They were still very bad for the people that were short AIG stock. Which is what the anonymous coward was suggesting.

In an interesting twist, coop owners of profitable coops in California frequently make $16.50 plus "share". Share meaning the owners share of the profits, minus retained profit. This is because "share" currently seems to be allowed by the IRS to be declared as long term capital gains and not earned income.

There are dev shops in California where the junior employees make $39.90/hr and the senior employees make $16.50/hr. (of course the Senior employees generally have a higher total compensation.)

California has some, shall we say interesting, minimum wage laws.

• Minimum Wage $8.25/hr.
• Minimum Wage for Management (people that spend > 50% of there time supervising people), if you don't want to pay overtime, but instead offer paid time off. $16.50.
• Minimum Wage for Computer Professionals if they are not management and you want to treat them like management $39.90/hr and $83,132.93/year
• Minimum Wage for Physicians that you want to treat like management even though they spend less than 50% of their time managing other employees: $72.70/hr.

The back story of these laws was that there were some companies that were hiring HB-1 visa holders at far sub market rate and using their immigration status to keep them in essentially indentured servitude. One of the results of this has been that desirable locations in California have become heavily populated by computer professionals.

Except that it is more profitable to produce housing that is 25% occupied that is priced at > two million a unit than lower priced units that are actually occupied by residents of the city.

The 25% occupancy rate was a fairly recent number from One Rincon Hill With units going for between $700,000 and $30,000,000. That is some of the densest housing in San Francisco.

One of the effects of Prop 13 is that in California when your property goes up in value, your taxes go up no more than 2% annually, and when your property goes down in value you get a new lower cost basis for which to limit your annual increase from. This means that housing shortages that predominantly effect the young and entrepreneurs minimally effect the large voting block of older voters allowing rather unique real estate economic systems to form. Many of them encouraging a concentration of wealth.

It was mostly due to microsoft cutting a check to godaddy to not show apache traffic server in the headers.

Godaddy runs IIS on linux. Well, they run IIS behind apache traffic server so which webserver to count as the webserver is a bit of an academic question. The moral here is that godaddy hosts a lot (hundreds of thousands, if not millions) of inactive sites that they collect 9.95 or so a year for hosting.

Um, Zimmerman was found not guilty. So, what harm was done to Zimmerman by withholding the evidence?

He might have been found not guilty after a shorter deliberation? The Judge is probably going to rule that any misbehavior by the prosecutors office is moot because they lost. Sort of like one of my chemistry professors in college couldn't be bothered to do more than inform the class that he knew that some people cheated on a test when the high score of the cheaters was a failing grade.

https://android.googlesource.com/ and your favorite dev environment (whether that is vim and various shell tools, emacs, eclipse, netbeans, visual studio, or whatever) Is the definitive source of android documentation. But, not what you want.

If you want to see the basics of writing an android app look at the source for phonegap and titanium. Those two frameworks combined with The New Boston will allow a programmer to come up to speed quickly

But, you seem to want to through together an app that you built yourself, without having to actually learn java and such. For that Buzztouch http://www.buzztouch.com/ is a pretty good solution, and you might not need more than that, depending on what your app does.

Not quite

If you voluntarily go to the police station without being asked. and refuse to answer a question, but don't say that you are invoking the fifth the lack of answer can be used against you.

The theory is that you instigated the conversation, so you had the chance to talk to an attorney before the conversation. (unrealistic for the general population, but the people that made this ruling have never dealt with low level civil law where over 25% of the litigants are self represented, and thus have a warped view of the world)

The big can of worms that this opens is that does it mean that you should not call 911?

You miss read.

What Google is saying is "You have seven days before I tall people how you customers are being screwed."

Once you have an active malware attack exploiting a vulnerability, what is the harm of full disclosure? They only thing I can see this buying is time for the PR flacks to get the story together.

Or a letter carrier that consistently delivers the mail in the wrong order in the housing complex.

I can count on my neighbors getting seven out of ten of my packages, and vice versa.

Fortunately we get along and have no major squabbles so we more or less resort the mail four days a week.

You're right of course.

It sort of comes down to what should we give the greatest incentives to people to pursue.

Right now, Things are very stacked towards research into drugs that suppress a problem without actually curing it.

People will always do things that they are not being maximally rewarded for economically. However, most people will pursue that path that provides the greatest chance of economic success.

Personally, I think that we should have more people than David Blech Deciding on what our national priorities are for medical research. However, I am sure others are in favor of letting the market sort it all out.

Although, it can be argued that patents cause the Medical industry to focus on drugs instead of preventative medicine.

If you have a drug that treats a condition at a cost of $100/month, and a profit of $40/month and the average usage is 10 years that treatment would generate an average of 48k profit per patient, and if the condition effects one million people a year you are looking at a predictable 4.8 billion a year in profit, with an expected profit of 96 billion during the period of patent protection and additional residual profits after the protection lapses. All that for an ante of about 45 million dollars. or an ROI of 200,000% over 25 years. (assuming that the approval process takes about 5 years, which is on the short, side but the 45 million is spread over 3 rounds of clinical trials).

While the numbers I pulled out were not based on any particular drug the are somewhat representative of the current drug development model in the US, with some anti psychotic and AIDS related drugs fetching over $1,000 a month per patient while identical generics are priced under $30 per month per patient.

The result of the current economic incentives of patented medicine has been a huge amount of research into drugs that people will have to pay for for as long as possible, with less investment into preventative measures.

The upside of this type of investment is that a lot of the failures in the hunt for a cure for aids have shown real promise for a treatment for cancer, and it has encouraged private investment in medicine.

The downside is that the potential financial upside of the treatment is considered very early in medical research.

The irony of the current situation is that it is in many ways a more extreme version of the worst case scenario painted by the critics of universal health care.