The headline is completely wrong and misleading. There are two major mistakes:
First, the linked article actually claims that the US will endup spending a total of $4 trillion over the next 50 years, with the costs heavily weighted to the far future. This is very different than claiming that it has alreadyspent $4 trillion.
Second, the linked article does not make any claim as to how the expense will be paid for. The submitter speculates that it will be via taxes on the lower class, but the linked article does not say this and it is, frankly, unlikely. Keep in mind that the top 10% of income earners paid 70% of federal income tax in 2008; the top 50% paid 97.3% of all taxes. If you add in payroll taxes, the situation is much less progressive, but payroll taxes are slated to fund entitlements which are, themselves, highly underfunded; they are in no sense funding the cost of occupying Iraq in the year 2060. I'm sorry, but the US has 1) a high level if income inequality and 2) a highly progressive income tax structure. The combination of the two means that any expense like the Iraq war is going to be borne on the backs of the rich and the middle class. What taxes the "lower class" pay (however you wish to define it) is already spent.
"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil"
-- Donald Knuth
Getting the code written and the app out the door in a "good enough" state is almost always the most important part. If you're a startup, it's may well be the only important part.
It's an incredible sales tool for the framework, I'll say that. I'm in the process of selecting a Javascript framework for a new project, and this makes selecting Knockout very compelling.
It's hard to convince yourself you need to evaluate some other competing and (almost invariably) poorly documented framework when you've got this tutorial sitting there, just asking to be used...
Yes... But don't disregard the nasty collective action problem they have.
Let's say one of the big labels suddenly gets religion, and rewrites their contracts with Spotify and others to be fair and generous. Great! What happens now?
Well, Spotify is going to make a lot more money...or they would, right up until the other big labels step up their demands. If, say, Warner decides to cut the share of Spotify's revenue they demand in half, that just means Sony BMG and Universal can up their demands. And both of them will be convinced that if they don't, the other one will, so both will...which means Spotify would be no better off. The entire process would just be Warner giving money to Sony BMG and Universal, which is hardly helpful to anyone other than Sony BMG and Universal shareholders.
And even if - through some miracle - you got the big three to agree to give Spotify an even break, there's the constant risk that one of them could come back and demand every dime Spotify is making at any time. And since everyone knows that any one of them could do that, they will feel compelled to get their share. And even trying to come to an agreement would probably be illegal collusion and price fixing.
The government created this problem via the very specific details of how copyright law is implemented; only the government can solve it - probably through some mix of mandatory licensing regimes and major curtailment of copyright duration. And good luck getting anything like that through Congress, ever.
One thing to keep in mind is that restaurants typically has pretty high fixed costs (rent, power, lights, a minimum number of staff), but moderate-to-low variable costs (food, extra staff). A hot dog - even a vegetarian hot dog - only costs a fraction of what a place like Drew's charges.
As others have pointed out, a GroupOn deal is usually going to be half off the normal price, and they take half of that, leaving 25% for the retailer. That actually is going to cover most (or for some places, all) of cost of the food.
Apparently, Drew's charged $3.69 for a basic beef hotdog (Applegate brand). You can buy them retail for maybe $0.70 each, which is less than 20% the total cost. The bun and condiments are negligible; if Drew's could avoid hiring too many extra staff to handle the GroupOn rush, and if the GroupOn customers were mostly new, and not all regular customers looking for a bargain (both big assumptions) they probably just about broke even on the deal, even getting only 25% of normal revenue per hotdog. Blaming GroupOn is tempting, and it might even be the straw that broke the camel's back, but it's not very plausible.
While it often seems to surprise Americans, there's nothing about a universal postal service - or even universal postal service - that requires granting anyone a monopoly. Many countries have allowed competition in the postal market and/or privatized their postal service. The results have mostly been very positive. Really, it's a bit like suggesting that the only way we can be sure every American can purchase food is to grant a Federal Food Service a monopoly on all retail food sales. It just isn't so.
Basically, there are three ways you can provide universal service:
1) Split the country up into regions, and reverse auction contracts to provide service; contracts require mail interchange with other contractors. Not common in the postal sector, but widely used elsewhere.
2) Designate one entity as the universal service provider. Could be state owned (as in NZ) or floated on the stock exchange (as in Germany). Since providing universal service is expensive, the government provides a subsidy to cover the cost. Accounts are reviewed periodically to ensure the subsidy is in-line with costs, and that value is being obtained for the money.
3) Designate one entity as the universal service provider. Don't directly subsidize them, but instead grant them monopolies on random services which you fondly hope will provide revenue streams broadly similar to what universal service actually costs.
Method 3 has a few disadvantages:. It's unfair, it's expensive, it's opaque, and it doesn't actually work. For example, at some point, the monopoly revenue will be too high. With nothing else to do with the cash, it'll get spent on lavish infrastructure, marble floors, and gold-plated pensions. Later, changing market conditions means the monopoly revenue falls, and the postal service goes bankrupt. Insanity.
1) It looks very interesting, but I've looked at more todo list, GTD, project management, kanban, and issue tracker apps than I can list. I wouldn't mind giving this a whirl, but... I have to give my credit card info? Just to get a good look at it? Meh. At a minimum, a proper free trial is probably a good idea. Or better yet...
2) ...a cheap (or free) tier for small teams. I'm reluctant to bring this up, because it sounds selfish (and hey, maybe it is) it really would be nice. Consider: Small teams arguably don't benefit from the tool as much (I mean, a single dev can do just fine with post-it notes). And further, if you get small teams hooked on a tool early on, it can really pay off when they get larger and need more seats. :)
3) Minor point, but Vimeo is not really the best choice to host a long video. I watched the whole thing, went off, then came back to rewatch the part with the kanban board to think about how it might be useful for me. Or rather, I came back to TRY and rewatch the kanban board part, 'cause Vimeo doesn't support seeking to arbitrary locations that haven't been loaded yet.
It's actually hard - and perhaps impossible - to bias a coin by weighting one face. It's not a very well studied area, but according to what info I can find[1], as general rule, you should assume that if some shady stranger in a bar is offering to bet money on the outcome of a coin flip, the coin is going to be perfectly fair. (Also, you can always work around a possibly biased coin by instead flipping the coin twice, and repeating the process until you get HT or TH, and then using the first element of the pair as the result.)
On the other hand, it is well established that the process of flipping a coin is biased, and a skilled coin flipper can produce whichever result he wants with a probability approaching unity. And there's NO way to work around that bias. The lesson here is probably "don't wager money on the outcome of coin flips".
Zagorsky is being sited in other comments here, but the problem with Zagorsky is that his results control for education and income. Problem: Education and income is highly correlated with IQ.
What Zagorsky is saying is that, for people with a given level of education and income, a higher IQ doesn't really help you much. Fine...but it could hardly be less relevant to the question of whether wealth and IQ tend to be found together!
Let's unpack Zagorsky a bit more: Overall, people with a low IQs, no degree, and a poorly paying job have a low net worth. Overall, people with a high IQ, no degree, and a poorly paying job also have a low net worth. However, most people with a high IQ have a degree, a well paying job, and a high net worth. Zagorsky concludes that IQ doesn't matter, but this is, frankly, nonsense.
Git is very, VERY commonly used in a "centralised" manner, so don't worry about that. Once you're used to git, the overhead of having to commit and push whenever you would have just commited in svn is minimal. Still, it will always exist - so the question is "what do you get in exchange"? There's two major things:
First, the two step process lets you perform commits CONSTANTLY on your local repo. Coming from svn, it may take a little bit to figure out why this is good, but trust me, it is. In svn you (typically) are careful about checking in half working code into the central repo. And rightly so; people are (often) relying on the trunk code to be working. You don't want to break the build, right? But anyone who has done non-trivial work with svn will, sooner or later, lose some work that wasn't "ready" to check in. In retrospect, it feels kind of weird to have source control that you aren't supposed to use...
Second, everyone knows that git has strong support for branching. But developers used to svn don't always "get" is that git has REALLY strong support for branching. As in, you should be using it. Right now. Constantly. Are you about to start work on a new issue? Branch. Got a new idea on how to solve that problem? Branch. Unsure if you should branch? Branch. Feeling bored? Branch twice. Okay, I'm exaggerating a little, but only a little. You really should be doing everything in branch, because it's very VERY easy to merge, swap branches, pull changes between branches, shelve a branch and start over, stop working on a branch, restart work on a branch, and generally do whatever you want. Again, anyone who has done non-trivial work with svn will have probably learned that branches are a cunning trap for the unwary - you need to unlearn that. :)
I'm sure there are teams out there using git in a "truly" decentralised manner, but in my experience the point of git (and any other dvcs) is actually that it makes a centralised workflow much less painful for the individual devs.
If you think about it a bit, you'll work out that taxing "bad things" is a great idea, and that the proper tax rate is the net externality of the activity. We're not trying to stop the activity outright (if we were, we'd ban it); we just want to get rid of the "excess" activity. Since the excess is caused by a negative externality (ie, people aren't paying the full costs), if you set the tax to be equal to the externalities, everything comes back into balance.
Spending the collected tax money on something related to what you're taxing (ie, cigarette taxes on curing cancer, or whatever) is entirely uneccesary. (Indeed, given the fungability of tax dollars, the concept doesn't even make sense.) The optimum amount to spend on, for example, obesity reduction simply has nothing to do with the amount you would collect from any "fat tax", and visa versa.
(The technical name for the is a Pigou tax, incidentally. A carbon tax is a textbook example.)
Everything in the article is based on a single data source: Page hits at DistroWatch.
And that's a completely useless data source. We don't have the slightest idea how many people are using Ubuntu, or how many people are installing Ubuntu, or how many people are using Mint, or how many people are installing Mint, or how many people are using or installing any other distro.
What we have is page hits on a single website. Do a search for "linux mint" and DistroWatch is the third result. Do a search for "linux ubuntu" and DistroWatch is the fifth result (below the fold for anyone with a small monitor). Anyone who actually wanted to INSTALL either distro would probably click the first result (the actual distro's website). Anyone who was actually USING either distro would probably not be searching at all. (Personal anecdote: I've used Ubuntu and considered using Mint; I've never visited DistroWatch. Why would I?)
There's nothing to see here other than a desperate attempt by an irrelevant website (DistroWatch) to drive traffic and attention. I would be interested in how Ubuntu is doing relative to Mint, but that data is simply not publicly available.
Pretty much every single element of the iPhone 4s is a copy. Admittedly, it's mostly a copy of other Apple products (most significantly, the iPhone 4), but that doesn't change the fundamental nature of the device: It's a copycat. (Or, if you prefer, it is a subtle refinement of earlier designs. Same difference.)
Given that, the article's assertion that "copies never achieve the success of the thing they copied" is practically self-refuting. I suppose what ACTUALLY means is that "copies of design elements that originated from a different company never achieve the same success as copies made by the company that first originated them". Which isn't exactly a stirring battle cry for originality, and is trivially disprovable to boot.
And of course, that's also not really what he's saying. Traced far enough back, most of the elements of the iPhone UI don't originate with Apple either. Apple claims they invented multi-touch - by which they mean they were the first to stick capacitive multi-touch onto a mobile device, using the technology of a completely different company who also hadn't actually invented multi-touch. If that's an example of Apple being "innovative" the term has no meaning any more...)
tl;dr summary: The author appears to believe that the definition of "innovation" is "things Apple has done", whereas the definition of "copying" is "things done by companies which are not Apple". For people who use a different definition of either word, the article is amusing.
My experience is that Python is everywhere, but Ruby is a tiny niche. I know lots of Python developers, but I don't know a SINGLE Ruby developer. There was recently a Python conference in my (fairly small) city, but I don't think there's ever been a Ruby conference. I attend a monthly meetup of Python devs in my (fairly small) city, but there's no Ruby meetup. I could go on...
In fact, I've seriously wondered before why Ruby gets as much notice and buzz as it does. Lots of talk, but it seems like nobody is actually using it (especially commercially) outside a couple of very high profile projects. :)
Of course, my experience is by no means typical (any more than yours is). However, do keep in mind that Python is VERY widely used throughout the animation, 3D, VFX, and CGI industries. Most packages have Python APIs or use Python as their scripting language; as far as I know none use Ruby. You also see a lot of Python in the game industry (and little or no Ruby).
(Also, you're making the common mistake of conflating Python and Django. Coming from a Rails background this isn't surprising, but Django isn't even the only Python web framework. Searching for "ruby + rails" captures most potential Ruby results, and essentially all potential Ruby web development results. Search for "python + django" results in a much smaller fraction of the total Python or even Python web development results. It's not an apples to apples comparison.)
Shorter article: European governments claim that the US government is selling European consumers cheap fuel. European governments vow to stop this terrible nightmare.
I am aware of multiple cases where subject matter experts have tried to fix errors relating to their area of expertise, had the changes reverted, and given up. The phenomenon is by no means limited to "SEO experts", but extends to, for example, law professors, including law professors widely regarded as the foremost experts in their speciality, trying to fix obvious non-controversial errors in an article relating to their speciality.
All it takes is one editor deciding that this is a good opportunity to play a status game. And it doesn't take long hanging around Wikipedia to learn that for a significant fraction of the active user base, every opportunity is a good opportunity for a status game.
First, the linked article actually claims that the US will end up spending a total of $4 trillion over the next 50 years, with the costs heavily weighted to the far future. This is very different than claiming that it has already spent $4 trillion.
Second, the linked article does not make any claim as to how the expense will be paid for. The submitter speculates that it will be via taxes on the lower class, but the linked article does not say this and it is, frankly, unlikely. Keep in mind that the top 10% of income earners paid 70% of federal income tax in 2008; the top 50% paid 97.3% of all taxes. If you add in payroll taxes, the situation is much less progressive, but payroll taxes are slated to fund entitlements which are, themselves, highly underfunded; they are in no sense funding the cost of occupying Iraq in the year 2060. I'm sorry, but the US has 1) a high level if income inequality and 2) a highly progressive income tax structure. The combination of the two means that any expense like the Iraq war is going to be borne on the backs of the rich and the middle class. What taxes the "lower class" pay (however you wish to define it) is already spent.