Real geeks hack their tech. And when it comes to cooking, you can buy something that is half as good as what you can build, for twice the price -- as this ridiculous article handily demonstrates. Food hacking (or Modernist Cuisine, if you prefer) is a very big field these days. Want a great steak? Start with sous vide immersion cooking to get the perfect medium rare, then hit it with a flamethrower for the char. Play with your food.

Immersion Cooker (about $100 all-in):
http://beach.traxel.com/img/hopped-up/whole-rig.jpg

Weedburner Charring (about $35 at Harbor Freight):
http://beach.traxel.com/img/sous-vide/weedburner-char.jpg

Here's some more info on building your own meat jacuzzi:
http://qandabe.com/2011/70-diy-sous-vide-universal-controller/

They were desperate for it. Just like the rest.

All bankers are parasites.

Hope This Helps with your understanding of the nature of banking.

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Citi are at the top of the list of banks making use of Federal Reserve loan facilities. If they are and were so healthy why are they at the top of the list of heavy users?

http://projects.propublica.org/tables/treasury-facilities-loans

The simple truth is they did need the money and would have failed as spectacularly as Bear Stearns and Lehman without it. I'll just point out that the Federal Reserve was created for exactly the purpose of transferring risk to taxpayers by exactly the banks who made most use of it.

Oh and JP Morgan did everyone a favour for taking Bear Stearns over a $2 a share, financed again by the Federal Reserve? Oh please.

a world without software patents would be 'open slather for anybody who can just go faster than the next person.'

Well, yes -- that is pretty much the essential nature of "Open." Anyone who has the skill, time, and energy can build whatever they want, even if it is based on someone else's work. It has its ups and downs, but saying the software world would be more Open if it were more restrictive is an internally inconsistent statement. It is logically self-contradictory.

There are those who believe that using the system against itself is better than changing the system. Some believe the GPL is better than would be the elimination of software copyright. I actually fall into this camp (though I do believe in reducing the strength and duration of patent and copyright). But it would not be more Open. Open has some shortcomings, and that may lead a rational person to believe that absolute Open-ness is less efficient than some degree of Closed-ness. But that does not mean you can redefine Open to mean partially Closed. Just say you believe in a balance between Open and Closed. It's OK to believe in shades of gray.

Not every question demands an absolutist answer, but rational discourse does rely on words like Open having a clear and unequivocal meaning in a given context. Dilute your hard-core ideology, not the terminology you use to describe it.

Good luck going to war against China.

Morgan Stanley had to buy back all the stock to prevent it turning from Facebook into Faceplant. They'll have to sell it all over again.

Investment income is the reward you get by risking your money by investing in a business ... It is not something that should be discouraged

Agreed. Similarly, having an income-earning job should not be discouraged. However, we tax both types of income, so the fact is that we are discouraging both, in order to fund our government. We can all agree we should cut spending, and in the meantime we have to pay our bills, so we will have to tax things. It is just a question of which things we tax and how we balance the taxes.

Aside: There is also the question of whether we have the fiscal discipline to pay our bills even when we don't agree with what those idiots are spending our money on. In my world you don't cut off your nose to spite your face. It's bloody and it makes you look stupid. But I digress.

Right now, our government taxes regular income earners at a higher rate than capital investors. Some will argue the double taxation angle, but it does not hold up to scrutiny of actual corporate fiscal policy. The Sage of Omaha believes there is a problem with capital gains being under-taxed, and it is pretty hard -- maybe impossible -- to find a more hard-assed, ultra-wealthy, fiscal perfectionist than Mr. Buffett.

So, the question is this: Can we show solid empirical evidence that supports our treatment of capital gains versus regular income? Do we know something that has escaped The Oracle? If not, we need to take a very hard and honest look at that policy -- regardless of what our long-held beliefs may be or where our self-interests lie.

He has previously stated this is the bill that you either support, 'or you stand with the child pornographers.'"

Damn, Vic -- must be tough. Most people actually think you are a greater threat than a child pornographer. I mean, I think you are a wildly irrational authoritarian with far more power to harm the Canadian populace than any person with your mind-set should have, but.... well... OK, maybe they're right. I guess you are more of a threat than a child pornographer.

Heh, I guess, maybe you should be careful with the comparisons you draw. You might just wind up on the wrong side.

The productive resources of which you speak are controlled entirely by private individuals. How do you propose to "allocate" them, good, bad, or indifferent?

Copyright is a fiat of government, and it is a variable thing. It is a knob that we can turn up or down to increase or decrease the amount of resources that private individuals choose to dedicate to the production of copyrighted works. When we strengthen copyright, capital lenders are encouraged to shift more resources into the production of copyright goods, because the probable ROI improves. When we weaken it, the resources shift out of copyright production into the next highest ROI alternative application of those resources.

It's the same as anything in our economy works -- except that copyright is a fiat monopoly of government, so it does not naturally self-regulate in a free market like soda pop or automobiles do. Since monopolies do not naturally self-regulate via market forces, we must control the dial manually, by considering whether we are investing too much or too little of our limited resources into the production of copyrighted works, and adjusting the expected reward.

Both Facebook and Google share many business practices and monetizing practices. While Google had the unfortunate timing for their IPO (2004) after dot com bubble burst, the exact same thing could had been said about them. Many slashdotters, however, still believe that Google does the right thing.

I'm not sure who these "Many Slashdotters" are that you refer to -- some sort of expert panel on the morality of corporations I guess -- but they certainly are ignorant, and haven't been reading the website for which they are named. Google has become quite bent, particularly relative to their starting point, and that subject is discussed regularly and extensively on these forums (typically with a few ignorant twits starting the discussion by saying, "But you all love Google!" followed by a chorus of, "Are you daft? No we don't."). From cozying up to the U.S. surveillance state to embracing censorship in China, Google has become far more morally flexible since their IPO.

And bear in mind, Google started off as a hard-core moralist corporation. They were the poster-boys for "what a scientist/moralist company should be" until Eric Schmidt and the public shareholders came along. Facebook is starting with no discernible principles to act as a rudder.

Of course, I agree with your assessment of the investment potential. But that says a great deal more about the flaws in our economic policies than it does about whether Facebook is good for long-term United States growth.