Can't you both be right? price changes tend to happen in chunks throughout the supply chain. Your aluminum is $2/kg from the supplier and then one day they tell you it is now $2.25. You suck it up for a while but then when they raise it again to $2.35 you finally say now we need to charge the customer more. That is why everything in Walmart can be *.97, you don't see a whole bunch of 1.36 products etc. prices move (stupid new keyboard is defective p apparently doesn't work with the shift key, nice) because they retailer has a pricing model, whether it be a standard ending on the end of prices, or "brackets" they place different categories of goods into etc.

I agree though: taxes on profits not total revenue does help a lot though. Same thing with the personal tax rate. When people say you can raise the top bracket it is just silly. 1) If you were making $300k and they changed the tax rate would you chose to stop at say $200k so you wouldn't hit the new high bracket or would you "settle" for making $275k this year? people tend to get used to making a certain amount and plan their spending accordingly. Which means they are still highly incentivized to earn (before tax) at least as much as before the tax rate hike. 2) A lot of high earners aren't making their money by salary: they are "choosing" to make X amount of money every year regardless of the tax rate. How much they keep and how much the tax man gets doesn't really affect them much. The investments, creative works whatever are already done. New investments needing bank loans might be another issue but that is what equity is for. If equity does get spread out because they can't get favorable loans, it will likely go at favorable multiples, which means the same revenue gets split more ways, less people in the top bracket and we get a more balances wealth distribution with fewer and fewer people hitting the "unfair" high bracket.

Also how often do you upgrade the software. If it is only once every 6mth-year or whatever is the cost of the setup going to pay for itself? If you run wires where are they going to go? If not how are you getting a wifi card into all these devices (are they configurable enough to do it, etc? What is the current process is this guy working after hours or doing one at a time at a gas station that is still operating? They might not like it so much if you close all the pumps at once for 20min vs only one at a time for 3 hrs.

I don't know if I'd blame the manufacturer. They couldn't exactly run ethernet under ground at a gas station very easily. Could have used wifi I suppose but flaky/some people are freaked out using phones around gas stations (might cause a spark, kaboom) so knowing they have a built in "cell phone" would make those nutjobs more paranoid than they are already. How often is this software updated? It might just be that, sorry to say, the posters time is of neglible value vs the cost of deploying and maintaining a network: remember networks have issues too. They probably don't trust a random guy they hire to do the upgrades to have the skills to figure out their software + any networking issues that pop up. Not sure wasn't clear if the poster is a true "IT" guy or an installer monkey. Installer monkeys are cheap you just have to keep the systems they play with very simple. Anyways, not clear what the business decision on the deployment was, might have made sense at the time.

+1 to notification crap. You can disable it but I'm amazed at the software that thinks it needs to startup an updater on boot just in case a new version is available. In my case at work: java, adobe, graphics driver etc. You can disable most of it but I agree it is stupid. My graphics card is particularly spammy( "you might not be planning on using it, but just in case, we really really need to let you know we have a driver that will give you a 5% improvement on Dirt 4"). Once a week or more it gives me an update notification.

Nivida: I like to stay up to date but I'm sorry I really don't care about your point-point release as in 187.02.03. Apps IMO should only check for updates when they are actually used (hard to get around the graphics driver I guess) and even then I think it should be limited to once a month or something.

Well they get away with it I think because they can stop supporting older hardware should they hit a limit vs the Windows ecosystem where you have people buying everything from $200-10k workstations/laptops.

They haven't stopped supporting systems for a long time though, my home desktop is a 2009 iMac and I was able to install Yosemite on it no problem. Didn't find that much difference performance wise from Lion, I guess slow is slow :). New system (Dell XPS 15 maxed out) comes on Tuesday so back to a reasonable system at home again for while. Non-SSD is so hard to tolerate once you get used to it.

Well for registry file, we'll see, I think it might only be for universal apps but win 10 is supposed to have a virtual registry similar to how WoW works. An app sees a registry but in actuality it is a private clone of the registry. When the app is uninstalled the OS just blasts away that clone and no cruft is left. At least that is the theory. For the desktop user, I think Mac has the cleanest installation process. Drag and drop. Things are installed in a single folder. Drag and drop the app to the trash and it is gone. For the power user: debian like is my favorite: apt-get is great. But still always having to remember what's in bin, whats in sbin, etc etc. Things do get scattered all over the place in Linux. Oddly it is the command line friendly OS that requires a lot of jumping between directories (which is a pain in the ass from command line) to get anything done. VS windows where everything is pretty much dumped in the windows folder and or available in the ui from a single (albeit huge) widget (control panel).

Probably because it supports a lot of .Net functionality.

Both right. I have a late 2009 iMac bootcamped to Win 8.1 pro. 1-2min before I can start opening up my own applications (have autohotkeys, and iTunes autostarting). But at work, SSD box. The system restarts faster than the monitor can detect that the computer has dropped the connection (~10-15 restart from desktop-bounce-login screen). I log in and as fast as I can get a mouse over a shortcut the computer is responsive. It all comes down to hardware at that level particularly ssd vs hdd.

There is also the "fast enough" metric. Mac users generally have mid to high end equipment. Chances are "slower than windows" for them is probably still plenty snappy. It is like the aero, vs OS X versus lightweight and snappy on a 1990's laptop debate: if you have the money to buy the hardware and feel more comfortable with the UI design, available software, heck just want transparency effects or whatever: who cares? It is a matter of preference. We are like whinny car nuts debating the merits of Ford vs Chevy trucks. It's a box you put shit into, if you are happy with it that is good enough I don't have to prove mine is better.

Some laws have budgetary impact so are somewhat logically linked to a budget. Example: if the government decides to make university free it is an expense they must budget for. I can see that getting added in to the budget (after the idea has been kicked around for a while as an independent bill). Go through committees get a pretty polished version ready, tack it on to the budget and get the funds allocated for it at the same time. The copyright issue though: kind of silly. Shouldn't affect the budget much either the original artist gets money, or the new artist that remixes it does, or for the most part it is something relatively small sales (say the Platters discography becomes public ... wow 10k best of albums don't get sold/taxed this year). Regardless, the copyright issue should be separate from its impact on government revenues: the law doesn't exist to provide income to the government but to "promote culture".

Add to that, the vast majority of revenue is going to foreign corporations and/or Canadians now living as ex-pats our government should have little interest in becoming record industry shills.

Who cares if an artist outlives their copyright? You can easily outlive your patents why is someone making a jingle more important than someone making an new gadget?

Huh, cool. When I'm away from wifi I'm generally on a train. There I just watch TV (downloaded already) or read till I get home/work so not a factor. All comes down to what you want to do I guess. My cellphone has a 200MB plan and I've never came close. I'm around a computer ~14hrs a day though so have very little need to get my internet fix on a small screen.

Not to mention a lot of people don't need nav systems. They either don't travel much or when they do they are flying somewhere. They know their local streets so never have needed one. My parents are that way. They just got a nav system 4 years ago when I moved way out of town so they wouldn't get lost on the way to my place. After 10 trips or so they knew the side streets well enough that they started leaving the nav at home again. I'm essentially the same way: I commute using public transit so I always plan how I'm getting somewhere before leaving. I've used my phone's gps once (one time with my parents since they aren't bringing theirs anymore and we got detoured for 10km out of the normal route to my house because of construction on country roads). Maybe not a typical user: but we do exist.

Also, probably not most of the /. crowd but about 10% of people don't have cell phones. Those likely are the same people that aren't into/can't afford other computer gadgets. My parents don't have a cellphone, nor my grandmother. One of my aunt's owns a cellphone but it is a dumb one, no gps. She doesn't ever us it, it is a pay as you go in case of emergency I can call someone in the car phone. As far as I know it is the same one she got 5+ years ago and has never made a call with. Not everyone is so obsessed with gadgets they have to horde them.

Maybe non-iPad tablets have a lot of GPSs I don't know. But (I think just anadocacoly) by far the wifi only iPad is the most popular iPad (if not tablet period): and it doesn't have a GPS.

I guess a question then becomes: why have a pile of old phones? Seems to be a common answer on this thread. I have my last phone mainly because I have to pay to dispose of it + take it to the middle of no where where the electronics recycling depo is and don't drive. I never got the idea of people having a 90's vintage blackberry or whatever that they never power on but hang on to forever.

Of course I also don't get people's fascination with getting a new phone every year. I use my phone for it's whole contract and then if they offer me a new one I'll take it. But only on my second cell now (previously out of country/living with Skype, then before that work supplied phone). I guess things accumulate if you have a spouse/kids all adding stuff to the pile too.