Yearly Archives: 2008

Subprime Social Security

This entry was posted in bush Social Security US Politics on by

There are a lot of things one could pick at in Froma Harrop’s recent column comparing proposals for private social security accounts to problems with some subprime mortgages. However, this in particular caught my eye:

If the folks now approaching retirement saw their private Social Security accounts suddenly lose 10 percent of their value — as have many conservative stock portfolios — we’d be hearing demands for a Social Security bailout on top of a mortgage bailout.

Well, their government managed “trust fund” has incurred a 10% loss over the past couple years. Froma, perhaps you should lead the bailout demands.

Oh, the us government is over 9 trillion dollars in debt and still spending so there is no money available for a bailout.

Friday Ark #178

This entry was posted in Bird Blogging Cat Blogging Dog Blogging Friday Ark Invertebrate Blogging Pet Blogging Pets Weekend Cat Blogging Weekend Dog Blogging on by

We’ll post links to sites that have Friday (plus or minus a few days) photos of their chosen animals (photoshops at our discretion and humans only in supporting roles). Watch the Exception category for rocks, beer, coffee cups, and….?

Visit all the boarders, Link to the Ark and check back for updates through Sunday afternoon!

You can find out how to board the Friday Ark at the Arkive page.

Cats

Invertebrates

Other Vertebrates

Dogs

Birds

In Memoriam

Didn’t Make It

  • Tetrapod Zoology: Ankylosaur week, day 6 ~ Silvisaurus, Silvisaurus condrayi

Exceptions (inclusion not guaranteed)

Extra, Extra: All Ark boarders are invited to shout out at the Friday Ark Frapper Map.

Cat folks: remember to submit your links to:

Birders: I and the Bird: A Blog Carnival for Bird Lovers is published every 2 weeks.

For the spineless: Circus of the Spineless. A monthly celebration of Insects, Arachnids, Molluscs, Crustaceans, Worms and most anything else that wiggles.

Dog folks: remember to submit your links to:

  • the Canine Carnival hosted by Pamibe
  • The Carnival of the Dogs hosted by Mickey’s Musings

    • has been out of operation since July 2007

For other current carnivals check out The Blog Carnival and The TTLB Uber Carnival

The Future is Fast….

This entry was posted in Internet Technology on by

Greg Reinacker notes:

…and the future is really blazin’ fast connections.
We used to have 4 T1’s ganged together somehow in our office, giving us around 6 Mb/sec. Shared by 75 people, and responsible for not only internet but also telephone traffic, you can imagine it wasn’t exactly fast.
At home I have a Comcast cable modem, and I get something like 8 Mb/sec, which until today I thought was pretty fast.
But this morning, when I got to the office, our IT folks had completed our office network cutover to a 100 Mb/sec fiber connection to the internet…and oh. my. gosh.

He is right. Once you’ve seen really high speed access, real broadband, those reasonably useful cable connections are clearly not that fast.
The baseline that we should be looking at for home connections is the 100 Mbps Greg now has in his office. You are not going to use it at that rate continuously anytime soon but it will help bring the Internet much closer to a real time interactive multimedia environment.
Bandwidth intensive businesses as well as many academic and research institutions now have 1 or more 10 Gigabit/sec connections.

If your workstation is optimized to take advantage of these high speed connections, and most are not, you will get some truly blazing download speeds.