You are under no ethical obligation not to ask for what you want. So you should ask. You do need to be careful, as other mentioned, not to overplay your hand. You don't want to sour your relationship, no matter what the answer is. Being in a position of being important to continuing operations is something you should definitely make use of (again, as other said, to the extent that it really is true). It may feel slimy because you generally wouldn't do it to your friends, but this is business. Your friends look out for you in a reciprocal way. In business, the only one looking out for you is you. I behooves you to do a dry run of your request and reasoning with a friend before heading to the "main office". Also, don't assume the answer is no. That will be self-fulfilling and puts you on adversarial terms right away. Assume in your language and tone that you are asking for something that makes sense for both parties.

You get a whole different set of comments depending on which selections you make in the post. Awesome.

You wrote my reply for me, nearly word for word.

This? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gumstix aka http://www.gumstix.com/ All models appear to have SD card readers.

What jumps out at me are the increasing disparities. In 1810, the income disparity is somewhere around a factor of 10. In 2009, it is well over 100. In 1810, the difference between the lowest and highest life expectancy is about 15 years. In 2009 it is around 35 years.

The creditors don't have any claims now, so the company can do whatever it wants. The terms of the arrangement will dictate what happens if the company goes under. If the arrangement effectively cedes control of the domain name (in practice or in fact), then the domain name was a priori not a valuable asset. If someone is a creditor now, and they don't like that, they should get out while the gettin' is good.

Of course there are resource limits. "Unlimited growth" is a reasonable thing to talk about *now* because of two facts, below. So, yes, we're limited in our physical resources, but until we are using them maximally efficiently, there's lots of room for economic growth. It may be debatable how long we have until we start to hit physical limits, but it is very likely not this year, nor 10 years from now, nor even 30 years from now. (Look up world population in Wikipedia for projections.)

1. Economic activity is proportional to population size (usually). So as long as the world's population keeps growing, the economy can keep growing. (And as an aside, I have always interpreted economists' talk about growth to mean: "keeping up with the population". Doing so makes all the talk about growth seem more reasonable.)

2. Economic activity, and hence growth, is not only a measure the use of resources, but a measure of the efficiency with which we use those resources. We have lots of room for increased efficiency. One real-world example is the vast underutilization of a vast portion of the world's population.

You can even have economic growth without any increase in physical resource usage. Here's a toy example. Suppose you lived in a world with zero population growth, and one in which every person renewably grew their own food and renewably built their own shelter, with no other economic activity. Now imagine this community discovered music (and at the same time money!). There is lots of room for economic growth as people learn to entertain themselves and others, and as they get better and better at it, and people are willing to pay more to hear the better performers. Then one of the really good performers realizes that it'd better if he pays some bad performer to take over the job of growing his food and building/maintaining his shelter, and the bad performer realizes she's better at that than making music. More growth. So you have lots and lots of room for economic growth even if people are only shuffling around into jobs at which they are getting better in lieu of jobs they're not so good at.