That's strange. I use my Streak 5 to make voice calls all the time and have since the moment I pulled it out of the box.

The Streak 7, although still an Android device, makes you work harder to unlock the phone capabilities.

Wrong. The percentage of income spent on food, housing, clothing, etc. has been declining for at least 30 years. What has happened is that US consumers have traded that decline in prices for more luxurious goods: Average house size is up ~ 50% since 1980, consumers eat more expensive foods, they eat out more often, they drive cars that are larger and fancier, etc.

His math is actually a little bit off, but when it comes to wealth, anyone that lives in the US is in the top ~12% of the world. Meeting physiological needs takes a tiny fraction of the average US income, which makes it less likely that high Gini coefficients will actually lead to unrest. The US Gini coefficient is 40 (equivalent to the whole of the EU BTW), but the IPF is essentially 99%.

It's a Guy Fawkes mask? I guess that explains my confusion at why people were dressed as Jack White.

If the real issue with education is parents, then why the fuck do we have these continual rants that society's failure to pay teachers more is leading to the decline of western civilization? If it sounds like I'm ranting, well, I am. I'm fucking tired of the teachers unions trying to have it both ways: "Why do you hate education?" when we won't pay them more and "Blame Johnny's parents" when we do and it doesn't amount to shit. I understand that they're trying to do right for their members -- that's their job. But for FSM's sake, don't wrap that shit in a giant appeal-to-emotion.

You're missing out on the point: Linking to the article from slashdot improves the pagerank score of said article, making the claim that "147 corporations control the global economy" more truthy for the Mother Jones set.

You're really going to go there? A small number of political action committees that are tightly regulated by the FEC makes us more lied-to and manipulated than, say, North Korea? Really!?!

Dell is the same way with the Streak 5. They have a kernel dump from an old version of Froyo from last year and their build instructions are shitty to the point of uselessness (download the android source from Qualcomm? Good thing there's only ever been one version...).

One of the problems that a flat tax solves is "moral hazard". People who don't feel any pain continually vote themselves larger and larger shares of the treasury with calls to pass the cost on to the "rich" (conveniently defined as someone who makes more than they do*) As to the regressive nature of such a tax, it's only regressive in the absence of a social safety net. If the social safety net includes food assistance, housing assistance, transportation assistance and medical care then much of what's left over isn't really for necessities. *You can see this in action whenever the topic of how much money is returned to states out of the amount they pay in federal taxation. All of a sudden people who are normally for progressive taxation get all worked up about not getting back all their federal tax dollars.

You're the pot calling the kettle black. The numbers you cite are _marginal_ rates and were paid by almost no-one (hence the AMT). Check the historical _effective_ rates and you'll see that the percentages paid by the top quintile has been essentially flat regardless of marginal rates.

What about OpenCV?

http://blog.damiles.com/?p=292

The gods of our legends were there:

Ted Turner, Hank Aaron, Jeff Foxworthy, the magician, the guy who invented Coca Cola. Also, Jane Fonda was there.

Oops -- I thought we were talking about the lost city of Atlanta.

Don't kid yourself. Oracle wants Solaris, while it would have represented a major competitor for that pile of crap known as AIX. Sure, IBM might have extracted ZFS and Dtrace before throwing the husk into a dumpster, but it would be nothing like the Solaris we enjoy today.

My employer bought a license for a Sun product that was dumped in favor of the Oracle version (Java CAPS). JCAPS is barely on life support @ Oracle -- they're committed to bug fixes and that's it. There will be no additional features, and the really cool stuff, like Fuji, that was promised "real soon now" is gone along with the talent that worked on it. As a result, we've foregone support and saved about $30k/year.

On the other hand, ForgeRock has taken the core of JCAPS (OpenESB) and is working on delivering the stuff that Sun had previously committed to.

Meanwhile, effective tax rates have been essentially flat over the same time period. If you really want to pick nits, effective tax rates for the top quartile are now actually higher than they were 30 years ago.