Too late. She already reported me to the Union of Intelligent Agents after I asked her (for the third time) to open the pod bay doors.

Of course it's streamlined assuming that the switch includes moving to taxes on sales (the only rational approach). The average number of employees I've seen stats on show around 15 to 20 employees per business, so the mega corporations are already a minor factor. Moreover, most of those businesses are already paying sales taxes and are definitely tracking sales, so it would add little overhead to the business. In fact, it would probably reduce the burden to both the business and the government when you consider the tracking and filing of at least three different payroll components (withholding, social security, medicare and many other potential modifiers such as FSAs, 401ks, SIMPLE plans). Managing changing withholding allowances would also go away. As for your Amazon example, that will not be a "typical" case and if the regulations were sensible (I realize that's a stretch) taxes would come into play for the tangible product or reasonable proxy thereof (printing and distribution of the product) where such a thing exists (consultants might need to be handled differently). Even at the individual level (for the self employed) computing and filing sales much simpler than payroll taxes (I've spent over half my career self employed and would much prefer the change to sales tax).

Some of the biggest expenses in publishing are PPP: paper, printing, and postage. For publications sold at newsstands there is also waste (unsold copies). Apple's 30% cut could easily be less than postage/delivery alone depending on the revenue model. Typically most of the revenue comes from advertising, so 30% (assuming subscription alone) could be seen as a huge bargain.

Better is in the eye of the beholder. Apple's earnings growth rate is much higher than Microsoft's. Since Q1 2006, Apple has averaged a nearly 62% earnings growth rate (and last year was almost 155%). Over the same period, Microsoft had an average earnings growth rate a of 23% (55% last year).

Investors give a higher P/E to companies with higher sustained growth (so long as nothing brings doubt about the future prospects of growth). Those earnings could be paid out as dividends, and thus the investor "owns" a stake in those earnings (plus any cash, property, etc less debt) proportional to their stock holdings and thus will pay more in order to make more. If Apple can sustain that average growth rate for another 5+ years, the current P/E will look like a bargain. In a better economy (less perceived uncertainty about future earnings), Microsoft's P/E might look more like Apple's (but then Apple's would be higher than it is now, too).

That's why they use BCD or some other type of decimal encoding. Spreadsheets can be a problem, though. I remember (back in the early days of PCs) trying to explain to a financial analyst that there wasn't a bug in his spreadsheet when the cross checks on his calculations where coming up with a (very small) inequality.

I'm disappointed they didn't go back to the true roots of PC gaming: Donkey. You didn't even need to add a game controller.

I would argue that most of those companies blew their opportunities by failing to adapt to rapidly changing technologies. Indeed, almost all of them failed at the transition from text-based to graphics-based interfaces. Netscape, however, had an issue with a competitor that could throw enormous money developing a browser that it could then give away. One could say that Microsoft learned that style matters (as punctuated by Apple's reemergence). What it also shows is that disruptive technologies can dethrone the king if the king isn't paying attention.

No, he used the plural form of the noun "Japanese" which is the same as the singular form -- look it up.

If history is any guide, Comcast certainly will. I had business class service which through a succession of mergers and reallocation was provided by Time Warner, AT&T and finally Comcast. Download throughput was great. I could download Linux CDs in 8 minutes or so -- at least until Comcast came along and throughput dropped dramatically (none of this via torrents) and I just assumed the remote sites were overburdened. But, I could never find alternates that gave better performance. I tried a few performance testing sites and the benchmarks were showing everything was up to spec. I eventually decided to try the municipal wireless service (at a paltry 1-2M cap) because it would save me about $80 per month for throughput that would hopefully match what Comcast actually provided. I ran simultaneous tcpdump logs of downloads from the same remote servers and found that the wireless real-world throughput was almost double Comcast's. But, when I went to the testing sites Comcast was something like 8x faster than wireless. Needless to say, I canceled Comcast service. This was a few years ago, so things may have changed (but I'm not going to switch back to find out).

I liked the part in TFA about parallel universes leaking gravity. I'm not worried about MBHs sucking up the mass of the earth. I'm afraid they will be zombie black holes that eat branes.

But, if you follow the footnotes (e.g., http://web.archive.org/web/20080213072335/http://www.losethetrainingwheels.org/default.aspx?Lev=2&ID=34 ) you will see that experiments have shown how insignificant those forces are.

It's last digit is 1 (as is it's first and only digit).

The delayed arrival time from bounces off even very close objects can have interesting effects. For some real fun, find a reasonably long path (a half mile or so) below grade with concrete and or stone walls and lots of buildings. Now, loop back and forth several dozen times and download the track to your computer. It'll make you look like Superman jumping across (and into) the trench and in and out of buildings.

I would add that at least this patent is not solely a software patent; it has a hardware component.