With the RatShack gone there will likely be no brick and mortar stores left for purchasing electronics parts in most neighborhoods. I like your idea that somebody will step in to fill the space but I really doubt it. In my part of the world there were some pretty nice parts stores back in the 90s. One by one they have closed. It isn't that they weren't making any sales though, they closed when the owners retired. Nobody seems to want to take them over or open a new store. I guess people just assume the market isn't there.
The Rat Shack isn't filling the gap our missing stores left behind now. Yet.. nobody else is stepping up to do it. Why expect somebody to magically pop up and fill the gap when the Rat Shack closes? At least they had some parts one could buy without waiting a month for it to ship from China.
"Are you wanting to argue that a specific arrangement of gears designed to perform a specific task can never be a patentable invention?"
As open ended as you just put it I would not make that argument. However, I'm imagining if people had big peg boards for placing gears on in their homes like people have computers now. And what if they somehow performed different tasks by placing their gears on the pegs in different configurations.
Now what if someone told you you couldn't put your gears on your peg board in a specific configuration that you wanted to use to solve your task because someone else did it first and they own the patent on it.
Bitcoin and the others aren't anonymous. Not when everyone has access to the record of every transaction. Just because they don't have names on them doesn't mean anything. All law enforcement has to do is figure out the people involved in one transaction and they can start tracking their way back through all of them.. unlike normal cash.
With the amount of information that DHS has on all of us they should have no problems doing this. Makes me kind of wonder about the identiy of Satoshi Nakomoto.
Idiot Senator, as the power hungry pro government anti-freedom a$$hole that all of our politicians are he should be praising Bitcoin!
I hated Microsoft pretty hard. Now... McComputer sounds about right. Good Call!
I mostly use Windows at work (because that's what my work uses) and just about entirely Linux at home (that's what I choose). This hasn't changed.
I don't think I have changed. Microsoft has changed and so has the market. I just don't see Windows computers crashing like they used to. Quality has improved Perhaps this was in part due to the threat of competition from oss? Note that I said threat of, not actual competition. We all know Linux didn't take off on the desktop but there certainly was enough hype about the possiblity!
Also, you can actually do something in Windows without having a corporate sized budget. Want to be an amateur programmer? It used to be all Windows had was a BASIC interpereter. To get an actual compiler (any language) was 100s of dollars. Apparently you had to pay for the privilege of creating software for Windows. Even though more software existing for Windows just makes Windows more desirable... explain that one. Now Micorosoft releases free versions of their development environments which are cut down enough to give companies a reason to buy the real thing but not so much as to prevent one from compiling a useful application.
Besides what Microsoft offers, now there is all sorts of free oss available for Windows. You can develop for Windows in gcc! Can't afford Photoshop? Gimp runs on Windows now. How about web serving. Microsoft used to charge big bucks for different levels of licensing on their web server. They limited how many people could connect at a time. I thought that was a very assinine money grab. It's not like Microsoft programmers put in more hours every time your server serves 100 copies of your web page vs 5! Do they still do that? I don't know. Who cares?!? I can always run Apache on Windows or any one of a million other free programs.
In the early days Microsoft plus IBM were the PC. The PC was awesome for hackers, makers and all kinds of geeks. Before that everything was pretty much proprietary. Now you could mix and match hardware pieces as you please. Also, I could run the same program on my Tandy as my friend ran on his Dell even though it was written on a computer made by IBM!
Later Microsoft became evil in part becasue the kind of compatiblity the PC gave us was expected. We didn't need Microsoft to help us get that anymore. But.. Microsoft was pushing things the other way, embracing standards just to change them a bit once they had a market share so that people would be locked in to using their product.
Now.. Microsoft is losing that monopoly power. They can't do as much damage as before. But.. mobile devices are the big thing, not Desktops. And with our phones and tablets we are back to the bad old pre-pc days where everything is proprietary. I'm not saying that Microsoft is doing anything to try to change this but at least they aren't the driving force behind it. That title is shared by Apple and the cellphone carriers.
So.. Microsoft is a de-fanged wannabe villian who occasionally does nice things. Apple and the Telecoms, they are where the real evil lives today.
At least those languages have all been around for a long time. My favorite is those job ads demanding 5+ years experience in something that has only existed for 2. Don't they know that those workers are going to come in hung over from all those time traveler parties?!?!
It's not just the software industry it's the hardware one too.
In the PC market open standards beat out closed propriety hardware a long time ago. With the Desktop PC we enjoyed the ability to connect nearly any peripheral regardless of the manufacturer of the device or the PC. Hardware was modular and pieces could be upgraded or replaced with ones from just about any other manufacturer. Because of standards across the hardware alternative software could be installed other than what the manufacturer originally included.
I realize that much of this modularity would be difficult or impossible to implement in a cellphone-sized device. However, Imagine switching between Android, Maemo or Windows8 as easily as you can switch between Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, etc... on a desktop! Proprietary chips and locked bootloaders make this pretty much impossible. How about being able to plug just any USB (or similar bus) device into your phone and actually expect it to work?
I doubt they are that old. Maybe 30s, probably 20s.
Generally, older generations understood that we work to live. We can't live without food and shelter is pretty important too.
Once you get beyond that... all those fun, fulfilling ways to spend the limited time you are alive, few if any get you paid and most cost money. So.. you work for it. Then you take the money and do something that actually has meaning to you. If your job is paying you well and it isn't killing you then you are half way there! Now use your nights, weekends and vacation time to go out and LIVE!!!
The current generation seems to have it backwards. They live to work. So... they NEED a job that fulfills them. The problem is jobs don't do that. Working sucks. That's why someone is willing to pay you to do it!
If you have good pay AND good benefit time then you have something worth holding on to. Keep earning that money. Put some away for retirement. Take the rest out with you during that benefit time and enjoy it!
Well. you should keep in mind this is THEIR world. The various flavors of religious folk do outnumber us all across the planet. Maybe we should be grateful that at least they still let us live here. Well.. most of them do.. for now anyway...
I'm pretty sure the process of getting that digital key identifies you, or at least identifies the owner of the car. This isn't a way to anonymously get deliveries.
Really? As a confirmed Apple hater I would love to believe this but... to develop for Apple I would have to buy a Mac. Then I would have to pay what is it... $100/year the last I checked to get the development environment. (chump change I guess after buying a Mac) Then.. the only way the app could ever get on to more than a fraction of a percent of people's devices is to get it approved by the Apple store which everyone I have talked to claims is a real pain in the ass.
To develop for Android just download the development environment for your favorite of Linux/Windows/Mac OS for free and start coding. It seems to me that Google is trying a lot harder to get developers than Apple is.
What I think is the real issue is that a lot of developers don't want to deal with the variety of screen sizes one finds on Android. They like Apple's closed little world. HTML was supposed to free us of this issue. With sizes being defined in percents, data inside of elements that describe what the data is, not how to display it, etc... devices were supposed to determine how to display things best based on their own unique hardware profiles. That was html documents but by now applications should work that way too.
But... thest f@!#ng graphics designers and marketers had to mess that all up. Instead everything is defined down to how it will look pixel per pixel. So of course... supporting many different sizes and shapes of devices means making sure your pixel by pixel design looks good on them all. So.. the lazy fckrs only want to support iOS because it is easier to design that way in a limited environment.
If I want to record you candidly I'm not going to use Glass. Everybody seems to expect Glass users to be so interested in violating their privacy. The poor people are probably just checking their text messages!
If I want to record you and I don't want you to know about it I am going to be sneakier than that. It isn't going to be a camera that is out front on the side of my head for you to see. Probably I will put my cellphone in a holster and put a little hole where the camera is. You will never see me coming.
Or.. for a pointless challenge, maybe I will get a bit hackier with it. How about a Raspberry Pi in a mint tin in my pocket. I can run a wire up my shirt from the Raspi to a tiny camrea module. Why does that one button on my shirt look a little different than the others? Better put on your tinfoil hat! The whole setup would probably cost me less than $50 off of Deal Extreme or Ebay.
But I am not going to do this. And that guy with Glass over there probably isn't recording you either. Why? You aren't that interesting. You are just a mama's basement living technophobe mouthing off about somebody else's toy. Probably because you can't have one yourself. Get over it!
Local governments give the cable companies their monopolies. It's the Federal government that allows or disallows the mergers. For the federal government to implement your solution they would have to dictate it to the local governments. In this area they are usually reluctant to do that.
Our energy mostly comes from non-renewable resources. Even if we produce enough that there is plenty for everybody we are all screwed when it runs out.
There are still many parts of the world where people live in horrible conditions.
In those parts where people live relatively well the gap between the richest and everyone else is going up not down. How can one take away from this that the problem of resoource allocation is getting closer to being solved? If anything a true solution is getting even farther away!
Whoever posted this lives in a nice place with a very limited view of the rest of the world.
That sounds so easy! It kind of reminds me of those conservative types who think that every Walmart employee could go and get a better job if they just chose to apply themselves.
Most businesses fail. To have any chance of success a new business will almost always require an immense amount of work on the part of the founder before employees take over the bulk of the workload. If employees ever take over the bulk of the workload. Even this hard work however is nowhere near a guarantee of success.
A more common version of your steps is more like this:
1. Do or don't go to college 2. Start a business 3. Work really really hard for a year or two 4. Close the business 5. Because your specialty was in the subject of your business and your business wasn't accounting you weren't smart about keeping business and personal finances completely separate. You now either declare bankruptcy or spend the rest of your life paying off the debt.
In the rare case where a business succedes the founder has most likely earned their success wether they payed a tuition tax or not. (I'm not talking about big mega-corps here where the founder has been dead for a couple generations and everything is run by parasite executives who have never produced anything)
That's easy to fix, If you don't graduate you have to pay it back.
I wouldn't put a 4 year limit on it though. Some students will have more or less parental support than others. Those not being supported by parents will still need money for books, rent, food, medicine and all that life stuff. To stay out of debt they will still have to work, not just be full-time students.
Besides, if you really want people to get something out of their classes they shouldn't be rushing things. Most full time students I have known that had good grades didn't really learn much of what was taught in class. Instead they were good at filling their short-term memories with enough facts to do well on the test and immediately forgetting it all in order to do it again with new facts for the next test. Truly learning the material associated with a 4-year degree will take much more than 4 years! I graduated in 4 years + 1 semester myself. I regret that. I wish I had taken fewer classes at a time, studied each class harder, learned while at the same time doing more to enjoy my pre-career life. Remember, once you start working you probably aren't going to stop until you are old and suffering age-related illness.
But then I am assuming this isn't paying room and board, just tuition and only for the credits necessary for a 4 year degree. I would attach some rules to this:
Degree must be chosen by sophmore year. Alternatively, only common electives that everyone has to fill plus classes that count towards a declared major count. Declare your major when you chose (up until you run out of electives) but if you do all your electives first it's going to be some very difficult later years! People that can't make up their mind pay their own way. Sorry, the tax payers don't need to pay for half a dozen half-degrees just so you can finally settle on underwater basket weaving.
Student must be enrolled for at least one class in each of two semesters each year. This way there has to be some end to it, someone can't just take a few classes then quit going claiming 'it is only a break' forever and thus get out of re-paying. Going back to the previous part about not forcing them to graduate in 4 years I wouldn't care if they go greater than full-time every semester or only 1 class a semster with summers off. So long as the taxpayers are only paying for the classes themselves and the student does eventually finish the cost to benefit ratio for the taxpayers is about the same.
making payments on current college loans should exempt one from paying the tax. The last thing someone needs who is already saddled with huge debt is an extra tax to save someone who was lucky enough to be born a little later from that same debt.
Actually, it would be nice if the tax only applied to the people who graduated through the program. Otherwise people who pre-dated it are getting charged twice! But.. that probably can't happen since it would require funding from somewhere else to pay for that first batch.
Maybe it could start as a lottery, at first only those x number of people that the state can afford to put through school get to use it. Then, those people pay the tax. Later their tax money is used to put a greater number through. Those peope are taxed too... repeat until everyone gets to go that wants to.
"Still no alternative gives virtual screen bigger than real screen (scroll when mouse hits edge)."
X itself does that! You have to have an Xorg.conf file. Then you can set the virtual screen to whatever size you want. It doesn't matter what window or desktop manager you are using.
I don't know if Wayland has this capability or not. My guess is no, afterall, it's Wayland! If a feature isn't used by a majority of gamers and movie watchers it shouldn't be there. Right?
I knew a guy that had a really bright laser pointer. I don't know how powerful it was but it was definitely not your typical weak red dot.
Anyway, he was showing this to me one night back before there was all this talk about laser pointers blinding pilots. He showed me that he could actually point it at the night sky and it made a visible dot, I guess it was reflecting off something or other in the atmosphere.
What I found to be really cool about this is it was a way to actually point out stars and constelations to someone. I know I find it difficult to precisely follow where a finger is pointing to find something in the sky. The laser pointer made it easy!
There were no planes that we could see at that moment. I suppose you never know about ones that are high enough up, it could be possible to miss them. So.. was this dangerous? Is it ok to point out stars this way?
If not then I think airplanes should have blinds and cameras. The pilots could fly by camera. In event of the camera malfunctioning open the blinds.
" I am a cynic towards X as I do not see dumb terminals besides at fast food restaurants like McD's these days." " I have never seen one before and I have been in tech for almost 15 years! "
I have one in my shop. I use it for remote access to my desktop when I am working on projects in the shop. What you haven't seen in your 15 years I am using every day! This allows me to have one highly customized desktop in multiple locations while only having to babysit one highly customized desktop. I don't want to babysit another desktop OS plus applications with their updates and customizations.
It allows me to access all the same files in multiple places without bothering with a file server.
- True, a fileserver wouldn't be difficult but that doesn't solve all the problems. I want my home directory shared including all my personal preferences/config files. With simple file sharing, what happens when the apps that use those preference files get out of sync version-wise? Easy solution... only one copy of every application, it runs in only one place!
It allows me to keep a tiny, low power cheap computer (I think it used to be part of a cash register) on my shop bench where space is limited. It didn't cost much to buy. It doesn't cost much to just leave it running. And yet... it seems to have all the power and speed of my desktop because I'm not really running things on it!
" I see web UI's taking over as well and serving the elements in HTML 5"
How are HTML5 cloud apps going to help me? I want to run things that have to actually talk to hardware such as USB oscilloscopes, microcontroller and eeprom programmers, etc... This is possible as the Linux kernel does support USB over TCP/IP. How is an HTM5 app going to do this? Also, while most of what I make I am happy to open source I reserve that decision for myself. I don't want to save my work on some cloud companies servers. I want it to remain in my home where I control it until I choose if/how to release it. I don't see any kind of replacement for remote display in web apps, only a convenient way to keep unimportant non-private documents. in other words, just a way to share a grocery list.
Ideally I want little terminals like my shop one in each location where I commonly use a computer. (that probably just means one more, in the livingroom) I would also like to see the LinuxPMI project take off so that I can make use of the power of each of these terminals. Sure, the wasted processor and ram don't really matter any more as fast as computers have become by hey.. why waste it. I've been watching LinuxPMI since it was OpenMosix. I'd love to contribute but I'm not that advanced... yet.
"I see mobile and low latency becoming big."
Yes, I too see value in mobile devices too. I want one (exactly one) of those for use when I want something to use when not in a place I normally use a computer. That one part is important for one of the same reasons I care about X terminals... to minimize the number of devices I have to maintain. Currently I have a Motorola Bionic with Lapdock and an iPad. Smart phones are very convenient as they fits in a pocket or single hand and are always present. Tablets are wonderful for looking things up on the internet on a whim. Neither are very good for real work, the Lapdock's laptop like interface comes in handy there. My perfect solution would be something like the lapdock but with a touch screen. It would have the ability to open clamshell style to use the keyboard or, flip the screen around and close it to get a tablet. That way, all 3 form factors, one device.
Total computers to babysit... 2. One main desktop and one phone. Perfect!
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With the RatShack gone there will likely be no brick and mortar stores left for purchasing electronics parts in most neighborhoods. I like your idea that somebody will step in to fill the space but I really doubt it. In my part of the world there were some pretty nice parts stores back in the 90s. One by one they have closed. It isn't that they weren't making any sales though, they closed when the owners retired. Nobody seems to want to take them over or open a new store. I guess people just assume the market isn't there.
The Rat Shack isn't filling the gap our missing stores left behind now. Yet.. nobody else is stepping up to do it. Why expect somebody to magically pop up and fill the gap when the Rat Shack closes? At least they had some parts one could buy without waiting a month for it to ship from China.
"Are you wanting to argue that a specific arrangement of gears designed to perform a specific task can never be a patentable invention?"
As open ended as you just put it I would not make that argument.
However, I'm imagining if people had big peg boards for placing gears on in their homes like people have computers now.
And what if they somehow performed different tasks by placing their gears on the pegs in different configurations.
Now what if someone told you you couldn't put your gears on your peg board in a specific configuration that you wanted to use to solve your task because someone else did it first and they own the patent on it.
Seems kind of silly doesn't it!
I'm not from there but I supposed something had to inspire him to write it.....
Bitcoin and the others aren't anonymous. Not when everyone has access to the record of every transaction. Just because they don't have names on them doesn't mean anything. All law enforcement has to do is figure out the people involved in one transaction and they can start tracking their way back through all of them.. unlike normal cash.
With the amount of information that DHS has on all of us they should have no problems doing this. Makes me kind of wonder about the identiy of Satoshi Nakomoto.
Idiot Senator, as the power hungry pro government anti-freedom a$$hole that all of our politicians are he should be praising Bitcoin!
I hated Microsoft pretty hard. Now... McComputer sounds about right. Good Call!
I mostly use Windows at work (because that's what my work uses) and just about entirely Linux at home (that's what I choose). This hasn't changed.
I don't think I have changed. Microsoft has changed and so has the market. I just don't see Windows computers crashing like they used to. Quality has improved Perhaps this was in part due to the threat of competition from oss? Note that I said threat of, not actual competition. We all know Linux didn't take off on the desktop but there certainly was enough hype about the possiblity!
Also, you can actually do something in Windows without having a corporate sized budget. Want to be an amateur programmer? It used to be all Windows had was a BASIC interpereter. To get an actual compiler (any language) was 100s of dollars. Apparently you had to pay for the privilege of creating software for Windows. Even though more software existing for Windows just makes Windows more desirable... explain that one. Now Micorosoft releases free versions of their development environments which are cut down enough to give companies a reason to buy the real thing but not so much as to prevent one from compiling a useful application.
Besides what Microsoft offers, now there is all sorts of free oss available for Windows. You can develop for Windows in gcc! Can't afford Photoshop? Gimp runs on Windows now. How about web serving. Microsoft used to charge big bucks for different levels of licensing on their web server. They limited how many people could connect at a time. I thought that was a very assinine money grab. It's not like Microsoft programmers put in more hours every time your server serves 100 copies of your web page vs 5! Do they still do that? I don't know. Who cares?!? I can always run Apache on Windows or any one of a million other free programs.
In the early days Microsoft plus IBM were the PC. The PC was awesome for hackers, makers and all kinds of geeks. Before that everything was pretty much proprietary. Now you could mix and match hardware pieces as you please. Also, I could run the same program on my Tandy as my friend ran on his Dell even though it was written on a computer made by IBM!
Later Microsoft became evil in part becasue the kind of compatiblity the PC gave us was expected. We didn't need Microsoft to help us get that anymore. But.. Microsoft was pushing things the other way, embracing standards just to change them a bit once they had a market share so that people would be locked in to using their product.
Now.. Microsoft is losing that monopoly power. They can't do as much damage as before. But.. mobile devices are the big thing, not Desktops. And with our phones and tablets we are back to the bad old pre-pc days where everything is proprietary. I'm not saying that Microsoft is doing anything to try to change this but at least they aren't the driving force behind it. That title is shared by Apple and the cellphone carriers.
So.. Microsoft is a de-fanged wannabe villian who occasionally does nice things. Apple and the Telecoms, they are where the real evil lives today.
"a clueless fuck whose degree is in Education"
Yeah, I remember those back in high school. I didn't meet any in college. Where did you go (if you went) so the rest of us can avoid it?
At least those languages have all been around for a long time. My favorite is those job ads demanding 5+ years experience in something that has only existed for 2. Don't they know that those workers are going to come in hung over from all those time traveler parties?!?!
It's not just the software industry it's the hardware one too.
In the PC market open standards beat out closed propriety hardware a long time ago. With the Desktop PC we enjoyed the ability to connect nearly any peripheral regardless of the manufacturer of the device or the PC. Hardware was modular and pieces could be upgraded or replaced with ones from just about any other manufacturer. Because of standards across the hardware alternative software could be installed other than what the manufacturer originally included.
I realize that much of this modularity would be difficult or impossible to implement in a cellphone-sized device. However, Imagine switching between Android, Maemo or Windows8 as easily as you can switch between Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, etc... on a desktop! Proprietary chips and locked bootloaders make this pretty much impossible. How about being able to plug just any USB (or similar bus) device into your phone and actually expect it to work?
I doubt they are that old. Maybe 30s, probably 20s.
Generally, older generations understood that we work to live. We can't live without food and shelter is pretty important too.
Once you get beyond that... all those fun, fulfilling ways to spend the limited time you are alive, few if any get you paid and most cost money. So.. you work for it. Then you take the money and do something that actually has meaning to you. If your job is paying you well and it isn't killing you then you are half way there! Now use your nights, weekends and vacation time to go out and LIVE!!!
The current generation seems to have it backwards. They live to work. So... they NEED a job that fulfills them. The problem is jobs don't do that. Working sucks. That's why someone is willing to pay you to do it!
If you have good pay AND good benefit time then you have something worth holding on to. Keep earning that money. Put some away for retirement. Take the rest out with you during that benefit time and enjoy it!
Well. you should keep in mind this is THEIR world. The various flavors of religious folk do outnumber us all across the planet. Maybe we should be grateful that at least they still let us live here. Well.. most of them do.. for now anyway...
Where do you think the raw materials for their projects come from????
Just pick the lowest version you care to support. Target it. Backwards compatibility does the rest. It's not that hard.
I'm pretty sure the process of getting that digital key identifies you, or at least identifies the owner of the car. This isn't a way to anonymously get deliveries.
Really? As a confirmed Apple hater I would love to believe this but... to develop for Apple I would have to buy a Mac. Then I would have to pay what is it... $100/year the last I checked to get the development environment. (chump change I guess after buying a Mac) Then.. the only way the app could ever get on to more than a fraction of a percent of people's devices is to get it approved by the Apple store which everyone I have talked to claims is a real pain in the ass.
To develop for Android just download the development environment for your favorite of Linux/Windows/Mac OS for free and start coding. It seems to me that Google is trying a lot harder to get developers than Apple is.
What I think is the real issue is that a lot of developers don't want to deal with the variety of screen sizes one finds on Android. They like Apple's closed little world. HTML was supposed to free us of this issue. With sizes being defined in percents, data inside of elements that describe what the data is, not how to display it, etc... devices were supposed to determine how to display things best based on their own unique hardware profiles. That was html documents but by now applications should work that way too.
But... thest f@!#ng graphics designers and marketers had to mess that all up. Instead everything is defined down to how it will look pixel per pixel. So of course... supporting many different sizes and shapes of devices means making sure your pixel by pixel design looks good on them all. So.. the lazy fckrs only want to support iOS because it is easier to design that way in a limited environment.
If I want to record you candidly I'm not going to use Glass. Everybody seems to expect Glass users to be so interested in violating their privacy. The poor people are probably just checking their text messages!
If I want to record you and I don't want you to know about it I am going to be sneakier than that. It isn't going to be a camera that is out front on the side of my head for you to see. Probably I will put my cellphone in a holster and put a little hole where the camera is. You will never see me coming.
Or.. for a pointless challenge, maybe I will get a bit hackier with it. How about a Raspberry Pi in a mint tin in my pocket. I can run a wire up my shirt from the Raspi to a tiny camrea module. Why does that one button on my shirt look a little different than the others? Better put on your tinfoil hat! The whole setup would probably cost me less than $50 off of Deal Extreme or Ebay.
But I am not going to do this. And that guy with Glass over there probably isn't recording you either. Why? You aren't that interesting. You are just a mama's basement living technophobe mouthing off about somebody else's toy. Probably because you can't have one yourself. Get over it!
I suspect that only people who live in an area with fiber would say that a LOT of places have fiber.
Local governments give the cable companies their monopolies. It's the Federal government that allows or disallows the mergers. For the federal government to implement your solution they would have to dictate it to the local governments. In this area they are usually reluctant to do that.
Our energy mostly comes from non-renewable resources. Even if we produce enough that there is plenty for everybody we are all screwed when it runs out.
There are still many parts of the world where people live in horrible conditions.
In those parts where people live relatively well the gap between the richest and everyone else is going up not down. How can one take away from this that the problem of resoource allocation is getting closer to being solved? If anything a true solution is getting even farther away!
Whoever posted this lives in a nice place with a very limited view of the rest of the world.
Or...
It's just a troll.
Whooosh!!!!!!!!!!!
That sounds so easy! It kind of reminds me of those conservative types who think that every Walmart employee could go and get a better job if they just chose to apply themselves.
Most businesses fail. To have any chance of success a new business will almost always require an immense amount of work on the part of the founder before employees take over the bulk of the workload. If employees ever take over the bulk of the workload. Even this hard work however is nowhere near a guarantee of success.
A more common version of your steps is more like this:
1. Do or don't go to college
2. Start a business
3. Work really really hard for a year or two
4. Close the business
5. Because your specialty was in the subject of your business and your business wasn't accounting you weren't smart about keeping business and personal finances completely separate. You now either declare bankruptcy or spend the rest of your life paying off the debt.
In the rare case where a business succedes the founder has most likely earned their success wether they payed a tuition tax or not. (I'm not talking about big mega-corps here where the founder has been dead for a couple generations and everything is run by parasite executives who have never produced anything)
That's easy to fix, If you don't graduate you have to pay it back.
I wouldn't put a 4 year limit on it though. Some students will have more or less parental support than others. Those not being supported by parents will still need money for books, rent, food, medicine and all that life stuff. To stay out of debt they will still have to work, not just be full-time students.
Besides, if you really want people to get something out of their classes they shouldn't be rushing things. Most full time students I have known that had good grades didn't really learn much of what was taught in class. Instead they were good at filling their short-term memories with enough facts to do well on the test and immediately forgetting it all in order to do it again with new facts for the next test. Truly learning the material associated with a 4-year degree will take much more than 4 years! I graduated in 4 years + 1 semester myself. I regret that. I wish I had taken fewer classes at a time, studied each class harder, learned while at the same time doing more to enjoy my pre-career life. Remember, once you start working you probably aren't going to stop until you are old and suffering age-related illness.
But then I am assuming this isn't paying room and board, just tuition and only for the credits necessary for a 4 year degree. I would attach some rules to this:
Degree must be chosen by sophmore year. Alternatively, only common electives that everyone has to fill plus classes that count towards a declared major count. Declare your major when you chose (up until you run out of electives) but if you do all your electives first it's going to be some very difficult later years! People that can't make up their mind pay their own way. Sorry, the tax payers don't need to pay for half a dozen half-degrees just so you can finally settle on underwater basket weaving.
Student must be enrolled for at least one class in each of two semesters each year. This way there has to be some end to it, someone can't just take a few classes then quit going claiming 'it is only a break' forever and thus get out of re-paying. Going back to the previous part about not forcing them to graduate in 4 years I wouldn't care if they go greater than full-time every semester or only 1 class a semster with summers off. So long as the taxpayers are only paying for the classes themselves and the student does eventually finish the cost to benefit ratio for the taxpayers is about the same.
making payments on current college loans should exempt one from paying the tax. The last thing someone needs who is already saddled with huge debt is an extra tax to save someone who was lucky enough to be born a little later from that same debt.
Actually, it would be nice if the tax only applied to the people who graduated through the program. Otherwise people who pre-dated it are getting charged twice! But.. that probably can't happen since it would require funding from somewhere else to pay for that first batch.
Maybe it could start as a lottery, at first only those x number of people that the state can afford to put through school get to use it. Then, those people pay the tax. Later their tax money is used to put a greater number through. Those peope are taxed too... repeat until everyone gets to go that wants to.
"Still no alternative gives virtual screen bigger than real screen (scroll when mouse hits edge)."
X itself does that! You have to have an Xorg.conf file. Then you can set the virtual screen to whatever size you want. It doesn't matter what window or desktop manager you are using.
I don't know if Wayland has this capability or not. My guess is no, afterall, it's Wayland! If a feature isn't used by a majority of gamers and movie watchers it shouldn't be there. Right?
I knew a guy that had a really bright laser pointer. I don't know how powerful it was but it was definitely not your typical weak red dot.
Anyway, he was showing this to me one night back before there was all this talk about laser pointers blinding pilots. He showed me that he could actually point it at the night sky and it made a visible dot, I guess it was reflecting off something or other in the atmosphere.
What I found to be really cool about this is it was a way to actually point out stars and constelations to someone. I know I find it difficult to precisely follow where a finger is pointing to find something in the sky. The laser pointer made it easy!
There were no planes that we could see at that moment. I suppose you never know about ones that are high enough up, it could be possible to miss them. So.. was this dangerous? Is it ok to point out stars this way?
If not then I think airplanes should have blinds and cameras. The pilots could fly by camera. In event of the camera malfunctioning open the blinds.
Dumb terminals are exactly what is missing!
" I am a cynic towards X as I do not see dumb terminals besides at fast food restaurants like McD's these days."
" I have never seen one before and I have been in tech for almost 15 years! "
I have one in my shop. I use it for remote access to my desktop when I am working on projects in the shop. What you haven't seen in your 15 years I am using every day! This allows me to have one highly customized desktop in multiple locations while only having to babysit one highly customized desktop. I don't want to babysit another desktop OS plus applications with their updates and customizations.
It allows me to access all the same files in multiple places without bothering with a file server.
- True, a fileserver wouldn't be difficult but that doesn't solve all the problems. I want my home directory shared including all my personal preferences/config files. With simple file sharing, what happens when the apps that use those preference files get out of sync version-wise?
Easy solution... only one copy of every application, it runs in only one place!
It allows me to keep a tiny, low power cheap computer (I think it used to be part of a cash register) on my shop bench where space is limited. It didn't cost much to buy. It doesn't cost much to just leave it running. And yet... it seems to have all the power and speed of my desktop because I'm not really running things on it!
" I see web UI's taking over as well and serving the elements in HTML 5"
How are HTML5 cloud apps going to help me? I want to run things that have to actually talk to hardware such as USB oscilloscopes, microcontroller and eeprom programmers, etc... This is possible as the Linux kernel does support USB over TCP/IP. How is an HTM5 app going to do this? Also, while most of what I make I am happy to open source I reserve that decision for myself. I don't want to save my work on some cloud companies servers. I want it to remain in my home where I control it until I choose if/how to release it. I don't see any kind of replacement for remote display in web apps, only a convenient way to keep unimportant non-private documents. in other words, just a way to share a grocery list.
Ideally I want little terminals like my shop one in each location where I commonly use a computer. (that probably just means one more, in the livingroom) I would also like to see the LinuxPMI project take off so that I can make use of the power of each of these terminals. Sure, the wasted processor and ram don't really matter any more as fast as computers have become by hey.. why waste it. I've been watching LinuxPMI since it was OpenMosix. I'd love to contribute but I'm not that advanced... yet.
"I see mobile and low latency becoming big."
Yes, I too see value in mobile devices too. I want one (exactly one) of those for use when I want something to use when not in a place I normally use a computer. That one part is important for one of the same reasons I care about X terminals... to minimize the number of devices I have to maintain. Currently I have a Motorola Bionic with Lapdock and an iPad. Smart phones are very convenient as they fits in a pocket or single hand and are always present. Tablets are wonderful for looking things up on the internet on a whim. Neither are very good for real work, the Lapdock's laptop like interface comes in handy there. My perfect solution would be something like the lapdock but with a touch screen. It would have the ability to open clamshell style to use the keyboard or, flip the screen around and close it to get a tablet. That way, all 3 form factors, one device.
Total computers to babysit... 2. One main desktop and one phone. Perfect!
Thanks for the explanation!