nirvana

Those aren't made up numbers. I actually did the math based on my income. How about you stop being a dishonest coward who characterizes your opponent, rather than making an argument, hmm?

You don't get what you pay for, of course, if you bothered to actually add up what you really do pay, and what you really do get, but then that is the essential swindle isn't it? You and all the rest of the thieves like to pretend like it's better to pay government $20,000 a year for services the free market would happily deliver for $20. And then you act as if those of us who point out we're getting ripped off are "greedy", or in your case-- dishonest.

Well, if you have to lie to make an argument, that tells me even you know your argument is the suck.

Ok, so you don't pay %50 on 1/3rd of your salary for 10 years. I wouldn't exactly call that "an amazing tax break". You're still paying way too much in taxes.

No. And contrary to what others have said, more Germans know english than Dutch know english, on a day to day basis. Though you can get by without knowing dutch in amsterdam with a little creativity.

Milton Friedman did a study of healthcare in the USA, and found that the government "help" had driven up the cost 26fold and driven down availability. Or put another way, the reason people could get bankrupted by an illness is socialized medicine, and it's also the reason they might not be able to find care when they need it. Contrary to what Obama says, socialism doesn't work, and if you think you'll get better healthcare in the NL than in the USA, you'll have a very rude awakening... but of course you won't be alive to post your mea culpas here on HN. Frankly, even assuming this shows a profound ignorance of both history and economics.

You should learn to think.

If you run a successful business in holland, and pay yourself a salary out of it, your tax rate is over %70! And on top of that, you have %20 VAT. And this isn't even going into the manifold fees and other types of taxes you are subjected to.

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This comment is not spam. It had a nice positive score until the socialists arrived. Of course, socialists being unable to deal with reality (or history!) must censor those who point out simple facts that undermine their ideology. And so this comment has been downvoted to obscurity (-15 at this moment) to make it less likely others would be made aware of the high tax rates in holland.

This kind of dishonesty and censorship is why you can't have fruitful discussion on hacker news. The site is overrun by ideologues and moderated by ideologues and anything that doesn't strictly toe to the fascist modern ideology gets the boot.

Ok, just accept, though, that you're anti-intellectual in a very profound way.

When you can't tolerate people stating inconvenient facts, it's time to admit you're an intellectual coward.

Frankly, I think you're all shit. You've elected a guy who claims he has the right to kill any american with a drone strike, in america, without any due process.

And you're so proud of it! It's astounding. You should be ashamed. Profoundly ashamed.

But know this, it is your cowardice and intellectual dishonesty that caused the state of affairs we find ourselves in. Run away to amsterdam if you like, see how long it remains nice.

also android fanboys who are instead falling all over themselves to claim that later and worse but open somehow beats better and earlier.

It's an ideology, mindless anti-progress, anti-innovation ideology.

A little thought experiment... some clever dudes manage to reverse engineer enough to "jailbreak" this, and then they put a little OS image on it and start hacking away... then a bunch of people say "hey, this is really cool! It's like Apple made a little raspberry pi for us!" but then even more say "but it's so limited, it doesn't have USB out, etc, etc."

And then dozens more just go on and on about how Apple "crippled" the device by not giving it USB and how this "proves" Apple just wants "control" and why did they have to jailbreak it anyway?

In the process of getting their panties all bundled up they never realize they're bitching about an adapter not being a general computing platform.

They're also proving Apple right-- it's engineered to solve a specific problem and provide specific functionality. Even if it were jailbroken from the factory, people would be complaining and demanding that it does other things... than what it was designed to do.

Ideology has trumped engineering, and as hackers, you shouldn't tolerate it.

Frankly, all of this has been obvious all along to any competent engineer, since the moment Apple introduced lightening. They described it as a serial bus and talked about how it gave more flexibility. If you think about it for 2 seconds its obviously better to run protocols over a serial bus than to run 30 lines of individual signals, with dedicated lines for analog and dedicated lines for digital in a world where people want HDMI adapters for a connector that originally had firewire signals on it, from a time before HDMI was even common.

But this is Apple, so the REAL reality distortion field kicked in-- a tsunami of press acting as if Apple was ripping people off with a $30 adapter, hundreds of mindless conspiracy theories from Apple bashers on Hacker News about how this is to have more control over people and how this once again proves that "open" (defined as google, not actually anything to do with openness) is better than "closed" (defined as Apple, you know the company with the most popular open source operating system in the world?).

It's one thing to not know enough engineering for this to have been obvious to you, it's quite another to spread lies and engineering ignorance as a result of your ideological hatred of Apple. And the latter is basically all I saw on HN about this format. (Which is one of the reasons I write HN off as worthless for months at a time.)

Because Steve Mann is into wearable computers and google glass is not a wearable computer project. Your wondering this is understandable because google has mislead you. But glass has no CPU, there's not enough power or space for one. The intelligence lives on google servers where the speach recognition is done, and everything else, and glass is useless without a net connection (So you have to be in an area with wifi or have a smartphone handy to tether to.)

Steve Mann has been working on head mounted displays, true, but he's been focusing on local horsepower wearable computers.

Ultimately, I don't think google glass is anything more than a PR project to remove the stigma of google as ripoff artists and to make it look like they're innovative.

Given current technology, glass on wifi should have about 20 minutes of battery life, maybe an hour. Which makes them pretty useless.

There's really quite a difference between a wearable computer (what Mann works on) and a bluetooth headset with integrated display (what glass is.)

For the record, this guy has been wearing actual computers.

Google glass is an accessory- essentially a bluetooth headset, display and camera built into glasses. The intelligence lives on the servers, and glass needs a bluetooth or wifi connection to talk to the net.

I think google's engaging in a bit of a PR swindle by making people think google glass is like an iPhone. It isn't, it needs and iPhone or android phone to connect to the net.

Consequently it can't replace a smartphone.

I'm also pretty dubious about the battery time it will get, even without having to run a local CPU.

The answer is that lightening is a general purpose next generation serial format.

This allows them to support different formats in the future, for instance, say when HDMI isn't popular.

The 30 pin connector didn't have HDMI on it at the time it was created and they have repurposed pins over the years regularly.

Here they can have a much less complicated solution-- a standardised serial bus over which they can stream any future protocol they want to support.

It's a lot more future proof.

The 30 pin dock had 30 pins so it could put video out directly and things like that.

Lightening is a SERIAL FORMAT with 9pins. So it streams audio and video out in an encoded form.

The AV adapter, need to take that audio and video and turn it into a standardized AV format for the AV plugs.

Now, rather than a lot of odd incompatibilities because Apple added new features to new devices that older docks don't support, we have a common communication format in lightening that should be much more robust going forward.

Apple can add whatever protocols it needs over the serial connection to support future tech, rather than the old way of redefining what some of those 30 pins meant from period to period-- remember the 30 pin connecter started out in a time when there was firewire taking up some of those pins!

People like to ascribe nefarious purposes to Apple or claim apple is "rippng them off" because a small computer that does digital AV conversion costs $30... and they dont' realize that the 30 pin connector didnt' do any conversion of formats was just bringing the signals out to a standard connector. This one actually has to do work, which is why it has a SoC on it.

Steam's support on OS X is the suck. I don't know what the experience is like on Linux, but given there is less competition from better stores on Linux I wouldn't be surprised to see Steam be a big hit on Linux.

As for me, after being a steam user for years, but given the fact that I haven't been able to play team fortress for 5 months now despite playing it for years, in the future, I'll use the Mac App Store.

Google glass is just a bluetooth headset with a display and camera, combined with a SIRI like service.

People seem to think it's a competitor to the iPhone, but it's an ACCESSORY that needs and iPhone to connect to the network.

Worse, it has no technology (other than miniturization) that hasn't been done many times before-- I first saw a "glass" type system in the 1980s.... and that one actually had a computer on board!