Does Arkham House (for example) really deserve to have the rights (and thus get a cut) of most of H.P. Lovecrafts works? Why the hell did they do to deserve such an eternal money maker?

Uh, yeah, they do deserve it. Arkham House was created by August Derleth, who was a friend of HP Lovecraft, and was a more financially successful writer. He didn't do it to make money, in fact he said (in 1970)"[T]he fact is that in no single year since its founding have the earnings of Arkham House met the expenses, so that it has been necessary for my personal earnings to shore up Arkham House finances."

Maybe they were hoping for Stockholm syndrome to set in?

Ask, and ye shall receive... Salvage

The only thing that could have made his delivery of the part better was if it didn't seem to be emanating from something apparently designed by Apple...

Funny - that was the one thing I thought the movie really got right. I never liked the costume for Marvin in the TV miniseries - I didn't think it fit with the Sirius Cybernetics Corps Marketing Division definition of a robot as '... your plastic pal who's fun to be with'. Having the stylish, well designed exterior helps throw his depressed, misanthropic exterior into sharp relief...

If you require your outsourcer to work the way you would if you hired staff yourself, they can't possibly provide the same service for less cost. Think about it - if they have to hire staff exclusively for you (since they are on site at your location), and do all the other things that your in-house staff would do - then their costs (irrespective of labor) will essentially be the same as yours would be (I'm oversimplifying a bit - there are some costs, like office space, that they won't bear - but you will, so it will not affect the final analysis). So the only way for them to provide the service cheaper than you, would be to pay people a lot less than you would (remember, they need to make a profit off it; which you don't). In general, if they are hiring in the same local market that you are, and paying significantly less than you would, then they are not going to get the same quality of people. Now they might do it by bringing in foreign workers - but if they have to work and live in your location, they are eventually going to expect the same compensation as local workers - so there will be very high turnover.

It seems to me that the only way this type of outsourcing really works is: it's for a short time, while you get staffed up, or get through a backlog of work; or it's an accounting trick to move operational expenditures to capital expenditures, which may look better on the balance sheet.

Of course, the government has already subsidized the road that the bus or car drives on. With rail, the railroad currently has to buy the land and build out the infrastructure. Even with toll roads, the government subsidizes them in a major way - so competition is currently nowhere near fair.

A similar situation exists for airports - the government invests a huge amount of money in the nation's airports (including providing the air traffic control system) - again, the competition is currently nowhere near fair.

A pace is two steps - and back in the dark ages, when I was in Boy Scouts, and learning orienteering, we actually practiced getting a 5 foot pace, so we could consistently pace off map distances. So 1,000 paces would be 5,000 feet, which is close to the 5,280 feet in the current definition of a mile.

As far as I know, you can still buy Six Easy Pieces in CD format (I received it as a present 6 or 7 years ago). I occasionally play the CDs in my car when driving with my daughter (who is now 9).

Just have to say - I went to UW Madison in the 80s, and Kiesler's Calculus textbook was notorious. It was only used by him. Those that were able to take his class, and get through it with a passing grade, ended up with a good understanding of calculus - but the drop and fail rate in his class was significantly higher than in the classes that used the other textbook (don't have it in front of me right now, so I can't tell you whose it was).

Actually, if you RTFA, you'll see that they already address this. One of the difficulties with current systems is that you have to go to the system to do the motion capture. This new system could potentially be used on set - which would be very attractive in situations where live-action and CG are mixed.

At least in the larger corporations I've worked in, you need to provide an assessment of the candidate to HR (not to the candidate). That assessment is filed, specifically to use in the case of an EOC complaint or lawsuit. Generally, if the assessment for a candidate that you didn't hire looks better than the one you do recommend for hire, HR may ask you to elaborate on the decision.

That was my point - there are not always jobs to be had out there. When the cab companies were requiring bachelor's degrees, where do you think the high school graduates went for jobs? When the unemployment rate is quoted at being, for example, 9%, that means that 9% of the workforce is out of a job, and actively looking for a new one. Once they get discouraged and stop looking, they are no longer counted as unemployed. Also, if they take a part-time job to pay the rent they are not counted as unemployed. Full employment is considered to be around 4.5-5% - which reflects the time it takes to find another job when there are jobs to be had. When it gets higher, it indicates that there are people who are not finding jobs, even though they are looking. As that number gets higher, the number of chronically unemployed or underemployed (the two categories I mentioned earlier) generally also go up - although those numbers are less widely reported. Also keep in mind when you talk about moving to find jobs - if those jobs have been moved out of the country, moving may not be an option. Many countries have far less liberal immigration laws than the US (at least as regards to US citizens), so you may not be able to follow those manufacturing jobs to Malaysia, for example. All I'm saying is that the government needs to provide those safety nets (social security, unemployment insurance, etc.). People can have their savings wiped out through no fault of their own, and be unable to rebuild those savings before retirement. I certainly think that people should save for their own retirement, and not rely on social security (I tell my financial planner to assume no social security) - but I still think it absolutely needs to be there.

I don't completely disagree with you here, but I'm guessing you're younger than I am. Your philosophy of 'everyone who can work, should' is great when we have full employment - but in recessions and depressions, there simply are not jobs for all the people who want to work, or who should work. Those people are burning through the money they saved for a rainy day. And often, their joblessness has nothing whatsoever to do with their worth - they just happened to be working for the wrong company (one that either ceased to exist, or at least had to lay off large numbers of workers) at the wrong time (when unemployment rates are high, so competition for the very few openings there are is much greater than normal, and perhaps in the wrong place (we usually just hear about the national unemployment rate - often it's much higher in specific places - especially if the major employer in a region goes under). Personally, I've been fortunate in my life - but I can still remember the early 80s when, even though the town I lived in had relatively low unemployment (compared to the national average), when a chain restaurant would open in town, they would get 300-400 applicants to show up on one day for a job fair. All of those people were competing for about 30-40 jobs (and we're talking pretty low wage jobs, too). It was a college town, and the jokes about taxi drivers with PhDs had essentially come true - the cab companies required at least a bachelor's degree for applicants. Those are the reasons why we have a safety net like social security - you can absolutely be a solid worker who tries to save for your retirement, and be completely wiped out, close enough to retirement age that you can not possibly recover on your own. And if you're working at Wal-Mart, or some other similar wage job, good luck saving anything (especially with bank fees, since you won't have enough of a balance to avoid them) - most people at that wage level can't afford health insurance, so getting sick (or needing dental work, etc.) can easily wipe out anything they can manage to save.

Not a contradiction at all - the article you linked to only mentions testing with rainbow trout - and the study's author points out that he would hesitate to generalize his results even to other types of fish - let alone to marine mammals like dolphins and whales.

It was a little tough to glean from TFA (let alone TFS), but what she actually seems to be saying is that Google is positioning itself to acquire the same type of monopoly on cloud computing that MS has in the OS space. Seems like a valid concern, and as long as all she's arguing for is increased scrutiny as enterprises move more and more to cloud computing, I can't really see an issue with it. It also explains the comment about MS being "so last century" - as companies move to cloud computing (assuming they really do), the OS should become less important.