Anyone who gave points to this pitifully ignorant post above should be flogged. Its author obviously either never took basic high school economics or failed the course. There is a real crisis. In absolute terms we're the most indebted country on the planet by far. If we didn't also have the world's reserve currency we would have sunk long ago. We have spending crisis, in which discretionary spending was boosted to ridiculous levels under Obama and Entitlements spending is going to be exploding as the Baby Boomers retire. If it had just been business as usual between the Republicans and Democrats, there wouldn't have been a fight over this debt ceiling vote. But the people, true American patriots who assembled as the Tea Party, were fed up with the spending crisis that D.C. had created, and they ended up sending a huge new crop of Congressman to fight for reduced deficits and debt.

As for calling those "vital social programs" Entitlements, the Obama Administration did not start doing that. That's what those programs are called. You can open up any Macro-Econ textbook to verify that fact. These programs, these unconstitutional, Socialist redistributions of wealth, entitle certain protected groups to money rightfully earned by others. And they are bankrupting the country. Public Entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, ObamaCare) plus Federal Employee Entitlements (salaries and pensions for the massive federal bureaucracy) account for an overwhelmingly high percentage of federal spending. The politicians have known for many years that there would eventually be a day of reckoning because of the gross financial negligence of Congress. Hopefully this is the time. Those who wish to maintain the status quo, like that fool above me, are in fact demanding much more pain for all American citizens shortly down the line. Even President Obama has admitted that the longer we go without reforming this system, the solution will become increasingly more painful.

What a mature argument befitting your advanced age, grandpa! You pathetic dolt. Why didn't you also yell at me to get off your lawn? Keep sucking those benefits while you can, you leech. Since it sounds like you're retired, you're therefore close to expiring and hopefully won't be a parasite on the national treasury too much longer. These Socialist programs are going away whether you like it or not. Soon enough dementia will take what's left of your meager braincells and so you won't care anyway. Pathetic old fool.

Awww, pathetic little leftist so sad to read the truth. What, do you think Hussein wasn't a vile dictator? The fact that the US supported him at one point in time is immaterial to the point that he was a vile dictator. Most all Iraqis would agree with my characterization, so much so that many call him a "Jew" (even though he was himself an ardent Jew-hater, antisemitism is so ingrained in the culture that anyone who is hated becomes derogatorily referred to as "Jew").

You can guarantee I wouldn't want to live without them? You're foolish if you really think you can make such a guarantee. I would gladly sign on to a national referendum abolishing all federal entitlements for those not near retirement age if I could. I don't believe in intergenerational theft, and I don't believe in government authorized pyramid schemes. My generation is getting raped by these failing Socialist schemes, which we have to pay into but won't get any benefit from. Worse, if we don't massively change course from the record-setting, enormous Obama deficits, the country will shortly end up in the same situation as Greece is in currently. Is that really what you want? Do you have any concept of the destructiveness of the debt we continue to run up? Do you know what debt service means? I sincerely doubt you do.

I am thankfully far away from that age. My mother isn't retirement age yet, either, and won't be for a number of years to come. So you're wrong on that account as well.

1. Yes, I'm on a computer on the Internet, but I don't know what the FCC or the DOE have to do with either. The DoD developed the forerunner to the Internet, which took off in academia and then was embraced by the free market. I appreciate the US government's contributions to the creation/maintenance of the Internet, but like I've indicated I have no problems with justified defense programs and research; since the Internet came from defense research originally, I don't have a beef with government having spent on it. 2. The federal government spending on interstate transportation projects facilitates regular interstate commerce and thus is constitutional. And transportation spending is small in comparison to the bankrupting entitlements and bureaucracies I argue against. 3. Yes, I attended university and graduated with high honors, but no, I didn't take out student loans to finance any of my education. I'm very proud of that fact.

You have such a weak argument you have to assume I don't know what federal agencies do. That's false. I've already shown that many of your other assumptions are faulty. You can't argue on the merits so you have to instead demagogue Reagan and Bush. Yes, Reagan allowed Congress to overspend especially on the domestic side, and he regretted it publicly in his farewell address. (Senate Majority Leader Tip O'Neill broke his promise to institute spending cuts, so Reagan only deserves a portion of that blame.) As for President Bush (43), at least he had the courage to point out the problem of Social Security and to offer a conceptual solution, even though Congressional cowardice meant it went nowhere. For all your sanctimoniousness and strawman rhetoric, in truth you're an ignorant blowhard and an enabler of the status quo that is destroying our country.

Hey AC, my foolish foe, you should check out what James Madison had to say about the general welfare clause of Article I, Section 8. But since I'm benevolent and know you're probably incapable of doing your own research, I'll start clueing you in: Madison said that the general welfare power granted to Congress there was a grant to carry out the duties expressly written in the rest of that section. Madison said it would be completely invalid to interpret that clause as granting unrestricted power to Congress because that would have made listing the expressed powers unnecessary and superfluous.

The Constitution created a legislature, Congress, with a limited, enumerated set of powers. It most certainly did not grant Congress general, unlimited power and scope to legislate on every matter and tax everything under the sun. All three branches of the US government knew this to be true until the corruption of the country in the 20th Century. Your view, as popular as it may be among the ignorant and their Progressive/Socialist masters, is utterly defective. And it is people like you who are destroying this country.

Those who know me personally or know my online record know that I'm one of the biggest deficit and debt hawks around, but I'll provide a contrarian opinion of sorts in this debate. It's not just the hunt for Bin Laden that cost us $3 trillion in this war on terrorism. If tracking down and eliminating Bin Laden was the only thing we spent that money and the rest of our treasure on (most importantly precious American lives), then that would be an unmitigated disaster. But it's obviously farcical and disingenuous to make that claim because killing Bin Laden wasn't the only accomplishment. We took away the safe haven Al Qaeda had in Afghanistan, and then, like it or lump it, we removed a vile dictator named Saddam Hussein and liberated Iraq. Now with the "Arab Spring" setting the Middle East ablaze, we have at least one marginal beachhead Arab state in a semi-stable, semi-functional, semi-democratic Iraq. It's also important to recognize that at the very least we have killed a lot of terrorists and would-be terrorist radicals who otherwise would have been left to plan attacks against us in the future.

Was it necessary to fight these wars? It's an arguable point. At the very least they weren't a total waste, but their efficacy, efficiency and opportunity costs can and should be examined. Did these wars do their part to massively increase our indebtedness? Absolutely they did, but not solely - they were coupled with out-of-control, unconstitutional Entitlements and bloated federal bureaucracies. (It must also be said that national security and national defense are responsibilities of the federal government under the Constitution, whereas the vast majority of Congress' other expenditures are unconstitutional and only permitted because of the post-FDR-New-Deal perversion of the Constitution that Americans have complacently allowed to remain and grow for 80 years.) But to paint the wars as caricatures, which is what is done when people say we spent $3 trillion killing Bin Laden, is at best satire and at worst historical revisionist propaganda.

The summary claims that one rule is to pay for more RAM over better processor. That sounds like poor advice for at least three reasons: 1) RAM can usually be user-upgraded later, while the processor usually can't be; 2) RAM is cheaper than the processor; 3) some OEMs overcharge for RAM upgrades (cough, Apple). Plus, it is dubious to claim processors are usually fast enough for most people. All told, whoever offered that suggestion wasn't thinking very soundly.

70% unit coverage? CCN complexity 20? Pre-sprint grooming of stories? This article is apparently not meant for a general geek audience. Can someone translate these terms into something that non-professional programmers can comprehend?

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those! Hey, someone bemoaned this no longer being a popular Slashdotism, and I agree it should be brought back.

I hope I'm wrong, but I hear serious Nintendo fans vastly overestimating the hardware capabilities of the successor to the Wii. They're hoping for hardware that will rival next gen offerings from Sony and Microsoft despite the fact that Nintendo has shown it doesn't want to compete in that high-end console space anymore. I hope I'm wrong though. With all Nintendo's success in the last generation perhaps they can come out with a Wii successor that has beefy hardware.

I don't know about an unrestricted right to remove any information pertaining to yourself, but I do think we should have online protection over details that should be personal, like phone numbers and home addresses. I'll give you the following example to illustrate this point. Several years ago I created an LLC. When I created it the form I used said that I needed to use a real street address instead of a P.O. Box. I should have put down a mail drop but decided to use my home address, thinking that if someone looked up my record they'd see it but that nearly no one would look for my company because it was a small home-based business that didn't interact with customers. Big mistake. My business did not work out and I closed it.

I periodically search for my name on the search engines to see what turns up. Usually only what I expect to see related to my name is what I find, but a couple of weeks ago I decided to search for my name and city and to my dismay I found two sites listing my old company along with my name and home address, and one of the sites (corporationwiki.com) has received a number of complaints over failing to respond to people over privacy abuses, and the site's owners hide behind a private domain name registration. There's a similar problem with real estate sites that crawl real estate records and make them accessible through the search engines. Thus, when I purchase property in the future I'm going to obscure the record by buying it through an LLC that will not carry my name on the public record. I'm currently investigating my options for getting it removed.

Now some will contend that my personal address is a public record and that I should be entitled to privacy for it. I disagree. The state of California made license plate records private information only available to investigators after a stalker murdered a Hollywood start after tracking her down through her license plate information. I think home address information should be private across the board and that a person should have a right to have it deleted if it appears publicly online.

As most Western governments are financially broke, who in the world is going to pay for the work-free basic income you envision? Let me guess, soak the rich right? That's not going to cut it. Government could confiscate 90% or even 100% of the wealthiest people's income and they still wouldn't be able to balance their current enormous budget gaps for the existing Socialist programs they run. Fail.

I'm really surprised that in a discussion about triple-screen budget PC gaming no one mentions AMD Crossfire (multiple graphics card support) or AMD Eyefinity (the feature that treats three separate displays as one combined display and which allows games that support it to properly run on all three screens).