Not hard to split up the debt. take the total revenues/taxes for each district last year, figure out the % it is of the total. Now use that percentage on how to break up the states debt.

I know that Northern Cali/Jefferson will get screwed, but it they want freedom, they should take the deal. It will prove to be a bargain, The rest of the state is not slowing down in ow fast they are spending money. The sooner they split, the less new massive debt that is not fair for them to take, that they will have to deal with.

That is the problem. Old skool players that have to much of the market cant make the switch. There is to much money in the old product and never enough money in the "where the market will be in 5 years product" to be worth their while. Then in 5 years if they enter the market, they are wannabes without a good product for that market.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar

I mean, even the close/minimize/maximize buttons had to be switched around to the top left... WHY?

I believe it is something like penis envy.

Duh, it is a huge deal. Ubuntu / Canonical maintains all the Xorg stuff. This will also be true of the Wayland stuff.

What do you do when there are ZERO xorg or wayland packages used is Ubuntu? That means Kubuntu/Xubuntu/Mint/etc will have to borrow from Debian and deal with whatever bugs pop up.Or each distro will create their own set of packages. Or they will have to join forces, make some sort of consortium and work up their own packages as a group.

The truth is none of these groups have the time to do that AND remove dumb Ubuntu stuff AND create their own non-unity programs of new features in Ubuntu.

You sir, sound like you are expecting an answer from reasonable people.

The GNOME 3 devs have a better than 3 year track record of showing that they are NOT reasonable people. No screen savers, no-left pane in a file manager, or being able to blank your screen instead of sleeping when you close the lid on your laptop. These are features that have been removed with no way to add the functionality back in (xscreensaver and moving to Nemo don't count). These are not the decisions of reasonable people. They have shut the door on these features, and if someone finds a way to hack them in, they then remove the backdoors that allow for that. They are damn serious about making this stuff go away and in their arrogance and hubris believe that they know better than you what you want and need to be productive in a desktop environment.

Especially in an environment like Gnome 3 where the preferred method of working is full screen apps. Drag and drop to what?

This is a very timely article for me. I installed Linux a week ago for a person with a junked copy of Windows Seven. To give you an idea of their technical expertise. They knew how to copy a URL from the address bar in a browser with right-click-copy and then go to a different tab, and right-click-paste to place the text in an email. So I get a call last night and she wanted to know how to do it in Linux. It had not even crossed her mind that a right-click might give her a context menu with the cut/copy/paste options. She is that computer illiterate. I mentioned ctrl-c ctrl-v, but she does not like the keyboard.

Then I remembered how much easier I find doing it the Unix way and why I hate getting stuck on Windows. Select then middles click is second nature to me. So I showed her how to do it. It took about 30 seconds to show her, and another minute or two to do it again and then let her do it. Funny thing is, she picked right up on it. It is NOT a confusing thing to a new Linux user. It is a useful feature and a good differentiator from Windows.

GNOME seems to want to remove any feature in Linux that makes Linux better than Windows.

And on a 7 inch screen that is practically unusable. It is not that usable on a 10 inch touchscreen. Touchscreen office is NOT a selling point on anything smaller than 12 inches. And no one wants a tablet larger than 11 inches.

Really, how many windows users have ever clicked the middle mouse button or scroll wheel?

The defection rate from windows is at max 1%. How many of those users will have highlighted text and then at some point later actually clicked their scroll wheel? That is going to be a very small number. How many of them will be so confused that they won't think, "how does this work" or "ok, don't click the scroll wheel?"

It is a non-starter. GNOME removes features and then comes up with whatever justification they want for it. They think if they keep removing things, everything will get simpler. Life does not work like that. The axiom "Every program has at least one bug in it, and can be shortened by at least one line of code, Means that every program can be reduced to one line, and it will have a bug in it". GNOME is shooting for that metric on the desktop.

This works because of your usage case. "I need a 10 inch tablet and would be willing to run office in metro mode, and want to be able to plug a monitor keyboard and mouse into it and am willing to spend $1000-$1200 to do so."

That is NOT a large market at this time. The sweet spot for tablets is 7 to 8 inches. The display is to small to use office effectively. My CFO chokes on $1,000 plus work stations for people that need them for AutoCAD and Photoshop. Since a standard desktop computer is less than $700, that is a hard sell.

There is not a large market for $1000 tablets that would be great on the road AND as a primary workstation.

The market has pretty soundly kicked the Surface Pro to the curb at the current price point.

I don't see anything that makes the Surface Pro 2 a more compelling device. All the "icing on the cake" that is added with new hardware features goes on top of the same "cake" that vast majority of MS customers have already rejected.

They have on "must have" features to make people leave Apple or Google hardware.
They have no "must have" software on the tablet side to make people leave Apple or Google software.
They can't compete on price. If you need windows desktop compatibility. Laptops are much cheaper.

I am predicting a big "fail" for the Surface Pro 2.

Let me clue you in.

In, on December 24, 1913 when no one was looking Income Tax came into being. The problem is there were people out there who spent a whole lifetime free. They earned their money and did with it what the wanted. Compliance with paying income tax was low to the point of being nonexistent. It would also not be likely that a jury of your peers would find you guilty of doing anything wrong if you had not paid it.

There had to be a way to get people to comply, and they had figured it out by the 1930's. Social Security was a program you could opt into. If you did, you also opted into paying Federal Income Tax. But now, you could retire at 65 and the government would take care of you. The average life span was less than 65. It would be much like Social Security being started today and them promising benefits when you turn 85. Your average white, wage earning male (the major working population back in the 1930's) is not living to 65 back then, nor are they living to 85 now.

It was so very nice for us that the government offered a 1 in 5 lottery program and all we had to do was to opt into paying income taxes AND have social security payment come out of our wages. Don't forget your employer pays to. Do you know why you are only worth $14 an hour and not $16? Your employer is already paying into Social Security on your behalf as well. It counts towards your pay and figures into what they are willing to offer for wages.

Speaking of bad Social Security Stories. My parents were divorced and remarried. One division of Social Security believes that they never remarried and therefore my mom is entitled to no benefits. The other division believes that they did remarry, and she is responsible for reimbursing his funeral expenses.

It will be a shame when it collapses. There are millions of people who had been promised that they could rely on it, have planned on it being there, and will find that it is not there. If you think unemployment is high now. What happens when 65-100 year olds are dumped on the labor market?

The you sir, are entitled to a refund. Every penny you paid for it.

To bad Miscrosoft does not have the same offer.

Back in the XP days, if I mentioned Linux, peolpe looked at me like a deer in the headlights.
Back in the VISTA days, a few people asked me what I heard about VISTA.
Back in the 7 days, the most said was to me was "It's not XP, but I like it"
Now with 8, people activley come up to me and tell me how much is sucks.

It appears that XP was the pinacle of Microsoft Computing. Sure 7 was better, but not by much, and all things in the public eye are compared to XP.

Where I work for a living, I give free PC "advice" to the employees for their personal PCs. If they want Windows work done on their home computers, I charge $75 an hours. I install and maintain Linux for free (my contribution to open source). We are now at the point people are asking me to install Linux on their computers. Only 3 or 4 in the last year. But faced with option of running windows 8, more and more people are opting for Linux.

You missed

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