Money is nominally a store of the value of people's labor(*). That's why we donate money now: we're giving the "liquid" form of our labor to a charity group, so that they can directly buy the products and labor to fill a need.

The existance of Google's competition directly refute your idea. It's private money being staked by Google and the team sponsors that made this price possible. Even governments have to use taxed money: moving the labor from those taxed so that the people in NASA/ESA/etc. can get fed. Without some way to "move" people's labor efficiently, you can try the North Korea approach (a country of slave labor), but we can all see how efficient that is.

A lot of people have come up with alternate economies, and most just call money by some other term. The rest usually just starve.

(*) In a fractional-reserve system like ours, where money gets "created" when it's borrowed, money is really a promise of future labor instead of a store of past labor. This makes a lot of the characteristics of the current economy a lot easier to understand. (IMHO, you can argue that money is an energy proxy, and that human energy (i.e. labor) will soon be less valuable than other kinds of energy, but that's an entirely different topic.)

Apple has $90 billion in actual cash value, but it couldn't offer most of it in a dividend.

Why? Most of that $90 billion is held offshore. To offer a dividend, Apple would have to repatriate that money, and that will kick in an automatic tax (about 30% off the top). Then, to issue the dividend, Apple pays another tax. Also, the income is taxable capital gains for its stockholders as well. By the time Apple stockholders take the dividend to the bank, they're down to somewhere around 20% of the original cash.

If Apple wants to reward stockholders, it could buy back shares overseas. Normally, I hate stock buyback plans, but this is one of the few times it would make sense.

In the meantime, you have $6 to $7 a gallon gas and thousand dollar a month food bills. Anyone who has attempted to save for their retirement has just been turned from a reasonably self-sufficient member of society to standing in line at the food banks and freezing to death because they can't afford $400-$600 a month to heat or cool their house.

This still doesn't stop us from borrowing either, nor does it fix the problem of Social Security and Medicare. The government will now be forced to either double its current budget, or do half of what it's been doing. You get all of the pain of government cuts, and you destroy the middle class and the old. Sounds like a win-win to me [/sarcasm].

Under copyright laws, it's true that she (probably) can't win a lawsuit. However, if he asks permission, he can be listed as writer or as co-writer (I forget which) of the parody song lyrics, and therefore get his share of the lyrics profits from the album and royalties from airplay, in addition to his "singer" royalties. Without permission, he cannot get any songwriter money, and has to live on just the "singer" share. The singer share isn't enough to live on (and Al has said so before in documentaries ), so that written permission is financially essential (beyond any moral issues).

Consider the old joke of the drummer in the back of the plane, while the lead singer (and main songwriter) flies with two seats in first class (one for the guitar). This is why bands like Genesis are so fastidious about keeping all songwriting "in house": the temptation for your people to want more than your 1/x of the pie is too tempting.

The moral problem is not that Terry Pratchett wants to kill himself. That is between him and God. Assuming that he has finalized his estate, he's welcome to off himself and suffer any consequences that might avail him in the life hereafter.

However, Terry Pratchett is a coward. He doesn't want to commit suicide. He wants someone else to kill him when it gets so bad he can't do it himself. That is the slippery slope that we want to avoid; having other people decide when you are no longer fit to live.

Be a man about it Terry. Take a knife and stab yourself. Get drunk and go swimming in a deep, cold lake. Overdose on pills. Get a shotgun; go in style (to quote Hania Lee). Just don't ask someone else to commit excused murder because you don't have the guts to bother to do the deed yourself.

Yup, you're a troll. You are also ignorant.

High school taught me that the jocks were invincible (even when they lose), that tenure is more important than competence, and that it's easy to snow HS English teachers with BS. I was very lucky to have one brilliant teacher who told me "you're a big fish in a small pond; don't dare think you'll just take college." (He was right; I lost a National Merit full ride fair and square.)

OTOH, Number One Son has more friends than I did at the time, is doing better academically, and is generally a more rounded individual than I was. His sister is slightly ahead of his stats at the same age...

There are homeschooling "protect my little darlings at all cost", although in my experience they tend to end up more at heavily-religious private schools. The homeschoolers I know have trouble with keeping the socialization limited, not with never getting it.

> made-for-TV movies that were so shitty that they made Roger Corman spin in his grave.

Considering that Roger is still alive, that's a great accomplishment.

Even worse, to quote Wikipedia about Roger:

Corman most recently produced the 2010 films Dinoshark and Dinocroc vs. Supergator for the Syfy cable television channel. Dinoshark premiered on March 13, 2010. Sharktopus, his latest Syfy production, had premiered in September 2010.

You have more strawmen than Kansas.

Shooting someone to settle an argument is murder. There is one or two jurisdictions in the US that allow a person to defend property (absence the threat of force (aka "your money or your life")) with deadly force, but they are rare and IMHO wrong.

The US has more gun deaths because we have more murderers. We have more knife deaths per capita in the US than Canada or the UK. More people per capita in the US want to kill and hurt people than in Canada. Why? There are a lot of possible reasons, but I won't start to speculate.

Israel hands out fully automatic weapons. The Swiss keep automatic weapons in every household. Neither has our murder rate, so it's not just the guns.

I will paraphrase John Lott: More Americans legally defend themselves from deadly harm using firearms than the total number of non-justified deaths (accidents, manslaughter, etc.) and shootings. By this count, guns are a net positive for the US.

If anyone committed cruelty, it's the homeowner by abandoning the pets and not paying for their protection as well as his own.

Animals are not people. It is negligence to force a human being to risk his own life solely to rescue an animal.

Entering a burning building is not safe. We have elevated the process from nearly 100% fatal to X% fatal, but X is still well above 0. Asking a person to accept the X risk for the life of an animal is ridiculous. And yes, I would think so even if the owner had been paying his fee.

Hospitals are legally exempt from the part of contract law forbidding contracts under duress. You can't say "But I was dying, they MADE me agree to this" for them.

If you pull up to the Last Chance Gas Station in Death Valley, and they want you to sign a contract to get the gas you need to get back to civilization, you may be under duress. No court in the land would allow anything outrageous in the terms.

A contract to fight the fire would work the same way. It would be nearly impossible to enforce a monetary judgement of any serious amount when the contract is signed under duress.

Don't forget collection. Hospitals lose an outrageous percentage of their non-insured accounts receivable to failure to collect. A fire department would likewise lose 30 to 60 percent of their "in-progress" bills.

This person is just lucky that his stupidity was costly, and not fatal.

Turn them in. You complain about "someone" not doing your job to fix a problem in your family (ok, your ex-family). Furrfu.

Even the most homeschool-friendly of states (such as Kentucky) allow state officials of one sort or another to investigate serious cases of educational neglect. In Kentucky, the local Director of Pupil Personnel does so (and (illegally) so do social workers). Give the officials probable cause, and they can find these people, require a written curriculum that matches state guidelines, and then arrest for truancy when that doesn't happen.

I personally prefer "lax" homeschool laws because Kentucky (at least) is notorious for having terrible school districts who start going broke because good parents pull out their kids (you know, the ones who pay per seat but don't cost much). Said districts then try to punish the good parents beyond what Kentucky law allows. OTOH, parents of troubled kids who pull their kids out instead of facing expulsion or "prison school" are encouraged to go, just to get their monsters out of the system.

I found a deal last week on the Brother HL-4040CDN (built-in Ethernet, color, duplexer, PCL 6, 500 sheet tray option, etc.) at OfficeMax, $279. For some reason, OfficeMax was showing it as discontinued last Wednesday, so the manager at the store sold me his display unit for an extra $28 off. Looks like they've got it back in stock now, for $399. IMHO, that's still a bargain, just out of the price range I could justify.

Pros:
* Built like a tank. Everything is built well (no little bits of plastic designed to break off).
* All the main consumables (drums, paper feed, etc.) are field-replacable.
* Toner cartridges are easy to refill.
* Standard PCL6.

Cons:
* As heavy as a tank. Plan on two-person carries.
* 64M of memory isn't a lot for a color printer. Scrounge out or buy a PC-133 SO-DIMM (laptop) and put in it first thing. I had a G4-era 512M SO-DIMM that it loves.
* 250-sheet tray is wimpy for a printer in this price range. Go on, take the extra inch, and make us a 500-sheet tray.
* According to the intertubes, printing Envelopes is an exercise in frustration. If you print lots of envelopes, go get something else.
* PCL 6 only. That's annoying, Postscript 3 should be an option there. (I haven't checked to see if it's there and hidden or not.)

Brother has end-of-lifed the 4040CN (non-duplexer), so if you don't need the duplexer, you might find a bargain.

I've not used it a lot yet (my big printing starts tonight or tomorrow, probably), but it really looks like a nice printer that's aimed for a 100k lifetime at least.

One strange thing: There is a Brother 4050CDN that fit most of the 4040CDN feature set, but appears to be UK only. The manual shipping with the 4040CDN says there is a 4040CN, a 4050CDN, and a 4070CDW (wireless). It claims the 4050CDN has Postscript and can take the 500 sheet add-on tray, and had a parallel interface. Brother is correcting some of their web site stuff showing the 4040CDN and 4070CDW, but the manuals are a strange change for Brother. They are usually much better at details than that. (It also lends credence to my first thought: they turned on duplexing on the 4040CN using software changes only.)

You don't give us a hint about your campus, but I'm sure that they have some form of backup system. Tivoli Storage Manager is big, bulky, and contrary, but in the hands of a paranoid pessimist (like our campus's TSM admins), it handles huge amounts of data and handles multiple copies all over creation. The systems I admin (AIX, SAP, DB2) regularly push 2T a day directly to an 8 drive LTO-3 library, while others are backing up to the 12 drive IBM "Jaguar" library in a different part of campus.

Check out main campus IT. At worse, you might have to buy them some LTO tapes or pay a per-meg fee, but you'll probably find a well-designed system that you don't have to maintain.

(If you do use TSM with Macs, go to the 6.1 client. it's a LOT better than 5.3 on the Mac. Also, run the first backup by hand. The client has memory consumption issues sometimes on the first backup.)