Uh oh, you better check some real sources...like the BLS website. Looks like food is in fact the top item category in the CPI-U calculation. The Federal Reserve uses the all items less food and energy, known as the "Core", CPI-U numbers even though the BLS releases numbers including and excluding food and energy. Even then the Fed uses PCE numbers to make actual policy decisions rather than the CPI. The PCE calculation is close to the Chained CPI-U numbers the BLS now releases which take into account things like item substitution.

Where are these rich people going to go? Almost every other first world country to which they can flee has higher tax rates for the wealthy than the US. They can flee to third world countries where they can spend most if their wealth trying to give themselves the luxuries of the US and then the rest hiring private security to protect those luxuries.

You need to cure yourself of the belief that if you don't suck up to the rich that they'll just up and leave and take their money with them. Even with slightly higher tax rates the truly wealthy have it better here than just about anywhere else in the world. They'd still have lower tax rates than most of Europe.

I would agree with your points save the one on term limits. Look at what happens today with freshman Congress people. They get shuffled into receptions and dinners jam packed with lobbyists. Since the lobbyists are the ones with the longest lives in Washington the nascent Congress members need to sign on with them to have any clout. With strict term limits every Congress member will essentially be a freshman and we'd end up with lobbyists with even more influence.

Besides lobbyist ties the whole internal operations in Congress would need an overhaul. The current committee system would severely break down if there was no meaningful seniority (not necessarily a bad thing). Current tactics your side (someone that agrees with your personal politics) uses would be thrown all out of whack. This might be helpful when it disrupts your political opposition but would really suck when things you want can't make it out of committee.

I think much more fair drawing of congressional districts (performed by multi-partisan independent panels) would be more effective than enacting strict term limits. Gerrymandering guarantees that areas that go strongly to one party in state-wide and national elections can still go to another party in local elections. It's something that only really serves the desires of national parties and guarantees alternative parties could never see any significant representation in Congress. It also breaks any sort of ability for constituents to have a meaningful say with their representatives. If a neighborhood/borough/region makes too much noise they'll just end up with a district line cutting them in half so they can't ever effect an election.

A design patent? Yes. As that is exactly what design patents are meant to do, protect aesthetic designs.

There's also the fact that if we took the largest, most powerful radio telescope we have, put it on a planet orbiting our nearest star, pointed it directly at earth with the most powerful broadcast it could generate... by the time the signal got to us, there is no equipment on earth that could detect it.

That's completely false. If you took Arecibo and stuck it in orbit around Alpha Centauri and beamed a signal back it would be fairly easy to detect with an Arecibo-class telescope provided we were looking. For a little more on the math read up. We could receive transmissions from dozens of light years away with existing telescopes and even further away with arrays and/or locations with better signal-to-noise ratios than available on planet (like the dark side of the Moon).

I've got a cheapo A10 powered tablet running ICS and it sucks. It's sluggish, 3D performance sucks, web video and audio rarely work right in either Chrome or Dolphin, and Flash is an absolute joke. A lot of apps that run without any problems on my Nexus 7 crash mysteriously on it.

I would hate to imagine my main cell phone being A10 powered and having the same shit reliability as my cheapo tablet. Even a low end cell phone needs to be serviceable as an actual phone (meaning decent battery life and reliability). People aren't going to spend even small amounts of money on something that doesn't work very well.

I assume they sync later to the pc or laptop in their dorms for real processing in Word or whatever.

Why would you assume this is the case? If someone is taking notes on their iPad using something like EverNote at what point is further processing needed? They can pretty easily collate their notes right on the device itself. Most note apps can easily save notes out to "the cloud" so they're readily available anywhere. What do you think people need to do with their notes for which they need a PC?

As for smaller backpacks, what? Through high school and college I ended up having to carry tons of books in a massive backpack and it was terrible. Then my dumb ass carried around a laptop in addition to the books in college. If I was in school today I'd trade a laptop and a ton of books for an iPad in a heartbeat.

If 4K wasn't better, then they won't add new effects to take advantage of it because there would being advantage.

What the fuck? What the GP was saying (and is entirely correct in doing so) is that the Mark I Human Eyeball has not meaningfully changed between Philo Farnsworth's first televisions and today's 1080p monstrosities. Besides human physiology our houses haven't gotten a whole lot bigger either.

Going to 4K resolution isn't going to do much for anyone because we're not going to get any additional visual information from the increased resolution. On a 55" 1080p TV every pixel is about half a millimeter. At any reasonable viewing distance you can't distinguish that the screen is even composed of pixels. At 4K a pixel would be roughly half that size. If you can't distinguish pixels today increasing the screen resolution isn't going to give the human eye any more visual information.

Before you mention computer monitors, consider the use case for them. You're almost always within three feet of a computer monitor when using it, often much closer. The difference between 1920x1080 and 2560x1440 is noticeable. Even on something like a cell phone the higher DPI screen is worthwhile because it's held so close that the increased pixel density is viewable by the human eye. A television which is viewed at much longer distances doesn't need the same sort of pixel density until it gets bigger than will fit in most homes.

4K cinema projectors make sense because the screen you're viewing is far larger than that of a TV even accounting for viewing distance. 4K in the home is a pointless endeavor that would only exist to get people to throw away perfectly good 1080p televisions because a stupid marketing campaign told them that they weren't good enough.

The move from tiny highly curved CRTs to larger flatter ones was a visual improvement. Moving from those to the totally flat Trinitron style CRTs was an improvement. 480i to HD was an improvement. Now we're really at the limit of what the human eye in the average person's house can actually use effectively. There's no magic special effects tricks that would make 4K displays in the home all that better to use.

What the GP is talking about is Windows 7 Starter's 2GB RAM limit. You can stuff more RAM into a machine running Starter (which is most netbooks) but it will only actually use 2GB. To be able to use more than 2GB with your netbook you need to upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium which is about $80, in addition to the cost to upgrade the RAM. This means the average $200 netbook ends up costing $400 to have a decent amount of RAM available.

I've seen very few netbooks that ship with Home Basic or Home Premium out of the box, most I've ever seen have Starter. Not only is the RAM limit a problem but it also gimps a lot of basic OS features like the ability to use multiple monitors, DVD playback, and fast user switching. Microsoft has put a lot of work into making sure the average netbook is just a crippled web terminal.

the sensible logical implication is that we should ignore them because they could never have any causal impact on our civilisation

What? It doesn't matter if we can have a direct conversation with alien life forms. The important discovery would be the simple fact that they exist. As of this moment our own planet is the only one in the whole of the universe that we know life exists on. Just finding a second one would be one of the great discoveries in our species' history. It's a bit silly on your part to suggest that such a discovery wouldn't in fact have a significant effect on our civilization.

No they had to use the API provided for USB file sharing. Like every other app that uses this functionality. Stanza was originally using a hack (IIRC pretending to be a PTP device) to do USB sync because there was no API. Now the API exists and is used by a number of apps.

Wow Apple killed Stanza? You better tell that to my copy of Stanza for which I get regular updates. Better yet, maybe you should shut the fuck up if you're not going to fact check things you say.

Several years ago Stanza had a problem because used an unsupported interface in order to load books onto it from the computer. Apple then added an API to allow apps to transfer files from iTunes. Stanza adopted this API and has since had no problems.

Your conjecture about B&N and Kindle doesn't even fucking make sense since Apple has their own eBook store. You're just talking out of your ass. I suspect maybe you've suffered from some sort of severe head trauma recently. You should maybe head to the nearest hospital and get that checked out. You wouldn't want permanent brain damage to occur.

With no Mac support they guaranteed that number was zero.

Also a lot of words to say "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about".

Very interesting. If the mass is low enough, we may see yet another "anomaly" shaking the main stream science community, who still believes in Einstein's relativity theory, which is so obviously wrong that it is almost beyond believe it has survived for more than 100 years.

You certainly typed a lot of words to say "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about". As far as scientific theories go relativity has a lot of very strong experimental support. Though I suppose if you want to say it's "obviously wrong" you might want to include some actual experimental verification or even peer reviewed papers of such a claim, you know, to enlighten us bozos.