Can't repay them? The US debt as a percent of GDP isn't even the highest it has ever been. It was higher right after WWII. The way to reduce the debt is simple - either raise taxes or reduce spending or both. We merely lack to political will to do this at the present. The notion that we have debts that "cannot" be repaid is nonsense. As for individuals there is copious data showing that individuals and households have been paying down debt levels significantly since 2008. Companies have balance sheets that are historically very strong with large amounts of cash and relatively low debt levels overall.

Actually, we cannot pay off our debts. Most of the money in circulation is created by the banks creating loans. These loans have to be paid back, with interest. We owe more money to the banks than actually exists. Or in other words, if everyone tried to pay back their loans, we'd end up in a situation where the banks would literally have all the money, yet the loans would still not be paid off.

The only way the system keeps on running is that new debt is constantly created to pay off the old debt. Well that, and the money the fed creates out of thin air.

On the upside, you won't have to deal with licensing issues for the operating system. I'm running into this with XP - Microsoft will not license new copies of XP and you can't downgrade a current version of Windows either. This makes replacing hardware difficult - even if the new hardware would work, if you can't get XP on it and the control software requires XP, you're kind of stuck.

Your examples are all crimes. Not knowing where your friend's house is located is not a crime.

The problem with most sedans when you're over 6 foot is that you barely fit into them anyway. You're already looking out the top of the windshield, so the only solution would be to lower the mirror, such as putting it on the dash as seen in some classics, or make the car taller like a truck or a Scion xB so that you can place the mirror higher. The problem is even worse in newer cars with their obnoxious sloping rooflines, where despite having plenty of head room I find eye level to be the sun visor. I suppose another solution would be to make the rear view mirror semi-transparent so you can see both through it and what's reflected in it, though it seems to me it would be really tough to make it work right in all lighting situations.

Don't forget that the actual horizontal resolutions are less than what they say too. 2K is 1920 pixels, 4K is 3840 pixels, and 8K is apparently 7680 pixels. Kind of reminds me how hard drives are sold, actually. Someone mentioned cinema, but in cinema 4K is 4096x2160, and this had been well established before the TV and computer monitor makers redefined the term.

There's plenty of them available for under $1000, with some under $500. Compared to what we paid for high end monitors back in the 90's, they are incredibly cheap. And that's not even taking inflation into account.

For a computer monitor, you can take advantage of 4K immediately. The 4K televisions are a bit of a mystery though.

That assumes that the refresh rate of the panel is stuck at 60Hz and can't simply change to 24Hz for 24 FPS content. CRTs are capable of changing their refresh rates, and it should be even easier for LCDs to do so.

Actually, I think the best thing would be to get rid of the different rules for light trucks. The current rules punish larger cars too much for being inefficient, so instead we get even less efficient (and less safe) crossover SUVs because they can be sold as trucks and not cars. These vehicles should be made to follow the same rules.

Even in the light truck category, things are still messed up. The rules allow for larger trucks to use more fuel, which makes sense. Except that the rules are skewed to favor larger trucks, which has had the result of pretty much destroying the small truck market in the US. This is also part of the reason why the entry-level trucks from the big three such as the F150 are huge compared to their predecessors from 20 years ago.

I doubt that they program had much effect by 2013. In the short term, it pulled a bunch of sales forward, but by 2013 that was pretty much over. Interestingly, the whole Cash for Clunkers thing actually didn't take many of the worst polluters off the road, as those were mostly owned by people too poor to take advantage of the program (which required the purchase of a new car). Instead, the cars that would have made their way down to them, many of which were perfectly fine cars, were taken off the used market and destroyed. Keep in mind that an older, worn out or poorly maintained car can pollute 100-1000x more than a new car.

They'd have to take into account the costs of processing and recycling a car then. It's not exactly a green process, though greener than mining raw materials.

I can't see how. I'd much rather have a large desktop screen and a regular keyboard than be hunched over a tiny tablet screen and what passes for a keyboard on those things if I'm going to do any serious word processing. Heck, even a modest desktop screen will give you more vertical space than the iPad in 3:4 mode, though granted the pixel density won't be as high.

Unless something has changed, you still need iTunes to use your iDevice. So everyone iPhone/iPad user has a Windows PC or Mac kicking around somewhere. I don't know about the Surface/Windows products but I would imagine they're the same. Maybe you could get away with it if you use Android.

Like the parent, I don't know anyone who has a smartphone or tablet who doesn't also have a computer of some sort. I know plenty of "casual" web users who still do most or all their web browsing from a computer. Maybe some of it is inertia, but there's also a lot of people who prefer doing things with a keyboard and mouse and a large 20"+ screen instead of a touch interface and a tiny mobile screen.

The real story behind the drop in sales is that the lifespan of a desktop computer is so much longer nowadays. For casual web browsing, pretty much anything made since about 2006 is just fine. So you're typical home user just isn't buying desktop computers, because the one they have works just fine, thank you very much. Laptop sales haven't been hit quite as hard since laptop hardware tends to not last as long plus there's a greater chance for damage or for the laptop to get lost. Meanwhile the lifespan of tablets and smartphones are only 1-3 years or so. It just seems to be expected that you're going to buy the upgraded version after a year or two.

Geocities is gone (RIP), but both Tripod and Angelfire are still around, actually.

They're not dropping a P4 or an Athlon XP in these things. The processor is basically a radiation-hardened Motorola G3 running at 200MHz. Or in x86 terms, take a Tualatin P3 (widely available mobile processor in 2002) and underclock it.to a fraction of its original speed.