Actually, traditionally, most farm work was done by neutered male cattle (oxen), not by horses. Horses were too expensive. And oxen did get slaughtered and eaten when they were no longer able to work.

The taboo about eating horses comes not from their being working animals - it comes from the fact that they were expensive, and therefore kept by the upper classes, who had plenty of other food, and thus, could afford to be sentimental. The fact that the upper classes mainly kept them also led to horses being considered a 'noble animal', which led to further cultural restrictions against eating them.

Well, some of us actually read the whole summary, and thus see that Saturday package deliveries aren't being cut out. So it's not going to affect getting packages at all.

Works created by and for the federal government are public domain; for state governments, it's determined by each state. Some make their publications public domain, others maintain copyright.

And there you go again, dodging the question. Can you give a source for that figure? Or are you going to act like a politician and nit-pick the question without trying to answer it? But here, I'll save you the trouble: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year2012_0.html has the $6.2 trillion dollar figure, now that I know what you're talking about. Note, though, that that page also indicates that's against a $15.6 trillion gross domestic product. It took me about thirty seconds of searching to find that, but apparently you'd rather spend time nit-picking questions instead of trying to produce verification of facts.

I don't know what taxes you're talking about, since you didn't specify. I'm not psychic. However, I'll note that you know perfectly well that I pointed out that the income being taxed in the US compasses more than just household incomes, but you don't address that point at all. If you want to include all government spending instead of just federal spending, surely you must concede that all of the tax base should be included, not just households?

Quite frankly, bullshit. Thats what some partisan shitheads are saying about the other side, thats all. Saying it doesnt make it true, just like when I say that tea-party members are all racists and democrats are all boozing womanizer tax cheats.. guess what.. doesnt make the statement true. There is no point to 'address' as you so ignorantly demand because its just a loaded partisan bullshit statement.

And I didn't say his point was true. All I'm saying is that you didn't address it. Which was not bullshit. You then fail to address my points about how much we're overspending on the military.

So tell me... do you actually want to have a rational discussion, or not? If you're willing to talk facts and figures, that's one thing. If all you want to do is nit-pick and name-call, then there's no point in even trying to have a discussion with you.

Building software like houses sounds nice, but it overlooks the real reasons that houses don't collapse: (1) How to build them is well-known. We've been doing it for literally thousands of years. (2) The people who build houses have to be licensed. This helps ensure that they know how to build them properly. (3) Mandatory house inspections mean that if someone builds a house without following accepted standards, they'll have to prove that it's actually safe to occupy.

Most importantly, though, when a house collapses, it's visible. The people living in it complain loudly. The neighbors see it and talk about it. It makes the news. And then, people don't want to hire whoever built that house. They get investigated. There's a good chance they lose their license. That's the big difference - our culture has come to expect broken software. "It's not a bug, it's a feature." "Oh, there's a workaround for that." "Yeah, that doesn't work in the version." "Oh, that crashes all the time. Just restart it."

If we treated broken software like broken houses - with astonishment, complaints, investigations, and penalties - software developers would do better. They'd have to. Of course, the reason we don't is that the consequences of broken software generally aren't nearly as serious. Sometimes, they are - but generally not.

Speaking of light generation... how about fluorescent lights? Those work on a fundamentally different principle than incandescents. And LEDs, which work in yet a different way? Granted, to the end user, they don't seem that different - but that's because of a large engineering effort that's been put forth to allow them to be packaged in a way that lets them easily replace incandescent lights.

Thinking about it, it seems to me that a big difference in modern innovation is backwards-compatibility. When electrical power generation and electric lighting were first being introduced, there was no installed base of any sort - before that, all power generation had been local, and only fuel was distributed. Now, though, there's a huge installed base, and new technologies need to be able to integrate into that. Thus, while the original electric light bulbs (and later on, fluorescent tubes) looked like something new, newer light bulbs don't look that different.

In the same way, when the first automobiles were introduced, there wasn't the existing infrastructure of paved roads, parking lots, etc. that we have today. Now that we have all those things, new types of automobiles have to be able to work with what we have, which limits the degree of innovation possible, and makes new cars look a lot like the old ones, even if their internal operation is fundamentally different. Electric cars are designed to look and operate like our existing gas-powered cars as much as possible - so if you're not driving one yourself, you may not even notice the growing numbers of them around.

There's also conservatism. Not the political kind - the kind that makes people say "X has worked well enough my whole life, why don't we just keep it?" Look at the resistance many people show to changing to LED and fluorescent bulbs. Yes, there are disadvantages - but there were disadvantages to switching to electrical light in general. Instead of having an oil lamp you could easily move around, you have one with a cord that had to be plugged in. And you had to have your whole house turned upside down to install all that wiring. And having all that wiring installed cost a lot. And then you had to pay money every month to the electric company. The same with cars - a good horse learned the way, but a car couldn't. And people could feed their horses from their family farm - they didn't have to go buy expensive, smelly, dangerous gasoline. And if your horse was sick, you could tell - you didn't have to worry about it suddenly dying on you halfway home for no apparent reason.

Heck, my dad doesn't use email, or have a mobile phone. Doesn't need them, he says. And he's right - he has almost seventy-five years of experience in getting along without them. From his point of view, they're more trouble than they're worth. Great for other people, who need them for something, but not for him.

People see the disadvantages in new technologies, while they've become accustomed to the disadvantages of those they're used to. Combine that with the fact that the external forms of new technologies aren't as different as they were in the past, and it's natural that people think innovation has stopped.

Wind and solar are both coming up quickly, though, and neither of those relies on boiling water.

Don't forget - solar and wind power are moving up. Wind generates 10% or more of the electricity in five US states now (http://www.earth-policy.org/data_highlights/2012/highlights27), and the amount of power being generated by wind worldwide grew by 20% from 2010 to 2011 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_by_country). Solar power usage is also growing quickly, with world solar production increasing by 75% from 2010 to 2011. (And the photoelectric effect is not from 'Newton's World'.) Granted, they've both been around at a low scale for a long time, but it's recent inventions that are causing them to now be useful on a large scale.

Part of it is the effect of living through something. It's easy to imagine the difference in pre-electricity and post-electricity cities... but remember, even in developed countries, it took decades to get electricity everywhere (The first commercial power plant in the US was established in 1882 - but it wasn't until 1917 that the first long-distance high-voltage transmission line was put into service). Indeed, it's estimated that 25% of the world's population still doesn't have access to electrical power. Solar and wind are helping to change that, since they can operate on a small scale much more effectively than nuclear, coal, or natural gas generation. We're now living through the rise of solar and wind power - and it will probably take decades, just like the rise of coal power plants did.

Of course they're doing it because of Google.

Where I grew up, we were close to a military base. The town allowed a cable company to have a monopoly. The base didn't, and had competing cable companies. Guess who got much lower prices and a broader selection of channels? Thankfully, the town council at least had enough sense to notice that the base was getting better deals, and to apply pressure to the cable company each time their monopoly came up for renewal. Thus, while they didn't have quite as good prices and selection as the base, my parents still get better prices and selection than I do, even though I now live in a city with about five times the population.

Competition does wonderful things to markets.

Can you give a source for that $6.2 trillion? The figures I can find say $3.8 trillion, which is considerably lower. The only reference to $6.2 trillion dollars with the US budget that I find is Paul Ryan calling for a $6.2 trillion dollar reduction in spending... but that was in spending over the next ten years, or a cut of $0.62 trillion in the average annual budget over that time.

Second, don't forget that households are not the only source of government income - corporations are another source. Profit that is not disbursed to stockholders isn't in those household income figures. As of 2009 (most recent year I can quickly find figures for), US corporations were believed to be holding about $5 trillion in liquid assets. While that's a lump sum rather than an annual increase, it looks like US corporations have been salting away liquid assets quite quickly the last few years.

Third, you don't address his point - that most of those crying out for less government spending are in favor of more government spending on the military. Most of the discretionary budget is spent on the military. The US doesn't just spend more on its military than any other nation - its spends more than numbers 2-8 on the list of highest military expenditures combined. Current estimates of naval strength indicate that the US Navy is stronger than all other navies in the world combined.

When you're spending too much - and especially if you're spending more than you make, as your figures indicate - it isn't the time to be increasing any expenditure. And looking at the biggest expense area that you have that you can easily cut is only common sense. In the case of the US, that's the military.

Nope. The Posse Comitatus Act states that the military cannot be used to enforce laws without Constitutional or Congressional authorization. It doesn't prevent any other sort of cooperation. Conducting training exercises, for example, is not enforcing laws, and thus isn't a violation of the act.

Here's the thing: When you're buying a hard drive, the manufacturer doesn't know what file system you're going to put on it, or whether you're going to use it as the system's primary drive or a secondary drive, or what OS you're going to put on it. Thus, they can't reasonably account for those things. I'll note, though, that some manufacturers do give the formatted capacity for their pre-formatted drives, and I definitely think this is a good thing.

The big difference in this case is proportionality. On a desktop or laptop computer, the OS as installed usually only takes up a small percentage of the hard drive - say, 10% or less. In this case, though, the OS as installed is taking up more than 25% of the space on the 128 GB version, and more than 50% on the 64 GB version. This is far out of the normal bounds of expectation. A 64 GB Surface tablet having less available storage for the user than a 32 GB iPad is definitely not something that anyone is going to normally expect, and of course Microsoft is going to get bashed for it. If Apple did that, they'd be bashed for it too. Any manufacturer would.

No, the US federal government isn't saying that. The WTO is. (The summary is wrong: the US didn't approve this measure - the US approved the rules which allow this measure to be taken, but that's not the same thing.) So, US copyright holders would have to sue the WTO. The question is, where? They can't sue in the International Court of Justice (aka the World Court) - only nations have standing there. Even if they could, the ICJ has no means to enforce their decisions.

And you know something? Antigua is a sovereign nation. They don't need the WTO's permission for this - the fact that they sought permission just shows that they're trying their best to play by the rules.

The Xerox Star interface really was much, much more primitive than the Mac interface, though. Drag-and-drop? Xerox didn't have it. The clipboard? Xerox didn't have it. Drop-down menus? Ditto. Resource forks to make internationalization easy? Ditto. Type and creator information stored for files? Direct manipulation to edit file names? Self-repainting windows? Programs being able to draw into obscured portions of windows? Progress dialogs? Confirmation boxes? Tool palettes? Keyboard shortcuts?

The Xerox Star interface had none of those. The first version of the Mac interface did. (Some of them were invented first for the Lisa, then brought over to the Mac, and some had been invented before at other places. As far as I know, though, the creation of them at Apple was a re-invention from scratch. They didn't know other people had already invented them.)

Where the Star did shine was in its internals. It had multitasking and memory protection, which the original MacOS didn't, and used the Mesa programming language, which had many advanced features for the time (modular programming, exception handling, and threading, for example). A large part of that, though, was due to the system constraints - the first Macs only had 128K of RAM, 64K of ROM, a single floppy drive, and a 7.8 MHz processor. The Star, in contrast, had a minimum of 384K of RAM (expandable to 1.5M), a hard drive of at least 10M, and a CPU that performed about the same as a VAX minicomputer did at the time. Of course, it also cost $16,000, versus the $2,500 of the original Mac. (An average secretary made $12,000 a year at the time.)

"X is not Y" is not equivalent to "X is not required for Y", nor "X is not important to Y". To give similar statements: "Mathematics is not physics." "Physics is not mechanical engineering." Both of those statements are true - but if you want to work in the field of physics, understanding mathematics is essential. If you want to work in the field of mechanical engineering, understanding physics is essential.

The person who developed AD is a software engineer. He undoubtedly studied computer science, and might even have a computer science degree... but that doesn't make computer science be the same thing as software engineering, any more than the fact that a mechanical engineer might have a degree in physics makes those the same thing.