This isn't really true at all. A GM car is fine in a fleet car - it has a dealer network, a steering wheel, instrumentation, pedals, and a shift lever... Just like every other car.

If Microsoft loses the consumer market, it will lose the corporate market as well. Microsoft owns the corporate desktop market, because users are familiar with it's products. Although it might be cheaper from a licensing and maintenance perspective to put everyone on Ubuntu, the cost of re-training all your employees to use LibreOffice and Unity greatly exceeds the cost of licensing the products.

If however, users become more familiar with another platform, it would start to make much more sense to simply employ that platform in your corporate space. Consider ChromeOS; it's cheap, easy, and readily available. If users become comfortable with that platform, there's absolutely no reason why most of the corporate desktop work couldn't be done on that platform. Microsoft would be in trouble.

Ya'll just voted in the administration that just LOVES to regulate everything about your lives and livelihoods...

Partisan idiot. The other guy ran on an anti homosexuality, anti abortion, anti birth-control platform. We elected the guy who has been actively working to reduce government regulation of our lives and bodies.

Also, this kind of policy is set by the FAA, not the feds. The current FAA administrator is a former pilot and professor.

http://www.faa.gov/news/updates/?newsId=58196

Current book is 'Understanding the Linux Kernel' by Daniel Bovet & Marco Cesati. In this economy, you really can't afford to stop learning.

I used to take the train to work every day, and found I really preferred it to driving in, even when the train took twice as long to get there. The time was useful for reading. Also for reading slashdot, and doing the other non-essential stuff I tend to do during the day. 4 hours of productive time on the train, vs 2 hours a day wasted in traffic. Easy choice for me.

For what it's worth, the US and Greece aren't the only countries carrying high levels of debt, and this is not the first time US debt has exceeded the GDP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_debt
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2010/08/us-debt-today-vs-ww2.html

Quick Google search suggests that economists in the educational sector broadly favored Obama. Business economists were very mixed, but somewhat tended to favor Romney. You provide information about the economists who support your position, but fail to provide information about those who oppose. I think you've fallen victim to Confirmation Bias.

If debt spending is an issue for you, you can't honestly favor conservatives. Although conservatives take the stance of being the anti-debt party, their track record over the past 30 years has been abysmal on that front, with Regan by far having the worst record for debt spending. In that time period, the only conservative president to take a serious stance on the deficit has been Bush Sr, who was unfortunately voted out of office for his position. Comparatively, Clinton actually managed to reverse the trend of debt spending, and Obama seems to also be slowing the rate of spending.

Obama has of course, inherited a very heavy rate of deficit spending, and in his favor, the rate of spending has fallen for every year he's been in office so far. The trend would appear to be continuing with the wind down of the Afghanastan war.

In general, the conservatives seem to have favored tax cuts over budget control, and most of their suggested policies (cutting social services) would not have affected a significant reduction in debt spending. Romney made it very clear in the debate that he has absolutely no intent to reverse debt spending (comments on the size of the navy, inability to provide details of his debt reduction plans, sabre rattling about another war with Iran, etc.) The conservative party appears to be unwilling to touch major sources of debt spending (military) since it brings major income into their respective states. All indicators point to him being another refund-and-spend conservative.

I agree with you that deficit spending is a major issue.

I'm fortunate to be pretty close to the money. If you're close to the money, you're doing fine in this economy. For guys like me, the recession ended in 09. I took a 25% pay cut in 08, and I was back to my former levels a year later. I make more now than I did 5 years ago.

If you look at the data, GDP started rebounding in 09. Corporate profits are back up. Most economic indicators show that business is doing well - many of the indicators are at or above pre-recession levels (housing obviously isn't back to it's bubble levels.)

Here are a bunch of economic information(pdf warning)

The fact of the matter is that there's plenty of economic activity in the financial and corporate sectors. But those sectors don't really drive hiring in a service economy. A healthy middle class is what's going to drive hiring. If I make 10x as much as you, I don't buy 10x as many clothes, employ 10x as many mechanics, or eat 10x as many meals. Hiring recovers when the middle and lower class have discretionary spending for those things.

Demand drives hiring my friend, not money. There is plenty of money available to hire more workers, but not enough demand in order to do so. Trickle down economics don't fix that problem. No amount of tax breaks will incentivise a company to hire when they simply don't need more employees. Make sure the middle class is taken care of. Focus on fixing income inequity, control the cost of living. Demand will increase. When people can afford housing again, more houses will be built. When people can afford cars again, the factories in Detroit will need to fill more shifts. Hiring will improve in all sectors of the economy.

Do you really think the party of supply side economics can fix a demand problem?

First of all, I'm not actually convinced that the economy is in trouble, based on the gross numbers. GDP is back to it's steady climb after the hit it took in 08. What we're actually looking at here isn't a poor economy, but instead general issues with the cost of living for poor and middle class families, dwindling employment, and low upward mobility*.

Those trends started in the 80s. This was also the decade that we made a move away from Keynesian economics, back towards classical economics and the idea of trickle-down economics. Ever since then, the lower and middle class have seen their real income fall, asset ownership decline, and the cost of living increase.

I'm not convinced that the guy saying "More of the same!" actually has the ability to fix those issues.

* AKA the American dream. For many, that dream is dead.

Democrats aren't really united on this one. Libritarians are united in favor, conservatives tend to be united in opposition. Still, it tends to be the democratic states that legalize drugs, and push for reduced sentencing. Trend seems to be towards legalization, and much like gay marrage, I suspect it's the liberals that will make it legal, when it happens.

A person has a right to life (unless they are a criminal, appearently.)

A fetus is not a person. The rights of the fetus are trumped by the rights of the mother during the First Trimester. The SCOTUS established that in Roe vs. Wade. It's a good read.

You're in favor of indentured servitude? How about human slavery and the sex trade? Both are situations a person may find themselves voluntarily, either due to misinformation or via social or economic pressure. Let me guess, if they make that decision, it's their own fault?

Your in favor of the landlord being able to enter a unit you are renting at any time, for any reason?

Your freedom to smoke vs. my freedom to be smoke free. You're still welcome to smoke on your own property. You're still welcome to make your kids breath your smoke during the most critical time of their development.

It's also illegal for me to enter an establishment naked, or with a huge boom box.

Such laws will go away when racism goes away.

Nope. They simply require that you have health care, which prevents you from placing a drain on the rest of society by abusing the hospital system.

You assume that democrats do not themselves pay taxes. BTW, you'll find that blue states tend to send more money to washington than they take in. Red states tend to recieve more federal money than they pay in taxes.

President with the best debt record in the past 40 years: Clinton.
President with the worst debt record in the past 40 years: Regan.

Bush Sr. was the last conservative president who really addressed spending.
Spending under Obama has been trending downward over the past 4 years. It remains to be seen whether or not he spends more than Bush Jr. He does recieve props for taking responsibility for Afghanastan and Iraq war spending rather than hiding the debt for someone else to deal with.

Seriously, how is it that conservatives still believe this shit about their parties fiscal responsibility?

No one is calling for this congressman to be censored - If anything, his retarded comments have intentionally broadcast so that more people can understand how stupid they are. His comments have already been addressed over and over, and it happened long before he even said anything. Any of the books from Dawkins should be enough to answer any questions he raises. All that's really left is some ridicule.

Virtualization is pretty easy in practice. Understanding the theory behind virtualization is what tends to separate the men from the boys. Management of larger virtualization infrastructures, storage, etc... Also tend to be pain points.

I've personally worked with KVM, Xen, and various VMWare products. My usually recommendation is to start with the free version of ESXi available for download from VMWare's website. Although ESXi alone lacks a few core features (you need Vsphere for live migrations, right-click cloning, DRS and a bunch of other things) it does introduce a lot of the core concepts in ways that are fairly easy to wrap your head around.

Understanding how to do the following things are a good start:
- Use over-commitment to make better use of available resources.
- Set reservations, resource pools, and shares to keep critical systems humming along when someone in the engineering department decides to write a fork bomb on a dev machine.
- Live re-size disks.
- Manage virtual switches & virtual networking.
- Optimize virtual guests to run under a hypervisor
- Learn about ballooning, swapping, page sharing, etc.
- Learn how to monitor VMs, and debug disk/network/cpu/memory issues using command-line utilities, such as esxtop.

In general, ESXi is a great way to setup a virtual lab. I usually create a pair of virtual switches; one attached to my ethernet interface, one strictly external, and I route between them using a dual homed firewall distro, such as ZeroShell. This is a great environment for playing with DHCP, and other stuff that could break your home network.

For what it's worth, being a good Virtualization admin usually also means being a good storage admin. If you can get your hands on the netapp simulator, it's absolutely worth playing with.

Finally, knowing how to mess with ESXi does not make you a good Virtualization Admin. Read some books. Mastering Vsphere 5 by Scott Lowe is a good start. It covers everything you need to know about VMWare, and hits on storage and networking as well.

Finally, while ESXi is a great tool for corporate use and to learn virtualization theory, I strongly recommend gaining some experience with KVM. If you know what you're doing, KVM is much more powerful than the stand alone ESXi product. It's great for small businesses, or business that are banking on open source infrastructure, since it isn't artifically neutered the way standalone ESXi is, and doesn't have major licensing costs (unless you insist on RedHat Enterprise Virtualization.) If you need something with enterprise management capabilities and don't mind deploying bleeding edge code, the upstream project for RHEV is available on Fedora. Checkout the oVirt project - they are doing some very cool stuff.

The issue for many novice riders is in their ability to judge entry speed for a corner, and set a line. There are a couple of common issues that come up...

Entry speed is too fast. The novice rider feels confident approaching the corner, but as they begin to turn-in, they have an 'oh shit' moment, panic, grab the brakes, or turn in too early.

Turn in point is too soon. This is a common mistake, that comes out of panic. The rider or driver tries to cheat by turning into the corner earlier than they should. This forces an early apex, and forces the rider to correct after the apex, or risk running off the edge of the road.

Some riders do think in terms of gears, but most of the racers I know don't. Motorcycle transmissions are sequential, so I generally think in terms of how many down-shifts we need to make while entering any particular corner. We use beginning and end of brake markers, as well as multiple reference points through a turn and speed judgement to try to set entry speed, and control our lines.

Your information is good though. you seem to do some performance driving.

Data analysis is not a cheat or an aim-bot. I say this as someone who races motorcycles: I wish more people would use data analyzers - they'd be better, faster, safer riders.

Different sanctioning bodies set different rules for what is allowed, and what isn't allowed in each racing class. In general, most racing organizations now permit traction control, ABS, and launch control, although in production classes there is often a restriction that the bike must have come originally equipped with those features.

Cheating at the club level most often comes in the form of illegal modifications, and usually qualifies as blatant cheating. For example, last year someone was caught running a GSX-R 750 engine in a GSX-R 600 chassis in a 600cc class. It's not terribly uncommon to see production bikes subtly modified in ways that aren't permitted by the rules. Sometimes cheating comes in the form of unintended violation of the rules - a while back, we had a major championship decided by an illegal brake fluid cover.

I am actually a motorcycle racer. First thing: Apps like this have been around for years, and hardware to accomplish the same thing has been around for even longer. This appears to be more or less a slashvertisment.

To address a couple of points above: I don't really see apps like this being a safety issue. Very few street riders use data-loggers or lap timers. While lap timers may encourage risk taking, data loggers almost certainly wont. The use to us for data-loggers is to establish strategy, and analyze riding technique. It's useful as a teaching tool to identify bad riding habits (mid-line corrections, over-braking, etc.) It's great for comparing two different approaches to a corner to identify which is faster. Data loggers are very useful on a closed circuit where you can easily take the same corner a dozen times over a two hour period. Few street riders will pay that much attention to a single corner*, and the data is rarely useful because of changing road conditions.

The additional weight of a smart-phone or full data logging system is pretty much irrelevant at most levels of racing. The value of the data obtained far exceeds the cost of the weight. Many of us also mount cameras (Go Pro, Countour, etc.) which also add aerodynamic drag and weight.

Using a datalogger in traffic is pointless. The traffic it's self adds too many variables to make the data meaningful.

Finally, no one uses a data logger to 'turn sharper.' On a motorcycle, turning radius is usually limited by rider confidence first, and cornering clearance second. It can be increased with training and proper technique. If there was an app that said "you could probably lean further" then yes, such an app would be dangerous. Modern bikes however, already come with such a feature (peg feelers.)

* On a given weekend, you'll find me walking around any track I ride, looking at surface irregularities, camber angle, analyzing lines, etc. We pay huge attention to each corner.

When Obama took office, the deficit was over $1 trillion. Go talk to any economist and he will tell you that during a recession you should NEITHER reduce spending nor raise taxes. Otherwise you risk making things worse.

Just a point: The top 5% of this country are most certainly not in a recession.