What a minute. I thought the USA was all about land of the free and personal liberty and free speech etc. Are you saying that anyone found on public property after dark who can't prove a permanent address would be FORCED to spend the night in a former prison? If you instead wanted to stay true to your founding principals, why not just invest in more public restrooms. Then who cares if someone is sleeping under a tree. They won't stink and your doorways won't smell of urine.

Sooo you might want to rethink the whole privatize everything including prisons plan.

Yes sometimes automated systems fail. So I wrote an automated audit system that sends up alerts in case the automated systems fails. But then I worried about what would happen if both my automated system and my auditor failed, so I wrote a system to monitor the auditor. But I was in a nasty situation once on an ocean fish boat where three systems failed or had issues at the same time and it was really bad. So I think I will write an auditor to audit my auditor monitor.

Remembering passwords is a bad idea. Use a vault.

The end result is a sort of arms race in American car design. Everyone has a a personal incentive to drive something heavier for their own safety, but everyone would be safer if, collectively, we didn't do that.

Which is yet another example of how badly your culture is broken.

On a related note...The US government asked the Canadian Government to tell Canadian banks to turn over all banking information about a list of names they provided. They said it was to catch tax cheats. The Canadian Government said "Sure as long as you do the same for us". The reply was that the US has a law against that so would not comply.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

So I am curious about what would happen in if the shoe was on the other foot. I am fairly confident that "American Exceptionalism" (aka double standard / hypocrisy) would kick in and the US would rant about the sovereignty of their jurisdiction

USA = Hubris.

I think you only have half the story there. I think the full story would be that developed nations should embrace a carbon tax as a way of subsidizing renewables and account for the true cost of carbon based fuels, whereas the 3rd world should develop enough so that they can create the conditions to eventually do the same. This was called converge and contract. I think it is still the working plan.

The supposed crisis that your talking about have lots of causes. Aging populations, and unrealistic expectations.

And also lots of well funded propaganda by for profit private health care providers. They try to fan flames of discontent to produce a ground swell of support against public health care. They should pack up their suitcases and go back to America.

Ditto to what he said but from here in Canada.

RSS is so much bigger then one stupid feed aggregator. To strat with there has to be dozens and dozens of aggregators. Secondly I am a huge user of RSS and I have never used a feed aggregator. Almost every website I make pulls in some content via RSS and/or makes its content available via RSS. My podcatcher uses RSS and I subscribe to feeds manually that I know already know about. I reject with prejudice the very idea that one aggregator going away would have any impact at all on RSS usage.

Hmm well to my knowledge the IKEA name and logo is owned by a family trust registered as a not-for-profit in the Netherlands. this "non-profit" licenses the name and logo to the chain of stores and thereby shifting profits from the stores in the country they operate in to the low tax rate of the not-for-profit. Family members are paid a generous amount for serving on the board of this not-for-profit.

So screw them for gaming the system and for clogging our landfills with glued cardboard crap.

Spreadsheets are just a part of the Darwinism of applications. Some sharp fellow within an organization things its important to start tracking some data point or another. Maybe it gets ignored and forgotten. Other times it grows as other people see its utility and start making requests to track related data points. Eventually you get a multi-worksheet or even multi-workbook spreadsheet masquerading as an application. At some point it becomes far to hard to maintain or understand so they contract out someone like me who moves it to a relational database with a web front end. Everyone is happy!

This work forms a major part of my work load don't fuck with it!

Also, it is appropriate. It would be inefficient to develop a proper relational database application on the whim that some set of data points might be useful. Spreadsheets are a proving ground, and important stage in the life cycle of an application.

Firstly, if a question is being repetitively asked then it is a design flaw. Move the button or make the process easier to understand, ask for feedback from the people posting the question. Second, when the wrong answer to a question can create expensive problems for me, maybe I would rather get the answer from someone who is SUPPOSED to have the right answer rather then someone who might just be talking out of their ass. Third, nothing makes me more satisfied with a product then getting great support when I need it. I recently purchased a small consumer NAS and was having trouble with installation. Considering the failures I had with my previous NAS I was about ready to return it assuming that it was yet another hunk of junk. Instead I called the tech support number. To my utter amazement with almost no waiting I talked to a human on the same continent as me who resolved my problem immediately by pointing out a step I missed in the installation process. It was a stupid error on my part and nothing was wrong with their instructions or their product. So from now on I will recommend "Buffalo" brand NAS products to anyone that asks (they are fast as well btw). Support can be the most valuable part of your sales team. Sales people spend a lot of money to get in front of a customer and to educate them about their product. Support calls are your opportunity to learn how to make your products better and to win customers for life. B-School classes really should teach the importance of support departments as a sales and branding resource.

$26,832 is a paltry amount of money, just buy them back

"Rapid Price Changes are part of a infantile system" What? Why? Sounds like something people tell themselves in the absence of evidence. BitCoins are a commodity.
The supply is fixed or grows at a predictably rate.
All price fluctuations are due to speculations and hype.
The only value they have is what some fool is willing to pay you for them.
I can't believe that it has gone on this long.

Currencies are backed by the government and they HAVE to accept it for payment of taxes. Gold has other commercial uses and value. What do bitcoins have? They have fashion, greed,and hope. The ENTIRE reason we have central banks with fiat currency is for price stability. Your trying to tell me that somehow magically bitcoins will achieve price stability? More likely the moment that they lose volatility is the moment the cease having any value at all.