Why is it so hard to grasp the concept that public policy is a balancing act? Just because I say today's minimum wage is too low, doesn't mean you get to extrapolate and say that my argument is equivalent to suggesting a $25 minimum wage, and that would be a disaster, so no increase at all. That's asinine. But it's exactly the argument that so many right-wing pundits are making - and that you're parroting so faithfully here...

The drop in labor force is not a drop in minimum wage jobs. Those are being added at a steady clip - that's part of the problem. Those 'giving up' are giving up on trying to find a job that they're qualified - and not yet ready to stoop to the minimum wage jobs that are available. Y'know, the ones you're only supposed to take when you're still living in your parents' basement...

You have a point. Of course, there are differences. This gives you desktop apps on ARM, unlike Windows RT. And the mobile apps you get are Android ones - i.e., there are mobile apps. The joining of the two is just as awkward (perhaps even more so) than in windows 8. But at least you're getting the apps you want - and oh, by the way, it's all free. It would be nicer if they somehow managed to run Android apps windowed on the Debian side - kind of like Windows 9 is promising to do...

This whole attempt to steer the discussion to one of illegal immigration is a cute trick, but it skirts the real issue. The minimum wage (which hasn't been adjusted for inflation in decades) isn't enough for someone working 40 hours a week (whether picking fruit or stocking aisles at WalMart, etc) to live on without some form of public assistance. So either:

1) Accept this - and lobby for public assistance to make up the difference instead of against it.
or
2) Accept that the wage needs to be raised, because it's more important to the American ideal for a full time worker to be able to support themselves - if not themselves plus their children, than it is for employers to be able to squeeze every last bit of profit from their labor.
or
3) Admit that you're okay with America not being a place where all people who work can afford food, shelter and health care (i.e., perhaps not The Greatest Country On Earth (tm)).

But the point of the article is that the argument that 'raising the minimum wage will kill jobs' has been disproved. To continue to scream it is to lie. But many of those are the same ones still touting that 'lower tax rates raise revenue' - despite the fact that that's not really what the Laffer curve says - and experience shows that we're on the part of the curve where that's not true anyway. In other words, it's a lie, based on a fantasy and/or propaganda - in the face of actual experience that demonstrates the opposite. That letting gays marry will destroy marriage and hurt children. I could go on...

Easy. Because they all still have big businesses selling Windows desktops and laptops - and don't dare piss Microsoft off too much. That plus the fact that Linux lacks 3rd party app support - but so does the Mac to some extent. Essentially, though, there's not a big enough market for such a thing - certainly not big enough to invest in the capability to offer phone support. Between Windows desktops/laptops, Macs, iPhones/iPads, Android phones and tablets and Chromebooks, there's a lot of competition out there for a new platform. And they can still sell their hardware to Linux fans. Unfortunately, that means Linux fans still have to pay the Microsoft tax.

More like Microsoft tried to clone Comouserv, AOL, and whatever else was popular before the internet came along and showed how uncreative they were. And now they're still trying to clone Google...

WINE on the Mac uses XQuartz too. It works well, except when it doesn't. I've had it freeze up my display completely - happens when I exit my WIN32 app and then restart it. If I wait a while before restarting, it's okay. But if I restart it too soon, X launches and the screen goes all white. That's when you find out that the Mac's equivalent of Windows task manager is pretty crappy. It won't come up either, so you need to reboot...

All true, but this dynamic only works for a short time. Since it amounts to sabotage of any real value in the company, it also counts on a business plan that involves unloading the company after a few years - either by selling it to another company or going public. The real enablers of this crap are the companies that buy such destroyed hulks - and/or the banks that hype their IPO's. My company just got spun off from a public company to a private equity firm. That's after a 400 million dollar writeoff (the public company was sold a bill of goods several years back). Anyway, we're one year in, and the IPO wheels are already turning. Improvements in the company's outlook? Well, there's now a vision of 'moving everything to the cloud'. No viable path to accomplishing that, but obviously these jokers think it's enough to hang an IPO off of.

Incumbents will always have the publicity advantage - though that also applies to bad publicity. If you think that carpet bombing the public with corporate-funded messages is an appropriate way to counter that, then where's the room for non-corporate messages. Somebody's still got an unfair advantage. Candidates of all stripes are well enough versed in media manipulation to largely counter the encumbent's 'newsworthiness' advantage - though I guess the media (and the public) are slow to pay attention until a candidate manages to get nominated into a high-stakes race. Still, the problems of a corrupt and lazy media and a lazy electorate are nothing compared to the wholesale undermining of the principle of one person one vote democracy that we have now.

There's a class of application that will never make sense to be stand-alone, and for those apps, the cloud is probably the best paradigm. But the current state of HTM5/Javascript calls for a cloud with a ton of application logic running in the browser. I'd much rather see a single app running in the browser that isolates all the front-end specifics and makes it really easy to write fully server based apps that use the browser as a universal delivery system - and nothing else. Sure, you're not going to write video games that way. But I'm talking about apps that handle data input and output with a robust widget set that doesn't need to be programmed on the front end. A smart terminal that lets you generate, say, data to be displayed in a grid on the server and just send it to the terminal for display and manipulation.

I wrote something just like that a long time ago - though it doesn't run in a browser - so the smart terminal requires Windows or WINE to run. That no longer cuts it, but as a proof of concept it works really well (and is still in use). The data grid, for example takes grid layout instructions and a file in a 'CSV with flags' format that is produced on the server for display (and editing) in the terminal. Besides making the app easy to implement and debug, that level of abstraction has some nice side benefits. 'Printed' reports come for free, because the data and the instructions for laying it out in a grid are generated separately from the display logic, and it was easy to implement a printing module that takes that same info on the server side and uses it to generate a PDF or XLS file for download and native display/printing. I guess it's essentially splitting the MVC model so that only the View part (the part that has to run on the client) runs on the client.

I can't be the only one that's done something like this - but I'm curious why I don't see anyone trying to adapt that model as a browser-based application platform. Just because Javascript lets you write application code that runs in the browser, that doesn't mean it's a good idea - or that the end result is easy to write, debug and support. The browser's a really smart terminal, but maybe it would make sense to write a browser application that turns it into a somewhat dumber terminal - that only does terminal-like stuff.

Easy. Because Republicans put the idiots on the Supreme Court that just decided that your employer can dictate what kind of birth control you use your health insurance to buy. That's right - YOUR health insurance. The insurance that you received from your employer in lieu of cash to buy your own - which would be an even worse deal, since the insurance companies still only offer their best group plans to employers. And while Obama deserves at least some of the blame for letting insurance companies dictate such things, at least he saw to it that insurance companies can't deny you coverage outright - for which many people are quite grateful.

Anyway, until a mass movement votes the Congressional tools of the oligarchs out of office, you may as well vote for the guys who won't give the Court to folks who are intent on allowing Republicans to choose who gets to vote in the first place...

I guess you haven't been installing the various upgrades to your distro until you get new hardware then. Not that that's so bad either - but it's about 2 hours of downtime each time the distro upgrades. That is, as long as your desktop environment didn't decide to change its configuration files in some incompatible way, in which case it'll take you another hour or so to get things back the way you like 'em. And all of this assumes you kept /home on its own filesystem.

Not horrible, but not the best use of your time either. Then again, I don't think I've ever upgraded Windows on any machine I've owned. That's either because the OEM version was good enough to tide me over until I needed new hardware - or because my old hardware couldn't handle the ever-growing demands of a Windows 0S.

Nice way to miss my point. For any given house, there's a point where its insulated - you can't throw more insulation at it and hope to gain much. So yeah, insulate as much as you can. Then go solar. You get all the benefits of insulation, and you need less solar to cover the now reduced energy demand. I guess a carbon tax is the same as a reverse subsidy - and it may be the most efficient approach... today. But if subsidizing solar leads to efficiencies of scale down the road, a carbon tax may never get you there.

Not to mention that the entire witch hunt for IRS 'discrimination against right-wing groups' is a bogus, political sideshow. And beyond that, not to mention that *all* of these political groups shouldn't be tax-exempt - or certainly not in the way that allows their donors to be anonymous.

It never ceases to amaze me that presumably smart Slashdotters are so quick to subscribe to conspiracy theories (cue smarmy response about how non 'presumably smart' I am). And that they embrace nonsense just because they think they're libertarians and the issue at hand falls on the libertarian side of an issue. The wholesale compromise of U.S. democracy in favor of big cash contributions is a tragedy - for liberals, conservatives and libertarians alike. But the media love it. Ad sales spike like crazy around elections, and for TV stations, election season is probably what Christmas season has long been for retailers - a few months, without which they would operate in the red...

If you can cut a ton of carbon emissions by adding insulation - great. Do it. Then cut another ton by switching to solar... So now you've cut two tons for $60, which you couldn't do with insulation alone.