There is no such thing as an idiot proof flat tax.

Businesses by their nature have very complicated taxes. We'll let them write off a $45,000 truck to deliver product but not a $45,000 mercedes (unless you are in the limo business in which case, you might be able to after all).

Wealthy people, by their nature, have very complicated taxes. Is this a business trip or a holiday? Is this a business lunch or a personal lunch?

We can reduce the loopholes (temporarily) but corporate bought representatives will put them right back in. The flat tax by it's nature is either regressive OR has a massive deduction for everyone which means many of the poorest won't be paying taxes (just like now).

Each share of the national spending last year was $10,000 for every baby, child, senior, and working person. It's about $20,000 if you restrict it to adults who have earnings. That means- unless people can earn well over $20,000 there is not point in working under a totally flat tax. Which means it must be progressive (you have to take money from those who have money to pay).

AND it ignores state and local taxes which are currently higher on the poor than the middle class and higher on the middle class than on the wealthy in every single state. In some states, it's 12.9% for the poorest but under 1% for the wealthiest.

It's pretty simple. Do you want to vote for corporate sock puppet #1 or #2?

But the republican sock puppets are very much against my self interest. The party has drifted a long way from when I voted for three republican presidents in a row.

I was asking about the Sparcstation 10, not a PC.

Wikipedia says "The SS10 can hold a maximum of 512 MB RAM in eight slots", so that means we need 64MB modules for it, and I'm not sure they were available yet in 1992.

I've got a SS20 in my garage, and it's got 208 MB of memory -- which wasn't too bad at all, "back in the day" anyways.

You're promoting perpetuating a long-standing, widespread and hugely-damaging user security error in order to avoid a relatively obscure problem which can actually be fixed through purely technical means. Not a win.

What you describe as a problem is actually part of the solution. The problem with classic OpenID was that it was virtually impossible to get, say 1st Bank of MyButt, to use it, because absolutely anyone could be an identity provider. I personally agree with you that classic OpenID was better in that respect, but 1st Bank of MyButt doesn't. They're hemming and hawing about letting Google manage their user's identities, but they will at least consider it.

Heh. Your snark falls rather flat, given how egregiously wrong the parent was.

Putting them in password managers is the right thing to do.

You're wrong. Hilariously so.

The entropy of "thatswhatshesaid" is far lower than 43,608,742,899,428,874,059,776. Randall Munroe calculated correctly in the XKCD comic, of course. He didn't assume that each letter was random, he assumed he was choosing four words at random from a dictionary of a specific size (about 2048 entries == ~11 bits of entropy per word). Your password is clearly not a selection of randomly-chosen words, and even if it were, it would likely have been from a much smaller dictionary.

This highlights the danger of asking users to pick passwords... even those who think they know what they're doing are likely to screw it up. Munroe's advice in 936 was good... but I think it has mislead more people than it has enlightened.

No, it's much better to use a password manager and let a computer pick large random passwords for you.

It would cost me money to use 2FA

It'll cost you money to not use 2FA too. Pay now or pay later.

I get 2000 texts a month on my $30 plan - I use maybe 10 2FA messages in that time - hardly worth complaining about. Electricity costs money too!

But to the GP - password quality is part of good 2FA; one is not a replacement for the other.

More likely, someone could run a forklift into one of the massive Fluoride gas tanks and puncture it (the gas is used to surface polysilicon wafers), wiping out a couple of hundred people Union-Carbide-style.

That's a minimal risk and some precautions can be made. But the more relevant metric is that roofing jobs are among the most dangerous in the US. Solar installers on roofs will fall to their deaths (or severe injury), and that's a guarantee. There's no magic that keeps solar installers safer than roofing installers.

I'm guessing it will be about as deadly as coal, per megaWatt. Nothing nearly as safe as atomic power or hydro.

Of course, by that metric, Suns weren't available at all.

SCSI was somewhat rare in a PC in 1992, yes, but not that uncommon. (Anybody remember the Adaptec AHA-1542B? It came out in 1990.)

800x600 was more common, but 1024x768 was available. I don't recall if it was all interlaced or not, but I do recall how much that interlacing sucked!

Ethernet (or token ring, that was still somewhat common) was quite common in environments where it made sense. Not in a one computer home of course, but in a business, sure. How else were you going to get at the NetWare server?

That's not true. A high end business class PC would run games just fine in 1992, for example. (As long as it had the right graphics, anyways.)

You might need to pick a different boot floppy, however. (Windows 95 certainly did improve things there!)

I'm not sure if this applied to the few SMP PCs available the time or not, however -- I got my first one a few years later, a Pentium Pro. That wasn't specialized -- it would run anything, though I imagine that many things would ignore the second cpu. (I ran Linux on it, which did use the second cpu.)

I understand nostalgia, but ... no.

SCSI was the (somewhat) new hotness in 1992, yes, but other drive busses had been used in the past and were still used in 1992. The large SGI I administered a few years later had ESDI drives, for example. (But it also had SCSI, and the desktop SGIs we had were SCSI only.)

Ethernet was also the current favorite, but other networking protocols were in use at the time. I was working at IBM in 1992 and most of the company used token ring at the time -- that's what I had coming to my desk, where I had a PS/2 running OS/2.

As for "big memory", yes, that was always the norm for big computers, whatever the OS -- big computers had big resources available.

As for multiprocessors, remember, the Sparcstation 10 was Sun's first multi cpu desktop box. Multiprocessing was somewhat common in mainframes and minicomputers by them (whatever the OS), but it was rare on the desktop, even *nix desktops.

As for graphics ... most Unix platforms had no graphics at all then. Sun's desktop offerings did, and they did have decent graphics, but they weren't really better than high end PCs that were available at the time. (SGI went more after the desktop graphics than Sun did, but maybe Sun had some stronger offerings that I'm not aware of.)

As for "integrated environments", I think in 1992 Sun still shipped compilers stock with their OSes, but it was just a few years later that they became a very expensive licensed add-on. gcc was available, of course, but getting it installed was kind of a chore, and it was inferior to the Sun compilers in some ways. Alas, g77 wasn't available until a while later.

And really, the environment wasn't "integrated" like it is now. No IDEs, anyways -- your environment was X windows, and you got to use vi or emacs or whatever. Really, the programming environments on a PC were integrated before they were on Unix systems as far as I know.

The trouble here is that the rest of the monitor is pedestrian as all hell(gosh Samsung, 1920x1080 on a 27 inch screen! I can practically taste the future...) and the presence of the charging widget in the stand suggests that you aren't going to be VESA mounting this one. If you really care about 'de-cluttering', you are much better off having your monitor float conveniently above your desk, not being stuck with the lousy stock stand.

At least the color scheme is atrocious.

A 32 bit cpu can address 4 GB directly, but that doesn't mean it has a 4 GB memory limit.

For example, in 1995 Intel added PAE to their 32 bit Pentium Pro cpus, allowing them to access more than 4 GB of memory.

Hell, my Apple IIe had 128KB of memory, in spite of the 8 bit cpu with the 16 bit address space only being able to access 64KB of memory, through similar tricks.

And yes, 4 GB is enough for most casual users today. 2 GB even works. But give it a few more years and 4 GB will become very restrictive even for somebody who doesn't do much on their computers.

Personally, I'm not going to make any claims that "X KB/MB/GB/PB/EB/etc. will be all you'll ever need in your lifetime" because it seems quite likely that whatever I pick ... it'll turn out to be wrong.

As much as I loved Sun hardware at that time (though I didn't get to touch anything better than a Sparcstation 2 until years later), since you explicitly mention high-end PCs, I'll have to point out that that 1992 hi-end consumer PCs (you did say high end, so I can pick the best of what's available) did have not just networking but ethernet (it was relatively common, and not just found on high end machines), could have 1024x768 with 16 or 24 bit (not color) graphics, perhaps 32 MB of memory (though that is on the high end for 1992. I wonder if you could actually get 512 MB into a SS10 in 1992 -- were chips of sufficient density available yet?), and could run all the exact same hard drives that your Sparcserver 10 did -- just get a SCSI card.

I also remember dual cpu PCs being available in 1992, though of course they were very high end and expensive.

Of course, a typical new but *low end* PC at that time had a 386SX, 1 MB of memory, a 640x480 VGA monitor ...

While the right calls Obama a socialist, he's really a capitalist corporate servant.

To be fair, the system has been so rigged at this point, that unless you are an independently wealthy socialist, you are going to have to sell out to capitalistic corporate interests to be elected.

And that's why we vote. To come to a democratic, collective decision.

And each of us tolerates the decisions we were in the minority on.

I don't like subsidizing sports stadiums but they got 51% of the vote.

I voted republican for Reagan and Bush Sr. and then the republicans went bat shit crazy (measurably so on 528.com) with reagan republicans having a '32" conservative ranking while Ted Cruz has a over 60 ( I think it's "68"). Democrats have stayed about the same in the 20's.

So now, I vote democratic. I don't like all they stand for but no way I'm voting for the extreme right wing conservative party the republicans have become. But... if 51% of the country elects a republican candidate then I'll tolerate it for 4 years because that's the collective decision of our democratic republic.