Hey - go light on the ACs here. It's easy to mistake Netflix and network. They both start the same way and it's hard to imagine a media delivery service surviving which doesn't function like the first ;)

Now there's a loaded question. Which cause would you identify as "root"? I can see many causal factors: parental responsibility, cultural priority of education, teacher pay (i.e. competitive with industry/business talent pools), outcome based rewards/penalties, curriculum cost/availability, politicization of academia, fundamental conflict between 9th, 10th, amendments and DOE, etc... or something else?

Sure, but the pipeline has been declined in the past by people in WA for the simple reason that they've already declined to divert water for their own use (The Columbia Basin irrigation project has zones - and there's plenty of farmers who live in zones that aren't guaranteed water that would really like it). The residents of WA have already decided to limit their own consumption for ecological reasons - I don't see them sacrificing their streams, rivers, and ecology just because CA has poorly managed its own resources. If the drought doesn't break and CA doesn't get a handle on it's resources - we're about to see some modern ghost towns.

Encrypt everything! Bummer about the decryption man pages...

You mean like Sindarin or Quenya? Tengwar is aesthetically pleasing and I think it has a Unicode section already reserved for it.

Ever hear of a mutual fund, 401k, 403b, IRA, etc... When an auto-trade algorithm hits an action point - lots of people far removed from the system are affected. The effects can be quite serious when one trader's algorithm triggers another's... etc. There have been some very bad days on the stock market triggered by such events.

1% in a day is more than enough for a pump and dump! I'd love a portfolio which could make me 1% per day. Generally I'm happy with anything above 7% in a year. Good news here is that the increased volume didn't trigger additional artificial pumping by other auto-buyers.

Yeah - they'd have to skate between the government and investors, and I'd bet that's a razor edge. Subsidiaries wouldn't protect someone as they'd have to pay on their "gains" based off of the main corps. "loss". Off shore holdings wouldn't work either since that's still going to be reflected in the corporations market value. The main philosophical problem is taxing what's already been taxed, unless you only tax based on the change in market valuation (also possible, but more volatile).

Absolutely correct. Just like a good pecan pie, nobody lets a pile of money get stale on the counter - it all goes somewhere. Finance is zero sum - everything else if figuring out the optimal way of getting work out of that pie before it's processed and flushed. If you do it wrong you either have a situation where the baker doesn't have enough energy to make more pie or the baker gets fat while everyone else starves - at least until people can't afford pie anymore, then the baker starves too.

Not a bad idea, but you'd have to find a way to tax vertical monopolies/integration. A value added tax system may help with that... but I've never figured out how that works with service companies (i.e. what's the valuation of entropic reduction?).

I just wish the US would get on board with this - or something like it. For public companies perhaps a flat corporate tax on market valuation...? In the current system companies have to evade taxes to be competitive with the rest of the tax evaders (i.e. everyone) - but if we close the loop-holes (globally) then corporations can become good citizens again (and help police their peers WRT tax evasion).

Wow - a limited monopoly for a service necessary for modern life like telephone, power, water, and sewer? Sounds like a public utility to me.

And it's the idiot bully's trick at that; the clever ones don't provoke the playground monitors.

And now, I would like to sincerely and heartily thank Verizon for the initial lawsuit provoking the playground monitor that made net neutrality a reality. I strongly encourage additional attention and noise to the issue for full on public utility regulation. Here's to moving the US into a First World nation with First World utilities like power, water, and real broadband - wired and wireless.

This is the problem inherent with a small sample size. For years everyone thought Temple of Doom was the outlier and when another in that vein came out they also called it an outlier - but that makes two outliers out of four. However, the larger the sample size the more representative an average will be of the series. So as much a fan of the series that I am, I must objectively conclude that the series is of less quality than I'd previously thought. I don't have a problem with that. While I appreciate gourmet desserts, I'm not so stuck on the purity of culinary art that I can't enjoy fast food milkshakes. I think the same applies to Dr. Jones and to Decker as well. That said, I'm hoping for sprinkles and a cherry.

You've got a good point, but the implementation of said conditions have a different intrinsic suspicion. Discussions on encryption will only get you put on the NSA watchlist along with everyone else. Conversations about OPSEC may get you a little bit more. For example - getting revealed as someone who sends encrypted messages to your friends is either in that category of nerdy or slightly suspicious. Getting revealed as someone who passes parcels to others via dead drops will probably get your door kicked in by the DEA shortly followed by a long line of other three letter groups.

PS - I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to use the word "intrinsic" without thinking of eating leprechauns or quantum mechanics. Does anyone else have this problem?