"Whether they choose to do something about it or not (e.g. offer a better salary, benefits, etc) is their problem, not mine. "

You say this as if we are all independent of each other and the economy. We stuck in a cycle of workers have less money -> demand slows -> economy slows -> businesses cut jobs -> less workers have disposable income... etc. It might be to our mutual benefit if we can nudge things in the other direction.

p.s. what is your job/what did you major in/what sort of experience do you have? I think I need to do whatever you're doing.

AKG Acoustics K-240 Semi Open Studio Headphones

Can't beat them at $80.00 USD. Very detailed sound.

The only problem I've ever had with Newegg: there were two versions of the GPU I wanted; one with a fan, and one with a heatsink. The catch: they had the same Newegg product ID. Terrible, terrible decision on Newegg's part. After getting the one with the fan 3 times even though I talked to support, explained the situation with the product IDs, etc., I gave up and ordered from another vendor.

But it still annoys me to no end that they couldn't fix that problem.

I still order from them though... creature of habit I guess. It's always interesting to compare their reviews with Amazon.

zfs! Works great. Included with FreeBSD 9, amongst other OSs.

You might also enjoy John Siracusa's exhaustive review of filesystems on one of my favorite podcasts.

I feel almost ashamed to say that as a 30 year old man, music teacher, and classically trained musician, it wasn't until just last weekend that I heard REAL live guitar amps, performed in a hall by expert musicians, without any other sound reinforcement.

I had been to many, many rock concerts, but they all fed the sound through the PA system, and though it sounded good, it was nothing like I heard in the hall last weekend. Just two small floor guitar amps, one on each side of the hall. The stereo effect was amazing. The bass player had his own amp. Otherwise the drums were un-mic'd, and only the vocal mics were fed through the PA system.

Speaking about just the tone quality, I'd rate every other rock concert as being about 60%-80% of last weekend's tone. It absolutely blew my mind.

The only thing I can compare it to is standing in front of a really good drum corps.

Even recordings I thought sounded awesome can't touch the live sound I heard last weekend. I'm afraid I'm addicted, and I don't even know where I'm going to find more performances like that. Even in the smaller clubs here, most bands feed through a PA system.

It is something I think every person should experience. No PA; just the amps, live in a good hall, expertly performed. If anyone cares, it was the wonderful Christina Courtin and her band.

Looking over? Doesn't anyone else use electronic bookkeeping and reconcile their bank statements? Money is so hard to come by. It is really worth your while to keep accurate records. And if you're nerdy enough to read this website...

I spend a few minutes each day typing receipts and cash transactions into the computer. Just this very act has increased my savings. My theory is that it helps bring your transactions into consciousness. You can also get all sorts of cool charts and graphs, which helps me decide if I'm really getting good value for my money.

This free and open source accounting application has served me well for years.

I am all for theoretical knowledge, but I really do believe basic bookkeeping should be a standard high school class... I didn't start keeping books for myself until I was into my 20's, and it has been a highly empowering activity.

Solution: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/

Access 2003? Even Access 2000 would be a huge landmark for open source!

Surely the increase is due in no small part to Leo Laporte and the HAM Nation podcast?

It's my first and only exposure to anything HAM.

In New York State, passage on many of the highways requires tolls. Many of us use an electronic system called EZ-Pass to pay the tolls. It's especially pleasant to avoid having to roll down the window during the cold winter.

Instead of all this fancy monitoring gear, you could just look at the times from toll to toll. It would be impossible to prove that a vehicle was never speeding, but easy to prove that it definitely was speeding.

I already feel my environment is overly draconian so I've never been one to advocate such a system.

Very thoughtful... thanks. :-)

How about a commodity balanced digital currency where x number of units will always be equal to the price of y bailes of hay, z barrels of oil, etc.?

Of course, my problem would be with the transition. I don't want a digital copy of myself with the original destroyed; I want the new me to still be... me. The discontinuity of consciousness is always a disturbing thought. Then again, I lose it every night when I fall asleep. This I also find disturbing.

Most people are too desperate for food & housing to risk such demands.

Thank you for taking the time to write a thoughtful reply.

Here is where I'm coming from:

No one expects a child to read and write before they know how to have a conversation.

Yet, as a student of calculus in high school, I was constantly "solving" problems completely outside of my imagination, which I liken to teaching a child to read and write, but this child does not know language and cannot hold a conversation.

If Feynman's advice were taken, mathematics education could only improve. Perhaps, my math education was not abstract enough (when I seem to be calling for something more concrete).

My wish is that, while solving those calculus equations, I would be able to "imagine" the problem, imagine the solution, imagine how the solution might change should the problem change... to have a sort of working mathematical... "vocabulary." Perhaps the words "imagine" and "vocabulary" are out of place here. Instead of all that, I felt I was just memorizing and manipulating symbols without meaning and without comprehension. I was literally just drawing pictures. Maybe that's all math is, a very abstract series of internally consistent manipulations. Maybe I just need more practice applying it in a wider variety of contexts.

But my hunch is that:

1. I should be able to know a lot of different problems and how to solve them, and only once that process has happened would I
2. later use symbolic notation to explain things I *already* know internally.
3. Finally, I would be able to use the symbolic notation to help me build new understandings.