The EPA uses a figure around $6-9 million last I checked. Economists looking at spending on safety measures come up with something closer to an implied value of $0.5-$1 million. (It's also probable that many people are not entirely rational about risk.)

Can't afford healthy food, hmm? Let's see. Lentils can be had for something like $2.50 a pound. The good kind of lentils. Organic. Red kidney beans can be had for even less. Oatmeal for breakfast costs mere cents. You still need some more leafy green stuff and the like, sure, but if you can afford chicken or beef, you can afford lentils instead.

I suspect cost alone is not why people are opting for the highly-refined-flour based "fast carbs".

Hey now, Hewlett-Packard has actually been doing pretty okay as a business. If they've struggled in the past year or so it's because of management shake-ups and the doofus plan to spin off PCs and turn into a software company, not anything to do with open source. And they're still worth $55 billion, even after that.

If you're trying to say "it works for some, but it might not work for others and certainly won't save you as a business if you're flailing around" I'd totally agree.

I didn't get that. The state isn't paying for the stupid project, are they? They're just letting people pay for the stupid project and not be taxed for it. Your language suggests that they're taking the money from the government - as if it were the government's money to begin with, and what right has this jerk to waste it how he sees fit? That worries me. And I don't think one needs to be a libertarian nutcase extremist to find fault with that reasoning, either.

Congratulations. You have also just described 75% of the plot of Ender's Game.

You speak of "rationalization". I demand an explanation of the mechanism you are using to attach Guilt to the developers of these applications, that we may assess the merits of your reasoning. While you're at it, please consider:

"If I don't do it, someone else will".

This is actually true.

"They'll never be used on innocent civilians / They'll never be used on Americans".

If things get to the point that these are, in fact, used on innocent civilian Americans, how substantial of a difference will these innovations make? The Nazis and the Soviets were able set up some pretty repressive regimes without the benefits of a military iPad, only guns and tanks... and they were hardly even the first tyrants.

Is it reasonable to expect that hindering the development of military software will materially protect truth, justice, freedom, and the American way? Is it reasonable to conclude that developing such software will produce material harm to such things? Explain, including comparison and contrast with status quo military capabilities, including nuclear weapons.

(Disclaimers. I am challenging your assertions, but I recognize that these challenges may be answerable. Reference to "the American Way" above is a cultural allusion and is not an assertion of the value of any particular facet or behavior of America as a cultural, political, or military entity, nor is it an invitation to critique of the same. Please note that I don't program for the military, or even for advertisers. No substitutions, exceptions or refunds.)

While I know enough to know that I don't really understand squat quantum physics, I'm pretty confident in saying that quantum teleportation is not actually an energy transport mechanism. It can't even teleport classical information.

Exactly. Because in the United States, if a jerk like you or me posts a critical comment on a site like Slashdot, the government will block the site entirely, and might even arrest and imprison us and our families! Truly we are, like, totally oppressed.

I'm going to agree mostly, but differentiate a little. I have actually worked with a couple of very talented Indian software engineers - more talented and experienced than myself, sometimes. They weren't working for an outsourcing company, though; they were full-time hires. Good Indian software engineers have a tendency to go the same places good American software engineers do: companies that value their talent and who are willing to pay for it. They just have a marginally harder time doing it due to US immigration law. (Myself, I'd rather have them fully naturalized as soon as reasonable - I can compete with them better when their wages haven't artificially depressed by the monopsonistic exploitation of their labor associated with the immigration game).

Anyway. It's already a lot easier to find a lousy software developer than to find a good one here in the US. Outsourcing to India as part of a management-driven process? Yeah, I'm going to laugh at the quality of the results in advance, please. As for Adobe employees working on Acrobat... let's just say their product doesn't do too much to promote the idea that they're competent.

Superfund? More like superfun!

(yes. i stole that line from spacechem.)

The Chinese luxury market is huge right now and easily dropping kilobucks and megabucks on all sorts of status symbols. Of course, once you're in that market, you don't care about fuel costs and you can find a better status symbol than that thing.

Leftist: want to redistribute wealth. Thugs: Want to implement mob rule. I think it's a fair assessment of the "hahahaha bankers suck let's beat them up and take their lunch money."

It seemed a good description of the attitude of people in this article, and of the guy I was replying to, and it may or may not be an assessment of some of OWS. Certainly when I was walking up Market Street last Saturday and ran into an Occupy SF parade banging drums and chanting "Who's got the pow-er? We've got the pow-er!" over and over again it came across as slightly more "thuggish" than "respectful of democratic norms", at least to me.

Anyway; I'm reasonably certain that there is a leftist-thug element to OWS, and worry what would happen if there were actually some sort of revolution and they gained power (not likely though). To be clear, leftists I can deal with. I think they're wrong, but I'm sure they think the same of me. The thuggish attitude is the objectionable one.

So you have inspected the list of credit cards which will be defrauded, and you are certain that each and every individual person who owns one of those credit cards are employed by the banking industry and engaged in unscrupulous, abusive, or deceptive activities? Furthermore you believe that the Anonymous people are behaving ethically when they act as judge, jury, and executioner, implementing mob justice and flouting the rule of law?

Well okay then, I guess you should be fine with it, except that the charities who receive these donations will have to deal with the implications of chargebacks (which will be substantial). Maybe someone will actually develop a secure credit card system as a response. That would be lovely.

It would also be lovely if the leftist thugs actually took over and you, personally, got a good look at the ugliness of the regime that your advocacy brought about - before your life turned nasty, brutish and short. Of course, there would be other negative consequences to that, so I won't be cheering for that particular outcome.

You miss something yourself. Share price is a function of people. People and organizations which are run by people buy stock and sell stock.

Now, if they want to make money off their stock, then they're almost certainly going to care about revenues, margin, and profit (especially the profit, though quarter-to-quarter the individual numbers there are easier to fudge than revenues).

But there's always room a human being to buy a share of a company and its revenues and profits at much more than the going rate of ~$15 per dollar of annual profit (Schiller PE ratio, S&P 500). Presumably, if the investor is not a total idiot (still possible), this purchase is on the anticipation of future earnings growth. Sometimes this even works out. This may not me such a time.

You joke, but Groupon's market cap is still $10 billion, slides in value notwithstanding. (Also, they're up from their low of $14.85 to something more like $16.35 as I write this, so they're hardly plummeting like Tepco just yet.

(Now if you want companies that totally destroyed shareholder value over time, though, you should look at Proxim Wireless.)