The point is not the database structure, it's collecting the data to populate it. Large tax companies have teams of hundreds of people that keep track of all the local tax laws, and charge a large amount of money selling the data to large retailers. It's not trivial to keep the laws of every 10,000 person municipality in the database up to date.

But but... it didn't give us any extra light for farming. We have the same amount of light. It just made farmers feel better, I guess?

This. I have never understood either. We're not changing the amount of time each day. If you need more light, change your hours. There is a very good image here that helps to explain (the purple one): http://www.thefullwiki.org/DST

Well, kindof. Not necessarily, it depends on the legal wording in your homeowner's policy: http://www.merlinusmonroe.com/2011/01/02/insurance-policies-and-forcible-entry/ IANAL

When 99% of laptops have touchscreens, they will be cheaper than non-touch screens. Economies of scale and all that.

On a serious note, what kind of strange issues will this create with HR? Am I working in the office or not? If not, why do they say I'm not? I personally think these things are pretty hokey, but it will be interesting to see how they jive with a real office and the people in it.

Entrepreneurs have also put in a lot more personal capital. If the manager fails, even if he loses his job, he gets a new job. If the entrepreneur fails, he loses his life savings often.

The difference is that economies of scale are extremely important in the electronic device world. It's easy to drop $100 million on R&D when you can spread it across 10 million device sales. If you're only going to sell them to ten people, then you need to sell them for $10 million each just to cover R&D costs. With Ostrich boots, the "R&D" cost is one tailor for one afternoon to make the pattern, maybe a couple hundred bucks in "R&D". That means they can produce very limited quantities and still turn a profit.

Out of around 130 million different books in the world, only about 20-25 million of them have been scanned. Also, a book and the content are different things. A rare 400-year old book has a lot of intrinsic value even if the text is available in digital format. So storing physical objects in a library will be with us for a long time.

And to what extent do you avoid cutting costs? Avoid 99% of failure scenarios? 99.9%? 99.9999%? How would you justify where you cut the line? It's not a simple answer.

And where would you consider to be a "safe" area in the US that has no storms, no earthquakes, etc? And is also somewhat accessible and relatively close to a large population center?

"Current page-by-page review processes are unsustainable in an era of gigabytes and yottabytes. New and existing technologies must be integrated into new processes that allow greater information storage, retrieval, and sharing. We must incorporate technology into an automated declassification process" So this article isn't about changing the classification levels, etc. It's about making a computer decide what should be classified or not. Does anyone think it is a good idea to have a computer decide which information is sensitive, based on some kind of context analysis or something? This is someone trying to sell to the government. It just has to be-

So instead of Google being able to track me, Duck Duck Go can track me. I guess it's a question of which company you trust more?

America, or the United States of America? "America" is two continents...