What about firm which communicate using VPN ? No entities are in Australia , just maybe a worker or two communicating with a german firm for example.

I don't think market cap is a good measure of size. If it were, then during the dotcom boom various online pet food suppliers, etc, which had barely any assets, employees or customers, would have counted as 'bigger' than more boring companies with a much greater footprint in the real world. Similarly, a large company may head towards bankruptcy and as it does so its market cap heads towards zero. But even if it is sold for a nominal price of one dollar, it is still a big company by any reasonable measure.

Given Newton's later descent into religious mania, he might not be the best example here ;)

I know Slashdot takes a lot of heat for reposting old stories, but this one is truly impressive. Its 45 years old! Most Slashdot readers weren't even born yet. The Beatles were still together. I was 2.

Its like the editors went, oh old stories huh? You think these are old stories? I'll show you old stories, mofo!

Tomorrow: Jules Verne in 1877 suggested it might be possible to bootstrap space navigation by hitching a ride on a passing comet (tagged: screwyouwhiners)

Ah, I see the rumors of Francis Dec's demise were greatly exaggerated.

I dunno...

For one thing, a bog standard Tesla already has pretty good protection. The NTSA actually had to make up new tests to find any kind of limits to the thing. For example, when they tried doing standard crashes into poles, it kept breaking their poles. They flat out could not get the thing to roll over. You'd think with that as a standard to start from, they could achieve some pretty great things if given the extra custom design latitude and budget a POTUS limo vendor is typically given.

For another, with the extra space under a stretch limo, as the article points out they ought to be able to pack enough extra battery to make up for the extra weight.

For another, electric cars already have much more power at lower revs than gasoline cars. I'd think that would be a pretty attractive feature for people worried about someone trying to block off their vehicle in an ambush.

No, "assault rifles" are not perfectly legal...

Bzzzzzt. Wrong.... The only rifles that are restricted to own are automatic rifles. ie: machine guns.

Bzzzzzt. Wrong. An actual "assault rifle" is a select-file (i.e., can be set for auto or semi-automatic operation) rifle of intermediate power. They are automatic weapons, and as such heavily restricted.

"Assault rifle" is not to be confused with "assault weapon", which is the sort of "ugly gun" you're speaking of. The term "assault weapon" seems to have been a deliberate coinage by a prohibitionist to confuse scary-looking semi-automatic rifles with actual military select-file assault rifles.

"Assault rifle" is a meaningful term. "Assault weapon" is not.

This "article" reads more like an ad. $120/year for 1 TB is more than 9 times what I'd pay for 5 years of a 1 TB internal SATA.

You internal SATA is not an off-site backup. This seems like a decent option for a backup that will still exist if (fates forfend) your house burns down.

Unless we have the name of the person who owns that first telephone number it's still just a number.

"Hey, Sprint? Yeah, this is Agent Smith at the NSA. I see that the phone number 443-555-5555 is on your network. What's the billing address for that account? Uh-huh. Any other accounts at that address? I see. And is there a credit card on file? Can I get the name and card number? Ok. And what's the PIN on their voicemail? Right. And the MEID on the phone? Thanks."

Granted, matching a name to a phone number is trivially easy,

Especially when you're the frickin' NSA.

Back when I worked for one of the top defense contractors, they really didn't pay us very competitively. I was looking around, and encouraged a good friend of mine to do so as well. He was a really good engineer, and deserved better. Unfortunately, he told me he couldn't.

You see, a few months after hiring on right out of college, he discovered he had diabetes. Our employer's insurance continued covering him (because they had to), but if he tried to go anywhere else nothing diabetes-related would be covered, as it would be considered a "preexisting condition". He was trim, and healthy and kept good care of himself, but every 2 years or so something would go wrong and he'd end up in the hospital for a couple of weeks. Without coverage for this, he'd be a financial disaster. He was stuck working there.

This is the point where a person starts to wonder how many other folks like him were out there. How many people had developed conditions that made them essentially indentured servants? And how much had this situation screwed over the natural economy that our country should have?

I know "pre-existing condition" exceptions are outlawed now. But our current Congress tried to reinstate them more than 50 times, last session. We're just one good Republican election away from getting them back.

Have you ever tried to raise capital in a socialist system? Capitalism makes capital common and available.

Capitalism keeps capital in the hands of the capitalist class, that's it's whole reason for being. The idea behind socialism is to make capital -- not to be confused with money, but the actual "means of production", and so not something that has to be "raised" -- available to workers without having to get some parasitic aristocrats involved. Unfortunately, Marx was not an empiricist and his version of socialism lends itself to abuse by authoritarians; but even his fscked-up version took an agrarian nation barely out of feudalism (Russia still had legal serfdom until 1861!) and turned it into a space-faring nuclear superpower -- and that in spite of bearing the brunt of the cost of stopping the Nazis. Stalin sucked and Marxism has serious flaws, but the whole "OMG socialism failed!!1!" meme doesn't hold up to serious examination.

As you can see from the Wikipedia article it was only used for MtG for a short time, then the domain name was repurposed.
It's been Mt. Gox for a few years.

A very good analysis. My only complaint with it is that a lot of it is conjecture based on the theory that the money supply is currently being increased, which is not actually the case. The Fed is not printing money, and in fact is not capable of doing so. It might be a very good idea right now, for reasons you are quite eloquent about, but the agency that would have to do it would be the Treasury, not the Fed.

The basic situation is that we went through very nasty credit-induced recession. We don't know what's typical for such things really, but the last one is now called "The Great Depression", and took more than a decade (and some say a major war) to recover from. So we should be thankful things aren't far worse, but they still suck compared to a typical "recovery". There's a good chance it will recover on its own eventually, but for us humans "eventually" doesn't buy us groceries, so it would be a really good idea to do what we reasonably can to help it.

The problem there is that we are currently the proud holders of a congress that couldn't pass gas in a chili house. The political cynic in me would say that the Republican Congress doesn't want the economy to recover before the 2018 election, and is doing everything they can to stop recovery efforts. But even if you don't buy that, its undeniable that there's no way they are going to allow any further stimulus (that isn't war-related).

So this means that the Treasury department will simply not be allowed to print money to help us out of this, no matter how good of an idea it may seem. The only government agencies that are capable of acting are independent agencies, and of those the only one with a mission of looking after the economy is The Fed. They can't print money of course, but what they can do is effectively give free loans to banks (which they are doing), and take treasury securities out of circulation by increasing reserve requirements (which they are also doing). Both of these in theory ought to make it easier and more attractive for banks to give out loans and people to buy stocks.

Of course this means that those who don't want the economy stimulated now hate the Fed, and are spewing all kinds of vitrol against it. It doesn't matter much if there's any truth in their complaints, because what the Fed actually does is so arcane that nobody can refute lies without making the typical American's eyes glaze over.

Great point. Sadly, the rest devolved into another goofy anti-fed diatribe, from a different angle.

You may have noticed that inflation is actually at a historic low right now. So based on this external data, it doesn't really look like the money supply is being artificially increased right now, does it?

Well, that's because it isn't. What the Fed is doing to stimulate things right now is twofold: It is allowing banks to borrow money from it at almost no interest, and it is "buying" its own treasury securities to get them out of the market. There is no extra new cash flowing around the USA right now, and if the government wanted to do that, it would have to be the Treasury Department doing it, not the Fed.

So why the "printing money" meme? The cynic in my says its because the phrase tests well for Right-Wingers when they use it, and the truth is so complicated there's little danger of the fib going corrected.

By this logic, you could make the same claim about Microsoft, every time its OS "phones home" for some reason while running on your computer. Somehow, I don't think that will fly.

It could easily be argued that this is the normal operation of the software that you purchased as part of your hardware purchase, and if you didn't want that you were quite capable of buying somebody else's product that didn't do that. It could also easily be argued that you are a mortal human being while Ford (like Microsoft) is comparatively an immortal being with unlimited resources, and thus they are quite capable of either buying enough lawyers to beat you in court, or if their case is particularly bad, just stalling in court until you either run out of money or die of old age.

So good luck with that. I'll be rooting for you.