Oh this is just the biggest pile of crap.

Here in Switzerland they did a study to see who costs more. IE is there a pattern so that costs can be cut in health care. The answer, there is no pattern. Sure if you are overweight you are going to have problems [x,y,z], but if you are thin you are going to have problems [a,b,c] and if you are athletic you will have problems [d,e,f]. Thus there is no correlation whatsoever. The problem with healthcare is that it pops up like a bad nightmare. One day all is good, and the next day WHAMO! Then you get into problems and you will not have enough money.

The reason why employers and society needs to pay for health insurance is because if you don't you have a worse off society. Need I point out who lives longer and lives better? Switzerland or USA? HMMM, let me think about that shall I? For here we have 100% private healthcare, but everybody has to pay and our system does work (pretty close to Obamacare). Sure there are issues here and there, but people overall are healthy and life longer.

As if I have to have to touch, see or own a gun to determine what to do about guns. I can very well think about what a gun represents and what it is capable of. Thus I am very able of deciding on laws about guns. I am going to ask you, do you know about everything when you give a comment? Or are you just winging it and pulling feathers out of your arse? For if you are, then you STFU! At least that is what you are writing in your comment.

Hey guess what, nice idea of the car control...

Wait in fact there is car control!

1) You can't drive a car UNLESS you have a drivers license
2) You can't get a drivers license unless you are 16 years of age, and have passed both a written and practical test. Some places even require you to take drivers ed.
3) Cars must have safety glass, cars must be certified to be driven on the road! ...
the list goes on...

Imagine for the moment, that guns had this much control as cars. Wanna bet that we would have less gun accidents and less bad guys? NAAAA that could not work because it would take away my freedom to shoot crap without anybody telling me otherwise!

Did you read his comments? He was not saying that everybody becomes a plumber, but that those who are not as academically adept should. I think he is right. If you don't have the grades and you seek a higher education job then most likely you will get a crap job with a big loan, with bs money. However, you could become an awesome plumber and that work cannot be outsourced. It is not a bad idea IMO! The trades are rated too low in America. Guess where trade skills are rately highely? Oh yeah GERMANY! Guess which economy is doing really well? Oh yeah GERMANY...

You mean the scene where Kirk says, "oh it will fit..." is classic? How many times have we seen a scene like this? Only now it has lens flare and 3d effects! Yes that is just wonderful!

The problem is that Abrams took it in the wrong direction. Lets compare this to say Oblvion? At least there some interesting questions were asked with kick ass graphics! IMO this is the direction of SciFi. Or what about even Cloud Atlas! Not the fastest moving of things, but pretty decent actually. No Abrams is selling us the crack in movies we know as Transformer-ietes. In about a decade the Star Trek movies will be dated like Miami Vice is today! Compare that to Magmum Pi. Same era and pretty darn dated, but it is a good watch even to this day.

Oh bloody hell, what history books have you read? I ask you a simple question why on earth are kids still working today in other countries? The only thing that stopped child labor were the laws! And wow you have not dealt with programmers in India or other places?

While programming is not dangerous work in terms of physical danger, have you seen the programming pits of some of these offshore places? I have! And trust me it ain't pretty. They work ungodly number of hours and behave like monkeys (lack of sleep) when the boss comes by.

Again not seeing the reality are we? The GP has made a legite point and all you do is fire back the theory. First we do have liability laws on the books. Second, lets for the fun of it say that 20 million needs to be paid. What about those situation where a company produces a product and it is bad with people dying or getting sick? Tooth paste? Asbestos? Lead Paint? and the list goes on. Are you going to convict each and every company?

Oh wait this has already happened and why the US pays so much for health care. Doctors have to buy extremely expensive mal-practice insurance. People are bitching and whining about it is too easy to sue.

What the GP is saying, and this is the problem. When you have one set of contractors cutting corners to get a job, you setup a race to the bottom. And there is no amount of legislation, etc that will stop that. The problem here is to figure out how to stop the race to the bottom.

This is the classical mistake where people like you assume that labor is a resource like steel, or oil. Humans are not a resource, for they are unpredictable, and stochastic. Meaning if I drop steel I have certain physical properties. Where as if I drop a person I will have a multitude of reactions.

"For example, in the classic case of the original Luddites, when it became cheaper to make clothing due to technological advance, people had more money to spend elsewhere, and that elsewhere is where the new jobs go, and you invariably see more jobs created than had existed before that "job costing" technology was invented. It happens every single time, without fail"

Silicon Valley; In fact jobs have left and have not been created. Sure there are success stories, but the influence of Silicon Valley as a job creator has waned. Take for example Apple, or Oracle, who have jobs there, but have created a huge number of jobs outside of that region. Facebook is a bit of the old culture of creating jobs in silicon valley. New jobs have not replaced the old jobs. I can bring in many other examples of where more jobs are not created.

"As for minimum wage...If your wage was below what you're willing to work for, then you'd simply not take the job. This is a fact. Most people do in fact work at above minimum wage. Minimum wage has the following effect: For the low end workers who really aren't worth a shit (there are many out there - this nobody can deny) they simply have no job at all. Whereas they could have at least had SOMETHING, they now have nothing. This has two effects: Increased unemployment, and higher prices. Because prices now go up to match that minimum wage increase, your purchasing power hasn't really gone anywhere. Most people tend to equate money with wealth, and that relationship isn't one to one."

Wrong, another example, Germany. Germany has no minimum wage and in fact there is this concept of hunger wages. This means a person is working full time, and does not even come close to making enough money to support their family. I am talking wages of about 1 euro per hour. The government kicks in social help to make ends meet. Germany has shown that to survive you will take work below your pay because you need to do something.

"A classic example I look at is this: Back in 2001, I paid $3800 for a 50" tv. The thing was pretty massive not just in diagonal length, but it was pretty fat too - it was rear projection. A really big and obnoxious TV by today's standard. Last year I "upgraded" my whole living room: Bought a new leather couch, ($1,200) built a 5.1 surround system from the ground up (none of the HTIB crap, a truly good sound system, $1,000ish with 8 channel lossless audio) and a new samsung 50" tv that has a MUCH better picture quality than the one from 11 years ago, consumes a lot less power and is light enough for one person to carry. Total spent was $3,200. Basically by spending less I have more "wealth" than I did 10 years ago - and that's even ignoring inflation."

Oh yes just because I can pay for cheaper consumer crap things are ok. I am going to ask how old are you? For life also includes health care, education, etc. These costs have become prohibitive for the poor. Sure they are given loans and then get jobs where they can barely pay back these things. But hey as long as I can get get cheap consumer crap all is ok, right?

"When somebody tells you that the poor are poorer and the wealthy are wealthier because - adjusted for inflation - the poor are making fewer dollars today than they were in the 90's, they have no idea what they are talking about. "

Again you don't know what you are talking about. Cheaper consumer crap yes. Cheaper food? NO, but I guess you don't buy food do you? Again the question of age. The poor are poorer than the average poor of say 40 years ago. When economists measure poverty and such they don't measure it in absolute values like how much currency you have. The measure it in terms of what you can afford for the monies you make. Again, great I can get 50 Mbit Internet, so long as I don't want to visit a doctor, or get a diploma.

"By the way, even the most liberal of liberal economists will tell you the same thing. The champion economist of the democratic party nearly all of the left politicians model their ideals after (including Obama,) Paul Krugman himself believes that sweat shop labor is better than no labor, and minimum wage causes more problems than it solves, and ultimately makes things worse."

Ah yes armchair snapshot economist. Yes Krugman did say this a long time ago. But did you happen to dig a bit deeper? He also called for wealth redistribution! I am sure having no minimum wage, but wealth redistribution is much better, no? Cynically put what Krugman was talking about could be referencing to something like Germany has. No minimum wage, but wealth redistribution. Which do you prefer? I happen to prefer a living minimum wage thank-you.

"The reason tariffs are a very bad thing is because they completely ignore a concept economists refer to as comparative advantage. "

And here you basically lost your argument. I am not calling for tariffs, but here is why you fail. Take the situation where one country disregards worker safety, disregards environmental laws, and pays workers low wages. This is a "comparative" advantage that other countries cannot exploit unless they do the exact same thing. You can't automate because even then you still go to the other country because those that can run the automation will be cheaper yet. This is the race to the bottom that occurs. To assume that China is more efficient and better is ignoring what China is doing. Do you want to live in a Chinese city? Have you seen the smog? Have you seen the pollution? China has made progress, and I applaud them for that, but to say that we can't compete with them because we are not trying is really not seeing the reality. BTW China is now considered an expensive place to produce and companies have been shifting their work to other places to get them even cheaper.

When I read your post I read a post of somebody who has yet to undergo hardship. I am not one to call for tariffs, or socialist policy. I am more a Warren Buffet kind of guy who believes that you need Free and FAIR trade. Read up some of his work and you will see it is very pragmatic.

Let me count the ways shall I?

1) Speed; desktops can ramp up the CPU without problems. Meaning when I do an email search, or text search I can run full speed. However if I do that then my battery life suffers dramatically

2) Screen size: A desktop has a larger screen than a tablet. An ideal desktop size is about 23", laptop is 14.4", and tablet 8". I do not want an 8" desktop, and 23" tablet.

3) Complexity: A tablet does not need ports. Yes yes many say we do, but I argue we need good synchronization software. With less complexity the device becomes simpler. However with a desktop I want complexity. I want the ports, I want the extensions.

4) I want it cheap. I don't want to pay more than 1200 per device because I worry that i might break it. I like being able to put my tablet into a gumdrop case so that the device can fall without breaking. My notebook is fragile and I have to treat it as such.

I could using manufacturing combine this into one device, but then it becomes to fragile, too unwieldy to use successfully. Bill Gates IMO does not get, but hey he is a PC guy!

The problem with your approach is that when I have a tablet I want battery life and ease of use. And when I use a PC I want power, and speed! They are orthogonal to each other. As the CAP theorem, says, you can have 2 out of 3, not all three, so choose what you want.

THANK-YOU...

Steve jobs himself said, "When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that's what you needed on the farms." Cars became more popular as cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic transmission became popular.

"PCs are going to be like trucks," Jobs said. "They are still going to be around." However, he said, only "one out of x people will need them.""

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20006526-56.html

Where people said that he thought PC's would die is something I don't get. He NEVER said that!!! The problem is that Bill Gates thinks everybody needs a pickup truck, which is clearly not the case!

Here is people like you don't get!

The Connecticut shooter was a good guy UNTIL he pulled the trigger. The Colorado shooter was a good guy UNTIL he pulled the trigger! All of you NRA nutballs thinks that if we somehow manage to isolate the bad guys then the good guys can take them down like a shoot out in the OK corral! The reality is that the bad guys come from the pool we call the good guys. We only know they are bad once they have done their act.

Simply put it is IMPOSSIBLE to keep the guns out of the bad guys because they are the good guys to start off with. Yes yes some bad guys are bad guys and are able to get guns. But I ask you a simple question, how the eff did they bad guys get a gun in the first place?

Think hard about this. Smith Wesson (good guy) makes a gun, exchange, exchange, exchange, shooter (bad guy) kills person. We started this chain with a good guy and ended up with a bad guy. How did this happen? According to the NRA it was pixie dust where the gun magically appeared and no good guy was responsible foe it. This is why gun control is not only needed, it is an absolute for it is the good guys that are coopting our society, not the bad guys doing the action. Because bad guys are just that bad guys, but it is the good guys that do business with the bad guys that are the real problems.

The NRA President is a nutcase! I am Swiss and we have a militia, and I was born in Germany that had conscription. The reality of the matter is that these days humans are not able to withstand an army unless they have been trained like the army. If anybody thinks that they can do a few laps around the track and shoot some "evil doers" paper stands and call it ready to stand against tyranny then they are dreaming BIG time... Vietnam was an example of pulling in people that had no experience nor understanding of war against those who did. The US got its ass kicked big time because of the attitude of people like Jim Porter.

To be able to stand up to tyranny you need to be able to walk up to a person and pull the trigger without hesitation. To be able to stand up to tyranny you need to be able to sacrifice your family in the name of the quest. To be able to stand up to tyranny you need to be able to endure torture and pain for the quest will make you victorious! The fact that you have a weapon is secondary. Heck in those situations they could give you a pitchfork and you would be a badass!

But no the NRA is selling the American people a facade on how they "would and could" protect themselves! I say BS! BS! BS! I am not saying I could protect myself, because I can't. I am saying if you want to be able to stand up to tyranny you need to be psychologically ready first, weapon second.

I don't know if you are sarcastic or not, but I for one am thankful for the maintainers of Fedora. Hear me out...

These days I have to type in passwords that are akin to random letters. I am ok with that. BUT it is BLOODY EFFEN HARD to type in the password into the text field. And if the text field hides the text it becomes annoying to have to input the data again. The problem is that I know my keyboard, but sometimes I have to type twice to hit the correct %^*( character. If I am looking at the keyboard and the screen at the same time things become confusing. Doing this two or three times becomes a royal pain in the arse!

I understand WHY you should not do this, but quite frankly there is theory and there is practice. And in an era of long obtuse passwords I am thankful!

Bezinga!