Rethinking Our Tax System
03 Aug 2011 19:12 Filed in: Tax Stat Analysis | Linguistic Shenanigans
On the day after the announcement of the debt ceiling deal, the New York Times’ editorial page, under the headline “To Escape Chaos, a Terrible Deal,” opined that the Democrats “held out for a few basic principles.” Among these, the paper observed, was the principle that there “must be new tax revenues in the mix so that the wealthy bear a share of the burden . . .” Hmmm. A share of the burden? Let’s check that out.
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Why the Big ISPs Are Lying to You About Net Neutrality
22 Apr 2011 06:51 Filed in: Linguistic Shenanigans | Net Neutrality
First, the basics. Last year a federal court of appeals in Washington, D.C., declared that the FCC lacked the authority to prevent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from restricting the websites their customers could visit. That’s a big deal if you care about an open internet.
An analogy here should be useful. As hackneyed as it is, imagine the internet as a highway over which information flows. The only way you can access any of that information is via an an off-ramp, and the ISPs own all of them. Get your internet from Comcast? You’re at the end of a Comcast off-ramp. The traffic on the highway below you, like the traffic on the internet, flows unimpeded regardless of rules governing the on-ramps and off-ramps. But you can’t access any of it without your off-ramp controller (your ISP), and they are fighting as hard as they can to be allowed to make decisions about what you are and are not allowed to see.
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Speeding Up a Sluggish Mac
13 Dec 2010 07:47 Filed in: Mac Hardware | Mac Software
Slow Mac issues are generally caused by one of three things: RAM over-utilization, too little free space on your hard drive or various, esoteric issues with system permissions and the like. It is undeniable that two of these three could almost certainly be helped by hardware upgrades, but it is also undeniable that there are likely things you can do to optimize the performance of the Mac you have rather than the Mac you might have someday in the future. That’s what this post will help with. So read on because even if you are planning on adding RAM or a bigger hard drive, there is no sense in using what you already have inefficiently.
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Don't Let Your Password Slow You Down
27 Aug 2010 07:24 Filed in: Mac Hardware
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Printers for College Students
16 Aug 2010 12:57 Filed in: College
The Tired Donkey is not usually one to create a post just to refer his readers to another site. But several circumstances have conspired to create an exception: (i) college is starting soon, (ii) college students are reading about Mac hardware and software on the Tired Donkey’s site,
Having perused the list and done some additional research, the Tired Donkey strongly recommends the Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901. Why? In order of importance: beautiful text printing, cheap black ink ($0.01 per page!), 150-sheet feeder tray for printing, wireless printing, scanning (with 50-sheet feeder), copying, touch screen. To get this incredible per-page price for black text, make sure you buy the 105XL high-yield black ink cartridge ($5.00 for 510 pages of printing) rather than the more expensive and less useful 100XL cartridge.
You will read in various reviews that you can get a printer that prints better photographs. That is undoubtedly true. But so what? This is a printer for college, dude. Don’t be an idiot. What you need is a printer that produces great text at a cheap price. And that’s this printer. So if you are in the market, consider it seriously; right now you can get one for around $200.00 including tax and shipping. But read over the other reviews in the MacWorld piece. Because, who knows, you may actually need a printer for college that excels at $0.15/page color photographs more than anything else. But probably not.