As far as I'm concerned, if it's gravitation is enough to pull it into a sphere, it's a planet. Yes, I'm happy counting Luna and a bunch of other satellites
Then wouldn't our very own moon be a planet and not a moon by that definition?
Most people are ignorant that Earth's moon has a proper name: Luna, or that the term satellites refers to anything that orbits another body. Man-made satellites have recently become the primary definition of satellite but the original definition is still very much valid.
Another interesting fact: Earth's sun's proper name is Sol.
What if the first thing that shows up in a google search about you is a court filing about someone else that shares the same name as you? Any HR department that takes a google search at face value isn't doing its job.
I think the "right to be forgotten" idea has good intentions but the problem is similar to the RIAA's resistance to the internet. A better reaction would be to give an alternative to people treating search engines and random internet sites as authoritative sources of information and instead give people something that they can trust that includes all relevant information. It could be similar to a credit score or a government run webpage that includes every individual's public information.
Riddle me this... do you want the US postal service to run your internet?
People tend to hate comcast more then the Post Office, so... yes?
The problem with requiring someone to hold onto shares for a specific amount of time is that it doesn't prevent HFT but instead adds a barrier to entry. If I buy 5 shares of IBM but then must wait a week before I can sell those 5 shares what prevents me from selling these other 5 shares I bought last week? If there was a company that held several stocks that were readily trade able other people could contract selling the shares & replacing them for a nominal fee. This would be similar to shorting stocks.
One possible solution would be to trade shares on a fixed schedule, ex: every minute but not between minutes. This would provide everyone the same amount of time to react to the information. The difficult part would be deciding between who wins the bids, since time is an unfair determining factor that leaves some other metric like price bid or bidder's history or a random element.
And why is it that you are owed free content?
And why is it that this content shouldn't be free? It seems to me that the spreading of the spirit of international cooperation and friendly competition should have as few barriers as possible.
I've never cared about the Olympics but I could easily see an argument that access to the Olympic games is a citizen's right. However I am enough of a realist to recognize that money quickly comes into the argument. Organizing the games, advertising, etc costs a lot of money and that the majority of that comes from selling the broadcast rights to different companies. But the price that NBC paid for the rights is tiny compared to the USA Federal budget. The USA could pay the license rights, broadcast the content, and probably break even while still providing access to every citizen.
Then the content would be "free".
As several people have pointed out Amazon appears to be applying the correct sales tax. The fact that the resident of NJ doesn't understand his own sales tax demonstrates how complex sales tax can be. Every state, county, and city can have their own sales tax laws which have to all be correctly applied based upon arbitrary characteristics. A state can have a tax rate of 4% with an additional 3% for prepared foods and then a city in that state could have a 2% tax on sugary treats. What counts as a prepared food or sugary treat? That will vary just as much and may not even follow common sense, tomatoes have even been legally defined as vegetables for tax reasons.
A national sales tax could make a lot things a lot simpler but would force states to relinquish a lot of power as every business that could use the national sales tax instead of the local taxes would. States with high sales tax would see a large revenue drop while residents of states without a sales tax would be penalized. I could see brick and mortar stores jumping through hoops to selectively use the lower tax rate, if the local tax rate is higher then the national one they'd "order" the item for the customer and then "deliver" it from the backroom.
The best solution I can see is if the federal government runs a sales tax database that every retailer can query. The retailer submits the location, price, item, and some relevant descriptors: "luxury", "food", "service", "book" and the API spits back what the sales tax should be for the item. It's then beholden to the states to keep their relevant data updated. The states would be limited in how creative their sales taxes could be as the software would need to support it but the states wouldn't need to cede power to the federal government.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fSqFWcb4rE
They have a video camera that takes frames faster than light can travel, so they have the technology. Problem is it requires the subject to be ungodly bright.
No. No they don't. They have a "camera" with a very fast shutter speed. Then they take millions of pictures of different laser pulses and stitch them together to create an animation that mimics a single laser pulse.
I know that the comments on youtube are pretty poor and that most people rarely read articles but this is a really cool video and if you can't be bothered to understand what you're looking at then I feel sorry for you.
Physician: One upon whom we set our hopes when ill and our dogs when well. -- Ambrose Bierce