The land was only "worthless" because it had liens exceeding the value of the property. So it was secretly expensive land disguised as incredibly cheap land.

Employees don't really seem to be assets as far as the stock market is concerned. They are an expense that you suffer so the business will still operate. Assets are things that you can sell, like buildings and equipment.

Markets always crash. It's how they operate. People make money not by owning stocks, but by owning stocks that are moving. It's not in their interest to have a stable marketplace. That's why the stock market will always be volatile, because the people who run it need the volatility to skim off their percentage.

Real Estate will always be worth something. Even if we decide that precious metals are worthless (maybe someone invents a Star Trek replicator), land will always have value. At the very least you can farm it and feed yourself and your family.

My experience with lost/rediscovered films like this is that they were usually lost for a reason. Nobody cared enough to keep it safe when it was new, and today it is at best a historical curiosity. More often the film is just straight up boring or terrible and maybe it was lost for a reason.

Isn't that what Chrome (not Chromium) is for? It's the entire reason I have it installed on my laptop.

I remember years and years ago when this first came out it was party to some of the worst looking games of all time. But bad games can be made on any platform, I'm sure someone could have made something good by now. Their website doesn't list any projects that use the library, which is very troubling. They haven't been just developing the library for their own sake for 16 years have they? Someone must be using it.

Wow, I can't wait until the Congressional hearings on the "hook up classes" held by the first school district that tries this. Teaching "children" about healthy sexual attitudes is a major taboo in the US. It undermines the message they were getting from their church and parents about sex being evil and dirty.

The Kickstarter has a handheld version with a battery, screen, and keyboard. You can install Wolfram Alpha on it as well (it comes by default with Rasbian now). It has better everything than a TI graphing calculator and costs $49.

Even cheap flat panel TVs usually have a lonely Composite jack somewhere on the back, just in case someone's grandfather wants to plug in the VCR. Of course this means you'll be limited to NTSC resolution and probably a fuzzy picture, but it's $9 and has built-in Wifi and Bluetooth so you don't need to hang a wired keyboard off of it like you do with the Pi. I'm not sure what I'd do with this, but that's true of all of these cheap little SBCs, and I usually find something worth doing.

The handheld version with the GPIO pins sticking out seems pretty cool. I'd really like to feel that keyboard before committing to it though.

The way I see it, MIcrosoft wasn't making that much money from consumers on version updates. Almost nobody buys a box copy of Windows to do the upgrade. They just upgrade when they buy a new computer. It's always been rather expensive and the past few versions of Windows have had additional barriers to entry (annoying changes to the UI for instance) to further discourage people from updating. With this system your new "made entirely of ribbons" OS interface is just a Windows Update away.

Several years ago I was really concerned about the 2038 rollover because so many protocols have hard baked 32 bit timestamp fields in them. Even if systems were updated the protocols might not be. But I've come to realize that once the systems are updated, the protocol tend to follow suit in the next revision, and in the next 23 years pretty much every protocol is going to go through at least one revision. There are still going to be a few holdouts that have trouble in 2038, but I'm expecting it to be as much of an event as the year 2000. A few fringe things act weird or even stop working, but pretty much everything important is OK.

If you let a bunch of loons run it's pretty easy to look good by comparison. Look at Mitt Romney. A terrible candidate by most measures, but still better than all of the frothing at the mouth crazies he was running against. This is especially important if you don't have a good centrist candidate and you need to make him look centrist by comparison.

Actually firing people is unpopular, even when you are "lowering the size of government". It means taking services away from people and reducing government oversight. It's better to just spend recklessly and then force the next president into financial crisis after financial crisis so they are forced to make the cuts instead.

That's why "debt doesn't matter" when the Republicans are in charge.

I thought he was implying that the current Republican slate was full of crazy old white men. For all of her numerous faults, Carly at least has one thing to differentiate herself from the pack. Two if you count the whole "drove a Fortune 500 company into the ground" thing.