Here, let me google that for you. Yes, there are taxes, just like any other kind of property. The first two links in the search above give a good overview of these issues.

Hard decision whether to mod this or comment, so I chose to comment so I can correct the erroneous information here.

What you wrote is ABSOLUTELY INCORRECT. Intellectual property and intangible assets are absolutely part of one's estate (and also come into play in divorce proceedings, for that matter -- See the divorce of Tom Clancy) and are recognized as such under the law. If you disagree on a moral level with this practice, that's another matter, but to state that "it is not part of an estate" is spreading misinformation. I work at an IP consulting firm, and we are frequently asked to value intellectual works for use in estate planning. These can range from rights of publicity, to copyrights/copyrighted works, to trademarks, among other assets.

You say that "to consider intellectual works part of an estate diminishes human capital and is an insult to those who created it." I think you have this backwards. When the esteemed playwright George Abbott died, for example, his estate was left with the rights to his many copyrighted plays, which could then earn them royalties on performances. Similarly, after Marlon Brando's death, the demand to use his name and likeness did not immediately disappear. His heirs controlled his rights to publicity and had the power to decide when it was appropriate to use his voice or other personal aspects to endorse products for a fee. Don't you think that Marlon Brando would have wanted his legacy to continue to provide for his loved ones? Wouldn't it be more of an insult to George Abbott (whose "human capital" is at issue) to have his works just be taken away on the day of his death instead of allowing him to build something that could continue to benefit his family?

Copyright law may be totally frakked in its current iteration, but that is a completely separate issue. The fact is, people work to build an estate -- but this work does not always take the same form. Some people build corporations, invest is stocks, or gather cash; others create works of art. You would never just assume that a corporation should automatically become public because the owner died, so why should that novel or that play immediately lose all of its value to the owner? Somebody spent their life working on that (instead of pursuing other avenues of wealth accumulation) so those assets are what they have to pass along in their estate -- Or should everyone just give up creating original works to pursue entrepreneurial or big business goals so they can provide for their families after they are gone?

"Wing Flying" (using air resistance on wings to gain altitude) is not a particularly efficient way to gain altitude. We do it for human transportation because the altitudes we are talking about are negligible when compared to the lateral distance we want to cover. We might fly to 10,000 feet when covering 200 miles, for example, and possibly as much as 50,000 feet to cover a thousand miles. Using wings for lift are really only practical because flights are largely about covering horizontal distance, and the wings are really about covering horizontal distance as efficiently as possible. Not to mention wings are a really cheap and handy way to control descent so the aircraft can be reused (one would hope).

But any sort of rocket is going to need to go UP over 200 miles to develop any sort of orbit. The Space Shuttle is in "Low Orbit" which is around 200-350 miles. 250 miles equates to 1,320,000 feet. Even a transcontinental flight on an airplane never reaches a significant percentage of that altitude.

To get up to escape velocity, the most efficient way up is the one in which you encounter the least atmosphere and resistance. In other words, pretty much "straight up" for as long as you can with as few drag-inducing bits sticking out of the unit as possible. When you reach an altitude were wind resistance is not an issue, you can start adjusting your horizontal speed for an orbital entry.

But you don't want to waste a lot of time noodling around in low atmosphere because you'd burn up all of your fuel in aerodynamic drag, and you'd never have enough fuel to reach escape velocity.

If I want to find out about an Apple product, I'll go to apple.com. If I want to find out about a Microsoft product, I go to Wikipedia.

This isn't necessarily a problem. Sure, if you want to walk around Earth then you're going to be in a bit of a fix... But what if you plan on spending the rest of your days in space? What if it's a one-way trip?

I thought we'd already figured this bit out? All you have to do is spin the structure.

We don't need to.

When's the last time you saw somebody sitting out in a snowstorm waiting to mutate and grow an insulating fur coat? Around here we just but on a coat. We're human beings, we have brains, we can make and use tools.

That's the whole point of experiments like this one. We're not going to wait around for environmental forces to craft us into better organisms... We're going to identify the problems and fix them, just like we have for thousands of years. That's what we do.

I agree with you in general; however, I think it's important to note that quantity does not necessarily equal quality. The kids may be reading more during their time online, but if the bulk of that is communication with peers that doesn't utilize proper language, it may be counterproductive (or at least not beneficial to assimilating language rules). Sometimes using proper language and punctuation can even result in ridicule from peers because it's not "cool" to actually spell things out and use an apostrophe now and then. In addition, the more acceptable it is to let proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation fall by the wayside in a variety of contexts, the less incentive there is to actually learn and care enough to implement proper language rules -- even as you enter adulthood and the professional world. I work at an IP consulting firm that provides expert witness services in litigation so I am often privy to discovery that includes email traffic between CEOs and their employees. I've been absolutely flabbergasted at times by the amount of typos and spelling errors, inappropriate abbreviations, and just generally poor written communication skills exhibited by senior members of even Fortune 500 companies in supposedly formal communications. I don't profess to be perfect myself, nor do I expect it of others, but I do feel that my written communication skills are more developed because I make an effort to actually apply proper language rules rather than relying on the principle that people will know what I mean when I use approximations.

There are probably multiple errors in the passage above, but it's comparable to what I read online so it's ok... ;)

Lots of machines from that era had strange ways of storing data. A few used flip-flops as registers a bit later, but for main storage (at least, until magnetic core memory came in) they typically used something like that. Another popular method, for example, was to display something on a CRT, which caused a change in charge on the screen, and then read back the charge. The charge only lasted a fraction of a second, but it was long enough to draw the entire contents of the screen and then redraw it by reading back the charge.

If you visit Manchester University's computer science department then you'll see a 2KB magnetic core memory in one of the corridors. It's about the size of a wardrobe, and you can see how each individual bit was stored. The first computer my university bought used this kind of memory, and allocated 200 bytes to lookup tables for addition and multiplication. Neither of these were handled in hardware; if you wanted to add two numbers together, you looked up the address in the lookup table constructed by combining the two digits, read the result (if the overflow bit was set you then did the same process with a one and the result of the next digit) then moved on to the next digit. The machine used 6-bit bytes, each of which stored a decimal digit with some condition codes. Words were variable-length, with one of the values being reserved as an end-of-word marker. Everything was stored in little-endian format so that you could add arbitrary-length numbers by adding their digits together in pairs until you got to the end-of-word marker for one and then just copy the digits for the other. Adding two numbers together could take several hundred instructions; not an inconsiderable length of time given that this was an era when computer speeds were measured in thousands of instructions per second. Runtimes for nontrivial programs were measured in hours.

The article says that they were HP laptops, not Sony.

</obvious>

About four or five years ago, Texas A&M started experimenting with "class clusters" which is basically groups of students in the same major taking the same core classes specific to their discipline at the same time. The idea was to simplify scheduling and provide students with a consistent set of classmates. They even when so far mark certain groups of classes as "cluster-only." The problem was that non-clustered students got completely shafted come scheduling time. Since most of the core classes were designated for specific clusters, that left only one or two-sections for non-clustered students. To compound this, certain classes which were considered "core" for one major and considered elective for another major, even though the student needs that elective credit to move on. You ended up with engineering majors locked out of a number of sections of humanities classes, even though in Texas engineering majors need a certain number of humanities credits to graduate. It was quite a mess. I'm not really sure what the outcome of the experiment was, but the big lesson to take from here is that the Japanese-style system has to be all or nothing.

Uhm, you do realise that most of the mainstream media in the US is own by Rupert Murdoch, and other wealthy Republicans?

Not even close to true. He doesn't own ABC, CBS, or NBC. He does own Fox, one of four major networks. On cable, you have Fox News owned by Murdoch (very Republican-oriented, granted), CNN owned by Ted Turner (debatable), but the rest of the news channels aren't close to right-leaning in general. For newspapers, he owns the WSJ, which is the only prominent right-leaning paper, with the Washington Post and New York Times being the two most prominent newspapers in the country. They also happen to be *extremely* left.

So your big Republican conspiracy is 1 out of 4 major networks, one or two major cable news channels, and one major newspaper. That's a lot more than those that are clearly left-leaning. The network news tends to skew left, as do newspapers in major cities.

My downloads from iTunes and Amazon are almost exclusively free music.

Not to mention the "obvious exception" of free music available from a variety of sources under Creative Commons licenses. (Hint: If there are obvious exceptions, it's probably not appropriate to use the word "all.")

>>>Technically, you never truly 'own' property.

Property tax was invented by the Progressives, who would probably call socialists in today's terminology. There was a problem where rich people were buying land, saving it, and then selling it for profit. That drove-up land prices and made it difficult for poor or middle income citizens to buy land. The progressives/socialists came-up with the idea of property tax.

Basically the property tax is supposed to offset any profit, and thereby discourage speculation. As with most good ideas, it was perverted and now it's become a way to turn citizens into the modern-day equivalent of serfs. You rent the land rather than own it.

The worst type of property tax is in Virginia where you pay a tax on your car. Why? A car's not property - it's an appliance; it depreciates rapidly. There's no valid reason to charge an annual tax/tribute on a depreciating hunk of metal, anymore than you'd pay property tax on a refrigerator or a stove or a television.

Greedy politicians.

Except that James Cameron has been dreaming up this idea for going on a decade and a half. The Anime has only been in existance since it's conception in 2001 and wasn't on TV until 2005. James Cameron wrote a lite-script for Avatar in 1995.

The TechCrunch rebuttal to the points of Apple's letter is spot on, but the idea that somehow Google has power over the iPhone, or that Google Voice gives it more power, is nonsense. It's hard to believe Apple really thinks this, or that TechCrunch would accept it as a valid explanation. How does having iPhone users receive calls via their Google Voice number affect the iPhone overall at all? iPhone users still have to use AT&T for their calls? It no longer ties the user strongly to their iPhone phone number, but with number portability that represents no advantage for Apple or AT&T. Having Google manage your calendar and contacts doesn't make any difference to the iPhone in general. Google Voice may give Google more power over individual iPhone users, but not over the iPhone itself.

And all Apple would have left is the browser? No, Apple would still have the industry's most advanced, user-friendly handheld OS and probably a hundred thousand apps, including--if they turn out to popular enough to be a thread--Google Voice. If Google has any power over the iPhone, it stems only from their willingness to pull a Microsoft and withdraw those apps and technologies from the iPhone at some point in the future, such as when it comes time for Apple and Google to renegotiate their license for YouTube, maps, and search. But the flip side is equally true; there's no question that its to Google's advantage to be a prominent part of the smart phone platform likely to cell hundreds of millions over the next five years.

In short, I don't think we've heard the real rationale; certainly TechCrunch didn't provide a believable one. I think it's more likely that Apple perceives Google's calendar and contacts apps as a threat to Mobile Me, which does compete directly with Google. Or that Google Voice potentially interferes with something else Apple considers a unique advantage, perhaps something that they aren't even using yet but is in development. And finally, it's possible that Apple really isn't worried about Google Voice per se, but is worried about opening the door to other challenges to their "no duplication of built-in functionality" rule.

Google should not have complied. It should have fought back instead of folding like cheap lawn furniture. However, Google is like any other American corporation when it comes to deciding whether or not to set a very bad precedent: take the cheapest route and smoke pole like a Tijuana crack whore.

What Liskula Cohen did was game the system for ego gratification. Pure and simple. Google could have spotted this (I'm sure they have *some* intellegent people working there). Hell in fact the Judge in this case could have spotted this and told Ms. Cohen to grow up and stop acting like a narcissistic, spoiled little eleven year old. I'm almost positive that Cohen's attorney told her that the case was terribly weak. But no. Instead, they both 'presented' like a whipped omega baboon. Pathetic.

In the US, it is quite legal for us to call each other names and say awful things about one another. Follow any election cycle! Plenty of people snipe at political candidates from what effectively constitutes 'anonymity'. Virtually nobody tries to stop them either. Its a hot kitchen, the internet. Man/woman up or GTFO. Sounds simple and fair to me.

Also... There's this thing called Barratry. Most of the US legal system has forgotten that it exists.