Comment Re:Advocates and Proponents only? (Score 1) 139
Yes, because that would cost $0.001 more per phone and then they cant have solid gold toilets in the executive bathroom.
Yes, because that would cost $0.001 more per phone and then they cant have solid gold toilets in the executive bathroom.
It is a royal pain in the ass to get a IMEI blacklisted. I had to fight AT&T even though I sent them the police report and the phone was in their records as my property.
"But it's currently activated" Yes, by the thief, blacklist it.
"but that is one of our gophone customers", Yes the thief blacklist it.
"but but....." Do I need to get a lawyer involved?
"One moment please...."
99% will not force them to blacklist the phone but just let it go. To hell with who they sold the phone to, I was not going to stop until the phone was forever disabled from being a phone.
This whole idea is unnecessary if the wireless carriers would just set up a database of stolen IMEI information.
They already do in many countries. The UK has had IMEI blacklists for several years. The US is just late to the party.
Now in an ideal world they would actually track the devices back, notify law enforcement, and collect the stolen device. But sadly that doesn't happen.
The carriers already can (and do) block stolen phones. Each phone has a unique IMEI number, in addition to the SIM card number.
The carriers are already required to do this in some countries, and do it voluntarily in other countries. They just don't do it in the US.
IMEI blacklists are common in many countries, including the UK. When a device is stolen the IMEI number is put on the list and carriers reject the device and (potentially) notify investigators.
401(k) is a place to play the market, which is a lot like playing poker: it's not the cards and the luck that make you win or lose, but rather the other players shaking your inexperienced ass down so you make bad decisions and lose all your cash.
It's not really much like poker, because it's not a zero sum game. Stock value has gone up fairly steadily over a century. Sure you can find ways to lose money if you're trading actively and poorly, but passive stock investment has outperformed other investment options consistently for a long time.
To be clear, I'm kind of "you in the future". I paid off my first house when I was 28 or so; I also started investing in stocks. The money in stocks did a lot better than the money that paid down my mortgage (you can measure this easily; interest is interest - and when mortgage interest rates are as low as they are, they're not hard to beat). It's riskier too, but when you're young is the right time to be taking that kind of risk (assuming you have your basic obligations covered); over time, stocks will win out, so they're the right choice for long term investment even if they may entail short term setbacks.
I mean, say 5 years ago today you had put $50,000 into a vanilla ETF (we'll say QQQ). You'd currently have $128,860. I didn't cherry pick that or something, I just picked a round number time frame and an extremely common ETF. In the same time as you gained $78,000 on stocks, you could have, instead, saved $10,000 of interest on a 4% mortgage.
That's not to say that there isn't other things worth doing. Maybe you want more education or windows or who knows what. Lots of things can make sense. But eventually, you'll almost certainly want money in the stock market if you're ever going to retire.
Programming is the new factory work, and software patents have ruined the industry so badly that anything that is slightly innovative is murdered by assholes with patents.
The Economist. Still worth reading.
The new universal apps and WP8.1 might change that. I don't even have an WinRT or WinPhone device but I write windows code for a living. The dev tools are probably the best in the industry and to be honest if you want to make a lot of money the WinPhone is a good target since as you point out it is not filled with apps yet but the phones are sell okay. Not at the IOS or Android level but well enough to make good money.
E = (T2-T1) / T1
Everyone with an engineering degree knows this. Trying to extract much energy from low-grade heat at the output end of an engine is inefficient. This was figured out a long time ago. Here it is in The Manual of the Steam Engine. It's possible to increase steam engine efficiency by compounding, where the exhaust from each cylinder feeds a larger, lower pressure cylinder. This is cost-effective up to about 3 cylinders ("triple expansion"). Engines up to quintuple-expansion have been built, but the additional power from the last two cylinders in the chain isn't worth the trouble.
In 2005, this appeared in SF Weekly, about the gentrification of the Polk St. area of the Tenderloin:
Gay Shame calls the Lower Polk Neighbors Association a "brutal gentrification squad" of wealthy business owners, slumlords and bureaucrats.
"They are trying to transform Polk Street from the city's last remaining gathering place for marginalized queers and street culture into a hip destination for wealthy suburbanites," Mary said. "We want a safe place for marginalized people, and Polk Street has historically been that space.
"The neighborhood may soon be known more for green-apple mojitos and stretch Hummers than trannies and tweakers (methamphetamine users)."
That was back in 2005. Gentrification won.
At least, won't everyone who's paid a middle to upper middle class wage, buys a house and saves for retirement eventually be a millionaire?
If you want to retire at 65 and have enough money to live a decent life for 30 years after that, you need pretty close to a million dollars plus a paid-off house. And, frankly, it's not that hard to accumulate a million dollars of net worth over a ~40-year career, assuming reasonable returns on your retirement account and modest appreciation on your home. I'm actually targeting net assets of two million for retirement, given that it's still 20 years away and I expect that inflation will roughly halve the value of the dollar between now and then.
Yes mine can, and no you dont.
i was working with touchscreens from AMX and Centron , admitedly at $10K+ a piece that had responsiveness not far off modern ipads.
The tech was there, the pricepoint however was not.
Took the mouse about as long to take off.
As I said I am a big fan of Android and have an Android phone, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10. I also have a macbook and run Windows and Linux on my desktop.
Microsoft has great development tools and lots of developers. It would be foolish to not recognise those strengths.
I want Microsoft to do well in the tablet market and I want Apple to do well and I want Android to do well. I like the idea of choice.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the `social sciences' is: some do, some don't. -- Ernest Rutherford
