Actually 3/4 of the states can call for a Convention. Congress has no option to oppose that. Its not entirely clear what their 'calling' function entails, but if there were a clear unequivocal 3/4 of the States passing a single uniformly worded call for a Convention within a stated expiry period then LONG before it got to all 37 required states Congress would pass the desired amendment to avoid the spectre of an open Convention running the country virtually as a de-facto parliament. Honestly a Convention is sort of a 'nuclear option' anyway because NOBODY knows how corrupt (or not) such a body would be as we don't even have rules for its constituence. IMHO it would just be a repeat of the House without a constitution to reign it in. The threat is still potent however and its worked at least twice before.

You can buy a SIM and a month of service online from Straight Talk as well. They also support CDMA phones (but you get to use the Sprint network in that case). Straight Talk is actually a brand owned by TracPhone. In any case spare yourself the trip to Wallyworld, its not really worth seeing unless you're actually here and needing something NOW.

Isn't the influence of money and other forms of power simply infinitely plastic? If you block one path to influence it will simply take another path, there are infinitely many ways to get what you want, and if you have lots of money its always much easier to exercise them. So isn't the real question one of values, not of money?

Well, the women are awesome. The rest of it? Sure, the government is pro-business and pro-capitalism, except its THEIR business and capitalism. In China the govt officials are the ones with the money, and LOTS of it. Corruption is astronomical. Unless you're in cahoots with some guys with a lot of 'face' you aren't going anywhere, and you can bet they get the fillet mignon cut of whatever you build. It makes the tax rates in the US quite equitable. There's LOTS of red tape too, though of course again how much that matters depends on whom you are connected to. The middle class in China is microscopic. If you were in downtown of a tier 1 city then you might get the impression, surrounded in your nice westerner bubble, that there were lots of well-off people around, but if you actually went out and met the regular Chinese people and talked to the people serving you food and selling you things and made friends with them you'd find out that life for the average chinese is pretty rough. Now go out to the countryside, or even tier 3 cities (prefect level towns for instance) of which there are 1000's and you find there's only a very small veneer of 'middle class' people.

As for the economy being 'robust', the banks all collapsed in the late 90's, ALL of them are insolvent. Most of the major businesses, same thing (the state owned ones). There's a whole zombie financial and economic sector that is just propped up with tax money or patronage in some form or other. There are a lot of businesses, yes, and a huge export sector, lots of growth, etc. There is also 300 million underemployed people, etc. The realestate bubble in China is 10x the size of the US one, and its teetering right now. Frankly I'm out, and I'm getting my g/f out too before something busts loose and it goes down like the US did in '07. Even the big financial analysts are looking pretty scared now. Housing is slowing and China is going to have a big bump.

Yeah, good luck, your lifespan is measured in days. If you are careful and lucky you can complain about SOME things, and people do let their opinions be known about GENERAL things "its very polluted here, this should be fixed!" or "food is too expensive!" etc. The government is pretty sensitive about public opinion up to a certain point. It is just always hard to tell if they will react to your complaints by fixing the problem, or killing you.

A LOT! I don't want your average bozo website running any script on my machine anyway...

That's correct, but it was called OS-9 (note the dash). It was then ported to the Motorola 68000 and called 0S-9/68k, where it was a quite successful RTOS. It was then rewritten in C (the original 6809/68k versions were all hand coded assembly) and rechristened OS-9000. Sadly the company bet the farm on building the stack for Phillips ill-fated CD Interactive. OS-9000 also wasn't that popular in the 68000 world since it was just a fatter slower OS. They've since dropped the OS-9000 brand name, but the company still sort of exists and the OS is quite commonly used in small embedded systems. It is very easy to ROM, quite reliable, can run on anything from an 8-bit 64k machine all the way up to 64 bit 4+ gigabyte systems, though it generally lacks support for virtual memory. Its a good OS, is POSIX compliant and most modern GNU tools work on it and compile for it (though the OS is peculiar in the way it lays out address space, which means you can't just compile with gcc, you need to use a Microware supplied compiler as far as I know). OS-9 never quite beat out VxWorks in the mission-critical embedded space, but it was (and probably still is) an equally good RTOS. AFAIK there was never a port of any GUI to OS-9(000).

It was originally SASI, so 'sexy' was kinda a natural follow on.

Well, I agree that spread sheets can be pretty obscure and there's a point where they aren't the best solution, perhaps. Of course if you do it right you can migrate a lot of the logic to a backend database or into code modules that still provide inputs to the spread sheet. Sheets are great for presentation and organization of certain types of numerical data, and with the built-in charting features they can be pretty good general data visualization tools. You just have to understand at what point to offload onto some other tool at least part of the work.

LOOKING AT the code is not testing it, 90% of all issues won't show up when you look at a piece of code, unless you're so thorough that you might as well have written tests (which is always a better way). Spread sheets are IDEALLY testable, each cell has defined inputs and outputs and you have a built-in way to enter data into it. You can also build another spreadsheet of expected outputs (heck, maybe that's just a cut and paste of the values you got the first time you used the thing, but at least that lets you test regression). Once you have expected outputs you can check them AUTOMATICALLY with a third sheet (IE difference the actual vs the expected, you should get all zeros). This kind of thing is trivial.

Sheesh, the problem here is people are LAZY. They want things to just be correct magically without any work. I got news for you, it ain't ever so. My first job was validating that a critical part of the flight control system of the 747-400 actually worked as advertised under all circumstances. You think we LOOKED AT THE CODE???!!! lol. Likewise, if you're going to make very expensive business and economic decisions then you FRIGGING SPEND THE TIME TO TEST, and once you decide you're going to do that, spread sheets are eminently testable.

Well, what makes you think that Gates, Buffet, or Slim work harder than anyone else? Clearly there is plenty of luck involved, so R can be greater than G but there is a LOT of noise. As for expecting the richest man to be a Rockefeller, who says the Rockefellers aren't vastly more wealthy than Gates or any other one of these people that Forbes lists? Do you think they keep their money around in places where it can be counted? Nobody has EVEN THE SLIGHTEST IDEA how much money the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the Fuggers, the Carnegies etc have. These great fortunes almost never die and entry into the top ranks of the world's wealthiest people is exceedingly difficult and rare.

I really don't know if Piketty's mistakes are all so dire as to erase his conclusions, or if they are warranted in the first place on the face of it, but I think you're very wrong about the nature of wealth and fortunes.

No they aren't, they're constraint based systems. flow of control isn't the focus. You could easily reduce a spreadsheet to a bunch of Prolog or to almost any functional language.

No kidding. Also, it MAY not be that easy to review the code in a spreadsheet, but it is VERY VERY EASY to test it. If you want reliable spreadsheets its PERFECTLY possible to test them to the Nth degree, far more so than with most other code. You have a place to put the tests, and a place to put the expected results, its all rather devilishly simple actually. For that matter you can document the bejeezus out of them too.

I think spreadsheets are like any sort of simple interpreted language. Idiots can easily blow their left foot off. Real software engineers can also do some very cool stuff. Most of the perl code I've seen is ugly as all hell and pretty worthless, but MY perl code is a thing of beauty that people maintain for years. Its all in how you use the tool.

Publisher? Distributor? Retailer? When you are talking about pure e-commerce of digital goods these are distinctions without differences. In the end the guy that has the PDF of Accelerondo gets to decide what it costs and where it gets sold. People will find it and buy it and there are plenty of places that can supply the finding and buying function besides Amazon. They have a viselike grip on nothing.

It doesn't matter. He only has to be the supplier of the market for Charles Stross, that's all. Amazon can't simply watch as every Charles Stross beats a path to some other distribution channel. Every author who does so is devaluing the entire platform that Amazon has built. As I said before the barriers to entry really are pretty low at this point, and getting lower all the time. Certainly to become a business of the size and scale of Amazon is a vast undertaking, but being able to sell novels online is not. Thus again, as I said before, the analogy is more like ESPN and Comcast. Sure, Comcast can try to play chicken and refuse to deal with ESPN, but sooner or later it will boomerang on them. Comcast is actually in a much STRONGER position than Amazon because its unlikely/impossible for customers to go elsewhere. Amazon has no such lock-in. They can lock up their little Kindle walled garden, but Android tables with e-reader software are a commodity. They're sub $100 now and will be a $20 item in a year or two. If Amazon gives people too much hassle they'll just go buy one that can work with generic publisher platforms and that will be it. Google will be happy to show their ads and help people find where to buy.