Pretty much. Like when you 'buy' a copy of Office, MS is allowed to turn around and sell it to your competitor. That web dev company has probably created a website for you based on a template they've used a hundred times before, adjusting the details and content for each new client, so they have - for the most part - sold you a web site that they'd already sold to one of your competitors. This is why it's important to spell out the ownership and rights to works created under contract - code, art, text content.

That's an excellent quote, but it probably means exactly the opposite of what you think. When Bastiat says "plunder," he means "take by taxation, regulation, or legislation." He would probably argue that a businessman (or company) is perfectly within its natural rights to negotiate any level of compensation and any form of contract, and that it is not possible for either a corporation to "plunder" its employees nor for one group of workers to "plunder" another. It's a little hard for me to guess whether he would consider the legally restrictive system of H1b to be "plundering" the foreign workers, based on the non-monetary power of residence granted to the employer. He would probably consider the limited availability of both H1b and permanent resident visas to be "plundering" from businesses by creating an artificial scarcity of labor.

That seems to be the point of the summary: that the study found small levels of contamination in a fairly confined region and were able to track that contamination (likely) to an uncharacteristic defect in one production facility. It sounds like a thoughtful, reasonable description that responsible producers could take as a warning to pay extra attention to storage facilities. Thus all the more disturbing that the producers' response was to go into full-bore discredit the tree-hugging scientists mode. Like when your doctor says "it's a cold: take two asprin and call me in the morning," and you sue him for diagnosing a non-existent tumor and botching the brain surgery.

According to some calculations the margin on Internet is around 97%, while the margin on video is only 55%. After all, the cable company doesn't actually have to share Internet revenue with any of the content creators, but powerful TV content, like ESPN, TNT, TBS, and FOX, can demand awfully high royalties from the cable cos. The physical infrastructure is identical, and most of it was laid to provide video. They basically get the internet for free.

The broadcasters know, though. 5 years ago, I had OTA access to 7 channels. Since then, most of those have split (ie, channel 2.1, 2.2, 2.3), adding an all-weather channel, an all-crime channel, and half a dozen channels with reruns of MASH, Gunsmoke, and Star Trek (ToS). There's 14 OTA channels now, and I don't think the expansion is done.

My neighbor's got bare coax running 50' from their house, looped around nails along a wooden fence, across my yard, to the comcast drop, with enough excess wire that it makes standing loops and some switch-backs in the ivy. It's bright orange, though, so not much chance of accidentally mowing it. Been that way for five years. The last service guy didn't bother to put the housing back on the drop, so the connectors sit out in the rain and the snow.

Windows XP lived for 6, 8, or 13 years, depending on how you count. I can see a computer lasting for 6 years (certainly today, though 2001-2007 saw a lot of functional progress), but definitely not 13. Since the retail copy is licensed to a computer, upgrading the computer means buying a new retail copy. Volume licensing lets you just track the number of computers and the number of licenses, and simplifies record keeping. My recollection is that volume licensing had a break-even with a 3-4 year hardware cycle. And there are an awful lot of accountants out there who will recommend a business rent anything rather than buy it just because it looks better on the balance sheet.

I suspect that, among other things, "digital native" means "more comfortable communicating by Facebook and Twitter than by email." Older workers, who started with email and found it to be completely adequate for all their text communication, are completely out of band with text, twitter, snapchat, and this bizarre phenomenon of sending photos of yourself holding hand-written notes.

No one got killed, but even French Christians can be pretty violent over images.

What I want to know is: when did any random loser posting anonymous 60-character messages become a "credible" threat? This seems like the 21st century version of pulling the fire alarm to get out of an exam.

Because threats made by a random driver, often through a closed window, against another random driver in traffic are widely believed not to be serious. If the threatening driver proceeds to follow the threatened around, it does become criminal.

That what the courts are for: to determine whether a "reasonable" person would interpret the behavior as a legitimate threat. eg, actors on stage regularly shout "Fire" in crowded theaters, and you are probably clever enough to shout fire, as a member of the audience, in a way that people realize you're "joking."

That was one of the big changes after 9/11: it stopped being possible to "joke" under certain circumstances. Joking about carrying a (picture of a) gun through security gets your "gun" confiscated. Using the phrase "another 9/11" "another Columbine" (or, at VA Tech, "another 4/16") on the internet gets you a visit from NSA or the local police. There used to be procedures for distinguishing real bomb threats from idle or frivolous threats, but they're pretty hard to apply to 140 characters.

If your cable company is only providing a fraction of the nominal bandwidth, what makes you think that fraction will stay the same when you upgrade? ie, you're buying 100M and getting 10M, and you imagine that buying 1000M will get you 100M. It's just as likely that you'll continue to get 10M, because the bottleneck is somewhere other than the wire between your house and the CO. Are you sure the game company is prepared to deliver their demo to 10 or 100 concurrent users, each at 1G bps?

The problem is that H1-B's aren't really hired. They are temporary workers to whom the company need feel no long-term obligation. They are temporary residents to whom the government need feel no long-term obligation. Bring a few of them in, let them work for a bit, then send them off when the project is done: perfect workforce flexibility.

The H1b program, like unemployment insurance, is a good idea but is subject to abuse. Fraud in unemployment benefits individuals, and we have all manner of documentation, regulation, and verification to minimize that abuse. Fraud in H1b benefits corporations, and we basically trust them to do the right thing.

So, you can design a controller for an automotive assembly line or a controller for a cow dung-fired power station. It's the same basic work, but in one case you're building cars and in the other you're bringing electricity to a developing country. You can design a CNC mill or a CNC embroidery machine, but I'm guessing that you won't find embroidery machines in any class project.

I have many female technical colleagues, and they seem to find math no more difficult than the males. If the social/cultural thing holding women away from STEM is just that they don't find car analogies as engaging as a typical male STEM student, well, would it really damage the male students to have a couple of problems related to more feminine stereotypes? Analyze the stresses in a 4" stiletto heel instead of a tie-rod?

My school used to teach "Statics" to mechanical engineers, "Intro Biomechanics" to bioengineers, and "Physics 1" to everyone else. Each of these covered the same content, in pretty much the same way, but used different examples to illustrate principles. It's surprising how different people respond to calculating the supporting forces of a bridge and the forces required to do a push-up, even though they are the exact same problem.

If you get more women interested in STEM by doing nothing more complicated than replacing some of the car-related examples with emergency shelter-related examples, what exactly is the problem in that?