"Yeah, because the alternative is people living in a house for 30 years and being forced to sell it to pay for increasing property taxes they cannot afford on a retired fixed income is so much better for everyone."

Please. That could have easily been solved. Instead we're in a situation where the people on 3 sides of me rent their original homes out -- it makes no sense to sell them because they pay only _$400_ a year in property tax. The 2 of the 3 houses behind me pay less than $800. Me, I pay $8500. Same size house, bought 12 years ago at a decent rate -- the problem is I remodeled it, and the county reappraises at current day rates. The house across to the left just sold, I expect he'll be near what I pay.

Prop 13 does nothing but encourage neighborhoods to be turned into rent factories and engender bad feelings between neighbors who pay VASTLY different sums for the _exact same service_. It was a good idea poorly implemented, and now everyone is too scared to change it.

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/firefox-9.0a1.en-US.win64-x86_64.installer.exe , as linked from http://nightly.mozilla.org/

64bit nightly installer. I've been running it a while now, fairly nice.

"(except for in California, where you have to have a teacher certificate to home school"

This is not correct. There is no requirement to have a teaching certificate in CA. That was a short-term decision of a court that was overturned on appeal a few months later; it was never a law. The only requirement is that the lessons include the standards-track material as well, and this is enforced thru periodic testing and feedback with a local school. Additionally popular are home schooling coops who create a legal and instructional framework around what is essentially a school for multiple children, run out of homes.

You are not misinformed.

The largest textbook purchasers are California (#1) and Texas (#2); The rest of the country arguably gets what we 2 states 'agree' on thru our negotiations with the publishers. Texas has such a large influence because it orders books at the state level, whereas most states order (and decide) at a district level.

Now normally, we balance each others whacky theories out. However, CA has drastically reduced _new_ textbook orders due to budget issues for the last few years, so this and last years TX board meetings were of particular import, as TX had unusually strong influence with the publishers.

$ time find ~ -type f -printf '%s %p\n' 2>/dev/null | sort -rn | head -1

Backups, virtual machine disks, and raw HDV m2t's seem to round out my >8GB top10 as expected.

Manufacturing of all things, including food, is also becoming increasingly *automated*, and is nothing to be nostalgic about. Even without molecular manufacturing (nanotechnology), this trend of accelerating (in)human productivity will mean that fewer and fewer warm bodies are actually NEEDED to engineer and produce most of the necessities and luxuries of modern life, and yet everybody is still expected to somehow earn their (should-be-easier) living, doing... something... anything else.

The day is fast approaching when we'll *have* to solve the unequal DISTRIBUTION problem, as you mentioned. Either the fruits of increasingly automated production will be fairly redistributed (oh noes: soshulism), or the fortunate few who hoard the resources and means of production will find the "barbarians" at their gates.

An economy of abundance isn't that far off - the next boom after the current recession's bust, in all likelihood. Green energy is part of it.

The solution is *better* socialism, and not more of the old dog eat dog bullshit. What we need is the systemic intelligence and compassion to DISTRIBUTE a sustainable BASIC living to EVERYONE, which still preserves incentives to try to better yourself and society above your baseline by being exceptional. In the U.S., at least, this idea is known as the Basic Income Guarantee (BIG), which quite a few nobel laureates have advocated for in vain thus far...

Nobody with a clue has been arguing that SSD's would be cheaper per gigabyte than ye olde spinning-platter HDDs any time soon.

What we're seeing now, and will see much more of, is the hybrid approach of combining a small-ish (80GB) SSD for the most-accessed OS & Apps, with a monsterously huge and relatively slow (array of) HDDs for bulk data archival and backup.

With HDD I/O still the single biggest bottleneck today, it makes sense to start transitioning to SSDs, but it doesn't have to be all at once. The premium for SSDs -- ~$2.50/GB SSD vs ~$0.10/GB HDD -- isn't that much, but it will probably pay for most to wait another year not just for prices to fall more, but for all SSDs to finally support TRIM, and have efficient firmware that competes with indilinx and intel's. SATA3 will also be welcome as current SSDs have already hit the SATA2 xfer limit.

(Oh, and please don't eat the "ZOMG SSDs have limited write-cycles!" FUD. In the vast majority of normal usage patterns, you'll never ever get close to hitting it, and even you did, the failure mode still allows you to READ your data off if you had no backup, as opposed to a HDD crash.)

I certainly am not holding any stocks, apart from my short positions.

Hah. Finally full disclosure from you.

Sorry to hear your shorts are bleeding (probably from as far back as S&P 900), but the market can stay irrational (and/or manipulated) longer than you can stay sane wishing for another crash or even just a no-inflation fair value correction.

(btw - the one thing that will save this screwed planet from bigger booms and busts, and also decimate the old scarcity-based markets, is our accelerating technological progress. We're a few short decades away from massively disruptive nano-abundance along with the (A)Intelligence needed to maximize the efficiency and "good" of these increasingly complex systems all around us.)

remove the $%*@%&#% cashew from the desktop.

Hah. It just so happens that the only package in Fedora's repos with "hate" in its name, does just that, so install it (and then add the applet) if you prefer an absolutely spotless desktop. Of course, it'd be nice to be able to more simply disable it without using a workaround package.

$ yum info \*hate\*
Loaded plugins: changelog, fastestmirror, presto, refresh-packagekit, security
Installed Packages
Name : kde-plasma-ihatethecashew
Arch : x86_64
Version : 0.3
Release : 2.fc11
Size : 55 k
Repo : installed
Summary : Removes the KDE Plasma Cashew From the Corner of the Display
URL : http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/I+HATE+the+Cashew?content=91009
License : GPLv2
Description: Removes the KDE Plasma Cashew From the Corner of the Display.