And if they refuse take them to court as you would with anyone who refused to pay you.

However, this could be detrimental to your future ability to remain employed with them.

Of the two, I'd go with bacteria, given that the bottled water aisle of my grocery store strongly suggests that water is a little less ultimate than you imply.

The water in the ocean has much salt, however... Also. in the grocery store; the water is only on one side of the bottle, and there's not enough of it to make strong currents.

This is expensive, for a variety of reasons. Low-priced software will likely be hackable or manipulable, and the confidence in the vote will be compromised.

No.... security is 80 to 90% less expensive, if you design your software properly with security in mind on Day 1.

What makes security seem so expensive, with cheap products already on the market --- is incompetent design.

It's not. I'm not saying hand it over to the lowest bidder.

Appropriately designed software following a secure development methodology need not be super-expensive.

Issuing part payment as shares is a tax dodge. You don't pay any taxes until the shares are sold but you can borrow money against them

In the real world.. they don't usually issue shares, they issue options on shares that vest over time. In other words: the employee doesn't get actual stock, they get a right to buy shares of stock exercisable at a price per share determined in advance.

If/When the employee decides they want the stock, after the options vested: they can exercise the option before its expiration date, which requires the employee to pay out of pocket for those shares of stock.

So they pay $X per share for shares of stock that are now worth $X + $Y. Where $X was the price the option was set at, and $Y is the additional amount that shares have appreciated by since the option was struck.

The employee already paid tax on the $X. For a statutory incentive stock option, the employee does not owe ordinary income tax on the $Y, until they dispose of the stock and benefit from the additional appreciation.

The exercise may still result in tax liability under the Alternative Minimum Tax.

And here I was thinking we'd finally killed defacto indentured servitude/slavery via company scrip.

You mean like the companies now that refuse to pay employees by check, and instead issue their salary by depositing it to a prepaid debit card, which incurs a $5 or $10 fee, if the employee wants to transfer money from the card to their checking account?

Good news for people who spent money on plugins for Aperture.

I suspect their pain will be nothing compared to the pain of Final Cut Pro users, once Apple discontinues that product in the future in favor of "iMovie 4", and people need to soak a few grand to switch to Avid Composer.

I guess the idea is it just doesn't make sense to write software targeted at professionals anymore; the higher price tag no longer makes up for the low volume, and it's infinitely more sensible to use your resources developing apps that larger numbers of people will need and want to buy.....

I wonder how often you will need to repeat this to keep your eBooks from deactivating....

Otherwise... you could use a removable ink.... and when you've got your eBook, remove your name, and sell the physical book.

Or for that matter... your 'qualifying physical book' might be a library book, or piece you've loaned from someone else.

Have one company that "rents" the antenna and provides a Software Defined Radio as a Service offering, where an API is simply provided to provision an antenna controller box which has its own IP address that listens on a specified frequency and bandwidth, compresses the bits, and streams them to the consumer.

Then another company that makes a box, which integrates with this service and "selects" television channels, from the radio antenna provider who is acting as a common carrier for "capturing signals in the air" and feeding them through across mediums, with no specific knowledge or interpretation of those signals or what data they might represent.

The content is a product and the cable companies profit from that product, and should therefore pay the OTA broadcasters for its use.

No.... it's OTA. The content is being distributed freely over the air. The cable companies are profiting from value they add in terms of technical expertise, engineering work, the spending of massive amounts of dollars in capital expense to build and maintain infrastructure.

Some viewers have difficulty receiving the OTA content over the air at the quality they want using their own equipment, or the investment is too much, or they lack the expertise to build large antenna structures and setup gateways to stream their content to themselves over the internet, so they are inclined to subscribe to a service to maintain equipment to receive over the air on their behalf and provide them the technical assistance to receive the freely available content in the manner the end user wants.

DirectTV should have zero say in the matter. And whether my neighbor lets just me, or a million people do the same, how does that materially differ?

It matters, because THIS is what the court is relying on, in effect.

They are totally ignoring all aspects of the technological arrangement, including the fact that a dedicated antenna is being rented out.

And saying.. essentially... if the end-user experience --- the end result -- is the same as with a CATV network, or if your business look like a CATV provider, then you are automatically a cable TV provider..., and therefore, you "perform" the work within the meaning if the law.

And this performance is deemed to be a public performance, because, the court chooses to ignore any underlying characteristics of the technology -- and look only at what the end result is, which is, that through all the transmissions made by your service, you are broadcasting each program to numerous people who have selected it.

while it is impossible in the forseeable future to use only electronic voting.

Impossible? How come?

Do what they did in the U.S. buy some computers and set them up as electronic voting kiosks.

Better still...... no special software needed, just a bootable read-only CF card with ChromeOS and a slightly customized config file; when the voter steps in, they power on the machine which immediately loads the Norway internet voting website.

As for the reason for the low turnout, that is a mixed issue. At least we can now assume that access to voting facilities is not one of the problems.

No... it's not really safe to assume that. First of all.... they have 3.6 million registered voters, and only 250,000 were ever eligible to cast votes electronically; secondly, failure to find evidence of a change in overall voter turnout does not mean that it does not exist.

Perhaps access to voting facilities was also a problem with their e-Voting trials. In order to cast a vote electronically; voters needed to receive a polling card.

The ability to receive the card through the mail on a timely basis and follow the instructions would be necessary to participate.

Also.... this was a new unfamiliar system for both government administrators and for the public, with a learning curve.

It is not clear at all that there would be no effect on turnout, after a broader rollout making ALL voters eligible to vote electronically, and increasing the familiarity of the public at large with the new system over a period of time.

They didn't conclude it CANNOT - they concluded it DID NOT.

No. Their report said they didn't find definitive evidence that it increased voter turnout. It didn't really say to what lengths they went through to try to find evidence of increased turnout.

And their bar was high.... it's not as if Norway suffers from low overall voter turnout.

The fact is... electronic voting should save trees, time, and transportation costs for many people.

If the software is adding costs... one should begin to question if: too many unnecessary requirements have been placed on the software, OR if the software developers' aren't "fleecing" them by selling them ridiculous licensing on a product that could be built relatively inexpensively, compared to the overall costs to the community of manually collecting, counting votes, and verifying counts, all with the possibility of high error rates ---- compared to the relative near-infallibility of an electronic count (at least, assuming a well-engineered well-tested, non-defective computer and software system).

We use paper ballots and cardboard ballot boxes. Total cost = pennies per voter.

Paper is expensive.... software should be thousandths of a penny per voter.

Evidence-based governance is completely foreign to us Americans, you'll have to understand if some of us can't quite understand it.

It's not that I don't agree with evidence-based government. It's that I cannot agree with their conclusion that online voting cannot encourage greater overall turnout.

The fact that 38% of the people took a chance to e-Vote, strongly suggests that much of the population was happier casting their vote electronically, and 62% were either skeptical, unaware, or lacked the ability.

Extremely good results, arguing strongly in favor of e-Voting, I would say.