And even you are understating the matter.

I once represented the general manager of the biggest one of those in town on another matter.

Breakeven is on sale: the down payment is set to what they paid at auction. They sell, collect a few payments, repo, sell again . . .

Their idea of a good car is one they get to sell 3 or 4 times.

hawk, esq.

You may not be rich, but you have clearly never been poor.

I, also, buy with cash, even (especially?) products as expensive as cars. But I have known many people for whom that was not an option. Not even on the used market. (I, personally, prefer to buy a car that's about three years old from a representative of the manufacturer. They often buy cars from people who are trading in on a new car. And they also want to keep the brand name in good repute.) But I've known many people who couldn't scrape together enough cash to purchase even an old used are.

Your question of "why people don't just get cheaper cars" is strictly analogous to Marie Antonette's "Let them eat cake." (though to understand this you do need to know that the cake referred to was dough that was caked to the sides of the baking oven during the baking process). For many people that is not an option. (There are, of course, the others. And, yes, foolish people exist. Just about everyon is in one area or another.)

No. The only possible (not probable) long term solution is technical...but the technical method involved is AI. And yes wit will be centralized, fur the reasons you gave.

What *could* happen is that an AI could take charge of handling communications. But it couldn't start there, it would probably need to start with handling business records (perhaps at AT&T) and branch out from there to handling users calls. Your information would not be secure from the AI, but the AI would, as it was designed to handle business records, be designed to protect them. You'd get end-to-end encryption that was transparent to the user. And nothing that could damage the corporation if revealed in court would be retrievable.

As I said, I don't think of this as probable, but it is *A* solution. Perhaps the existence of one solution implies that other solutions exist.

I've read the Quran. I've also read the Bible. The Quran isn't much worse. Both have their vile spots.

  (And how should that word be spelled. I've always spelled it Koran. "qu" should be pronounced about like "cw", since that's the french spelling of Old English words: "cwen" vs. "queen". I suspect that the better spelling would be something like "Q'ran", but perhaps it depends on which country you are transliterating from.)

I trust that was a joke...the science is NEVER settled.

That's true, but it's not at all clear that just because it works for a simplified, idealistic object it will actually work for any plausibly existing scenario. It might, but ...

I don't know enough math (or astrophysics) to analyze her arguments, but for now I'm going to classify them as "interesting" rather than "probable". Sort of like I did the other black hole replacement theory that I'm remembering as "Magnetar", but actually must be something else, because that refers to something much more observable. It was in the Scientific American a year or two ago, but a quick google didn't find it.

There's no way I'm going to move all at once. None. For a time I'll run both systems in parallel. (Yes, I would *also* first run the BSD system isolated from my other work...but that's not a real test, that just makes sure that it won't break something.)

My current system uses ext4 on a large partition, so any system I contemplate switching to must be able to read and write file to a large ext4 partition without problems. If everything works, then I'll consider moving over to a replacement system, and THEN I could consider switching to a different partition format.

N.B.: I don't have a lot of spare hardware. Or space to set any more up. Or, for that matter, budget.

That might be why the BSD folk don't use it, but that rather lets BSD out for my use. I need to share an existing large partition with a Linux install, because I'm not going to switch entirely to BSD without first trying it to see if it fits my use case. I didn't even do that when switching from MSWind to Linux back in 99.

>Relatively few people pick up a masters on their way to a doctorate.

Highly dependent upon field. In mine (economics), the masters is a sidestep. In others, its the norm.

And at some schools, there is a payment to the school for each master's awarded, so they're handed out along the way . . /

hawk

And how many people from Guinea have you spoken too in the last 5 years? Ive met several, but not met one with a good word for their government.

read the archives of alt.folklore.computers for great examples of some of these.

Swapping registers (in a two register + ALU architecture ) used to be a common one; you'll find an answer that was a step faster than the "correct" answer by using XOR in there.

My favorite, though, was handing the candidate a piece of convoluted code and asking what it did.

"Hopefully, it got the author fired." :)

hawk

Yes, but in this part of the world, the "funerary brigade" is the family. There is no other. So you are requiring the entire nation not just to have, but to understand how to use, a bunny suit. If they could afford one, they would probably instead use the money to feed the family who will otherwise starve to death, or to get the hell out - taking Ebola with them.

Western societies generally don't touch the dead, unless required to do so.

No, but you touch a lot of people who may have been sick for up to 20 days with no visible symptoms. (Shake hands and then touch your own eyes, nose or mouth is the problem). Big sports events could be a major killer.

If the model is right within +/- 50%, then another 4 months and its 5 billion or so infected. As there are only 10 million in the affected area, that means it will have a good foothold in Europe and America.

So far all suggestions for containment have taken more than 6 weeks to implement, by which time, even the viable ideas are only 25% of the scale required.

Its time to sent in Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee and "the great white Ninja".

In the middle ages, the answer was to build enormous stone churches and pray like mad. "To be sure it won't make a #@!! of a lot of difference, but nor will anything else, don't ya see".

Of course the data and the maths are probably wrong, the question is are they wrong enough to make a gnats piss of a difference?

As a first year college student hired after high school in a startup, I had a real eye opener when the person they brought in after me--with a MS in CS--couldn't, well, do much (they'd called me back after I left).

I finally had to take a stack of cards to manually demonstrate a bubble sort. No, I'm not defending or advocating bubble sorts. With an MS, he just plain didn't understand the concept.

His output roughly quadrupled once I was around (he wasn't around much longer).

And I've seen it in other areas. I have a Ph.D. in Economics and and statistics as well as a law degree, and I've met people in both who can function their way through the classes and dissertation, but just plain can't do anything useful in the fields.

hawk, j.d., ph.d., esq.