At my office on my network please give me a solid product that is simply good enough for the tasks I need it to do. I don't want to deal with implementing and administering every stupid new "feature" they wish to introduce across the vast array of stuff I have every 12-18 months.
A word of advice from my parents and a mortgage loan officer friend of mine is that 3x annual gross income is the most you should buy, with a little bit extra (~5-10%) for improvements or repair. If you keep yourself from estimating future incomes into this mix your life will be much better too (i.e. don't plan on raises or better job positions).
And by all accounts this formula (3x annual gross income) does not get you a luxury place, but you will certainly be in an excellent situation to contribute to your savings and rainy day funds. My family has worked from this formula with great results.
I'm sorry but your post really has touched a nerve with me. Then again it looks like you tend to troll quite frequently, but I'll bite.
There are many things about life which can inflict a person which they could never be expected to plan for, nor avoid.
Movies about people pulling themselves up out of poverty to become wildly successful because they got lucky is nice fun to watch but it does not reflect the reality of that sort of life where the odds are directly in favor of your death or disablement. Many people have to work just to survive, and many don't make it out of that grind. Take away their means (i.e. injury, disease, unemployment, eviction, etc.) and they have literally NOTHING left. People don't like to watch those movies that don't show success in the end though, but that's the reality for many (if not most) of the people in this position.
Social safety nets are designed with these things in mind. Choice requires opportunity which requires survival. Without opportunity there is no choice, only survival. If survival is the limit of your concerns then morality and social contracts frequently become the first victims as they are the least likely to feed you, clothe you, or shelter you. You have to not be struggling to survive before you can worry about anything else.
The thing you seem to fail to see is that there are a LOT of people (and growing) which never can make it out of poverty in the first place (or back out again in the second place) and it's mostly not because they make bad choices or just aren't capable people. They are stuck in the survival grind where they can't even take an opportunity if they get one (or are not educated enough to even know they have one). People in this position get desperate. And again, once people are desperate, then things like social contracts and mores are the first victims. If you value your own survival, you should value the survival of the people around you too.
Add on top of this that poverty is a moving line due to escalating costs of everything related to survival (food, medical care, transportation, etc.) are skyrocketing. It really doesn't take much for a person to be thrown back into poverty or desperate straights regardless of their previous station in life. Hence the government is then offering cradle to grave because the cost of survival is quite high and many people need the help from uh... cradle to grave (or at some point in between) just to keep them alive and out of desperate straights.
The balance between how large the safety net is and how much we do for other people before expecting them to make choices (or even have chances to make them) is certainly up for debate. But you seem to start out by assuming that the major modus operandi of these programs is to enable people whom are incompetent to leech off of the wealthy. That is as much to the point of these social safety net programs as the reason why the police, fire, ambulance, road, healthcare, telephone, electrical, water, mass transportation, and sewage systems frequently exist under government control. There are certain things in life that one person cannot be expected to provide entirely for themselves. We have agreed as a society that it is in our best collective interest to have these things, and to make them available to as many as possible in order to enable people to better their lives. And I dare say that we all get benefits from these services, rich or poor. You just seem to have neglected to acknowledge that there is a return path for helping other people with their survival in general. Namely that of assuring your own safety and quality of life. Don't think so highly of yourself that you would be able to pull yourself back up without outside help if shit really hit the fan for you. And please don't abuse the things society has given you by refusing to acknowledge the benefits it gives to others./rant
Re:If we just cut planned parenthood
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 3, Interesting
$300 million and give $1.00 to each american.
FTFY
In my opinion, for $1 of my money, they can keep the planned parenthood program. We can evaluate that once we get to the point where that little bit of money begins to matter. We have wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other military or paramilitary spending in so many other programs that the $1 for planned parenthood is the least of our concerns for now.
At the bare minimum... at least the entitlement programs like SS, welfare, planned parenthood, and medicaid go into the pockets of the people of the US (except for big pharma which should be addressed) instead of only being vaporized in labor, bombs, and gifts in other parts of the world. Too bad we can't have our military do the big service projects inside of the USA like dam / bridge / road building and maintenance. At least then we could keep our coveted military spending AND we would get some rather direct benefits from it domestically.
The politicians I think are supposed to reside within their representative districts (state-level anyways) but since the borders of that district are not concrete they frequently get redrawn into the oddest of shapes to try and trap the most supporters of one group or the other.
That it will. On the other hand, costs to distribute said fuel don't have much of an exponential increase in cost like overhauling the electric grid and adding power generation capacity (the volt), or attempting to retrofit all of the "fueling stations" (for compressed gas), and does not demand people sacrifice their wallet or much of their driving habits and comforts (prius).
I'm not ruling out the alternatives as being worthy areas of research... but I would rather we have people adopt things they can embrace directly with a minor bit of education instead of subsidizing or penalizing people for not adopting things which have knock-on effects in a vast many other ways and frankly seem to be only 1/2 of the answers we need in the longer term.
But we can't just wholesale shift to batteries and electric either. However, what we do have is fleets and fleets and fleets of trucks and other commercial machinery which runs on diesel. We already have a "grid" or distribution network capable of supporting it. And the model already exists for extending it.
I'm not saying that diesel is the ultimate end-game for going green. What I'm saying is that it is a perfectly sensible model for adjusting our posture while we more closely examine alternatives.
A lot of people think that in order to hop from 25mpg gasoline to 50+mpg requires electricity. Hence, they spend far more on cars which cause other problems like electricity grid strain and so on while typically sacrificing comfort and amenities to do it.
If we want something "doable" we shouldn't target something which causes people to disrupt their lives and hence will not adopt without subsidies, taxes, fees, etc. Instead we should target realistic things which do not have domino effects in all directions.
You can also promote a shift over to turbo diesels like much of Europe uses. I own a 2006 VW Jetta which gets 55mpg on the highway under favorable conditions (level road, new pavement, behind other vehicles at consistent speed) and 41mpg under unfavorable conditions (hilly, windy, traffic, etc.)
I usually get at least 35mpg in severely congested traffic (like roads filled with stop lights) if not >~40mpg on the side streets without too many stops.
My car is not spartan by any measure (electrically adjustable leather seats with heaters, heated mirrors, sun(and moon)roof, satellite radio, traction control, ABS, full airbag compliment, 6 disc changer, large trunk, and in-dash navigation). It is a stick shift (by choice, auto is available). My car is not especially light either at about 3200 lbs curb weight but it's not especially heavy either which gives it good handling in snow and ice (I live in the northern US).
If I went to buy this again in 2011 (@ ~$22-24K fully loaded) it is less than the cost of the Prius ($25-30K) or the Volt (@ ~40K) and I can refuel anywhere, my maintenance is fantastically cheaper and I don't have to wait for it to charge.
Granted, it's not using electricity, but the expenditure in fuel is about the same over the whole tank (Volt is electric only for the first X miles, then gas). This is without me having to press any buttons to switch between "Normal" driving and "Eco" driving. I don't have to do squat to enjoy it.
Why we (as Americans) get typically suck on "electric" being the only way to go "Green" or "cheaper" I will never understand. And as a matter of fact, the VW's were the only non-hybrid or fully electric cars to qualify for that green tax credit.
Rocking something is slang for indicating possession. Sort of like "rolling with" something. But cooler (and doesn't mean you are literally rocking or rolling).
Just about every single thing you will ever do, touch, see, think of, or make in your life will be a reconfiguration of existing tech. Think about this for a minute.
Invent just means you found a novel way to do something with existing tech.
Just imagine what inventions would be like if you had to make everything in it from scratch, and didn't already start by knowing how to make fire, dig up minerals and metals (let alone smelt them).
This is not for raising how much MORE we want to spend on future programs. This is for covering what is already scheduled to be spent under programs currently in operation.
Not raising this limit will mean a technical default or failure to meet our obligations as a debtor. Like not paying your credit card bill. You already spent the money, but you just refused to pay for it. This is exactly why the credit rating agencies have considered lowering our nations credit score... Failure to pay...
By trying to "fix our balance sheet" by blocking payment on our CURRENT obligations instead of when we make a new budget... yes it is easy to see the republicans as trying to make Obama look bad. The proper time for trimming fat is when you are making a new budget. Not when it comes time to pay your bills.
Or you know... you can instead memorize HOW to do multiplication instead of memorizing the fact of 6*6 = 36...
I learned how to multiply, and when I did the same multiplication many times I naturally memorized the results, but I did not strive to remember all of the results...
Memorizing results doesn't get you anything else of greater usefulness out of having done so.
Personally I would rather learn the why and the how than memorize the what.
Given the hash in a common format, applications like LophtCrack could take this out in about 20 minutes or less... We won't even start with how fast rainbow tables or brute force could whip through it at a length of only 9 characters and only using alpha-numerics.
There is even a specific option to slightly increase the cracking time by checking for letter - number - symbol substitution which it will do before attempting brute force checking.
Not really any more secure at all. Sorry. I used to use Lopht on a network I administered to check for passwords this weak. And without fail they would take at most a couple of hours to find.
All three are close in percentage and we shouldn't give anything a pass without looking at it: http://www.cbpp.org/images/cms//PolicyBasic_WhereOurTaxDollarsGo-f1_rev4-15-11.jpg
Just be aware that Social Security and Medicare Part A are funded exclusively by the dollars taxed for that purpose. Cutting those programs benefits while not cutting what we pay into it might make life cheaper for us on paper (as a nation, not personally), but it does nothing for the balance between debt and income nationally. Squeezing expenditures on programs which are successfully self-funded is a trite way to try and reduce the appearance of deficits in other areas of the budget because of over spending in those other areas. Reduce costs in SS and Medicare to pay for Iraq and Afghanistan? Oooh look! the budget is "balanced"... except we now are losing on both ends...
They call it entitlements largely for a reason... as in "I paid for those benefits, I want my promised return dammit!" you don't pay into a lottery system with SS and Medicare Part A you pay into an entitlement system BECAUSE you expect (and were promised) returns... Why else would you pay?
Changing demographics in the future may change this equation a bit. But, in reality, if you want to change the impact on American lifestyle your tax dollars spent domestically mean a whole lot more than your tax dollars spent carrying out wars in middle-eastern countries. If you want my opinion, adjusting the military objectives and reformatting the medicare parts B,C, and D (or better yet the whole health care insurance / service industry) make a whole lot more sense than SS and Medicare Part A. In the same token however (before just throwing out the whole program), just remember that many people need those additional medicare programs in order to just survive as there is not a viable alternative.
The biggest problem is the fact that health care is too damn expensive no matter who is paying for it. $40 for a bottle of Tylenol or $200 for an inhaler? $1000 for a ride in an ambulance? $5000 for a night's stay at a hospital? Please... It shouldn't be cheaper to take good ecstasy (illegal substance), snort a line of very pure coke (also illegal), take a taxi 200 miles to a really expensive hotel and rent 5 prostitutes ("care givers", also illegal) for less than the cost of common things you might need at a hospital which are not illegal... On that note maybe we should just make Tylenol illegal and let the black market handle it and save ourselves some coin...
Whether you pay for these benefits directly to an insurance company, directly to a care provider (cash), or the government does it for you... it's the escalating prices which will screw us all (and put non-covered persons at a severe disadvantage). Our health care system is broken and what we budgeted for will not keep up with the costs for things like Medicare part D (prescription drug coverage)... but this is not because Tylenol is becoming harder to manufacture or there is a shortage of steel canisters to put aerosol into for inhalers... they didn't start making Ambulances with low radar profiles for stealth operations.... and the cost of a bed frame made out of steel pipes and crappy mattresses isn't really going anywhere. Somehow I doubt nurse or attendant salaries have moved up in-line with the costs of "observation" either...
So, lets go through the un(der)funded programs and take a long look as to whether we as a whole country, not the just the top 10%, absolutely need them or not. If we need them we need to fund them, if we don't we need to axe them. If we need them, but cannot fund them we need to fix the reason behind the costs which make it unfundable.
Our infrastructure is crumbling (repairs are not being funded), health care is not affordable (price of even insurance is a joke), education / R and D / and investment are stagnating and their budgets are shrinking, we are literally bailing out mega-corps and banks while mortgage holders go bankrupt.
Here is the full text of the article due to the paywall suddenly becoming active for some:
Robert Morris, a cryptographer who helped developed the Unix computer operating system, which controls an increasing number of the world’s computers and touches almost every aspect of modern life, died on Sunday in Lebanon, N.H. He was 78.
The cause was complications of dementia, his wife, Anne Farlow Morris, said.
Known as an original thinker in the computer science world, Mr. Morris also played an important clandestine role in planning what was probably the nation’s first cyberwar: the electronic attacks on Saddam Hussein’s government in the months leading up to the Persian Gulf war of 1991.
Although details are still classified, the attacks, along with laser-guided bombs, are believed to have largely destroyed Iraq’s military command and control capability before the war began.
Begun as a research effort at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in the 1960s, Unix became one of the world’s leading operating systems, along with Microsoft’s Windows. Variations of the original Unix software, for example, now provide the foundation for Apple’s iPhone iOS and Macintosh OSX as well as Google’s Android operating systems.
As chief scientist of the National Security Agency’s National Computer Security Center, Mr. Morris gained unwanted national attention in 1988 after his son, Robert Tappan Morris, a graduate student in computer science at Cornell University, wrote a computer worm — a software program — that was able to propel itself through the Internet, then a brand-new entity.
Although it was intended to hide in the network as a bit of Kilroy-was-here digital graffiti, the program, because of a design error, spread wildly out of control, jamming more than 10 percent of the roughly 50,000 computers that made up the network at the time.
After realizing his error, the younger Mr. Morris fled to his parents’ home in Arnold, Md., before turning himself in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was convicted under an early federal computer crime law, sentenced to probation and ordered to pay a $10,000 fine and perform community service. He later received a computer science doctorate at Harvard University and is now a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer science faculty.
Robert Morris was born in Boston on July 25, 1932, the son of Walter W. Morris, a salesman, and Helen Kelly Morris. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a master’s in applied mathematics from Harvard.
At Bell Laboratories he initially worked on the design of specialized software tools known as compilers, which convert programmers’ instructions into machine-readable language that can be directly executed by computers.
Beginning in 1970, he worked with the Unix research group at Bell Laboratories, where he was a major contributor in both the numerical functions of the operating system and its security capabilities, including the password system and encryption functions.
His interest in computer security deepened in the late 1970s as he continued to explore cryptography, the study and practice of protecting information by converting it into code. With another researcher, he began working on an academic paper that unraveled an early German encryption device.
Before the paper could be published, however, he received an unexpected call from the National Security Agency. The agency invited him to visit, and when he met with officials, they asked him not to publish the paper because of what it might reveal about the vulnerabilities of modern cryptographic systems.
He complied, and in 1986 went to work for the agency in protecting government computers and in projects involving electronic surveillance and online warfare. Although little is known about his classified work for the government, Mr. Morris
Actually, they bought out another company called "The Geek Squad" which did on-site and in-shop computer repairs (and had a good reputation) based in the Minneapolis suburbs of MN. Years ago I worked at their pilot store (Minnetonka MN) when they did their first store roll-out. I came in from another on-site service company based elsewhere right after the initial buy out. This was during the time when they were still getting their investors drummed up over rolling it out nation wide. The company brand name and trademark definitely existed before Best Buy bought it.
A bit of history: Best-buy had a terrible track record for their service and returns department prior to the purchase of the Geek Squad. It was commonly filled with CD sales and inventory workers (flunkies) and no one had any real training... Meanwhile, The Geek Squad had an excellent track record in the Minneapolis area. Best Buy put 0 and 2 together and figured they would improve the service at their stores by modeling after The Geek Squad (that is where the VW Bug thing started from, that came along with the purchase as the original Geek Squad did that and were in-fact called "agents").
My co-workers at the initial store were competent and knowledgeable (for the most part, there was about 10-15 of us there)... and many were "agents" of the original company for a while and during the initial trial the original "Geek Squad" guys were doing the on-site work still while we did the in-store work. We had people with computer diagnostic and repair backgrounds working at our bench separate from the people doing sales. They paid us crap but we could still turn around most computer repairs short of hardware replacements within about 24-48 hours or so in-store. Corporate was in love with that (for a bit) and our profits at the main store surged because it worked well. Then they wanted us to take it national, and our department had many people sent out to different cities to train their existing service departments on the new procedures and introduce brand awareness. I went out to another location as well, but I'll withold further details so as to remain at least partially anonymous.
The people we trained at stores after that were terrible (the previously mentioned flunkies) and corporate "sales" based programs and rules (and hiring practices) de-emphasized good technicians in favor of procedures to dupe as many people as possible into buying shit like ISP programs and OS / Motherboard re-installs. No one really needed that crap but corporate measures the success of their store's service by their "Attachment rates" of services per customer, not customer satisfaction. Internally, the service departments are ALSO rated by their sales figures. So they pushed that sales crap in order to fill the knowledge gaps of the people doing the work... leaving it to be flip-chart diagnostics at it's worst.
In addition to that "the management" found it completely acceptable to fill temporary staffing gaps at the computer repair desk with people from CD / Media, cashiering, inventory, etc. They expected us to teach these people how to diagnose computer problems (with no relevant computer skills) just for the days when we were short handed (happened regularly). On top of that, we had to keep our sales attachment rate up or we would be negatively reviewed as a department (and individually)...
Being competent and having morals and understanding that people were bringing me machines they couldn't really live without, I did not sell people the garbage services (like AOL / Earthlink or needless OS reinstalls and motherboard replacements) which means I was later terminated under the guise of being late to work by less than 15 minutes a whole whopping twice over a 1 yr period. This even considering than between myself and one other guy who came from the main investor store were able to take the average repair times from over 430th in the company to less than 150th in the company in less than 4 months while losing 2 other staff members of our department in
When your warranty includes tolerance for solar flares, martian soil in it's parts, atmospheric re-entry, severe radiation storms, micro-meteors, sand storms, in excess of 200 degree (F) temperature swings, severe g-force shock on both launch and land, and "wear and tear while traversing alien soil", all while being constructed of the lightest materials possible powered by nothing other than the sun, then it's probably expected that even 90 days was hard to warrant against failure.
Launch your laptop through those same paces. Put it in a zip-lock bag and place it in your freezer overnight, followed by flexing the screen quickly and shooting it with a pellet gun before throwing it off your 2nd story balcony into a pile of sand before tossing it in your pre-heated oven. Even this will be kinder to the electronics than is likely encountered daily on Mars.
- Toast
With much lower liquidity. There was also many fewer players and economies in the world market at the time. This day in age it is rediculous to confuse the current market conditions with ones from 10+ years ago. Especially since the world exchanges and economies are linked together.
A properly motivated and educated tuna can be a shark just the same. Short term trading has not killed long term investing.
At sub second speeds you still have to be a smart shark in order to keep yourself from going broke at the speed of light anyways.
You should forcast your investment return and trade frequency based on your expected investment duration in any case. If you want sub-second profits you have to put extra money,time, and risk into it. And you get to deal with sub second competitors too. If you just want to invest... Then just invest...
Think of it this way: if there were no day traders and you wanted to get rid of some stock in a company you have been holding for quite a while you would likely run into liquidity problems and get stuck holding that stock when you no longer wanted it. If you wanted to sell because you didn't agree with the motives of the company, or you didn't like the management policies or you thought the company would do poorly, but you had no one to sell to, then you would likely have a different opinion of day traders.
After all, you are perfectly capable of investing in preferred stock in companies willing to issue it to you. This would generally give you the right to attend board meetings and if the company supports it you may receive dividends where common stock may not.
And I hate to say it but ALL investments are a gamble. Day traders or not. Short term or not.
Exchange isn't exactly hard to read e-mail in either. Not that that was your point, but I find your boss' reasoning quite ironic on those grounds. Stuff like that tends to come out of the same peoples mouths which set their passwords as "password" and even need to write it on a post-it note on their monitor to remember it.
Slashdot Mirror
Speak for yourself.
At my office on my network please give me a solid product that is simply good enough for the tasks I need it to do. I don't want to deal with implementing and administering every stupid new "feature" they wish to introduce across the vast array of stuff I have every 12-18 months.
A word of advice from my parents and a mortgage loan officer friend of mine is that 3x annual gross income is the most you should buy, with a little bit extra (~5-10%) for improvements or repair. If you keep yourself from estimating future incomes into this mix your life will be much better too (i.e. don't plan on raises or better job positions).
And by all accounts this formula (3x annual gross income) does not get you a luxury place, but you will certainly be in an excellent situation to contribute to your savings and rainy day funds. My family has worked from this formula with great results.
- Toast
I'm sorry but your post really has touched a nerve with me. Then again it looks like you tend to troll quite frequently, but I'll bite.
/rant
There are many things about life which can inflict a person which they could never be expected to plan for, nor avoid.
Movies about people pulling themselves up out of poverty to become wildly successful because they got lucky is nice fun to watch but it does not reflect the reality of that sort of life where the odds are directly in favor of your death or disablement. Many people have to work just to survive, and many don't make it out of that grind. Take away their means (i.e. injury, disease, unemployment, eviction, etc.) and they have literally NOTHING left. People don't like to watch those movies that don't show success in the end though, but that's the reality for many (if not most) of the people in this position.
Social safety nets are designed with these things in mind. Choice requires opportunity which requires survival. Without opportunity there is no choice, only survival. If survival is the limit of your concerns then morality and social contracts frequently become the first victims as they are the least likely to feed you, clothe you, or shelter you. You have to not be struggling to survive before you can worry about anything else.
The thing you seem to fail to see is that there are a LOT of people (and growing) which never can make it out of poverty in the first place (or back out again in the second place) and it's mostly not because they make bad choices or just aren't capable people. They are stuck in the survival grind where they can't even take an opportunity if they get one (or are not educated enough to even know they have one). People in this position get desperate. And again, once people are desperate, then things like social contracts and mores are the first victims. If you value your own survival, you should value the survival of the people around you too.
Add on top of this that poverty is a moving line due to escalating costs of everything related to survival (food, medical care, transportation, etc.) are skyrocketing. It really doesn't take much for a person to be thrown back into poverty or desperate straights regardless of their previous station in life. Hence the government is then offering cradle to grave because the cost of survival is quite high and many people need the help from uh... cradle to grave (or at some point in between) just to keep them alive and out of desperate straights.
The balance between how large the safety net is and how much we do for other people before expecting them to make choices (or even have chances to make them) is certainly up for debate. But you seem to start out by assuming that the major modus operandi of these programs is to enable people whom are incompetent to leech off of the wealthy. That is as much to the point of these social safety net programs as the reason why the police, fire, ambulance, road, healthcare, telephone, electrical, water, mass transportation, and sewage systems frequently exist under government control. There are certain things in life that one person cannot be expected to provide entirely for themselves. We have agreed as a society that it is in our best collective interest to have these things, and to make them available to as many as possible in order to enable people to better their lives. And I dare say that we all get benefits from these services, rich or poor. You just seem to have neglected to acknowledge that there is a return path for helping other people with their survival in general. Namely that of assuring your own safety and quality of life. Don't think so highly of yourself that you would be able to pull yourself back up without outside help if shit really hit the fan for you. And please don't abuse the things society has given you by refusing to acknowledge the benefits it gives to others.
$300 million and give $1.00 to each american.
FTFY
In my opinion, for $1 of my money, they can keep the planned parenthood program. We can evaluate that once we get to the point where that little bit of money begins to matter. We have wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other military or paramilitary spending in so many other programs that the $1 for planned parenthood is the least of our concerns for now.
At the bare minimum... at least the entitlement programs like SS, welfare, planned parenthood, and medicaid go into the pockets of the people of the US (except for big pharma which should be addressed) instead of only being vaporized in labor, bombs, and gifts in other parts of the world. Too bad we can't have our military do the big service projects inside of the USA like dam / bridge / road building and maintenance. At least then we could keep our coveted military spending AND we would get some rather direct benefits from it domestically.
The politicians I think are supposed to reside within their representative districts (state-level anyways) but since the borders of that district are not concrete they frequently get redrawn into the oddest of shapes to try and trap the most supporters of one group or the other.
That it will. On the other hand, costs to distribute said fuel don't have much of an exponential increase in cost like overhauling the electric grid and adding power generation capacity (the volt), or attempting to retrofit all of the "fueling stations" (for compressed gas), and does not demand people sacrifice their wallet or much of their driving habits and comforts (prius).
I'm not ruling out the alternatives as being worthy areas of research... but I would rather we have people adopt things they can embrace directly with a minor bit of education instead of subsidizing or penalizing people for not adopting things which have knock-on effects in a vast many other ways and frankly seem to be only 1/2 of the answers we need in the longer term.
That's all.
But we can't just wholesale shift to batteries and electric either. However, what we do have is fleets and fleets and fleets of trucks and other commercial machinery which runs on diesel. We already have a "grid" or distribution network capable of supporting it. And the model already exists for extending it.
I'm not saying that diesel is the ultimate end-game for going green. What I'm saying is that it is a perfectly sensible model for adjusting our posture while we more closely examine alternatives.
A lot of people think that in order to hop from 25mpg gasoline to 50+mpg requires electricity. Hence, they spend far more on cars which cause other problems like electricity grid strain and so on while typically sacrificing comfort and amenities to do it.
If we want something "doable" we shouldn't target something which causes people to disrupt their lives and hence will not adopt without subsidies, taxes, fees, etc. Instead we should target realistic things which do not have domino effects in all directions.
You can also promote a shift over to turbo diesels like much of Europe uses. I own a 2006 VW Jetta which gets 55mpg on the highway under favorable conditions (level road, new pavement, behind other vehicles at consistent speed) and 41mpg under unfavorable conditions (hilly, windy, traffic, etc.)
I usually get at least 35mpg in severely congested traffic (like roads filled with stop lights) if not >~40mpg on the side streets without too many stops.
My car is not spartan by any measure (electrically adjustable leather seats with heaters, heated mirrors, sun(and moon)roof, satellite radio, traction control, ABS, full airbag compliment, 6 disc changer, large trunk, and in-dash navigation). It is a stick shift (by choice, auto is available). My car is not especially light either at about 3200 lbs curb weight but it's not especially heavy either which gives it good handling in snow and ice (I live in the northern US).
If I went to buy this again in 2011 (@ ~$22-24K fully loaded) it is less than the cost of the Prius ($25-30K) or the Volt (@ ~40K) and I can refuel anywhere, my maintenance is fantastically cheaper and I don't have to wait for it to charge.
Granted, it's not using electricity, but the expenditure in fuel is about the same over the whole tank (Volt is electric only for the first X miles, then gas). This is without me having to press any buttons to switch between "Normal" driving and "Eco" driving. I don't have to do squat to enjoy it.
Why we (as Americans) get typically suck on "electric" being the only way to go "Green" or "cheaper" I will never understand. And as a matter of fact, the VW's were the only non-hybrid or fully electric cars to qualify for that green tax credit.
Enjoy!
Rocking something is slang for indicating possession. Sort of like "rolling with" something. But cooler (and doesn't mean you are literally rocking or rolling).
-Toast
Just about every single thing you will ever do, touch, see, think of, or make in your life will be a reconfiguration of existing tech. Think about this for a minute.
Invent just means you found a novel way to do something with existing tech.
Just imagine what inventions would be like if you had to make everything in it from scratch, and didn't already start by knowing how to make fire, dig up minerals and metals (let alone smelt them).
This is not for raising how much MORE we want to spend on future programs. This is for covering what is already scheduled to be spent under programs currently in operation.
Not raising this limit will mean a technical default or failure to meet our obligations as a debtor. Like not paying your credit card bill. You already spent the money, but you just refused to pay for it. This is exactly why the credit rating agencies have considered lowering our nations credit score... Failure to pay...
By trying to "fix our balance sheet" by blocking payment on our CURRENT obligations instead of when we make a new budget... yes it is easy to see the republicans as trying to make Obama look bad. The proper time for trimming fat is when you are making a new budget. Not when it comes time to pay your bills.
Or you know... you can instead memorize HOW to do multiplication instead of memorizing the fact of 6*6 = 36...
I learned how to multiply, and when I did the same multiplication many times I naturally memorized the results, but I did not strive to remember all of the results...
Memorizing results doesn't get you anything else of greater usefulness out of having done so.
Personally I would rather learn the why and the how than memorize the what.
Ok, I give myself the "whoosh" of the day award. Carry on...
Given the hash in a common format, applications like LophtCrack could take this out in about 20 minutes or less... We won't even start with how fast rainbow tables or brute force could whip through it at a length of only 9 characters and only using alpha-numerics.
There is even a specific option to slightly increase the cracking time by checking for letter - number - symbol substitution which it will do before attempting brute force checking.
Not really any more secure at all. Sorry. I used to use Lopht on a network I administered to check for passwords this weak. And without fail they would take at most a couple of hours to find.
All three are close in percentage and we shouldn't give anything a pass without looking at it:
http://www.cbpp.org/images/cms//PolicyBasic_WhereOurTaxDollarsGo-f1_rev4-15-11.jpg
Just be aware that Social Security and Medicare Part A are funded exclusively by the dollars taxed for that purpose. Cutting those programs benefits while not cutting what we pay into it might make life cheaper for us on paper (as a nation, not personally), but it does nothing for the balance between debt and income nationally. Squeezing expenditures on programs which are successfully self-funded is a trite way to try and reduce the appearance of deficits in other areas of the budget because of over spending in those other areas. Reduce costs in SS and Medicare to pay for Iraq and Afghanistan? Oooh look! the budget is "balanced"... except we now are losing on both ends...
They call it entitlements largely for a reason... as in "I paid for those benefits, I want my promised return dammit!" you don't pay into a lottery system with SS and Medicare Part A you pay into an entitlement system BECAUSE you expect (and were promised) returns... Why else would you pay?
Changing demographics in the future may change this equation a bit. But, in reality, if you want to change the impact on American lifestyle your tax dollars spent domestically mean a whole lot more than your tax dollars spent carrying out wars in middle-eastern countries. If you want my opinion, adjusting the military objectives and reformatting the medicare parts B,C, and D (or better yet the whole health care insurance / service industry) make a whole lot more sense than SS and Medicare Part A. In the same token however (before just throwing out the whole program), just remember that many people need those additional medicare programs in order to just survive as there is not a viable alternative.
The biggest problem is the fact that health care is too damn expensive no matter who is paying for it. $40 for a bottle of Tylenol or $200 for an inhaler? $1000 for a ride in an ambulance? $5000 for a night's stay at a hospital? Please... It shouldn't be cheaper to take good ecstasy (illegal substance), snort a line of very pure coke (also illegal), take a taxi 200 miles to a really expensive hotel and rent 5 prostitutes ("care givers", also illegal) for less than the cost of common things you might need at a hospital which are not illegal... On that note maybe we should just make Tylenol illegal and let the black market handle it and save ourselves some coin...
Whether you pay for these benefits directly to an insurance company, directly to a care provider (cash), or the government does it for you... it's the escalating prices which will screw us all (and put non-covered persons at a severe disadvantage). Our health care system is broken and what we budgeted for will not keep up with the costs for things like Medicare part D (prescription drug coverage)... but this is not because Tylenol is becoming harder to manufacture or there is a shortage of steel canisters to put aerosol into for inhalers... they didn't start making Ambulances with low radar profiles for stealth operations.... and the cost of a bed frame made out of steel pipes and crappy mattresses isn't really going anywhere. Somehow I doubt nurse or attendant salaries have moved up in-line with the costs of "observation" either...
So, lets go through the un(der)funded programs and take a long look as to whether we as a whole country, not the just the top 10%, absolutely need them or not. If we need them we need to fund them, if we don't we need to axe them. If we need them, but cannot fund them we need to fix the reason behind the costs which make it unfundable.
Our infrastructure is crumbling (repairs are not being funded), health care is not affordable (price of even insurance is a joke), education / R and D / and investment are stagnating and their budgets are shrinking, we are literally bailing out mega-corps and banks while mortgage holders go bankrupt.
So... if the money we
Here is the full text of the article due to the paywall suddenly becoming active for some:
Robert Morris, a cryptographer who helped developed the Unix computer operating system, which controls an increasing number of the world’s computers and touches almost every aspect of modern life, died on Sunday in Lebanon, N.H. He was 78.
The cause was complications of dementia, his wife, Anne Farlow Morris, said.
Known as an original thinker in the computer science world, Mr. Morris also played an important clandestine role in planning what was probably the nation’s first cyberwar: the electronic attacks on Saddam Hussein’s government in the months leading up to the Persian Gulf war of 1991.
Although details are still classified, the attacks, along with laser-guided bombs, are believed to have largely destroyed Iraq’s military command and control capability before the war began.
Begun as a research effort at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in the 1960s, Unix became one of the world’s leading operating systems, along with Microsoft’s Windows. Variations of the original Unix software, for example, now provide the foundation for Apple’s iPhone iOS and Macintosh OSX as well as Google’s Android operating systems.
As chief scientist of the National Security Agency’s National Computer Security Center, Mr. Morris gained unwanted national attention in 1988 after his son, Robert Tappan Morris, a graduate student in computer science at Cornell University, wrote a computer worm — a software program — that was able to propel itself through the Internet, then a brand-new entity.
Although it was intended to hide in the network as a bit of Kilroy-was-here digital graffiti, the program, because of a design error, spread wildly out of control, jamming more than 10 percent of the roughly 50,000 computers that made up the network at the time.
After realizing his error, the younger Mr. Morris fled to his parents’ home in Arnold, Md., before turning himself in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was convicted under an early federal computer crime law, sentenced to probation and ordered to pay a $10,000 fine and perform community service. He later received a computer science doctorate at Harvard University and is now a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer science faculty.
Robert Morris was born in Boston on July 25, 1932, the son of Walter W. Morris, a salesman, and Helen Kelly Morris. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a master’s in applied mathematics from Harvard.
At Bell Laboratories he initially worked on the design of specialized software tools known as compilers, which convert programmers’ instructions into machine-readable language that can be directly executed by computers.
Beginning in 1970, he worked with the Unix research group at Bell Laboratories, where he was a major contributor in both the numerical functions of the operating system and its security capabilities, including the password system and encryption functions.
His interest in computer security deepened in the late 1970s as he continued to explore cryptography, the study and practice of protecting information by converting it into code. With another researcher, he began working on an academic paper that unraveled an early German encryption device.
Before the paper could be published, however, he received an unexpected call from the National Security Agency. The agency invited him to visit, and when he met with officials, they asked him not to publish the paper because of what it might reveal about the vulnerabilities of modern cryptographic systems.
He complied, and in 1986 went to work for the agency in protecting government computers and in projects involving electronic surveillance and online warfare. Although little is known about his classified work for the government, Mr. Morris
Actually, they bought out another company called "The Geek Squad" which did on-site and in-shop computer repairs (and had a good reputation) based in the Minneapolis suburbs of MN. Years ago I worked at their pilot store (Minnetonka MN) when they did their first store roll-out. I came in from another on-site service company based elsewhere right after the initial buy out. This was during the time when they were still getting their investors drummed up over rolling it out nation wide. The company brand name and trademark definitely existed before Best Buy bought it.
A bit of history:
Best-buy had a terrible track record for their service and returns department prior to the purchase of the Geek Squad. It was commonly filled with CD sales and inventory workers (flunkies) and no one had any real training... Meanwhile, The Geek Squad had an excellent track record in the Minneapolis area. Best Buy put 0 and 2 together and figured they would improve the service at their stores by modeling after The Geek Squad (that is where the VW Bug thing started from, that came along with the purchase as the original Geek Squad did that and were in-fact called "agents").
My co-workers at the initial store were competent and knowledgeable (for the most part, there was about 10-15 of us there)... and many were "agents" of the original company for a while and during the initial trial the original "Geek Squad" guys were doing the on-site work still while we did the in-store work. We had people with computer diagnostic and repair backgrounds working at our bench separate from the people doing sales. They paid us crap but we could still turn around most computer repairs short of hardware replacements within about 24-48 hours or so in-store. Corporate was in love with that (for a bit) and our profits at the main store surged because it worked well. Then they wanted us to take it national, and our department had many people sent out to different cities to train their existing service departments on the new procedures and introduce brand awareness. I went out to another location as well, but I'll withold further details so as to remain at least partially anonymous.
The people we trained at stores after that were terrible (the previously mentioned flunkies) and corporate "sales" based programs and rules (and hiring practices) de-emphasized good technicians in favor of procedures to dupe as many people as possible into buying shit like ISP programs and OS / Motherboard re-installs. No one really needed that crap but corporate measures the success of their store's service by their "Attachment rates" of services per customer, not customer satisfaction. Internally, the service departments are ALSO rated by their sales figures. So they pushed that sales crap in order to fill the knowledge gaps of the people doing the work... leaving it to be flip-chart diagnostics at it's worst.
In addition to that "the management" found it completely acceptable to fill temporary staffing gaps at the computer repair desk with people from CD / Media, cashiering, inventory, etc. They expected us to teach these people how to diagnose computer problems (with no relevant computer skills) just for the days when we were short handed (happened regularly). On top of that, we had to keep our sales attachment rate up or we would be negatively reviewed as a department (and individually)...
Being competent and having morals and understanding that people were bringing me machines they couldn't really live without, I did not sell people the garbage services (like AOL / Earthlink or needless OS reinstalls and motherboard replacements) which means I was later terminated under the guise of being late to work by less than 15 minutes a whole whopping twice over a 1 yr period. This even considering than between myself and one other guy who came from the main investor store were able to take the average repair times from over 430th in the company to less than 150th in the company in less than 4 months while losing 2 other staff members of our department in
Found an abstract to a paper which is behind a paywall. Note that I'm not certifying the results, just reporting a 15 second Google search result.
http://www.sleep-journal.com/article/S1389-9457%2811%2900050-5/abstract
Please no one try this. Anti-freeze is in most radiators in the US and will taste sweet, but kill you easily.
- Toast
That is the most horrid website I have seen in 10 years. Were they trying to find the blink tag?
365days x 10 = 3650 (plus some leap days)
Poster didn't say anything close to 10 years...
When your warranty includes tolerance for solar flares, martian soil in it's parts, atmospheric re-entry, severe radiation storms, micro-meteors, sand storms, in excess of 200 degree (F) temperature swings, severe g-force shock on both launch and land, and "wear and tear while traversing alien soil", all while being constructed of the lightest materials possible powered by nothing other than the sun, then it's probably expected that even 90 days was hard to warrant against failure.
Launch your laptop through those same paces. Put it in a zip-lock bag and place it in your freezer overnight, followed by flexing the screen quickly and shooting it with a pellet gun before throwing it off your 2nd story balcony into a pile of sand before tossing it in your pre-heated oven. Even this will be kinder to the electronics than is likely encountered daily on Mars. - Toast
With much lower liquidity. There was also many fewer players and economies in the world market at the time. This day in age it is rediculous to confuse the current market conditions with ones from 10+ years ago. Especially since the world exchanges and economies are linked together.
A properly motivated and educated tuna can be a shark just the same. Short term trading has not killed long term investing.
,time, and risk into it. And you get to deal with sub second competitors too. If you just want to invest... Then just invest...
At sub second speeds you still have to be a smart shark in order to keep yourself from going broke at the speed of light anyways.
You should forcast your investment return and trade frequency based on your expected investment duration in any case. If you want sub-second profits you have to put extra money
Think of it this way: if there were no day traders and you wanted to get rid of some stock in a company you have been holding for quite a while you would likely run into liquidity problems and get stuck holding that stock when you no longer wanted it. If you wanted to sell because you didn't agree with the motives of the company, or you didn't like the management policies or you thought the company would do poorly, but you had no one to sell to, then you would likely have a different opinion of day traders.
After all, you are perfectly capable of investing in preferred stock in companies willing to issue it to you. This would generally give you the right to attend board meetings and if the company supports it you may receive dividends where common stock may not.
And I hate to say it but ALL investments are a gamble. Day traders or not. Short term or not.
Exchange isn't exactly hard to read e-mail in either. Not that that was your point, but I find your boss' reasoning quite ironic on those grounds. Stuff like that tends to come out of the same peoples mouths which set their passwords as "password" and even need to write it on a post-it note on their monitor to remember it.
Fun times...