I'm interested, particularly in the phone. #MakePhonesSmallAgain.

I don't believe my premise is wrong, but I may have not made it all clear due to brevity. Of course reality is more complex than a few sentences in a slashdot comment; if it were this simple we'd all be economy experts. Let me try to clear things up.

The government doesn't print money. Well, it does, but not nearly enough to matter, and in order to print it, the money has to be created first via a borrowing event. Look up how that all works.

When the news says the government is 'creating money' they really mean they are borrowing it. The US government has no direct control over the money supply, that's all handled by the Federal Reserve, which despite having "Federal" in the name is actually a private entity. Really.

The correlation is not immediately 1:1. It takes some time for the created money to get into the system. That said, the industries where the government is spending the money tend to be impacted first - so if you want to see what the impacts are, look at those areas. Education and Healthcare have been focuses recently, look at the inflation numbers in those fields.

Education is a great example; we tend to all agree that education costs too much (despite it becoming easier to actually distribute information) - it's due to dollars in that area simply not being worth the same amount as dollars spent elsewhere. This is thanks to government funding the schools directly, subsidizing tuition under the covers, and making loans very accessible. Money is easier to come by, so it's not worth as much.

I'm all for helping people- but the government programs to make college more accessible are making it cost more and hurting competition, and in the end hurting those we're trying to help. Schools don't need to get more efficient or produce better graduates, they have no impetus to. In some cases (such as government assistance to colleges based on square footage) schools actually have good reason to retain and expand old practices, which the modern student gets to help pay for, but gets limited benefit from.

"Inflation" in the education space has been miles higher than the overall "inflation" number that gets published. That's the place to look for a short-term study on government spending. Similar stories can be found in healthcare.

I didn't say due to appreciation, I said due to inflation. There's no additional value in this mythical house.

Let's say it another way - 30 years ago you took out a (for simplicity, 0%) loan for $100k. You still haven't paid it back today, but today it's much easier to pay it back because $100k is a lot less money than it used to be. The loan, like the house, hasn't appreciated. The only thing that's changed is the value of the dollar, effectively shrinking your debt without you doing anything to shrink it. Even if you're paying interest on the loan, if you got a good loan, your interest rate is less than inflation. Same effect but slower. As such, inflation helps (or at least *can help*) the people who can get good loans or own things, and just make things cost more for those who can't.

I look at it this way: Any government spending hurts the poor and benefits the rich.

When the government spends money, it borrows it. Borrowed money is created out of thin air by the banks. Reserve requirement.

Money creation causes inflation.

Inflation means it costs more for the poor to buy stuff, and it means the stuff the rich own becomes more valuable. (if you bought a $100k house 30 years ago, it's worth $300k now thanks to inflation... you made $200k simply by owning it).

Unfortunately this means huge government programs often hurt the people they try to help in the long run.

I'm all for helping people, but the money that goes to help people needs to come from individuals, not from money creation. Also, human time assisting the needy needs to come from volunteers, not workers paid from borrowed (created) funds.

Obviously, the next verision of Linux needs to be "Linux 11 for Computers" - we need to look more advanced than OS X and Windows 10.

Other variants can be "Linux 2015 Mobile Edition" for phones and tablets, and "Linux Server 2011 (Based on Linux 3.0 technology)" for servers.

Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with "No."

Mass surveillance won't end. We have a new era of existence now, and that era includes easy access to anything you've ever communicated.

The thing we'll need to keep in check is how the information collected is used, which is part of the reason why personal right and acceptance of others is so important.

I'm tired of these mfin mosquitos made out of mfin viruses!

The back of the 10.4 server box said "Open source made easy" - and that's what it was, a lot of open technologies pulled together and given focus by Apple. Samba, bind, Apache, MySQL, openldap, etc all controlled with a pretty decent gui. Even the Mach kernal had an open version you could download and use with a bad-like user land (darwin).

Then in 10.5 they started removing the open parts and closing it all up. 10.4 could be a windows domain controller thanks to leveraging samba- today's OS X server can't, because Apple decided to replace samba with a closed implementation.

Not only has Apple made more work for themselves, they are actively pushing away the users that help grow the platform. Sure, the grandparents don't care if there's a decent xserver included- but the young person who helps keep their computers working (and tells them what to buy) does.

I embraced OS X when 10.4 for intel came out, because I could run anything. I could compile my Unix tools and use them on a nice, more focused platform. Now that's much more difficult, and instead of looking forward to what's next from Apple, I'm wondering how much longer I can stand to stay in the ecosystem.

I've been looking for a square (or 4:3) ~27 inch display forever, for an arcade cabinet build. There are CRT SDTVs out there but they are horrible and getting rare. This may do the trick.

Perfect.

This is straight out of science fiction.

I can see it now, a comic book super villain and his swarm of programmable insects.

What a time to be alive.

Thank our KDE developers for their hard work. I'm really impressed by KDE and have used it a lot over the years.

It doesn't matter if he renames his team; Slashdot and the rest of the world will rename it for him.

I, for one, welcome our new animated paperclip basketball team.

There was a study a while back that showed that most NASCAR drivers and crews had lead poisoning due to the leaded fuel- they didn't move to unleaded fuel until 2008!

So in a way, we've already seen NASCAR with drivers under the influence.