Regardless of what has been said by whom, at the end of the day, it is my "opinion" that it is all a pack of lies. I believe he will raise taxes significantly, and folks making less then $250,000 or $200,000 or $150,000 or whatever will end up paying a majority of those new taxes. It can't be a lie, because it it is my belief and prediction based upon how democrats have governed in the past, and how I "believe" Obama will govern in the future. You can certainly disagree with me and trust what Obama has said -- the truths are still in the future though -- we will just have to wait and see...
I guess I am just having a hard time figuring out all of the proxies statements re: whose taxes are going up. Obama himself has adamantly said no one earning less then $250,000 would pay a dime more in taxes. Except then he said $200,000 in his infomercial. My bet is much like Clinton's pledge for a middle class tax cut which immediately turned into a middle class tax hike after he took office, anyone who pays federal income taxes will be paying more as soon as he gets into office. Of course maybe he was playing to the new group of folks who won't need to pay federal income taxes anymore...
I have no problem paying taxes (I pay enough of them), I am just looking for the government to stop spending as much at the federal level (i.e. health programs, education, welfare, bloated government bureaucracies, etc.) Exorbitant spending of this type was NEVER envisioned at the federal level, but was delegated to the states.
The more power that the federal government attains, the less freedoms we end up with and the more corruption we suffer from (remember the adage: absolute power corrupts absolutely). By limiting federal power and spreading and localizing the balance of power can only be beneficial to the citizens of this country.
You don't really believe the myth of "$250,000" do you? The latest from the Obama surrogates was $120,000 a year (Gov. Richardson), but I don't think many believe they will stop there. At the minimum, they will be increasing the capital gains rate, which will effect everyone with capital gains (more folks then you would think), and they will let the 2001 and the 2003 tax cuts sunset (which they will somehow classify as "not raising taxes"). Lastly, there is also a strong possibility they will eliminate the social security ceiling (i.e. if you make more then $104,000 a year, they will continue to deduct the social security tax, without giving you a corresponding increase in benefits when you retire -- i.e. turning social security into just another welfare program). But hey, you keep believing the $250,000 fairy tale, just like those who voted for Clinton to get that middle class tax cut -- NOT!
I don't wish to denigrate the loss of Iraqi civilians, BUT, Hussein didn't much care for the welfare of the Iraqi civilian either, and the vast majority of civilians dying today are dying at the hands of their Arab brothers and sisters -- truly a civilization with a self-destructive bent...
No, it probably doesn't included violent non-combat deaths (ex. vehicle accidents). But those types of deaths happen everywhere (i.e. take a sample of 140,000 young people in the United States, how many would one expect to die from similar causes in one month). My bet is that it would be a non-zero number...
Re: private military contractors -- who cares. They are forced to be there and they are paid well for the risks they take.
~3000 american deliberately murdered, such a trifle. That's also why I can't figure out why folks get upset when we have given a couple of thousand people uncomfortable interrogations in the last 7 years. I mean really, making then get undressed and lead around by a leash by a woman -- there are thousands of men that PAY for that treatment on a daily basis in the West...
You do realize that we had a grand total of SIX combat deaths in all of Iraq in all of September, yes? Heck, we suffer a similar number of combat deaths (i.e. murders) of young people in Chicago on an average weekend...
Unfortunately, it takes two to tango. IF the democrats had put up someone even reasonably qualifying for the office, they would have won. And yet again, they may prove to have made the same mistake again, choosing the MOST liberal senator out of the whole bunch. If they had picked like 85 instead of 100 on the list, this election would not even be in doubt...
This is big problem, and we are doing little to help ourselves here. We currently import significant stocks of refined oil products because we haven't built a refinery here in decades (with the regulatory approval processes here and rampant NIMBY, it's tough for organizations to justify the risk). So while it might be possible to build and run such industry profitably (relative low labor input), we have chosen to let other countries (primarily Europe) refine our additional demand. Same goes for oil production. We have known, proven and potentially profitable oil reserves which are politically unobtainable (ANWR, off the coasts of California and Florida at a minimum). Again, our political establishment has chosen to have us increase our imports instead. We also have additional oil contained in shale deposits in a number of western states, which due to environmental risk, will probably remain untouched until the precipice gets oh so close. Canada certainly has similar issues re: environmental issues for their oil sands based products -- just have chosen to mitigate and proceed. When gas gets to $8 to $10 a gallon, we will make the same decisions of course (it will be surprising to see how fast the oil derricks and refineries go up actually...).
Actually, the B-52's have only been around since the early 50's;-), and are currently scheduled to be front-line heavy/strategic bombers until 2040 -- so another 30+ years.
Okay, this response is just a tad simplistic. We had a major bridge collapse on the NYS Thruway (Interstate Route 90) in the late 80's, killed a number of people and took 2 years to rebuild. This was on a government controlled toll road -- with plenty of money available from the tolls (although the New York state government was in the habit of siphoning off significant chunks of the toll revenue for other pet projects). Why didn't the government make sure that sufficient inspections were being done -- which they weren't, why didn't the government make sure that the design was able to survive a central support collapse -- which they didn't, and which they did do with the rebuilt span? After all, this was a government controlled road, getting adequate and specified toll based funding. I guess the conclusion I should reach is that government, even with overly generous funds available can't build and maintain a simple bridge...
This is exactly how Microsoft destroyed Novell. At the time, Novell was dominant, but charged a non-trivial fee for each user allowed to join a Novell server (user based pricing), while Microsoft's server (NT 3.1 and then 3.5), had no such "CAL" required (i.e. buy the server, connect up as many users as you can for "free" -- after all, they were already paying the Microsoft tax for their client OS. Once Novell was marginalized, Microsoft quickly implemented the Novell licensing model, charging for each user connecting to the Microsoft server (while still also getting the client OS fee).
It wasn't that the early versions of NT Server were that good (although they were in some ways more interesting then Novell's product), it was just that they were much cheaper to deploy -- at least on till they had enough people converted....
If you are on a Mac, and don't mind using a larger disk for backup, nothing is better then Carbon Copy Cloner. Lost an 80 GB internal drive on my laptop once, Apple had it replaced withing 3 days, I booted from my backup disk (cloned from the original on a weekly basis), copied back, rebooted and within 30 minutes was back to where I was a couple of days before the disk blew up. No restoration activities required, no involved thinking and strategizing, just 30 minutes of unattended, unthinking effort.
Actually, I believe this is not quite true. While one would have obviated the losses due to aerodynamic friction, there is still the problem of imparting enough velocity to maintain orbit (similar to the Rutan Space Ship One problem). While one might be higher then the Space Station, one will also be traveling quite a bit slower as well. You will need a fair amount of fuel (i.e. cost), trying to get your craft up to orbital velocity...
More relevant to me at least, is the ability to meaningfully add 4GB of memory to a laptop (starting multiple VM's being one use case). The Intel stack (with the addition of the Merom) finally getts a 64 bit CPU, there are 64 bit OS's available (including Windows XP/2003), but we are still waiting on a 64 bit (or greater then a 32 bit) chipset (and will be waiting at least another 7-8 months, best case). Without all 3, even if one puts 4 GB of memory in the laptop, the top 1 GB (usually) will be hidden and unavailable, as the chipset cannot remap all the other i/o, devices which need to currently map from the 4GB boundary down (which means that the OS never sees (can't see) the memory, as the BIOS has already hidden it. There is nothing more annoying then spending a fair amount of money for the memory, only to have a GB of it ignored and unused.
This isn't technically correct. I would argue if if want more then 3GB, then you need a 64 bit CPU, a 64 bit OS AND, a >32 bit BIOS/motherboard architecture. Else, you can forget about actually using any of that RAM above the 3GB boundary, as the system board will use that memory address space for various controllers and such (i.e. drive controllers, video controllers, etc.
This is one of the most ill-informed comments I have seen in a awhile. Diesel subs are perfectly capable of operating in non-coastal waters -- Last time I checked, the Germans used to post whole "wolf packs" of subs in US waters during WW II, which were responsible for numorous sinkings. The diesel subs of today are vastly more capable then the 1930's designed German submarines.
One possible line of thought is that this is a ploy by Apple to first get Microsoft Office ported to the Intel version of MacOSX, before they entertain opening up the software to be more competitive with the Microsoft Windows monopoly.
We actually provide 10% of the funding -- and will get access to all that is learned from the experiment -- seems like a reasonable investment (and some of the other countries are also providing 10%. If the experiment achieves a breakthrough, and can produce energy at a fraction of the future costs -- we will absolutely exploit it -- oil industry be damned. Profit is profit after all, and at the end of the day, we are just not dumb enough to let our competitors have access to energy prices which are fractional to oil and to what we ourselves could produce with the same technology.
Completely concur, however, the problem was still the French leadership chain, which was old and still stuuck on WWI. They had not invested much, if any intellectual capital during the interwar years, and the results of the 1940 campaign show this. It wasn't that that hadn't spent money and built equipment/fortifications, but rather, they failed to keep their tactics (i.e. a function of leadership) current and relavent. The interesting thing about this failure, is that they executed it in the near perfect knowledge that the Germans would attack.
The same could be said about the U.S. in the current war. After so many preceding events (the first Trade Center bombing, the African embassy blasts,the USS Cole, the Khobar towers blasts), there should have been no doubt that continued and escalating attacks would take place, courtesy of the islamofacists. And yet, the U.S. preceding on like it wasn't in danger. To be honest, it isn't a question of if the U.S. will be attacked by a nuclear device, but a question of when -- although to be honest, a clandestine strike might occur somewhere else first.
That the French needed to surrender is purely a problem with the French leadership. France had equal numbers of tanks with the Gremans (in fact, the French tank equipment was generally acknowledged as superior). They were just very poorly led.
Most things work fine on a laptop. The part where I always get tripped up is using a laptop on the road with an external display device (i.e. projector). Confidently connecting up to one and also displaying your screen on either the laptop display, the projector, or ideally both, is a black art at best -- and try doing it in front of a group with minutes to get it to work -- forget it. My powerbook running OSX on the other hand, makes it a completely trival exercise. Until one can confidently do this, without arcane editing of a text file and a probable xserver bounce, certain folks just won't find it a viable option (Note, I have been running Linux as a primary OS on laptops for at least 5 years, but this is one thing I cannot accept, when other Unix options exist and which make it so seemless and require such little effort.)
Actually, if you pay them extra money (typically in the realm of $200 a month in my neck of the woods), they will remove most/all restrictions, use any port you want, no TOS hassles, etc.... As with most things in life, the proper application of certain sums of money will solve most problems.
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Regardless of what has been said by whom, at the end of the day, it is my "opinion" that it is all a pack of lies. I believe he will raise taxes significantly, and folks making less then $250,000 or $200,000 or $150,000 or whatever will end up paying a majority of those new taxes. It can't be a lie, because it it is my belief and prediction based upon how democrats have governed in the past, and how I "believe" Obama will govern in the future. You can certainly disagree with me and trust what Obama has said -- the truths are still in the future though -- we will just have to wait and see...
I guess I am just having a hard time figuring out all of the proxies statements re: whose taxes are going up. Obama himself has adamantly said no one earning less then $250,000 would pay a dime more in taxes. Except then he said $200,000 in his infomercial. My bet is much like Clinton's pledge for a middle class tax cut which immediately turned into a middle class tax hike after he took office, anyone who pays federal income taxes will be paying more as soon as he gets into office. Of course maybe he was playing to the new group of folks who won't need to pay federal income taxes anymore...
I have no problem paying taxes (I pay enough of them), I am just looking for the government to stop spending as much at the federal level (i.e. health programs, education, welfare, bloated government bureaucracies, etc.) Exorbitant spending of this type was NEVER envisioned at the federal level, but was delegated to the states. The more power that the federal government attains, the less freedoms we end up with and the more corruption we suffer from (remember the adage: absolute power corrupts absolutely). By limiting federal power and spreading and localizing the balance of power can only be beneficial to the citizens of this country.
You don't really believe the myth of "$250,000" do you? The latest from the Obama surrogates was $120,000 a year (Gov. Richardson), but I don't think many believe they will stop there. At the minimum, they will be increasing the capital gains rate, which will effect everyone with capital gains (more folks then you would think), and they will let the 2001 and the 2003 tax cuts sunset (which they will somehow classify as "not raising taxes"). Lastly, there is also a strong possibility they will eliminate the social security ceiling (i.e. if you make more then $104,000 a year, they will continue to deduct the social security tax, without giving you a corresponding increase in benefits when you retire -- i.e. turning social security into just another welfare program). But hey, you keep believing the $250,000 fairy tale, just like those who voted for Clinton to get that middle class tax cut -- NOT!
I don't wish to denigrate the loss of Iraqi civilians, BUT, Hussein didn't much care for the welfare of the Iraqi civilian either, and the vast majority of civilians dying today are dying at the hands of their Arab brothers and sisters -- truly a civilization with a self-destructive bent...
No, it probably doesn't included violent non-combat deaths (ex. vehicle accidents). But those types of deaths happen everywhere (i.e. take a sample of 140,000 young people in the United States, how many would one expect to die from similar causes in one month). My bet is that it would be a non-zero number... Re: private military contractors -- who cares. They are forced to be there and they are paid well for the risks they take.
~3000 american deliberately murdered, such a trifle. That's also why I can't figure out why folks get upset when we have given a couple of thousand people uncomfortable interrogations in the last 7 years. I mean really, making then get undressed and lead around by a leash by a woman -- there are thousands of men that PAY for that treatment on a daily basis in the West...
You do realize that we had a grand total of SIX combat deaths in all of Iraq in all of September, yes? Heck, we suffer a similar number of combat deaths (i.e. murders) of young people in Chicago on an average weekend...
Unfortunately, it takes two to tango. IF the democrats had put up someone even reasonably qualifying for the office, they would have won. And yet again, they may prove to have made the same mistake again, choosing the MOST liberal senator out of the whole bunch. If they had picked like 85 instead of 100 on the list, this election would not even be in doubt...
This is big problem, and we are doing little to help ourselves here. We currently import significant stocks of refined oil products because we haven't built a refinery here in decades (with the regulatory approval processes here and rampant NIMBY, it's tough for organizations to justify the risk). So while it might be possible to build and run such industry profitably (relative low labor input), we have chosen to let other countries (primarily Europe) refine our additional demand. Same goes for oil production. We have known, proven and potentially profitable oil reserves which are politically unobtainable (ANWR, off the coasts of California and Florida at a minimum). Again, our political establishment has chosen to have us increase our imports instead. We also have additional oil contained in shale deposits in a number of western states, which due to environmental risk, will probably remain untouched until the precipice gets oh so close. Canada certainly has similar issues re: environmental issues for their oil sands based products -- just have chosen to mitigate and proceed. When gas gets to $8 to $10 a gallon, we will make the same decisions of course (it will be surprising to see how fast the oil derricks and refineries go up actually...).
Actually, the B-52's have only been around since the early 50's ;-), and are currently scheduled to be front-line heavy/strategic bombers until 2040 -- so another 30+ years.
Okay, this response is just a tad simplistic. We had a major bridge collapse on the NYS Thruway (Interstate Route 90) in the late 80's, killed a number of people and took 2 years to rebuild. This was on a government controlled toll road -- with plenty of money available from the tolls (although the New York state government was in the habit of siphoning off significant chunks of the toll revenue for other pet projects). Why didn't the government make sure that sufficient inspections were being done -- which they weren't, why didn't the government make sure that the design was able to survive a central support collapse -- which they didn't, and which they did do with the rebuilt span? After all, this was a government controlled road, getting adequate and specified toll based funding. I guess the conclusion I should reach is that government, even with overly generous funds available can't build and maintain a simple bridge...
This is exactly how Microsoft destroyed Novell. At the time, Novell was dominant, but charged a non-trivial fee for each user allowed to join a Novell server (user based pricing), while Microsoft's server (NT 3.1 and then 3.5), had no such "CAL" required (i.e. buy the server, connect up as many users as you can for "free" -- after all, they were already paying the Microsoft tax for their client OS. Once Novell was marginalized, Microsoft quickly implemented the Novell licensing model, charging for each user connecting to the Microsoft server (while still also getting the client OS fee). It wasn't that the early versions of NT Server were that good (although they were in some ways more interesting then Novell's product), it was just that they were much cheaper to deploy -- at least on till they had enough people converted....
If you are on a Mac, and don't mind using a larger disk for backup, nothing is better then Carbon Copy Cloner. Lost an 80 GB internal drive on my laptop once, Apple had it replaced withing 3 days, I booted from my backup disk (cloned from the original on a weekly basis), copied back, rebooted and within 30 minutes was back to where I was a couple of days before the disk blew up. No restoration activities required, no involved thinking and strategizing, just 30 minutes of unattended, unthinking effort.
Actually, I believe this is not quite true. While one would have obviated the losses due to aerodynamic friction, there is still the problem of imparting enough velocity to maintain orbit (similar to the Rutan Space Ship One problem). While one might be higher then the Space Station, one will also be traveling quite a bit slower as well. You will need a fair amount of fuel (i.e. cost), trying to get your craft up to orbital velocity...
And Clinton appointed judges who wanted to impinge on my civil rights too (like the 2nd amendment of the Bill of Rights). What is your point?
More relevant to me at least, is the ability to meaningfully add 4GB of memory to a laptop (starting multiple VM's being one use case). The Intel stack (with the addition of the Merom) finally getts a 64 bit CPU, there are 64 bit OS's available (including Windows XP/2003), but we are still waiting on a 64 bit (or greater then a 32 bit) chipset (and will be waiting at least another 7-8 months, best case). Without all 3, even if one puts 4 GB of memory in the laptop, the top 1 GB (usually) will be hidden and unavailable, as the chipset cannot remap all the other i/o, devices which need to currently map from the 4GB boundary down (which means that the OS never sees (can't see) the memory, as the BIOS has already hidden it. There is nothing more annoying then spending a fair amount of money for the memory, only to have a GB of it ignored and unused.
This isn't technically correct. I would argue if if want more then 3GB, then you need a 64 bit CPU, a 64 bit OS AND, a >32 bit BIOS/motherboard architecture. Else, you can forget about actually using any of that RAM above the 3GB boundary, as the system board will use that memory address space for various controllers and such (i.e. drive controllers, video controllers, etc.
This is one of the most ill-informed comments I have seen in a awhile. Diesel subs are perfectly capable of operating in non-coastal waters -- Last time I checked, the Germans used to post whole "wolf packs" of subs in US waters during WW II, which were responsible for numorous sinkings. The diesel subs of today are vastly more capable then the 1930's designed German submarines.
One possible line of thought is that this is a ploy by Apple to first get Microsoft Office ported to the Intel version of MacOSX, before they entertain opening up the software to be more competitive with the Microsoft Windows monopoly.
We actually provide 10% of the funding -- and will get access to all that is learned from the experiment -- seems like a reasonable investment (and some of the other countries are also providing 10%. If the experiment achieves a breakthrough, and can produce energy at a fraction of the future costs -- we will absolutely exploit it -- oil industry be damned. Profit is profit after all, and at the end of the day, we are just not dumb enough to let our competitors have access to energy prices which are fractional to oil and to what we ourselves could produce with the same technology.
Completely concur, however, the problem was still the French leadership chain, which was old and still stuuck on WWI. They had not invested much, if any intellectual capital during the interwar years, and the results of the 1940 campaign show this. It wasn't that that hadn't spent money and built equipment/fortifications, but rather, they failed to keep their tactics (i.e. a function of leadership) current and relavent. The interesting thing about this failure, is that they executed it in the near perfect knowledge that the Germans would attack. The same could be said about the U.S. in the current war. After so many preceding events (the first Trade Center bombing, the African embassy blasts,the USS Cole, the Khobar towers blasts), there should have been no doubt that continued and escalating attacks would take place, courtesy of the islamofacists. And yet, the U.S. preceding on like it wasn't in danger. To be honest, it isn't a question of if the U.S. will be attacked by a nuclear device, but a question of when -- although to be honest, a clandestine strike might occur somewhere else first.
That the French needed to surrender is purely a problem with the French leadership. France had equal numbers of tanks with the Gremans (in fact, the French tank equipment was generally acknowledged as superior). They were just very poorly led.
Most things work fine on a laptop. The part where I always get tripped up is using a laptop on the road with an external display device (i.e. projector). Confidently connecting up to one and also displaying your screen on either the laptop display, the projector, or ideally both, is a black art at best -- and try doing it in front of a group with minutes to get it to work -- forget it. My powerbook running OSX on the other hand, makes it a completely trival exercise. Until one can confidently do this, without arcane editing of a text file and a probable xserver bounce, certain folks just won't find it a viable option (Note, I have been running Linux as a primary OS on laptops for at least 5 years, but this is one thing I cannot accept, when other Unix options exist and which make it so seemless and require such little effort.)
Actually, if you pay them extra money (typically in the realm of $200 a month in my neck of the woods), they will remove most/all restrictions, use any port you want, no TOS hassles, etc.... As with most things in life, the proper application of certain sums of money will solve most problems.