The less time we spend touching the screen, the better one can keep their eyes on the road and avoid becoming absorbed with the gadget. That means sensitive touch controls with very little lag, quick look-up times, and voice inputs. Google/Bing integration would keep data entry to a minimum too; if I've already have a place marked on the maps, I wouldn't have to enter it into the system all over again.

Of course I have no time to watch movies on my screen or visually sort through ads to get what I need.

Because progressives have twisted the perceptions of economics and morality according to Marxist principles and the risk/reward/consequence dynamic that is a fact of life. It's not a moral imperative to create jobs. It's a moral imperative to treat people well, and how that translates into pay is totally subjective and legislating that will always hurt somebody. Hiring is done as a necessity to support the business, not the employee. The pay should reflect the value that the employee brings to the business, balanced against the revenues. If the business operates at a loss, or does not generate enough profit to stand for itself and build a healthy reserve to sustain itself during lean periods, eventually the whole thing will come down and the job creators have to consider this at all times and adjust accordingly, otherwise EVERYBODY loses their job.

True, but a drop in the bucket is meaningful when the bucket's already full.

I don't think it's unfair that I can't live in Beverly Hills; I don't have a right to live in BH and yesterday I had to drive by my local Maserati/Lamborghini dealership knowing I have no business being there either. We have mobility here in the US. Making a living is cheaper elsewhere but many are not willing to use their mobility to go there.

Seniors do it all the time. Once they retire and their income is lower, they change their lifestyle to fit their reduced income. They've taken on the responsibility of preparing for their retirement. In my youth, I'm choosing to go the other direction and "burning the midnight oil" to increase my income to improve my family's lifestyle in the short term and in the long term have a reserve for when I'm no longer working.

If instead I force someone by way of government to give me more of their money for the same work, I'm taking away from someone for my gain. That's not fair either. It's their business, their resources, their time and treasure on the line. "Tweaking" the market to make it more fair is a slippery slope and shifts the responsibility of making the economy work to the "tweakers" instead of keeping it in our own hands. "With great power comes great responsibility." So we give them responsibility and power all with a single vote. Then we complain when "we don't have a voice".

Sorry if I'm too much of a smart-ass, and thanks for the exchange. Cheers.

I didn't even mention unfunded liabilities, which are estimated conservatively at about $90 Trillion (with a T) and more aggressively at $120-200T. Here's a tid-bit from only one of them, Social Security, not from a right-wing paper or blog, but from the official Social Security website's actuary report. http://www.ssa.gov/oact/trsum/

Wanna check Medicare/Medicaid? Federal pensions? State pensions? Food stamps? All overloaded beyond capacity. And the only answer you get from anyone is to keep voting for the same people and keep doing the same thing.

Yes, I read your post and I misquoted you on the advocating mediocrity. Reading too many other posts and crossed my thoughts; my bad on that.

The entrepreneur will likely relocate, and look for another business opportunity with a different cost structure. That's what I'm doing. I abandoned the first business and am starting another one so I can profit from my personal investment in a different way. Not speaking from theory, but from very real experience. I have the economic scars to prove it and here I go again with a different strategy.

If your calculations were the only factors influencing inflation your numbers would barely start to make a shade of sense. But real inflation is built with things like food prices (which by all accounts are on the rise at a rate higher than the nominal rate of inflation), energy costs (which are also rising and about to skyrocket with more EPA regulation), and devaluing currency (which we are doing at a pretty good clip via Quantitative Easing and more printing money electronically to pay for our growing national deficit spending).

Remember that trillion you found from increasing minimum wage? We're overspending by more than that every year and borrowing from China and ourselves to pay for it. Serious economy mismanagement? We've been there for a while, but the media ignores the actual numbers. From every angle our government is making promises our pockets can't keep and my now-9-month old was born with about a quarter million dollars debt to his name because "we have to do it for the children".

It's not an employee you don't need. It's an under-performing load you wouldn't want anyways, or a tough choice you have to make having to let go of someone you actually like just to keep the rest of the business afloat. Starting a business is getting harder and more expensive than it was before. The new businesses that you say will jump in and fill the gap will have a higher cost structure than their predecessors, so the incentive is lessened, to the point where it's better to just not try.

There is no moral obligation to create jobs, and it's not the dream of the entrepreneur to create jobs either. "Progressivism" has successfully broken our view of the risk/reward/consequence dynamic that is a fact of life and replaced it with academic sophistries that ignore history and destroy economies for the sake of "equality". If I take a risk, I should be rewarded if I am successful, and should suffer the consequences if I am not. If we are all subject to that dynamic, then that is true equality. When you try to mess with that to manufacture equality, you get bailouts and cronies of the decision makers getting rich.

It's easy to see that most of the commenters here haven't started or run businesses and are commenting on real situations from an idealized or hypothetical perspective. Please go out and try to start your own thing, then ask why or why not.

Where the neighborhood of Fremont has a statue of Lenin, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Lenin,_Seattle) and people have voted in an openly-socialist council woman (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/seattles-socialist-councilwoman-on-why-capitalism-offers-nothing-for-young-people/).

It's trendy up there... (http://www.socialism.com/drupal-6.8/seattle)

a) Congratulations, you're now more of a burden to your employer than you were before, and at higher risk of losing your job entirely when he/she decides it's no longer profitable to run a business. Because nobody starts a business with a dream of creating jobs. I'm on my second business and dreading the day when I HAVE to hire somebody. The paperwork for a small business already sucks BEFORE you have employees.

b) Um, inflation has to be managed, or else it wrecks the economy. Google Weimar or Zimbabwe hyperinflation and get a bit of an education on real world economics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic#Hyperinflation

http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2014/02/inflation-argentina

c) Slacking in any job long-term doesn't help anyone. The employer gets less value, and the employee's skills don't develop. It's the formula for mediocrity, which you are advocating for gleefully.

Barrel, chamber and bolt assembly go on the upper receiver. The trigger, magazine, stock and serial number on the lower receiver.

Yes, the New Frontier ones are pretty good. I have two of them and they're pretty sturdy. I've heard of one that broke right outside the stock tube thread on the top, but I hear mostly good reports from these. The stock joint is the critical load point on these; not loads regarding the cartridge firing, but the load the user puts on the stock when they fire to manage the recoil, as low as it is. But NF receivers are fiber-filled polymer, as far as I can recall, and that is not achievable in Joe Blow's garage with a DIY printer. At least not in the near future.

In printing these, you'd have to have control of the filament direction to try to align the filament with the expected load at every critical point. I don't think the technology is there yet, but that's not to say it won't be.

Yes, I do, in fact expect the plastic ones to disintegrate under the typical chamber pressures that come from firing a round. The plastic 3D printers are the ones everyone is gushing about in the sensationalist news sites everywhere and that are practical to be widely available to the everyman. The metal deposition, selective laser sintering types that make metal parts are much more costly and not nearly as widely available, but those can, depending on the material and method) make viable gun parts that will withstand the loads for several rounds before succumbing.

Your alternate view is one I agree with fully. I practice this one myself. Regarding their practices, I also agree putting more responsibility on them for their handling is appropriate, considering all the factors. Point well taken. Thank you.

Still waiting to hear about how awful it is for cyber-attackers to go in and steal stuff that will enable further stealing from millions of users; you know, the working types who just want to buy and transact each day and go about their business.

"eBay's awful, PayPal's awful, blah blah blah. Guy Fawkes masks are cool, Marx and Che are cool, so is to sticking it to the corporations. Ha ha the companies should hire me because I know better than their dumb their security people doing dumb security stuff."

How many slashdotters worship all the cool haxxorz that keep causing losses in the millions and billions each year? And no standing up for the basic principle of not stealing. Ultimately that's the working man they're stealing from because a) identity theft hits everyone from the top to the bottom of the income scale, and b) the working man's 401k is staked on corporate profits.

For the on-board avionics, amateurs will run embedded controllers, -maybe- running Linux with some kind of kernel preemption. Pro's like what I used to be will use VxWorks or another one I can't currently remember that starts with a "U". This article is talking about the ground station software. Solaris was the OS of choice until Sun made the hardware impossible to procure and the software impossible to support.

I remember working with one of the prime vendors of ground control software to use their software in a training system's ground control software. The original software runs in Solaris in old Sun hardware, and I asked them to port it to something I could run on x86. I suggested porting it over to OpenSolaris to make it easier for them and they told me they'd rather port it to Linux and they did since I agreed to be their usage tester/guinea pig. This was way back in 2006-2007.

Almost borrowed the words straight from the Communist Manifesto. Read it; it's free on Amazon Kindle. We haven't learned from almost every aspect of life that public utilities always under perform compared to privately-owned utilities dollar-for-dollar. Here we go again...