Amazon is amazing. Gets patent for one-click. Gets oodles of money from the investors. Can do amazing things like tracking packages and deliver fresh produce. But it feigns inability to calculate local taxes. It drove the booksellers out of business.

But what is most amazing is that it does not seem to have made any profits yet.

Hollywood job pays on average 27K. (Using the numbers in the summary). Hollywood pay distributed very unequally. A few mega stars and peanuts for the bit players. The App distribution is much more broad, compared to Hollywood anyway. Without these super mega paychecks and glamor it will not get much of media play.

The telcos are dragging their feet and they are squarely to blame for the situation with robocalls and other unsolicited messages. They don't have to support the ability of the user to spoof. At the time the call comes into their POTS network, erase whatever spoofed header the call originator is supplying and replace it with the point-of-presence number. Once spoofing is stopped many other tools can be brought to bear to handle the situation.

Root cause of the problem seems to be, some large corporations with large phone banks want to spoof their number. They don't care if that ability is misused by shady operators peddling junk. They are totally wrong, it is better to pay a few cents more per call to get an account with the privilege to spoof the originating number. If they reduce the number of junk calls, their potential customers might actually answer their calls. Right now the junk call menace is so high most people are refusing answer any unknown number.

Just charge 1 cent per call to spoof the originating number, the junk call volume will go down by orders of magnitude.

... we may have use the 2km long ultra strong ultra light cable to dredge the Saudi economy from the bottom of the Persian Gulf.

So I guess the space elevator is not coming any time soon.

It has been soundly proved wrong. We have been coddling them by cutting cap gain taxes for 30 years. World is awash with capital. 2 trillion dollars uninvested. Labor is cheap, capital is cheap now. There is no demand for goods and services, so there are no good investment opportunities available. Why? Because the super rich have vacuumed up all the gains of all the productivity gains leaving the consumers threadbare.

Must tax the rich and spend it, spend it wantonly, spending it building bridges to nowhere. The Feds can bury boxes full of cash at random locations and ask people to go dig and find it. Even that would produce more economic growth than this madness of begging the rich to invest and create jobs.

You are working extra hard to confuse things. You talk as though people have this choice, "I can make 100000$ at an effective tax rate of 13.6% (col S not T) in wages or I can make 75000$ in capital gains. Shucks, cap gain is taxed more, so let me go with wages". Only the super ultra rich in top 0.5% bracket can rename their income stream from anything to anything. Just a question of lawyer fees and the number of shell corporations in the chain. Ordinary people do not have that luxury.

Using AGI is quite misleading. People at high income brackets avoid taking salary. They will call it stock options or carried interest or something else. Only 44 thousand people allowed their income to go beyond 5 million dollars. Either they had dumb lawyers, or they made so damned much this is the last few dollars that was impossible to rename through lawyering at a rate lower than income tax rate.

First we need to distinguish Financial Wealth from Net worth. FW = NW - (owner occupied homes + jewelry + cars + collectible and other personal valuables). Second 800K is for the world. For USA as of 2013 the number is 5 million according to IRS and 8 million according to the Feds.

A wealth manager for very wealthy makes a distinction between top 1% and top 0.5% (8 million according to IRS and 15 million according to the Feds). The top 0.5% is reached only by people with inherited wealth, or very lucky people who get to top 5% by smartness and hardwork, and end up in 0.5% due to good fortune, or stock options. Professionals, doctors, lawyers, accountants are very unlikely to reach top 0.5%, and increasing not even likely to reach top 1%. He used to see very successful professionals retiring in top 1%. But no longer.

He calculates that a person starting at low end of 1% by income for that age group, and staying at the same band (99% dividing line by income) all his/her working life will NOT end up in top 1% by financial wealth. A persons starting in the low end of 1% by wealth, will stay there if he/she draws the same amount of money our 1% by income professional, and might go up in scale.

In USA money earned by blood, sweat, tears and brains (wages, earned income) is taxed at much higher rate than money earned by money (capital gains, carried interest, qualified dividends, etc). This is the root cause of the inequality. For 30 years, since Reagan, the US Govt has been coddling the super rich by funneling all tax relief to them. They turned their back to the USA, invested all the savings in low wage countries to maximize their profits.

That is true. My original guess was the memory allocations alone could explain the speed difference. Someone pointed out the handicap to compiler optimizations due to aliasing. (I do not have formal education in comp sci, so I have only a fuzzy understanding of aliasing).

Have you done any comparison with this keyword in C and Fortran? I play in the Finite Element Field. For me the flexibility afforded by C++ out weighs the performance I could get in Fortran. At least the solver people work on a mesh that is not altered, you could estimate the memory needs in one pass and then do the allocations, even for unstructured meshes. I make unstructured meshes, so I would not know a priori the number of tets incident on a node or number of triangles incident on an edge. I build these structures as I go along, and it is impossible to avoid new() and delete() in C. They are basically malloc() and free(). So have not touched FORTRAN for ages.

Among the solvers some of the matrix solvers use FORTRAN and some blas. Again they too prefer C++ for most of the solution and reserve FORTRAN only for really serious loops.

Yeah, yeah YOU can. But the C compilers don't know it. They still optimize code not knowing what could change and what could not. So you pay a penalty.

Till about FORTRAN 77 it was clearly beating C in scientific computations. But that was mainly because Fortran used static memory allocations and C was littered will malloc and associated overheads. With Fortran99, dynamic memory allocations came to Fortran too. At this point I figured it must be just badly hampered C, all the pain and not much gain. Have not tried it personally.

But a question for those who have: Does it still win with dynamic memory allocation? How granular is the dynamic memory allocation? Complete like C? or it is a bastardized version where the common block sizes could be defined at run time and then it runs without ever calling free()? I could imagine the language getting malloc() but not free() to retain speed.

It is not a totally unrelated product trying to use the popularity of WhatsApp. It is a skin on top of WhatsApp. I am not able to check how this works. It seems to be running the real WhatsApp in the background and work as a Man-in-the-middle between user input and WhatsApp app.

Technically it would be very difficult to stop an executable to run another executable in a sand box. Depending on how well you have understood the executable, you could do many things like step through debugging, poking and pushing memory etc. Debuggers work by "instrumenting" the executables, but they too act as man in the middle.

In this case Android executables are java which started out as an interpreted platform independent language. So it is a lot more "debuggable" than your typical linux or windows executable. So WhatsApp+ could theoretically sniff the memory locations and intercept communications, eavesdrop on the data and sell them to advertizers. One of the biggest thing about WhatsApp is, it does not eavesdrop, it does not sell ads. User are dumb to use this app.

WhatsApp itself should come out with a free version that would sniff the communications and sell ads and call it WhatsApp Minus. Or WhatsApp Minus Privacy.

A large box, anchored to the ground or fixed to the wall. It has a spring loaded button to lock, but requires a regular key to open.

Or a pet door or a cut-out door in the garage door. Works same way, can be locked without a key, but needs a key to open.

Far less complex, as reliable, and added bonus: The body you have hidden in the freezer in the garage would not be accidentally discovered by the deliveryman. (Note to self. Should cut down on watching Investigation Discovery shows.)

Not only they won't build it, they will not let you municipality build it either.

Long back Google had a April Fool posting about toilet net. That idea is fundamentally sound. The municipality can run fiber optic cables in storm water drains. It won't cost as much as it is costing Verizon to dig up and bury the cable. But you won't get it. They have the state law makers in their pockets.