Need to run special software tied to the OS? No? ... Install Linux.
Really, it's that easy.

Ubuntu can be a drag, in more ways than one, but it's worth a try - and it does look really cool. Seriously.
Suse and Redhat are hassle-free to install aswell. All three are definitly more hassle-free than any Windows installation you can do thesse days.

I've got Ubuntu 14.04 on my ThinkPad. And while it can be anoying (which OS isn't?), it is way ahead of Windows in usability and you can get tons of books and free info on the web for it.

Other than that I'd recommend Mac OS X or Chrome OS - but since you already have your laptop I guess that's ruled out.

Welcome to the camp. Enjoy.

Need to run special software tied to the OS? No? ... Install Linux. Ubuntu can be a drag, in more ways the one, but it's worth a try. Suse and Redhat probably are hassle free aswell. All three are way easyer to install than a fresh Windows.

Here's a link to one of their articles which shows the contents of a cartridge. Hopefully that'll work?

Why is the tax code so convoluted that there is an entire industry devoted to following the code? It's because Congress keeps piling on the laws, exceptions, work-around, and "social engineering". Instead of adding law to the US Code, they should be removing pages from the US Code. To make things simpler, start eliminating "targeted" deductions and exemptions/exceptions to deductions, so that individuals and married people can play by the same rules as the businesses, companies, and corporations. If insurance premiums are tax-deductible to one class of taxpayer, it should be the same for all classes of taxpayers.

Completely remove the "negative tax liability". If you are going to give people money, give people money directly, and not via the IRS. The IRS is not a social agency. Their job is to collect taxes. I'm not sure what to do with tax-exempt organizations in the current climate, but the IRS shouldn't be making that determination off their own bat. They should stick to the "revenue" part.

The IRS regulations published in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) are to implement the statues passed by Congress. The IRS does not do this off their own bat. Court cases balloons the number of pages of interpretation, because there is no requirement to "backfill" the CFR or the USC, and stare decisis increases the amount of law surrounding tax -- another source of law bloat. That's why WestLaw and Lexus/Nexus is so necessary, and why tax attorneys demand -- and get -- such high fees. Those fees can be chickenfeed compared with the interest and penalties that their clients have to pay out when they don't use an attorney.

I don't have an opinion of the Fair Tax proposal, because I'm not sure I understand it yet. But I do know that there are way too many densely-printed pages in USC Title 26. Shrink that down to something the size of a magazine, and many of the tax ills will be solved. Ordinary people will be able to understand the law they are supposed to follow.

As a consequence, the IRS itself would shrink. And the new IT systems would be far easier and quicker to implement.

(pipe dream, for sure)

Gleaming the Cube

I'm coming in late on this. First, the activities of man have released a lot of the sun's energy that has been stored for millions of year. So I agree that the gross heat load on the planet has been increased. Whether this overwhelms our planet's ability to dissipate that heat is open to question. Why is it open to question? Because, without numbers, it isn't science, just an opinion.

The Chicken Little people have been watching with alarm several trends over the years showing varying temperature. First, it's too cold; then, it's too hot. (And the butt of the old Henny Youngman joke: if the water turns black, the baby really needed a bath!) Attempts to model the short-term temperature shift have not accurately predicted what is going to happen in the future. Worse, the models don't accurately reflect the past, when applied to the data collected over the years. How to the CLPs explain this? WIth lame excuses, mostley, that reduce to "we don't know enough".

The research needs to continue. The people who build the models need to add to those models those sources of temperature variations that are just now being discovered, said discoveries having blown the older models out of the water. (pun intended) There are zero-dollar things we can do now to improve the situation. Plant trees, especially re-plant those trees that were clear-cut in the Amazon. Replace incandecant light bulbs (and those mercury-filled CFDs) with LED bulbs, not to save the climate, but to SAVE MONEY in the long term; I'm about 45% through this process myself.

I don't object per se to spending money on the problem. I object to spending money recklessly JUST for climate change, without some accurate way of measuring the effects of the changes. Reducing certain factory emissions results in less acid rain, which can have an adverse effect on buildings, roads, and other infrastructure. Containing the worst methane emissions from oil/gas operations makes perfect sense because we can then use the stuff -- but remember that the release from the Earth without man's help overwhelms our pitiful contribution.

The science is far from settled. If it's truely settled, show me the accurate models that predict, with precision, what we see on November 1, 2016

Remember how cellular "feature phones" used to make an audible "ker-click" sound when you took a picture, and there was no option to turn it off? And how the gym prohibited all cameras in the locker room? Folks were worried about these increasingly ubiquitous cameras. Then smartphones came along and the cameras truly were ubiquitous and everyone sort of gave up... you can turn off the fake shutter sound now and that man in the corner staring down at his cellphone probably isn't trying to take a perv shot of you (probably).

I'm not defending Google here, or arguing that Glass is a good thing. Rather, that it's possible Glass will become socially acceptable once people get over the novelty of it. If I were advising Google, I'd tell them to add a prominent LED to the front of the Glass that glowed red when the camera was being used. Then people would "know" if you were recording or not.

The drawback, of course, is that this negatively impacts augmented reality (AR) applications, which are one of the big promises of Glass-like devices. In AR, the images are analyzed to detect faces/landmarks/surfaces/whatever in order to draw reminders/factoids/whatever in the user's field of vision. For instance, maybe Glass could be showing a mechanic the relevant portion of the service manual when he stares at $VEHICLEPART. Google could make it so that the LED doesn't light up when the camera is being used for non-recording purposes. The drawback to that is that Glass is then just one software hack away from being able to record covertly (e.g., without lighting up the public-notification LED)... so it'd really be better to stick with the first approach and hardwire the LED to the camera sensor.

Of course, you're still being recorded/tracked by a panopoly of public CCTV's, license plate readers, websites, and various other data cabals.

Video NLE on Linux or, more preciseley, in the FOSS department, is lacking. In recent years there are some tools that have become feasible - Pitivi comes to mind - but Video Editing has always been a high-end specialised market. Anybody doing video editing professionally has a full-time job already and no time to programm software on the side.

On top of that, there has been a huge consolidation in the Video NLE market, with vendors and products dropping left, right and center or simply entrenching themselves in their established niche of mostly gouvernment or conglomerate funded media - such as Avid or Media 100.

The climax of this development was Apple sewerely screwing up final cut pro as they switched to App Store versions only. Lots of much needed pro features broke or disappeared without a trace and the people moved to Adobe Premiere Pro in droves.

Then again, that premiere pro and final cut where the last big players in the field shows that there's been quite some cleaning out.

With 3D it's a little different in FOSS, because we have Blender. But let's not forget that Blender is a very fortunate exception. It has a little built-in NLE and a very neat compositor, but still is mainly a 3D toolkit. It used to be a commercial tool and we managed to buy it free for 100 000€, keeping the lead developer at the same time (Ton Roosendaal). Despite being in active development, Blender still has tough competition in the professional field, although they've been feeling the heat from Blender free offering vs. their 900$ - 6000$ range of products.

What we need in video is a programm like Fusion or Shake going full FOSS and the lead developers staying with the product, funded by a foundation or something. Or a crew like Pitivi actually getting through and sustaining with their crowd-funding model and adding in all the pro features people want.

Personally, I'm going to look into Pitivi this year to see if it holds up on simple to mid-range video tasks. They appear to be very ... avid (no pun intended) and active. Maybe it's even matured further. But I don't expect miracles. If you want to do non-trivial video work today, you need tools like Fusion, Avid and the likes - and those are all closed-source.

As a C programmer, you maybe haven't bought into OOP, templates, exception handling, metaprogramming, or other such features that C++ brought to the systems programming scene. Maybe, like Linus Torvalds, you've tried C++ and think it's a horrible language.

I myself agree with you (or rather, Linus)... except I'm coming from the applications world (C# mainly), where those nice features (that C++ popularized well and implemented poorly) are bread-and-butter techniques. I want to do systems programming with objects, exceptions, namespaces, reflection, etc., *but* I'm not willing to weather C++ for them, nor am I willing to drop down to C. Ergo D, except it doesn't really have a viable ecosystem at this point. :-( (And, like you said, JavaScript/Java/C#/Python/etc are fast enough for the vast majority of applications.)

Mainly, it's a systems programming language, meaning that it gives the programmer fine-grained control over memory and operations so that you can write operating systems, drivers, and high-performance applications. This is relevant because, aside from the two biggies (C and C++), there aren't a lot of other languages in this space. I mean, there's Objective-C (which sort of half-asses it), and recently Go and Rust arrived on the scene. All the other popular languages are pretty much for scripting (Python, JavaScript, PHP, etc.), or running atop a managed virtual machine (Java and C#).

As for what it offers... it's basically a re-invention of C++. No, no... it's deeper than that. It's the idea of C++ re-invented in such a way that you get most all the power and low-level control of C++ without so many of the dangers and difficulties.

Unfortunately, D has struggled to gain wider acceptance. It fractured it's community when D version 2 broke backwards compatibility with D version 1, and the forums (which run on a dedicated Usenet server, FFS) are filled with endless commentary about what does and doesn't work in the latest point release of the DMD compiler. Bright and Alexandrescu have certainly designed a compelling language, but they seem (from my distant vantage point) to be mired in implementation details... yeah there's a standard library and everything, but the surrounding ecosystem (standards, tutorials, tools, IDE's, API's, packaging, etc.) hasn't made the leap to that sort of functional minimum you see with (for instance) node.js or Haskell's "batteries included" experience.

TL;DR - D's a super awesome low-level language, but it's not yet a platform.

Check that make-a-law impulse. A desk job is just about the safest thing you can do (assuming you don't have to travel for work). Very little chance of suffocating a mile underground (mining), disappearing into the sea (commercial fishing), losing a limb (logging, mill works), or routine exposure to carcinogens (many factory jobs). (Obligatory slideshow: the twenty deadliest jobs.)

That's not to say OSHA should have no concern but office workers (which they do)... just that it should be proportional to the risk involved.

Read this brief on the perils of both sitting and standing, and then check the references at the bottom. Notably, standing all day leads to varicose veins and puts a strain on your circulatory system.

Just generally, the factory production line taught us long ago that holding the same pose or making the same motions all day long will have chronic repercussions. (If you ever have to work an assembly line, hope it's in a factory that practices job rotation so your tasks are varied over time.)

Android has matured and leads in apps. And it's freely available for a wide range of devices already. I don't see anybody coming close to the package Google can offer, tie-in services included. Apple sells hardware - their services are a loss. MS sells business software, subscriptions to MS Office, Consoles and now tablets. AFAICT they are behind in comodity computing now.

Google makes money selling *you*. They can give away all their stuff for free, including their services. As soon as one vendor has to pay extra to adapt Tizen, there will be a strong incentive to look into Android again. Or Chrome OS as the case may be. All Google needs to do is perhaps offer a few cheap-and-easy co-branding options for their OS.

Google wants to bring the second half of humanity online, along with any hardware vendor that cares to emphasise the bottom line.
I think they have a very good chance of succeeding.

My 2 cents.

Genau!

Genau! Achtung! Verboten! Halt! Gesundheit! Fahrvergnügen! ... Did I miss any cliche German words? :-)