to their word, they finally are opening Watch Instantly to Mac users.
Correction: They're finally opening it up to some Mac users. This solution is for intel Macs only. That's fine if you're assuming people want to use it to see the occasional flick on their laptop, but a fail for those users who have an older Mac as a media center, since a lot of those are old PPC systems.
I have two thoughts about this. First, Netflix should have gone with Flash video which is already in use by sites like Hulu so any DRM issues are bunk. Second, Netflix's selection of movies for live viewing is so poor, anything else they do is pretty much pointless. Right now only 14% of the movies in my queue are available for instant viewing and most of those are really bad old movies just there for bad movie and beer nights.
So instead of having a wired sensor on every external door/window, I now have a wireless setup? How many batteries and how do I maintain them?
My system has batteries half the size of an AA in each door sensor and bigger ones in other devices (fire alarms and audio sensors) and notifies me if they're running low.
Jesus, you really need to try the current Firefox minefields, they're insanely fast.
They're fast compared to the current release, or were a week ago... but the Webkit nighlies have been faster yet on the benchmarks I've tried. So I say again, what benchmarks are you using?
The only thing I can think of is that Google's browser is based on WebKit and Safari is at least partially based on WebKit.
You've got that a bit backwards. Safari relies upon Webkit for rendering. Chrome uses Webkit for some rendering and their homegrown javascript engine for javascript (instead of JavaScriptCore which is part of Webkit). If you're going to refer to one of them as partially based on Webkit, it should be Chrome.
But this fact has nothing whatsoever to do with Opera Mini.
Apple's licensing requires iPhone browsers to use the built in rendering engine in the iPhone SDK (which happens to be Webkit).
Webkit is fine and there are several fine browsers available based on Webkit in various stages of maturity and development. Opera's proprietary renderer is also very good. However, as far as being the most efficient, the most recent benchmarks show Firefox 3 clearly beating both in terms of performance.
What benchmarks are those? For javascript at least the Safari/Webkit nightlies seem to be beating the Firefox nightlies by a significant margin, or were last few times I ran them.
On top of that if you nationalize healthcare you also nationalize the costs of obesity, therefore such a lifestyle should be taxed higher to cover their added cost to society.
From all the studies I've seen this is dead wrong. Obese people die younger and end up with lower overall healthcare costs than average. By your logic, then, shouldn't they be getting a discount on their taxes?
That's how it will go down at the national level too. You can't punish people for being fat or for smoking, but you can offer "incentives".
You should research your opinions more. Fat people die younger resulting in a net savings to the healthcare system. There is no incentive to discourage people from being overweight.
On the other hand, neither McCain's nor Obama's are any better.
I doubt Obama's plan will ever see light of day since the democrats already have a version of Clinton's plan on the table and (given the votes) will pass it and Obama is unlikely to veto. The real question is if there is a republican president with veto power and if the democrats get their 60 votes to override it. Obama's plan is unlikely to ever see light of day no matter what happens.
It saddens me that every time someone on/. states that capitalism is not the end-all, there are always people that seem to think communism is the only other option. And they seem for the most part to be coming from the USA.
Education works... and so does miseducation. The US spent million on a misinformation/propaganda campaign to demonize the soviet block, focusing on communism and socialism as word to engender negativity and confusion. As a result the average american doesn't know what communism or socialism are, either in terms of economics or in terms of political parties (very different things). Just look at the latest two party name calling in the US where McCain is trying to criticize Obama by calling him "socialist" after just supporting the largest socialist program in decades with the socialization of US banks.
Does having only 2 relevant political parties make people limited in their views and reasoning or something?
That is a factor, since it leads to polarized views. Politics in the US is like sports. People want their "team" to win and aren't interested in more than the most superficial examination of the issues. They don't want to debate. They just want to cheer and jeer and want easily memorized talking points to simplify that. They don't even care if their talking points are true (Obama is a muslim or McCain was strongly involved in the savings and loans scandal). Even after being shown to be incorrect, they'll use that same argument the next time the topic comes up. It's quite sad.
But in the case of communism/socialism it is not the two-party system so much as the huge cold war era misinformation campaign.
Speed seems to be determined by a lack of bloat... and by bloat, I mean features. Firefox, back in the days it was referred to as phoenix, was exceedingly fast. Since then, fancy bookmarking, spellchecking, rss feeds, etc, etc has been added to it, causing slow startup and loading times.
I disagree. Safari has been adding features and getting faster. In fact, most of the browsers have been of late. Optimizing for speed is a feature and takes work and has been a focus of late as speed becomes a greater concern for companies launching Web applications and who want them responsive.
Chrome doesn't have many features, so it runs amazingly fast.
I don't see chrome doing significantly better (sometimes worse) than nightlies of Firefox and Safari according to the majority of speed tests out there. Basically, I don't see the correlation you're claiming. What benchmarks are you relying upon?
I won't be buying one, because any phone from T-Mobile is no longer in the running for me. They are my current provider, but (unlike every other provider) their service area near me has been shrinking rather than growing. Places I had service last year are now consistently "emergency call only" areas. We're talking about a good quarter of the state. On top of that, they had the nerve to send me advertising text messages telling me how they've expanded their coverage. I am currently contract free, so if another provider comes out with a good Android phone, I'll look into it, but who cares how good it is if it has no service.
It depends on the bike. You can run a sport bike up to red line and it makes a ton of noise but its high pitched. You as a runner will hear it but the guy in the car might not.
C'mon. This is Slashdot. We can make pipes to alter the pitch of anything to be loud and lower pitched with a little physics.
The reason that Harleys are "loud" (really any cruiser, not just Harleys) is that their exhaust note is low pitched.
Well, the harley is a special case since they intentionally run cylinders out of synch to create a "distinctive" noise but for just volume they are no different than any other engine. Cruisers and touring bikes have lower RPMs for their displacement and so have a deeper sound with the same pipes, as compared to sport bikes, but anything you put stock harley pipes on would be loud because they design them for it.
If he was so drunk he didn't see stopped cars in front of him, what makes you think ANYTHING else would have gotten his attention?
Maybe it wouldn't have, but this problem is a frequent one for more than drunk drivers. I've heard of plenty of cases where semi drivers forgot the truck in front of them and decided to pull a little further forward crushing the bike in front of them that they could no longer see over their hood. In fact, this problem is so common most motorcycle safety courses specifically instruct riders how to deal with it.
Not that a system like this would necessarily work as a solution, just that you can't discount the solution using the assumption that it only applies to drunk drivers.
1. Packages. Specifically, aptitude. It is unbelievably easy to find software to open weird file formats, play simple games, or speak some weird protocol. This is the single #1 feature Linux (BSDs too, possibly) has going for it. Packages are awesome for experienced users and newbies. If you say otherwise, you really haven't tried a well maintained distribution yet.
In theory I acknowledge that packages and package managers are a superior technology. In practice, package managers and formats in use provide a significant advantage for installation and updates if you're only using OSS and are only using packages that are in the right format for your manager. In practice, they're a problem as implemented for install from a Web page, run from removable media or network, portability to new hardware, incompatibility among package formats, and consistency of installation usability.
They are certainly a big win for upgrading software, but for installation can be a real usability downfall for a significant number of current users, although they are getting better. My ideal OS has a package manager, but significantly improved from what is in use today and with a much more flexible package format.
2. $SHELL shell, and the associated core utils. I use bash, but that's probably because it's what I learned first. I know my grandmother, my mother, and my girlfriend don't want to use the CLI, so it's not a major feature for most.
Amen! Powershell just isn't there.
3. UI consistency. ZOMFG WUT? Yes; I use KDE, and it kicks ass.
I always end up with a mix of Gnome and KDE apps and never know quite what the capabilities and UI is going to be. Not that Windows is a lot better, but from a design perspective it is more consistent, if the larger design base has resulted in a less consistent result.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure maybe the hardware is more reliable, but the software is terrible.
Software was one of the categories, with the Blackberry having a 3% failure rate in the first year and the iPhone having a 1%. Unless there was a serious problem with their methodology, it look like their study trounces your anecdote. Not that I care since I can't afford either right now.
Could it be the physical keyboards... on the blackberry that make it more prone to 'breaking'.
Yes, but that only accounts for one of the eight categories of failure and the iPhone beat the Blackberry in all of them.
I have to agree with this totaly[sic].
You have to totally agree with a posting of speculation and conjecture that would be pointless if you bothered to RTFA?
Perhaps I am inferring too much but you seem to think that you have to spend as much in buying a house as you do a in renting. That is NOT the case. If you rent only what you actually NEED then the difference saved can be significant and with the magic of compounding will set you on a path to financial independence.
I'm paying a hundred bucks less a month for my house than I was paying in rent for a place barely big enough for myself and my girlfriend. Additionally, most of that money I'm spending is going to an invest in equity in the house (savings) not wasted as it is in renting. Add onto that the fact that I can subtract the remaining amount from my taxes and yeah, it is a better move than renting, even if my rent was only $1 a month. Get it?
What do you consider to be a good long term investment?
Long term investments are ones with low risk for good return, as opposed to my higher risk investments in stocks and commodities.
Ummmm, okay if you say so
I do, as does almost every economist in the world. I don't know where you went to school but we covered this in econ 101 and it is clearly explained in most economics textbooks.
So how does progressive taxation bring the system back into balance?
Progressive taxation takes more from the wealthy than the poor, proportional to their incomes. This means although you started out with a million dollars more than I, you're also taxed more heavily in an amount that evens out how much wealth you'll accumulate simply due to wealth condensation. It further means if you want to make significant amounts of money more (instead of just living off your inheritance at a steady level) you actually have to get a job and contribute to society to increase your wealth. This prevents money from automatically concentrating into fewer and fewer hands and allows for merit to be a major factor in how wealth accumulates. That means rich or poor, additional wealth will come from what you do, not your initial station in life.
Just take a look at countries with the highest standards of living in the world, lowest levels of poverty and violent crime, best education, etc. Notice they all have more progressive tax systems than the US currently does? Note that previous to the Bush administration we had more progressive taxes and violent crime was dropping and the economy was stable and growing?
'Socialism' is a bad word in the US due to the propaganda campaign against the soviets, but the US is just as socialist as europe is. Our socialism is just directed more towards the military and taxes the poor more heavily, in comparison. Public schools, police, roads, social security, NASA, is all socialism. Every economy in the world is socialist to some degree, just as they are capitalist to some degree. It is balance that makes for a stable economy and extremism that undermines it; extremism in either direction.
Please, with the tax advantages I'm making more money in the long term by buying a house than I am renting anything, even a small apartment. It is by far the best financial move as any advisor will tell you.
That is one of the great fallacies that perpetuates the confusion of want over need. Renting a room in a house from some old lady for $200/month and putting the $800+ into savings or even better safe and sound investments will likely pay off way better than a house ever would.
Are you joking? The opportunity costs are quite clear and paying into a mortgage instead of just losing that money to rent is almost always a net win. It sure is in my case.
Over the last decade housing has been a great investment (until about 2 years ago) long term it tends to run about even with inflation.
Housing is a long term investment and the recent downturn only really effects those pressured to sell in the short term. It is still a good long term investment for people looking for something conservative.
Having been a "creative" real estate investor several years ago, I know from first hand experience that there are quite a few landlords out there that were not born with it. In some cases they borrowed their way to ownership and in others they own it free and clear.
Irrelevant. In general, having money allows you to make money and money is consolidating by all accounts.
As for the $100 analogy why is it unsustainable?
You don't see a few percent of the population owning larger and larger shares of the country's wealth as unsustainable? It ends up with a few basically owning everything and then a depression or rebellion to forcibly redistribute the wealth. It wasn't called the "new deal" because the wealth stays in the same hands. The deal was, we don't kill the wealthy and they take a larger share of theory taxes to provide public works and the money goes back to the poorer part of the populace.
The average person does not have less and less the average person decides to max his credit cards out to try and out-jones the joneses.
The average person does have less and less, relative to the very rich. If you bothered to study sociology it is you'd know it is wealth disparity and not overall wealth levels that has the most influence on society. And it doesn't matter if you max out your credit if you have no real hope of ever having any net positive wealth.
And this is probably the biggest problem yet with the "average" person. Instead of slowly building wealth the are all convinced the way to do it is by taking big risks and getting lucky.
FAIL. Sorry, but being lucky is what it takes to become wealthy if you aren't born that way in the US. Take a look at the numbers. If you aren't born in the ultra rich class you have basically no chance of achieving that status through hard work. The vast majority of wealth is transferred via inheritance and interest, not though entrepreneurship. This is simply the reality of economics and if you want to claim otherwise you better have some pretty extraordinary evidence to the contrary.
Go ahead spend all your extra money on Megamillions each week - consider it an investment in your future.
No thanks. I can do math. That's why I also recognize the realities of the chances of normal people to advance economically in the US, compared to more progressive societies. Extreme capitalism is just as doomed as extreme socialism as even Greenspan has admitted now. You may not like the truth, but that's the way it is. A balanced economy is the only route to stability and our current economy is anything but. It needs correction and that means compensating for wealth condensation with sufficient levels of progressive taxation to bring the system back into balance.
While I do not doubt that for an equivalent home buying is going to be cheaper than renting plus you get the benefit of building equity. That said, I sincerely doubt that you could not find a room to rent that would be significantly less than the cost of buying a home.
Please, with the tax advantages I'm making more money in the long term by buying a house than I am renting anything, even a small apartment. It is by far the best financial move as any advisor will tell you. The point is, even making this best financial move, I'm making a lot of money for someone else who just happens to have started life wealthier than I am. Statistically speaking, this is how most wealth is transferred among people, by people who inherited it leveraging that wealth against those born with less. The "american dream" idea of a meritocracy is a dream, not a practical reality in the general case.
It seems that you have been convinced that you HAVE to have certain things and that you HAVE to borrow in order to obtain them.
Not at all. I just recognize that borrowing is sometimes the best financial option among many bad options. Investing in a good education that has allowed me to profit later in life has been a great financial move for me. I may still meet my goal of being a millionaire before I retire. That said, people who have done nothing but loan me part of their disproportionate inheritance are benefiting financially from my hard work as much or more than I am. That's the reality and that situation has been becoming more and more extreme over the last eight years.
If the US was represented by a population of 20 and our wealth by $100, one guy would start out life with $50 of those dollars and end up with $55 they pass on to their kid, despite having done nothing but loan that money to some of the 10 people who started life with no money at all or one of the 8 people who started with $5. The problem being, this isn't sustainable and we're rapidly approaching an economic collapse because the average person has less and less and so spends less and less. Heck the only reason we've lasted as long as we have without a collapse is because of the absurd credit being provided to people who will probably never pay it back. Now it's coming to a head and people changing they way they live will have little or no effect upon the average distribution of wealth, because while there is some opportunity for smart, hard workers like myself, it's an uneven playing field from the start and those who succeed because of their efforts are exceptions.
Wealth can be earned in this country no matter how much you start out with - that is what makes it great.
Sure it can. You can win money in the slot machines at Vegas too. The problem is, on average, most people don't win and the money slowly accumulates with the house... or in this case with the ultra wealthy who already have incomes in the millions each year.
It just means living within your means and planning for the future instead of borrowing from your future and living in the now.
No, it generally means taking big risks and getting lucky as well as wasting a lot of your effort digging yourself out of an economic hole where you start out with less wealth and power than a few percent of the population simply due to circumstances of birth.
Why couldn't I take of an isolated bubble of atmospheric air, and examine the breakdown from CO2 to N2 and 02 as the C-14 decayed into N-14?
I don't know, other than the difficulty of finding an isolated bubble of air and testing it without contamination. What you suggest may be possible, but I suspect if it is, getting good results would be iffy.
...but other than plants providing a method of fixation, why would they have to supple to only one?
Your last sentence there is a bit garbled. If I get your meaning, well, they don't supply the only radio dating isotope, just the most common and reliable one for recent history.
Why do they "have to borrow"? Isn't it amazing how so many in this country believe that they "have" to borrow the money so they can buy a new car.
Here's an example from my life. I bought a house. My choices were to pay rent or buy a home and the latter option is a much smarter financial move since my mortgage payments are less than rent in this area and I build equity in a home at the same time (savings). Either way, however, I end up paying money to someone who has more wealth to start out with... either because they own a rental or because they have the capital to lend me to buy a home. Do you recommend I live on the streets until I can afford to buy a home outright? You see how it works? It's not the only situation or the sort, investing in an education requires borrowing for most people and medical care requires borrowing for many.
I agree that credit card debt and the attitudes towards spending in this country are a problem, but even were it solved that does nothing to address the larger and more serious issue I mention. Wealth condensation is real and is runaway just as it was before the great depression and that is not the fault of the 50% of americans who start and end life with no wealth at all.
So, you're not really bothered by the notion that he thinks it should be funded at the same scale as the military, without mentioning where he thought that cash might come from?
We know where he plans to get the cash, increased taxes on the top end of society, you know that 5% of the country who have 50% of the wealth and who have been having their taxes lowered for the last 8 years? You know, the same people McCain doesn't want to tax in favor of just borrowing more from China and driving the country deeper into debt?
On a totally different note, why would carbon dating only work on things that were once living? Assuming that carbon got into the blade (through the process of making the steel or as air bubbles trapped within it) why wouldn't it work?
Carbon dating doesn't use just any carbon, but the carbon-14 isotope. Plants fix atmospheric carbon while alive so the level of the isotope will be the same as the atmosphere when the plant dies (or when an animal that consumed the plant dies). Every year after that, the remains will have decreasing amount of the carbon-14 isotope as it decays into nitrogen-14. The rate of decay is known, so the quantities can demonstrate how long since a sample containing carbon was alive, up to about 60,000 years.
This means you can't use it to date carbon that was never part of a plant. You can, however, use it to date swords and other steel artifacts, since the carbon used to make steel is generally from charcoal, made from wood that died during the same period the sword was constructed. A quick google search will turn up plenty of swords dated using this method.
Why do we have to raise taxes to pay down the debt? Why not cut other spending?
There are two reasons for this. First, budget cuts can only go so far and neither candidate will cut enough to make a dent in the debt. Republicans say they are for smaller government for every state but their own, and make no mistake it is the poorer Republican states benefiting from richer, Democrat states currently. It is political suicide for congresscritters to actually vote for smaller government in pretty much any state.
Second, progressive taxes are required for a stable economy. Any reputable economist will tell you about the wealth condensation principal. Basically, the more money you have the more money you make. Without higher taxes on the wealthy than on the poor, wealth concentrates into fewer and fewer hands in a capitalist system and eventually the middle class disappears and you have feudalism or a revolution or a depression. Over the last eight years, taxes on the very wealthy have gone down compared to taxes on the rest of society and wealth has consolidated dangerously. This wealth disparity is strongly correlative with violent crime and many other societal ills. Raising taxes on the high end and lowering them significantly on the low end, as Obama proposes, reverses this trend and stabilizes the economy.
Lowering taxes for all and cutting spending is great in theory, but realistically such a plan just results in paying for programs with borrowing, which increases the national debt. It also does noting to stabilize the economy in the long term and stop the increasing wealth disparity. In short, Joe the plumber is no economist and holds the common belief that our society is a meritocracy. In truth, most accumulated wealth is the result of inheritance, not hard work. He doesn't think people should be punished for being successful, but he takes it on faith that said success is the result of merit, which is simply not true (statistically speaking). The bottom 50% of our country has no net wealth and spends huge portions of their resources paying interest on money they have to borrow from those who started out with more in life. Those on the top don't have to work, they can just let their wealth work for them, loaning it to the poor and collecting interest. Without progressive taxes, that bottom 50% will grow until even greater portions of our society spend ever greater portions of their effort paying off debt until they simply can't take it any more and the economy collapses into a depression, just like it did during the great depression.
But, true to their word, they finally are opening Watch Instantly to Mac users.
Correction: They're finally opening it up to some Mac users. This solution is for intel Macs only. That's fine if you're assuming people want to use it to see the occasional flick on their laptop, but a fail for those users who have an older Mac as a media center, since a lot of those are old PPC systems.
I have two thoughts about this. First, Netflix should have gone with Flash video which is already in use by sites like Hulu so any DRM issues are bunk. Second, Netflix's selection of movies for live viewing is so poor, anything else they do is pretty much pointless. Right now only 14% of the movies in my queue are available for instant viewing and most of those are really bad old movies just there for bad movie and beer nights.
So instead of having a wired sensor on every external door/window, I now have a wireless setup? How many batteries and how do I maintain them?
My system has batteries half the size of an AA in each door sensor and bigger ones in other devices (fire alarms and audio sensors) and notifies me if they're running low.
Both Safari and Chrome use the WebKit (not to be confused with WebKitCore, JavascriptCore, JavascriptGlue).
Webkit is not to be confused with the components of Webkit? By the way it's called 'WebCore' not 'WebKitCore'.
Jesus, you really need to try the current Firefox minefields, they're insanely fast.
They're fast compared to the current release, or were a week ago... but the Webkit nighlies have been faster yet on the benchmarks I've tried. So I say again, what benchmarks are you using?
The only thing I can think of is that Google's browser is based on WebKit and Safari is at least partially based on WebKit.
You've got that a bit backwards. Safari relies upon Webkit for rendering. Chrome uses Webkit for some rendering and their homegrown javascript engine for javascript (instead of JavaScriptCore which is part of Webkit). If you're going to refer to one of them as partially based on Webkit, it should be Chrome.
But this fact has nothing whatsoever to do with Opera Mini.
Apple's licensing requires iPhone browsers to use the built in rendering engine in the iPhone SDK (which happens to be Webkit).
Webkit is fine and there are several fine browsers available based on Webkit in various stages of maturity and development. Opera's proprietary renderer is also very good. However, as far as being the most efficient, the most recent benchmarks show Firefox 3 clearly beating both in terms of performance.
What benchmarks are those? For javascript at least the Safari/Webkit nightlies seem to be beating the Firefox nightlies by a significant margin, or were last few times I ran them.
On top of that if you nationalize healthcare you also nationalize the costs of obesity, therefore such a lifestyle should be taxed higher to cover their added cost to society.
From all the studies I've seen this is dead wrong. Obese people die younger and end up with lower overall healthcare costs than average. By your logic, then, shouldn't they be getting a discount on their taxes?
That's how it will go down at the national level too. You can't punish people for being fat or for smoking, but you can offer "incentives".
You should research your opinions more. Fat people die younger resulting in a net savings to the healthcare system. There is no incentive to discourage people from being overweight.
On the other hand, neither McCain's nor Obama's are any better.
I doubt Obama's plan will ever see light of day since the democrats already have a version of Clinton's plan on the table and (given the votes) will pass it and Obama is unlikely to veto. The real question is if there is a republican president with veto power and if the democrats get their 60 votes to override it. Obama's plan is unlikely to ever see light of day no matter what happens.
It saddens me that every time someone on /. states that capitalism is not the end-all, there are always people that seem to think communism is the only other option. And they seem for the most part to be coming from the USA.
Education works... and so does miseducation. The US spent million on a misinformation/propaganda campaign to demonize the soviet block, focusing on communism and socialism as word to engender negativity and confusion. As a result the average american doesn't know what communism or socialism are, either in terms of economics or in terms of political parties (very different things). Just look at the latest two party name calling in the US where McCain is trying to criticize Obama by calling him "socialist" after just supporting the largest socialist program in decades with the socialization of US banks.
Does having only 2 relevant political parties make people limited in their views and reasoning or something?
That is a factor, since it leads to polarized views. Politics in the US is like sports. People want their "team" to win and aren't interested in more than the most superficial examination of the issues. They don't want to debate. They just want to cheer and jeer and want easily memorized talking points to simplify that. They don't even care if their talking points are true (Obama is a muslim or McCain was strongly involved in the savings and loans scandal). Even after being shown to be incorrect, they'll use that same argument the next time the topic comes up. It's quite sad.
But in the case of communism/socialism it is not the two-party system so much as the huge cold war era misinformation campaign.
Speed seems to be determined by a lack of bloat... and by bloat, I mean features. Firefox, back in the days it was referred to as phoenix, was exceedingly fast. Since then, fancy bookmarking, spellchecking, rss feeds, etc, etc has been added to it, causing slow startup and loading times.
I disagree. Safari has been adding features and getting faster. In fact, most of the browsers have been of late. Optimizing for speed is a feature and takes work and has been a focus of late as speed becomes a greater concern for companies launching Web applications and who want them responsive.
Chrome doesn't have many features, so it runs amazingly fast.
I don't see chrome doing significantly better (sometimes worse) than nightlies of Firefox and Safari according to the majority of speed tests out there. Basically, I don't see the correlation you're claiming. What benchmarks are you relying upon?
Are you in the western united states?
Nope, I'm in the east. Apparently they suck everywhere.
I won't be buying one, because any phone from T-Mobile is no longer in the running for me. They are my current provider, but (unlike every other provider) their service area near me has been shrinking rather than growing. Places I had service last year are now consistently "emergency call only" areas. We're talking about a good quarter of the state. On top of that, they had the nerve to send me advertising text messages telling me how they've expanded their coverage. I am currently contract free, so if another provider comes out with a good Android phone, I'll look into it, but who cares how good it is if it has no service.
It depends on the bike. You can run a sport bike up to red line and it makes a ton of noise but its high pitched. You as a runner will hear it but the guy in the car might not.
C'mon. This is Slashdot. We can make pipes to alter the pitch of anything to be loud and lower pitched with a little physics.
The reason that Harleys are "loud" (really any cruiser, not just Harleys) is that their exhaust note is low pitched.
Well, the harley is a special case since they intentionally run cylinders out of synch to create a "distinctive" noise but for just volume they are no different than any other engine. Cruisers and touring bikes have lower RPMs for their displacement and so have a deeper sound with the same pipes, as compared to sport bikes, but anything you put stock harley pipes on would be loud because they design them for it.
If he was so drunk he didn't see stopped cars in front of him, what makes you think ANYTHING else would have gotten his attention?
Maybe it wouldn't have, but this problem is a frequent one for more than drunk drivers. I've heard of plenty of cases where semi drivers forgot the truck in front of them and decided to pull a little further forward crushing the bike in front of them that they could no longer see over their hood. In fact, this problem is so common most motorcycle safety courses specifically instruct riders how to deal with it.
Not that a system like this would necessarily work as a solution, just that you can't discount the solution using the assumption that it only applies to drunk drivers.
1. Packages. Specifically, aptitude. It is unbelievably easy to find software to open weird file formats, play simple games, or speak some weird protocol. This is the single #1 feature Linux (BSDs too, possibly) has going for it. Packages are awesome for experienced users and newbies. If you say otherwise, you really haven't tried a well maintained distribution yet.
In theory I acknowledge that packages and package managers are a superior technology. In practice, package managers and formats in use provide a significant advantage for installation and updates if you're only using OSS and are only using packages that are in the right format for your manager. In practice, they're a problem as implemented for install from a Web page, run from removable media or network, portability to new hardware, incompatibility among package formats, and consistency of installation usability.
They are certainly a big win for upgrading software, but for installation can be a real usability downfall for a significant number of current users, although they are getting better. My ideal OS has a package manager, but significantly improved from what is in use today and with a much more flexible package format.
2. $SHELL shell, and the associated core utils. I use bash, but that's probably because it's what I learned first. I know my grandmother, my mother, and my girlfriend don't want to use the CLI, so it's not a major feature for most.
Amen! Powershell just isn't there.
3. UI consistency. ZOMFG WUT? Yes; I use KDE, and it kicks ass.
I always end up with a mix of Gnome and KDE apps and never know quite what the capabilities and UI is going to be. Not that Windows is a lot better, but from a design perspective it is more consistent, if the larger design base has resulted in a less consistent result.