The government can't take property (including intellectual property) pursuant to the TAKINGS clause of the US Constitution without paying just compensation.

The "intellectual property" is a government grant, not a contract. Someone's patent or copyright can be nullified or revoked; if the right law is passed, and the executive takes the right action.

km/ks is the same as m/s

Err.... how about km/ms or seconds per kilometer :)

We'll do that once we adopt the Spastic System. Sign the petition now.

As long as you write 1.94E-3 km/s plus or minus a standard deviation [Sigma], in regards to the distribution of speeds people actually travel down the road away from the mean, or plus or minus 10x the expected measurement error.

Actually, it should be in km/s, as h isn't SI.

The numbers would be too big. How about km/ks

As in kilometers per kilosecond or km/ms kilometers per myriasecond.

Speaking of which... how come we haven't stopped using normal seconds and switched to decimal seconds yet?

Soon motherboards will be just wiring for the I/O and CPU

And despite that, there is no price decrease to be seen in motherboards... if anything, they are getting more expensive, despite having less silicon and intelligence on them <G>

But only what you listed as the 0th law is credible and broadly accepted, as a fundamental rule. There is great doubt as to under what conditions those other 'laws' can or will continue to hold.

"We're grandfathering existing accounts that signed up before day X", duh.

Advanced notice doesn't mean there's a frenzy of new signups; it just means existing users are treated fairly.

Version control systems, unlike file downloads, are not particularly widely abused for hosting malware to be distributed through emailing deceptive links to unsophisticated users.

This is easily prevented by not allowing direct download links. For example, by requiring a hashcode in the HTTP request string accompanied by a cookie which is only set by answering a prompt.

and by restricting the files that can be made downloadable to .tar.gz and .zip files.

If someone tries to hide by creating a new wallet, you can also see that money from a known account got transferred to a wallet for which no previous transactions exist. Perhaps this is a different person, but when you see the same transaction patterns in the new account you can start narrowing your assumptions.

You could generate a large number of holding wallets in advance of any transaction, and retain a set amount of money in each wallet.

Then when you are planning to make another transaction, you generate a new transaction-specific wallet, and execute some sequence of transfers from a random assortment of your holding wallets to your transaction wallet, and then execute the transaction.

You could also have multiple layers of holding wallets and transaction wallets, and conduct some bitcoin rotations with friends to shuffle things around.

I envision if a few people are doing that, it could be very difficult indeed to correlate transaction to holder; now, I won't say impossible, because there are probably bound to be some patterns that might be detected through statistical analysis...

Not general problems, but implementation-specific problems that would be likely to occur.

There is also the issue about transaction cost, since the 'holding' and temporary/thorwaway wallets generates spurious non-transactions that look like transactions, and therefore, would use part of the bitcoin network's capacity.

That exchange will never be anonymous.

I wouldn't say that... I would say that exchange will sometimes not be anonymous. Especially when that exchange is made from bitcoins to a currency, and one of the trading partners is a large institution with regulatory requirements to meet.

But there will be other cases where it could be nearly anonymous. Mainly when neither of the trading partners keeps records of the identity of the other trading partner; or when they trade without learning the identity of whom they are trading with in the first place -- probably for intangible goods like data.

A private cloud would be a single physical server on-premises, or uplinked to the clients office from a datacenter via MPLS circuit

The private/public distinction seems totally artificial then.

Does it really matter whether their internet service is residing in a VRF, with IP space routed to a VLAN on the virtualization cluster, or whether the end user has a site-to-site VPN solution, as if a VPN suddenly makes it public?

Is the distinction private/public not totally artificial?

Of course there should be a scalable cluster and a large storage array, as shared storage is required for high availability. If you don't have a cluster, then you have a single physical server... not a cloud, where things are distributed and protected.

I see no reason OpenStack, CloudStack, OpenNebula would be required.. right... those are essentially APIs to optionally enable developers to do a lot of fancy things. just create a user in vCenter for the admins in each organization, with read access and remote console/power/reboot to only their vApp, and a couple orchestrator workflows for setup/teardown, which is more than most need -- when most people are reliant on the technology provider support department to do all their planning and provisioning anyhow.

the U.S. branch of Apple probably has gigantic expenses that it owes to another branch of the company that operates in international waters (or the Cayman Islands, or Ireland) for the use of the trademark "Apple". It's a shame

If it's legal to do, then I suppose it is the rational approach, and we can't fault Apple for that.

However, one of two things. Either; a company operating in international waters should not be permitted by the USPTO to be assigned a trademark right, OR, there should be a 40% tariff for the licensing by a company (outside US borders) of a right to a US company, unless that overseas company reports US income in the amount of the total of "exported trademark revenues".

In other words.... the transfer of US dollars overseas to cover the expense associated with a "trademark", "patent", "copyright", "contract", or other intellectual property license, should have a duty assessed, slightly in excess of the income tax rate.

They'll eventually get fed up of being told their code is bad even though it is and will just leave it bad and ignore any warnings.

The developers who don't ignore them, and consistently improve their CQM or have good CQM get all the important development work.

Those who choose to ignore successful metrics ultimately get marginalized and eventually laid off.

So all government is evil?

1. No government is terrible.

2. A little limited government is good.

3. A little more government than a tiny limited government is extremely good

4. A little bit more government is a tiny bit better

5. A lot of government is really no better -- there are diminishing benefits at this point.

6. A big government is a bit worse than (4) -- too costly, too controlling, few advantages over (5).

7. A huge government is much worse than (3) -- massive cost, drain.

8. A massive tyrannical government is terrible -- worse than (1).

This bad publicity can cause the companies involved to suffer a punishment of a loss in revenue - the public are less likely to do business with companies they see as not paying their fare share of tax.

I'm not less likely to buy any Apple product because of this.

What seems unfair is the US government attempting to lay a claim to revenues that were generated by Apple's related entity in another country.

This is because the "income tax" itself is immoral. The only country that should fairly have any ability to be able to tax the revenues is the country that they were generated in.

The so called "social acceptability" is just an attempt at manipulating companies into fiscally irresponsible behavior to prop up the poor behavior of fiscally irresponsible governments.