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By weldon at 2010-09-02 18:27:53 UTC
George Washington, Maryland, UDC, Catholic, and Penn. Should be fun.
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By weldon at 2010-09-01 13:37:14 UTC
Unity, the new overlay on mutter for Ubuntu Netbook Edition (no longer "Remix") looks like it could be really cool. The alpha status is glaring, though: clicking on "Desktop" gets you a menu that says "Desktop Menu Will Go Here"
By weldon at 2010-08-03 15:24:42 UTC
The "crisis" in social security is that we normal people expect the rich to pay us back the money they borrowed from us.
The Social Security trust fund is $2.5 trillion held as Treasury bonds. That is to say, when you look at your pay check and see the withheld line marked "Social Security Tax", that money gets pooled with everybody else's and first is used to pay out the benefits for everybody that's currently on social security. The money that's left over (though for the first time this year at one point there wasn't money left over, which made everybody's head explode who was to the right of Paul Krugman) then gets sent to the Treasury to buy bonds -- that is, to buy parts of the national debt. The trust fund currently holds a little more than one seventh of the US debt (2.5 trillion out of 14 trillion).
The point is, Social Security is sitting on 2.5 trillion dollars of Treasury Debt -- you could look at it as funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan if you were particularly perverse. So, conservatives who say it adds to the deficit are wrong, and liberals who say it doesn't add to the deficit are right. For the most part. Even if we stopped taking levies from people's paychecks, it has enough money to pay out everything for a couple of decades, and with the levies (assuming the economy doesn't get incredibly worse) it can hold out for a very long time indeed. But, I said "for the most part" for a reason. The problem is, Congress (and by extension the rest of us) has gotten addicted to that false revenue stream that has guaranteed 200 billion dollars or so in automatic debt purchase every year.
So, I say "for the most part" because as the baby boom continues to retire, we will have more years where the payroll levies do not exceed the benefits paid out, and the SSA will have to start cashing in more of those bonds, which means the treasury will have to pay them. This bothers conservatives because it means money going to poor and middle class people rather than no-bid contracts for Halliburton.
A conservative blogger to whom I will not link because the rest of the post is pretty odious proposed an interesting thought experiment. Suppose that the trust fund were a stack of physical bonds sitting in the SSA's offices somewhere. And suppose an intern accidentally dropped them in the shredder (this is simplistic to the point of comedy, but you get the point). On the one hand, the poor guy has really screwed up because now SSA has no trust fund (bad). On the other hand, nearly 3 trillion in US debt just disappeared (good). We have used Social Security levies as a cash spigot for so long that it's going to be difficult to honestly not call social security outlays as actual outlays, even though in the magical world of accounting they won't be. And not only is the spigot going to start sputtering off, it's going to actually start sucking money from the rest of the Federal budget.
Now, Democrats will point out that we've known this all along and there's nothing new here to make this a "crisis". We chose, against Al Gore's advice, to keep pouring the money into bonds rather than gradually weaning ourself off this fake revenue stream that we know would disappear. However, that's where we are now: not only are working people about to, in net terms, stop lending money to the government, we're about to demand the government pay us back.
From a moral standpoint, the solution is obvious: continue the levies, pay out the promised benefits with the Treasury bonds, and for general Federal spending do some combination of cutting expenses and increasing revenues (getting our military out of Iraq and Afghanistan and ending the millionaires' free lunch tax breaks are two great ways to do that).
But, all of our moral and intellectual rectitude doesn't change the uncomfortable fact: even if by literal principles of accounting Social Security doesn't add to the deficit, the simple fact is we are going to have to scramble to find new sources of revenue to cover the fact that it's in the process of transferring from net yearly black to net yearly red. If I'm saving up my change in a piggy bank, and leave an IOU in it every time I take money out to buy a pack of smokes (I last smoked back when you could still buy a pack with a reasonable amount of change), the fact that the piggy bank is full of IOUs to myself doesn't help me if I'm out of money when I actually need to spend the change on whatever I was saving for.
We screwed up Social Security by letting Congress give our payroll levies to rich people, and it's going to be a hell of a time getting it back from them.
The Social Security trust fund is $2.5 trillion held as Treasury bonds. That is to say, when you look at your pay check and see the withheld line marked "Social Security Tax", that money gets pooled with everybody else's and first is used to pay out the benefits for everybody that's currently on social security. The money that's left over (though for the first time this year at one point there wasn't money left over, which made everybody's head explode who was to the right of Paul Krugman) then gets sent to the Treasury to buy bonds -- that is, to buy parts of the national debt. The trust fund currently holds a little more than one seventh of the US debt (2.5 trillion out of 14 trillion).
The point is, Social Security is sitting on 2.5 trillion dollars of Treasury Debt -- you could look at it as funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan if you were particularly perverse. So, conservatives who say it adds to the deficit are wrong, and liberals who say it doesn't add to the deficit are right. For the most part. Even if we stopped taking levies from people's paychecks, it has enough money to pay out everything for a couple of decades, and with the levies (assuming the economy doesn't get incredibly worse) it can hold out for a very long time indeed. But, I said "for the most part" for a reason. The problem is, Congress (and by extension the rest of us) has gotten addicted to that false revenue stream that has guaranteed 200 billion dollars or so in automatic debt purchase every year.
So, I say "for the most part" because as the baby boom continues to retire, we will have more years where the payroll levies do not exceed the benefits paid out, and the SSA will have to start cashing in more of those bonds, which means the treasury will have to pay them. This bothers conservatives because it means money going to poor and middle class people rather than no-bid contracts for Halliburton.
A conservative blogger to whom I will not link because the rest of the post is pretty odious proposed an interesting thought experiment. Suppose that the trust fund were a stack of physical bonds sitting in the SSA's offices somewhere. And suppose an intern accidentally dropped them in the shredder (this is simplistic to the point of comedy, but you get the point). On the one hand, the poor guy has really screwed up because now SSA has no trust fund (bad). On the other hand, nearly 3 trillion in US debt just disappeared (good). We have used Social Security levies as a cash spigot for so long that it's going to be difficult to honestly not call social security outlays as actual outlays, even though in the magical world of accounting they won't be. And not only is the spigot going to start sputtering off, it's going to actually start sucking money from the rest of the Federal budget.
Now, Democrats will point out that we've known this all along and there's nothing new here to make this a "crisis". We chose, against Al Gore's advice, to keep pouring the money into bonds rather than gradually weaning ourself off this fake revenue stream that we know would disappear. However, that's where we are now: not only are working people about to, in net terms, stop lending money to the government, we're about to demand the government pay us back.
From a moral standpoint, the solution is obvious: continue the levies, pay out the promised benefits with the Treasury bonds, and for general Federal spending do some combination of cutting expenses and increasing revenues (getting our military out of Iraq and Afghanistan and ending the millionaires' free lunch tax breaks are two great ways to do that).
But, all of our moral and intellectual rectitude doesn't change the uncomfortable fact: even if by literal principles of accounting Social Security doesn't add to the deficit, the simple fact is we are going to have to scramble to find new sources of revenue to cover the fact that it's in the process of transferring from net yearly black to net yearly red. If I'm saving up my change in a piggy bank, and leave an IOU in it every time I take money out to buy a pack of smokes (I last smoked back when you could still buy a pack with a reasonable amount of change), the fact that the piggy bank is full of IOUs to myself doesn't help me if I'm out of money when I actually need to spend the change on whatever I was saving for.
We screwed up Social Security by letting Congress give our payroll levies to rich people, and it's going to be a hell of a time getting it back from them.
By weldon at 2010-06-15 18:26:57 UTC
Gary Brooks Faulkner is a moron, but an awesome one.
By weldon at 2010-06-03 14:52:42 UTC
This probably sounds stupid, but I just realized you can still use Lenny repositories on Squeeze without a problem.
By weldon at 2010-06-02 15:49:24 UTC
This does not mean you have a Turkish locale installed (necessarily); it's an Empathy bug (that is, it shows Turkish as an option whether it should or not). The spelling backend it uses is gnome-spell; install that package and your system language will appear as an option.
By weldon at 2010-05-30 17:56:54 UTC
So the clock applet in Ubuntu is neat, and has a weather component (not sure why those two should be in the same executable, but so be it).
However, it didn't work for me after install. Turns out the fix is simple.
Check your /etc/timezone; it is set to the time zone you selected at install (or changed it to later). Now, go into gconf-editor and look at /apps/panel/applet_$X/prefs where $X varies depending on what order your clock is on the panel (yes, that's idiotic).
In the prefs key, you'll see City=Whatever, Timezone=Whatever, etc. The "Whatever" Timezone equals must be the same string as you find in /etc/timezone (it's not enough to simply be the same time zone; if one says EST5EDT and the other says "US/Eastern", it won't work).
Edit either the gconf key or the /etc/timezone file so that they match, and your weather information will appear. Something stupid is going on here.
However, it didn't work for me after install. Turns out the fix is simple.
Check your /etc/timezone; it is set to the time zone you selected at install (or changed it to later). Now, go into gconf-editor and look at /apps/panel/applet_$X/prefs where $X varies depending on what order your clock is on the panel (yes, that's idiotic).
In the prefs key, you'll see City=Whatever, Timezone=Whatever, etc. The "Whatever" Timezone equals must be the same string as you find in /etc/timezone (it's not enough to simply be the same time zone; if one says EST5EDT and the other says "US/Eastern", it won't work).
Edit either the gconf key or the /etc/timezone file so that they match, and your weather information will appear. Something stupid is going on here.
By weldon at 2010-05-26 16:00:30 UTC
This is getting stupid.
After the mysterious explosion of my Eee, I got an Acer Aspire One at Microcenter for $200. To my shock, this model included a 3G modem, which I hope to configure at some point.
There are a few issues with what this model's actual name is. The baseplate says "ZG8". But that name seems to have been deprecated in favor of 531H-1729 (the later revisions all keep the 531H; I'm guess ZG8 was the release name that they then changed after continuing the model).
What works:
Video. i915 works great, compiz is compizy. 1024x600 resolution. glxgears (yes, I know, glxgears is not a benchmark) hits about 500 FPS with a desktop running.
Wireless. Some issues here. It's an AR5001 chip, which in theory should work with the stock ath5k. However, in the Lenny kernel, it will come up but neither scan nor associate. Madwifi does work, but drops out after about an hour or so. I installed the kernel from lenny-backports: this worked fine. Note to Ubuntu users: Lucid seems to not be able to bring this interface up automatically; you have to either "enable wireless" in the network manager, or bring it up with ifconfig (ifconfig wlan0 up). There is a switch that as far as I can tell is supposed to switch between the wifi and the 3G (see below). Switching on/off the wifi doesn't disable it but sends an unknown xkey event (I will at some point look up what it actually is). In any case, the wifi is not currently indicated on the LED; the light always stays off, and as far as I can tell the transceiver is always on.
Audio. Works fine; decent volume (better than my now-exploded Eee). Volume and mute buttons work.
Power. Battery life is a disappointment at 2 hours or so. But I only have a 3-cell battery right now, and I hope to get a 9-cell soon which advertises 6 hours or so. Suspend and resume work. Removing AC darkens the screen, and plugging it in brightens it, but manual control of screen brightness doesn't work OOTB.
Bluetooth. This works for once; in every other netbook I've had, the bluetooth receiver is not recognized. It does have a front panel switch that needs to be enabled, and the LED indicates it properly.
3G. This is intriguing. The laptop came with a Qualcomm 3G modem. The lenny-backports kernel correctly loads qcserial. Like the bluetooth, the 3G is managed by a front-panel switch and indicated with an LED. There is a package (gobi-loader) to load the firmware, which firmware I have now downloaded from Acer. I'll see about getting this to work and signing up with a provider (supposedly gnome-dialer works with it).
After the mysterious explosion of my Eee, I got an Acer Aspire One at Microcenter for $200. To my shock, this model included a 3G modem, which I hope to configure at some point.
There are a few issues with what this model's actual name is. The baseplate says "ZG8". But that name seems to have been deprecated in favor of 531H-1729 (the later revisions all keep the 531H; I'm guess ZG8 was the release name that they then changed after continuing the model).
What works:
Video. i915 works great, compiz is compizy. 1024x600 resolution. glxgears (yes, I know, glxgears is not a benchmark) hits about 500 FPS with a desktop running.
Wireless. Some issues here. It's an AR5001 chip, which in theory should work with the stock ath5k. However, in the Lenny kernel, it will come up but neither scan nor associate. Madwifi does work, but drops out after about an hour or so. I installed the kernel from lenny-backports: this worked fine. Note to Ubuntu users: Lucid seems to not be able to bring this interface up automatically; you have to either "enable wireless" in the network manager, or bring it up with ifconfig (ifconfig wlan0 up). There is a switch that as far as I can tell is supposed to switch between the wifi and the 3G (see below). Switching on/off the wifi doesn't disable it but sends an unknown xkey event (I will at some point look up what it actually is). In any case, the wifi is not currently indicated on the LED; the light always stays off, and as far as I can tell the transceiver is always on.
Audio. Works fine; decent volume (better than my now-exploded Eee). Volume and mute buttons work.
Power. Battery life is a disappointment at 2 hours or so. But I only have a 3-cell battery right now, and I hope to get a 9-cell soon which advertises 6 hours or so. Suspend and resume work. Removing AC darkens the screen, and plugging it in brightens it, but manual control of screen brightness doesn't work OOTB.
Bluetooth. This works for once; in every other netbook I've had, the bluetooth receiver is not recognized. It does have a front panel switch that needs to be enabled, and the LED indicates it properly.
3G. This is intriguing. The laptop came with a Qualcomm 3G modem. The lenny-backports kernel correctly loads qcserial. Like the bluetooth, the 3G is managed by a front-panel switch and indicated with an LED. There is a package (gobi-loader) to load the firmware, which firmware I have now downloaded from Acer. I'll see about getting this to work and signing up with a provider (supposedly gnome-dialer works with it).
By weldon at 2010-05-19 18:36:16 UTC
Turns out to be pretty simple: to match abc\ndef just type
abc C-q C-j def
in the miniwindow. For that matter, C-q C-j works anywhere you want a literal newline in a buffer that expects Return to signal end-of-input.
abc C-q C-j def
in the miniwindow. For that matter, C-q C-j works anywhere you want a literal newline in a buffer that expects Return to signal end-of-input.
By weldon at 2010-05-17 20:25:18 UTC
Install can be a bit tricky since Lenny's kernel doesn't recognize the ethernet or wireless, so I had to get a backported kernel on the USB stick and dpkg -i it.
With that new kernel, wireless and ethernet work. Video (+aiglx) works with i915. Compiz runs, though the screen is rather small for it (unchecking "invert snapping" under Wobbly Windows helps by stopping the irksome default snapping). Camera works. Audio works but the keyboard buttons for it don't; I recall seeing something on DebianEeePC about that, and I will dig it up in my Copious Free Time.
Battery life is ~6 hours (though seems more sensitive to load than larger laptops I've had have been). Scrolling via the trackpad is more sensitive than I like.
With that new kernel, wireless and ethernet work. Video (+aiglx) works with i915. Compiz runs, though the screen is rather small for it (unchecking "invert snapping" under Wobbly Windows helps by stopping the irksome default snapping). Camera works. Audio works but the keyboard buttons for it don't; I recall seeing something on DebianEeePC about that, and I will dig it up in my Copious Free Time.
Battery life is ~6 hours (though seems more sensitive to load than larger laptops I've had have been). Scrolling via the trackpad is more sensitive than I like.
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