Man I figured you could back Win7 up to the XP look but I'd never actually tried it. Myself, I like my transparencies, tyvm. I mean, in my linux boxes I lately have been using XFCE, but I still use transparencies, to the point where having a completely opaque terminal is a showstopper. Anyway, so I tried setting Win7 to the classic theme and it looked like the mid 90's puked all over my computer. All I'd need to do was switch to a 1280x1024 CRT and set my wallpaper to some poorly rendered fractal and it would be like I was in middle school all over again.

I switched back to Aero pretty quick. We're talking about pure aesthetics here, but I can't imagine why you'd intentionally go back to that look.

But when I switched it was because of Ubuntu's Unity. I suspect that's not an issue Torvalds would be likely to have.

I once wanted a 6ft HDMI cable right away. I noted that they were available at a popular online cable store for $10, and set out to find one for $20 or so, considering that to be an acceptable mark up for the immediacy required. Couldn't find any for less than $30, most stores sold them for $50 or $60. They are either price fixing or just individually deciding to rip people off. Either way I just went home, paid $12 after shipping, and waited for them to show up.

I agree. I'm personally of the opinion that absolutely anyone who wants to immigrate should be able to, assuming they pass a security check and have a reasonably clean criminal record in their former country. We should be thrilled that people want to move here. Many first world countries are actually losing population and it is very hard on their economies.

Also Java and Visual Studio tend to be used by less skilled developers and students (disclosure: i'm a student). Poor responsiveness of programs written in Java or using VS is more a factor of who is writing it than anything to do with the language / VM / IDE.

This is a terrible idea. If they want to make it consistent, they should make it so that NO online purchases are taxed, regardless of state. Sales tax is a horrible system and should not be encouraged. What should be encouraged is online purchases. It is so much cheaper and more efficient than traditional storefronts, but if people are forced to pay sales tax on purchases that have no business being taxed, then that is going to lower the economic incentive to purchase online. As it is I don't think there's any constitutional leeway here one way or the other. Trying to enforce state tax laws at a federal level is a gross overreach of federal jurisdiction.

I'm not sure what you mean. When I look at the blog, it's black text on a white background, fixed width, centered. The font's kinda big, but that's about it. It's about as simple as you can get. Now if he had a busy background image, he may have removed it to conserve bandwidth, i'm not sure, but as of 8:24pst, it's a pretty dead simple page, and is perfectly readable. If anything it's TOO readable.

The tax system is a mess, but I think the key issue here is innovative accounting. I'm sorry, but accounting is supposed to be, by definition, crystal clear and straightforward. Innovation is this field is more properly described as "accounting in such a way as to hide money we've made while still (maybe) following the rules". Which says to me that the rules are not complete enough.
Unless GE gave every dime of profit they made to charity, they should be paying taxes. A lot of taxes. THIS is why we have a budget deficit.

Well it's going to happen eventually, even if it's not the "big one" this article is predicting, the fact is that the SJF subduction zone has an extremely violent earthquake, on average, every few hundred years. And there was a big one in 1700. The average is 500 years, so maybe we can get along until 2200 before the next one. Maybe not. But it will happen eventually.

I don't show any desktop icons, personally. Between the Win7 taskbar and start menu/search field, there's really no reason to have to go back to the desktop to start applications or access anything. I know this is a personal preference thing, but once you start showing icons the whole thing can get ugly quick.

I am strongly opposed to the idea floating around of making all online retailers collect taxes in all states. Buying things online is, in and of itself, better for the economy and the environment than buying them in a brick an mortar store, it is significantly less expensive and wasteful. If we are going to consolidate the system, level the playing field, then all online purchases should be tax-free. Let the states raise money through some other means (income tax, property tax, etc.).

Five seconds of ad is five seconds too many. And ads in flash video are a huge waste of bandwidth. The addons do not yet exist to block them. If they really want to give us an opt-out, it should available immediately, and it should also be available as a blanket opt-out of all advertisement as a user-configurable setting. Hopefully, if this problem becomes prevalent, work on such video-ad blocking addons will begin in earnest.

C# does seem an obvious possibility. As cool as Go is, it's not really the same sort of thing as Java. It's mostly intended to be compiled and is heavily geared at concurrency. I don't think any Hold-Your-Hand IDEs exist for it yet, either, that I'm aware of.

During my stint in pizza delivery, I became painfully aware of the uselessness of probably 75% of Close Door buttons on elevators during normal operation. It's funny that it almost never works at hospitals, which you would expect would share my sense of urgency. It was highly frustrating.

Walk buttons are another one I thought had to be true. It's a bigger problem in Bellevue that Seattle, though. Often in Seattle, the light on the main thoroughfare will stay green until it detects a car stopped on the cross street. At certain intervals the Don't Walk sign crossing the cross street will flash, but it will go back to walk unless there's a car (in which case it's Don't Walk in both directions) or someone actually hits the button to cross the thoroughfare. This is a good system, I think.

I voted for the income tax, though I didn't expect it to pass legal challenge. Rich people can buy a lot of lawyers. And in the end, we are back where we started: An antiquated, recession-prone sales tax that hits poor people a lot harder than rich. Washington's the sort of state I thought would be daring enough to perhaps someday implement a negative income tax, but if we can't even pass a traditional income on less than 2 percent of the state, then I really don't know about that. I'm just appalled people are willing to accept the status quo. But the most interesting point here is that this also say something about certain (but not all) macroeconomic theories. Some theories rest on the idea that individuals will always make decisions based on their own personal interests. Passing that income tax would have been in the interest of any person that made less that 200k a year, that is to say, about 98% of the state. The prop lowered taxes on these people. They would have received a direct financial benefit. And yet they voted it down by something like 60%. That either means that people are incredibly concerned about the welfare of rich people, or that people are more than willing to make decisions that harm themselves if they are convinced to do so by advertising.