Investors do throw a lot at those companies - but mostly to cover running expenses.

The billions they use to buy up other companies come mostly by using shares, valued at a certain amount. E.g. a smallish company issues say 10,000 shares, sells 100 of them at $100 each, raising $10,000 cash. The rest of the stock, those 9,900 shares, are booked at $990,000 total.

Next thing you hear, company A buys up company B. They use 5,000 of their shares to pay for it, valued at $500,000. So they buy the company for $500,000! Or do they? Well, the ones that accept those shares now have a share in the new company - but good luck selling them for cash at $100 each...

That's what Facebook et.al. are doing. Just add a bunch of zeros to the numbers above, I kept it simple for readability. Now would our example company go bust, they may wipe out $1,000,000 in value, but investors stand to lose only $10,000. So nothing much lost, really. Makes it easy to inflate bubbles, easy to pop them, and all with little impact to the economy at large.

This of course in contrast to the recent banking crisis, where real money was lost. Lots of it.

That's done all the time. And then they're let out an hour a day or so to walk around a slightly larger space (like the Orca's get to a bigger pool to perform tricks), and get some exercise.

This is what's called "prisons". Humans generally don't seem to like it, but they also don't live that much shorter inside a prison than outside (it's suggested that it cuts lifetime to about a quarter of natural lifetime, which for humans would mean most prisoners should be dead within 20 years behind bars).

Oh sure, and those with the high gun ownership rates and absence of government are the best places to do business, of course!

Sex is not the problem - the Africa is the fastest growing continent in the world, by far! We really don't have to provide that. On the contrary, that's something you'd want to slow down. Or at least educate the population on - where the Internet has a great role top play again. Oh, and the churches as well. The "no sex before marriage" moral isn't all that bad. Especially if combined with proper sex education and the provision of contraceptives and condoms as "second best" option.

Anything I had for the last 15 years or so has been booting from USB just fine. And anything older than ten years is probably not suitable for this purpose anyway, and there are plenty of younger disused computers out there so you don't need so really old ones.

Drivers is usually not much of a problem when talking about Linux. It comes with drivers for all common and lots of less common hardware included, and older (even legacy) hardware tends to be supported best - this in contrast indeed to the latest and greatest hardware.

For a large part of Africans, those problems have been solved long time ago (if they every really existed to begin with). That's the part of Africa this project is useful for - and likely by pushing up the standard of living of those Africans, there'll be a trickle-down effect to other parts of the continent. Overall more and overall better paying jobs means more people can get to work, and those that work get better income, which hopefully is self-reinforcing.

The best help for those countries is to help them to help themselves, and helping them improve their Internet access and computer literacy is one of those ways. Sending large quantities of free food and clothing is great for emergency relief, after that it's becoming destructive (as it kills off any local food/clothing production).

There is a major difference between most African countries and most Asian countries, and that is a strong, stable government. This as political stability is a requirement for businesses to thrive. In too many countries, larger companies need their own private army to protect their factories. You don't need that in China, or even Myanmar. Those countries are far more stable than most African countries. (note: in this argument I don't care about WHAT KIND OF government there is, just that it is STABLE).

Secondly, China alone has a far larger population than the whole of Africa. And even China is currently suffering from serious labour shortages, with factories not being able to take on more orders as they don't have the people to manufacture them.

I agree with you that Africa is a great candidate to become the next low-cost manufacturing hub, however first they'll have to get their politics in order. A stable government, that is firmly in power, and that rules the whole country, not just the big cities. Factories need space, they're not in the cities, they're out of the cities. Without proper safety there, and at least a half-decent protection of land ownership, it's a no-go.

You just explain why people watch only such a small subset of channels.

For you the Spanish channels may not be interesting, for someone else they may be all they watch.

And be glad that Amazon is not good enough for all of us! They're monopolistic enough already. Try to imagine a world where the only place to buy stuff is Amazon (and, where the only place someone can sell stuff, is Amazon). Just the though of it scares me.

Somehow I have the feeling that if a nuke detonates, that is powerful enough to produce an EMP that causes a blackout in the entire USA, the EMP will be low on the list of things to worry about. That is, assuming you survive the initial blast long enough to even realise there is a nation-wide blackout.

Of course. I have no idea where you'd get the idea it's done the other way around.

Just check out TFA, for example. Alibaba is currently estimated to be worth about US$153 bln. That is based on their IPO work and other analyses, and has nothing to do with Yahoo's stake in the company as such. So the 24% of Yahoo in that comes to almost $37b (which happens to be just a little less than the total market cap of Yahoo itself). That's how this valuation of Yahoo's stake is done, not the other way around.

The main thing of your political system that needs to be fixed is the lack of choice, i.e. you need more political parties. Like all real democracies in this world have.

I've mis-used databases just as you describe. And continue to do so. That's fine, I'm an amateur, and I never needed to handle databases larger than a couple thousand rows. I could probably get away with tens or hundreds of thousands of rows before running into problems.

Now if I were to develop something that needed a billion rows - that's a different story, and I do know my current approach won't work and I'd have to learn a lot about databases to pull it off. And submitter is obviously trying to do that (or at least something that needs a few rows and hoping it grows larger than Facebook and Google combined, so he needs scalability). Also I believe submitter doesn't really know what he's talking about.

If you really need to be able to handle that kind of data sets, and have even just a subset of the skills needed, you don't come to Slashdot for advice. You'd know who to ask - a friend or colleague who does just that.

So submitter may have big dreams, he almost certainly doesn't have the skills to have even a fighting chance of making it. And with that I don't need the actual database management skills, but the skills of knowing where your weaknesses are, knowing who can fill those gaps, and asking those people (maybe by having a discussion over a beer, or by hiring them outright).

If you want any viewers - more than just the people involved in making the movie and their close friends - you don't have much choice but to go the YouTube route.

These claims can only be proven true or false in court - which means one way or another the accused infringer will have to go to court. A simple counter claim does not invalidate the original request, as the counter claim can be just as invalid as the original claim. So for a DCMA takedown notice to be proven false, you'd need a takedown notice, then a counter claim, followed by a law suit where the copyright holder (the person whose content was incorrectly taken down) manages to win a judgement in his favour.

Besides that it will be hard to find a copyright holder to go through all this (and what are three judged false notices on half a million correct, i.e. undisputed, ones?), it's going to take years before judgements are granted, considering how slow the judiciary normally works.

The professor is addressing his students on a professional basis - he's getting paid for it - so there's clearly financial gain in play.

In his teaching he points out additions to the text, possible omissions, insights that have changed since the printing of the book (e.g. Pluto is not a planet any more). He gives the students the patches (bits of information) to add to their text books ("cross out 'nine', replace by 'eight'; cross out 'Pluto' from the list of planets and add it to a new category called 'dwarf planets'.").

The fact that one is done by computer, the other by hand, shouldn't change anything.