Your crushing ideas intrigue me and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Yeaahhh, you need to work on your delivery.

How does your signing a waiver such as this, make your heirs party to some agreement (in the case of your death)?

Do you know if their co-opt clause has ever been tested?

Does Dallas currently spray for mosquitos, either by truck or aerially?

Houston has always sprayed by truck, and Austin sprays by truck, but a lot less than Houston.

No kidding. The summary quoted(?) this nugget: "...to overcome the limitations and inconvenience of QR codes, whose usage has greatly increased in the last few years."

I'd say that the reason usage QR codes has greatly increased in the last few years is because they are not so limited or inconvenient as the article asserts. The QR code may contain several types of information, but in a 2D bit array, you are inherently limited. QR codes are not a high-bandwidth transport, but even if all they contain is a vcard or URL, the URL is the gateway to larger content.

I like QR codes because they are inherently opt-in. Screw the NFC based ad network!

Exactly. What the article reports is that they detected various concentrations of caffeine in the ocean at various locations. No surprise there. Plastic bits are also in various concentrations about the world's oceans. The number of "sea beans" also varies along the eastern S. American coast (where many sea beans originate), up along the Gulf of Mexico and eastern US coast.

Since we're talking about caffeine, which is a stimulant for our bodies and IIRC many other mammals, what effect does caffeine have in aquatic creatures? At what concentrations do these effects begin? How can caffeine be reduced in the ocean? No answers here. But according to the article, the presence of caffeine is more of an indicator of the increased presence of other pollutants, such as prescription medicines, hormones, etc., which may indicate that water treatment practices are lacking.

I'm still waiting for our media (USA) to convert the important distances to some quantity of football fields.

I totally disagree. On the contrary, military spending is not a mere blip on the radar of our budget. According to http://www.usfederalbudget.us/federal_budget_actual, the *actual* defense budget was about 24% of the total budget between 2006-2011.

The three biggest spending areas in 2011 were defense (24%), health care (24%) and pensions (22%). Education was 3%.

Indeed, our military spending IS too large, as are numerous other programs. The US's finances are a disgrace. We desparately need to cut our budget and reduce spending. This is not sustainable.

Agreed. Multiple sample images would be great to see.

I'm afraid their phrase, "images taken at different times of day" is very imprecise. It's not like you can take images hour-to-hour of features on the moon and see significant changes. Since the moon rotates at 29.x days/rotation, obvious shadow changes (to our eyes) would only be observed by taking images Earth *days* apart. I'm surprised the BBC wrote this.

One thing I have enjoyed about Macs since starting to use them in the late 80's was the ease with which you could enter the "decorated" characters. The Option key is like the compose key on other keybds. Opt-: u gives a umlaut-u, Opt-* gives a bullet, Opt-' gives accents, etc.

On DOS/Windows one had to use Alt plus the num keys, and enter the actual character code. Alt-2,4,7 would give character #247. Pathetic.

"Generosity" was not the word I had in mind.

Actually, this story is the first volley in our unannounced plan to disseminate information through particular channels to identify leakers.

I'm looking at you, Agent 597 in Omaha.

I wish the summaries would include direct links to the interesting bits, rather than some random ad-fest blog entry.

The underlying tool for all of this is at https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm

And just to really finalize these toy numbers now that I know a few more things, FB currently has 2.14B shares, with cash on hand of about $8B. This yields $8/2.14 = $3.74/sh book value, again not counting other company assets such as IP. Thus a more proper stock value would be $7.43 (from parent post) + $3.74 = $11.17/sh.

I've been wondering what a fair value is -- *assuming* that FB is worth investing in at all, which is dubious at this point. But, for the sake of argument, let's say it is.

At IPO, the $38 was 107 times their annual earning, so that's roughly $0.35/share value, not counting their assets, IP, etc. Last I calculated, Apple had a P/E of 17, which is surprisingly low for a "hot tech property", but Apple has the earnings to fully support their valuation. During the past 3 years, FB has increased their revenues by 71% annually, or increasing it fivefold in this time (5x = 1.71^3). While I don't think that growth rate will continue, I do think it warrants a slightly higher P/E valuation of 20-25. Let's be generous and give 25. That in turn gives a valuation of $0.35*25 = $8.75/sh. No doubt these are hand-wavey arbitrary numbers here...but not unreasonable.

Last, my final adjustment is simply a value proposition. If I believe $8.75/sh is worth it (AND if their business model matures), then I need a buffer for a profit, at least 15%. So, my buy-in price is (1-0.15)*8.75 = $7.43.