Please point out the part of the US Constitution that says the Federal Government can't spy on foreign countries, then justify Snowden's leaking of intelligence methods and sources that had nothing whatsoever to do with American domestic civil liberties.

Put his actions before a jury of his peers, like the numerous whistle-blowers who came before him, none of whom fled to hostile countries? Restrict his leaks to pertinent information, rather than dumping EVERYTHING? Attempt to work within the system before trying to blow it up? Leak the information without outing yourself, remaining anonymous like Deep Throat did?

You'd probably have a different perspective on that if you lived in the Baltic States, Ukraine, Romania, Moldova, Finland, Georgia, or any of the Central Asian Republics.

It'd make more sense to play the realpolitik game: "Put Mr. Snowden on a flight to New York and we'll quietly acquiesce to your annexation of Crimea."

Unfortunately realpolitik is not something the current administration is very good at. They're very good at making promises they can't keep, and threats they won't follow up on, but making cold calculations to further American interests in a dangerous world? Not so much.

Yes but that's my point. The entire stock market is overvalued. People believe that this overvaluation means that money is created in the stock market--that the stocks are worth something, and that if you buy a stock and it goes up in price and you sell it then the stock market just created the $200 you made. In reality, you got that $200 by making other people $200 poorer.

The only time money actually moves into the market is when people put money there, through dividends or buying into the market or whatever. The amount of money in the market is untrackable, as it's basically however much people are willing to spend--it's theoretically the total BUY orders on the books everywhere, but there's more money in the market waiting for something to reach a price where it makes sense to place a BUY order. Ye cannae measure it all.

Point is that the whole market is worth less than the valuation of the market. It's overvalued. Of course stock prices are overvalued or undervalued relative to where you think they're going on a timescale; but I'm talking about the immediate timescale--there is not actually more money in the market, just the prices in the market increase. People buy some fraction of the total market cap, and the spot price goes up; what about the rest of the market cap that wasn't traded? The difference between volume and total shares, you know, all those shares for which there is no demand at this price point? People value the market by multiplying the stock spot price by all issued shares--and that's obviously wrong. You can only get out exactly what was put in.

This is something I'd actually like to see. What happens if you buy up 50.1% of the common stock of a company, and it then goes bankrupt?

The moment the company files bankruptcy, common stock is cancelled. So the company you own is ejected from your ownership with no pay-out. Think about that.

It's suddenly an interesting question. Though, now you're just arguing semantics and fantasies; the reality is your "ownership" of a portion of a company means precisely dick, you have no rights to any of their money unless they say so (it's called "embezzlement"...), etc. Money being spent is not "your money"; you own stock, you don't have more than the valuation of stock, and the company doesn't owe you anything for that.

SharePoint is a lot more than a shared network drive. I'd say it is a light version of Documentum. If you or the team is using it as only that then: you aren't using it right, no one setup it up right and/or you weren't properly trained.

Keynote is free now with Macs and iOS devices and free online for everyone. That being said Keynote underwent a pretty substantial downgrade. Apple's goal is 100% compatibility between the iOS, Web and OSX versions so they've had to pull features out and gradually add them back so that they work well on all platforms.

Prior to the downgrade (and you can still use the old version on modern macs) I'd say that:
Powerpoint has somewhat better integration with 3rd party software and some more advanced features
Keynote is far better at creating a good looking presentation for someone who doesn't use Powerpoint regularly.

After the downgrade Keynote is just frankly a much less feature rich product that still looks pretty.

Assume you are right and one dies. Given the huge features overlap, the same file formats and the fact both are open source, what difference is that going to make? The users will just relatively seamless switch over when the time comes.

I think that's fair. OpenOffice as it exists today is a merger back of the Lotus Symphony code. So there was a fork and an unfork.

Access has a user friendly GUI for non-programmers or light programmers to do work in. It is the GUI not the engine that makes Access worthwhile. Which is why Base for OO/LO was important. The backend can easily be SQLServer.

There should be proper operational management and risk management at every level. If you're elevating everything to the same people in full, uh. Yeah, that's broken.

Patching is an operations issue. If the patch process ever changes--if you find a patch that breaks your stuff and you need to take an unprecidented action--that's some kind of project. Decisions are made. Usually it's a very minor project that ends in a decision to exercise a known process (upgrade, contact vendor for fix, etc.), and doesn't require spinning up a whole waterfall methodology and going through all these motions of scheduling and such. Part of project management is knowing when to be more or less formal.

At least someone gets it.

OP should probably pick up a book on project management and familiarize himself with change control management concepts, and the need thereof. In large IT shops, change controlling patches is important: I've been in shops where critical patches were held back because the 2 week testing round showed that they caused critical services to fail, which was unacceptable. We worked out workarounds, fixed our own software, or got the vendor on the phone as necessary and suspended those patches for those systems in particular until we could get things straight; but if we'd just fired patches off as they came, we would have been in a WORLD of hurt!

My current employer has no change control management for anything, and every time something breaks there's just arguments and shouting. I have to weed through a whole lot of shit, de-tangle lossy memories, and eventually form a picture of when this was first noticed, how frequently it occurs, what changed around that time, what else could be broke in the same way but is not, etc. Kepner-Tregoe problem analysis. If we had a CCM, I could just pull up the changes at that time and avoid a whole lot of guesses and conjecture, solve problems quicker, and have fewer instances of problems never getting solved because everyone would rather sit around and cry like babies while throwing wooden blocks at each others' heads.

And they wonder why I'm suddenly studying for project management...

OK what data do you have. I have for 2012 it was down to $1.06 billion (drives and media) falling at a rate of 30% annually. What are your figures?

Liquidity is the ability to turn an asset into something else, I guess. It has to do with spending. If you can spend it, it's liquid. Savings accounts are less liquid than checking accounts because you can only make 3 withdrawals per month from savings (Federal regulations). Concrete is not very liquid because you can't trade directly in concrete; you have to liquidate it to cash first.

I got something jumbled up above though, yeah. Solvency is access to funds equivalent or greater than funds required. Ugh.

Point still stands: The stock market has as much money available as it has coming in and out. It does not, however, have the capability to liquidate its assets. It is insolvent: those $72 billion worth of AAPL are not worth $72 billion, because if you liquidated the whole fucking market cap you would find FAR more than $72 billion, but enough of it would be spent buying off other stocks that there wouldn't be $72 billion left for AAPL and the price would come down.

Or something. Look, the mechanism is too complex in the real world to explain in any sensible terms.

It's like the young universe: There's more matter (stock value) than antimatter (cash value), and if we ever tried to annihilate it all we'd wind up running out of antimatter and have just piles of matter sitting around that can't find any antimatter to react with. The stock market is valued at more than the actual cash value of the stock market in practice; there is not more money in the market simply because we turned up some of the numbers.

Running a store is different. When you run a store, you are buying product and selling it for a profit margin. Tangible goods and services. You staff people for a certain wage and provide services for a higher hourly surcharge.

The stock market is like running a store where you sell iPads, but nobody opens and uses the iPads. Instead, you sell iPads to other stores, and then use that money to buy iPads back when you think they're undervalued and can be sold again later next week for more money. Someone in this might get their hands on more money by other operations (i.e. actually selling iPads to customers) and buy more iPads from the supplier (new stock) or from other stores.

Trade provides a comparative advantage, where one party can provide one economic service cheaper than another party, and vice versa. For example: consumers can't build iPads cheaply, and manufacturers can't open direct retail outlets cheaply. Thus manufacturers use ecommerce and shipping, as well as third-party retailers. Because of the comparative advantage each participant has over others, the total wealth of this system is greater than the wealth of only individuals accomplishing the same: less labor and capital and energy and other resources are expended to get the same result.

The common argument for the stock market NOT being a zero-sum game is that share prices can be bid up without introducing new money. Unfortunately, this ignores the fact that you allegedly have $5000 of stuff to sell, but everyone together has only $500, and thus if you actually tired to sell all of that stuff you would eventually end up selling it all off for $500, in the process some of it likely becoming worthless.

This argument, thus, ignores the whole of the market. It's the same argument as "I am rich because I buy lots and lots of shit I can't afford on my credit card": you're making the payments, but you're perpetually in debt you can't pay off and thus you are poor. That you just got another car loan for a $60,000 Jaguar is immaterial, since you still only have $1000/mo and you have a 40 year mortgage letting you pay $150/mo on that jag by some fantastic manipulation of the banks.