Just as a correction, you don't need to carry papers in New York State:
    http://www.nyclu.org/oped/column-showing-id-nypd-our-times

I'm not as brave as I wish I were with the random searches in NYC. What I do is say "no thank you" and leave the station and then re-enter the station at another entrance.

There is a good book on this subject, "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45" by Milton Mayer. It gives you a much better understanding of how the Nazi's really gained power vs. the silly version you get from popular culture and high school history classes. In some senses it's very chilling because the parallels are strong but you also see how powerful the parallels were to what happened here during the cold war yet we managed self correct. Reading that book was what made me realise why Joseph Welch's standing up to McCarthy was so important, if decent people had done the same thing early enough in Germany it really would have prevented the Holocaust. Again I'm not as brave as I'd like, but I've seen the a little bit of power of standing up to the thugs at the airport. When I opt-out of the porno-vision scanner there are often a number of people who summon up the courage to do so as well.

Yes, of course. But the alternative would be to run a water cooled electrical power-plant that uses the water on the cool end of their heat engine and pumps more heat into the water and then run an AC that pumps the heat from the data center into the atmosphere. So this ends up putting less heat into the environment overall. There can be arguments for why not to put this type of data center in some sensitive environment, say spawning grounds, but those same arguments would be made about the power plant and there is no reason to think Norway doesn't do the type of environmental assessments that would prevent you from dumping heat into a sensitive area. Using a body of water for cooling isn't a new idea, it's used for air-conditioning skyscrapers all over the world. Data centers have been built up very quickly in the couple decades and are just now starting to be made more efficient. As far as I know all the issues have solutions. The water intakes are designed not to suck in too much fauna and the exhaust is mixed with cold water and/or located where it will have minimal impact (there are of course a lot of grandfathered in power-plants that don't do this, but the solutions exist.)

The per-capita argument will be made by any poor country, you need to counter it with a strong fairness argument based on something else. For instance, you might divide by CO2 emissions by GDP instead and get a different map. The argument for that is that the goal is to lower CO2, but you want to increase the overall standard of living so a factory producing a widget at 1 ton of CO2 is preferable to one producing the same widget using 2 tons of CO2 no matter what country it sits in. Then the counter argument becomes, "Raw GDP isn't fair because some widgets will sell for less in China than in the US, you need to adjust for purchasing power." So then you adjust for purchasing power. After a series of such adjustments we can end up with something that a citizen in both a developed nation and an underdeveloped nation understand as fair. From that point you plug it into economic growth models and come up with efficiency targets that will over time lower world emissions as the world economy grows. How to meet those efficiency targets can be handled per country knowing you won't be penalized for your country's economy growing as a proportion of the overall world economy.

* It's significantly lighter!
  * It plays movies as well as the iPad
  * The interface is faster and easier to use than the iPad.
  * The web browser is infinitely better than the cr*p browser on the iPad.

I have the original iPad and not the iPad2, maybe they fixed the horrendous UI and the lack of responsiveness of the original iPad. I find neither tablet a usable replacement for a book or an e-reader. Both that have screens too much glare to use for reading more than about 5,000 words at a time and the back-lit displays make them unsuitable for use in either low light or sunlight conditions so using either to read a book or other lengthy material out of the question.

I didn't even think of it until this was posted on slashdot, but the iPad hasn't left it's cradle since the Fire was activated.

That said there are a couple issues.
  * The "power button issue" has an easy workaround, hold it so the button is on the top and not resting on your tummy. But this could have been avoided by making it not stick out and instead needing you to use the point end of a finger to push it.
  * The is no way to password protect the purchase function. This means you can't have a credit card associated with the account if you have small children which in turn makes purchasing apps a chore. I'd prefer something where a password isn't required to just update apps or "purchase" free apps like on the iPad, because that is really annoying. But whenever a debit is being made against my CC I'd like a password prompt.

Huh, I never considered hedge fund managers or high frequency traders to be providing value via "creativity" and "inventiveness", but I'm sure happy to let them argue that before being hung in a public square.

Hedge fund managers make investments on behalf of their clients. Here the idea is specialization. Instead of you having to research a bunch of investment vehicles for your small pile of cash, you along with hundreds of other people hire a hedge fund manager to do that for you. This means only a few people have to do that research that before specialization hundreds had to do. As long as there are enough fund managers to avoid group-think society benefits by having fewer work hours spent on finance overall.

High frequency traders have driven down the insane profits that used to be made by human traders on the trading floors. This has succeeded to the point where many of my neighbors in NYC who used to be traders have now switched to the other side of the house and have become fund managers and investment advisors. This is often misunderstood because trading itself is a zero-sum game so there is no benefit to society in the profits that are made, but the HF traders have driven down the overall profits which is a net benefit to society.

None of this means I will defend the privatization of profits and the socialization of losses. But I don't think that is a problem with the financial industry per-say. Other industries have been equally successful at fleecing society, Hollywood with the copyright laws, large 'real' property owners with the zoning laws, the drug industry with our patent laws, and industrial farmers with our food labeling and inspection laws. The problem is not with our financial industry, it is with us and our inattentiveness to managing our own government.

I think the ban is on Sodium Chloride - try cooking with Sea salt.

Sea salt is almost entirely Sodium Chloride with just an insignificant portion of shellfish and Potassium Chloride thrown in.

Meanwhile, I'd like a ban on Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) in restaurants

Ok, so you want no meat, no tomatoes, no mushrooms, no cheese, no dairy at all. It sounds like you would like restaurants to serve only black coffee with refined sugar.

Doh! I've been trolled!

Corporations shouldn't be taxed, period. Money that comes OUT of that corporation through stock dividends and wages and bonuses and perks should be taxed. And that should all be taxed as plain old income, not special kinds of income like "capital gains" that has lower rates to compensate for corporate taxes already taken out.

The biggest problem with this is that if you don't have a different rate for capital gains and dividends then inflation will mean that even if you sell an asset at a loss when adjusted for inflation you will end up paying taxes. This means there will be a disincentive to sell under-performing assets to someone who might make better use of the asset. I would say have the same rate as other income, but also allow deductions based on the same official inflation rate as is used to adjust social security payments. Right now capital gains taxes are way too low on goods held year and a day to about 10 years. The Crazy Eddie rates on capital gains mean businesses are highly encouraged to convert their income into capital gains via acquisitions that may not make a whole lot of sense in terms of overall profitability. This means that a tax being too low actually hurts growth because of its distorting effect.

If you got rid of the corporate income tax and replaced capital gains by regular income tax minus inflation adjustments, I think that would help businesses of all sizes a great deal. But the income tax rates might have to be adjusted upwards to make up for the income shortfall, and if you did the change too quickly the capital flows to adjust to the new tax regime might be problematic (though in terms of political will it is when the economy is bad is really the best time to make this type of large structural change.)

To those saying why does it matter what the tax rate is... Tiny but growing businesses do pay the top tax rates; you need to build up cash on hand disproportionate to the size of the business when you are growing rapidly. It's not good for prices or for jobs to quell competition against established players via tax policy.

I fear the rich will have to rediscover the situation they were in with a massive uneducated population before they stop this downward spiral.

The rich are by and large begging for higher taxes and higher government expenditures. It's the poor simpletons that are railing against the $40k/yr of services they receive. Outside professional pundits and the politicians you will find practically no one making over $379k/yr after deductions complaining about a marginal tax rate on income above that mark increasing from 35% to 39%, it's poor people making $140k/yr that in practical terms pay no income tax that have their panties in a bunch.

If someone has named an employee as selling your trade secrets that's a legitimate reason to spy on that employee. But it's not legitimate to spy on everyone because you have a bad apple in the bunch.

If your boss gets a hair brained idea like that you should first attempt to talk them off the ledge, and if that fails hand in your resignation. You don't want that on your conscience for the rest of your life and a company with that kind of oppressive corporate culture is not likely be a good place to work in the short run or to succeed in the long run.

What she really needs to do is talk to her insurance agent and get coverage that protects the company when it gets sued. She should also hire a lawyer to sit with you and someone from operations and come up with an employee handbook that burdens the company's business with as few addition costs as possible while still allowing the company to fire employees that cause more trouble than they are worth. Once a decent cost estimate for all this is available she needs to adjust her prices 5%-20% to account for the new costs imposed by the law, other business in the same sector will be under the same pressure as well. She should make sure that she lists the reason for the price increases in the announcement.

She should also join some kind of business lobbying coalition. Many countries have "Chamber of Commerce" type lobbying groups which will give your Senators and Representatives and their families free vacations to Bali and the like if they "play ball". This should make sure the really dumb laws mostly just hurt poor people.

They are very reasonable. The free tier looks like it offers enough to replace what I was paying $70/mo for an old server with just 80GB of storage in a colo facility not so long ago. In particular, it looks like it's easier to host low resource servers for 24/7 for free than with AWS.

Reading the comments it looks like some people have gone hog wild on server resource utilization when it was free. One commenter said his free app was using eight 24/7 servers. But if you're using those kind of server resources you should have what, 500k active users? At that point you should have enough advertising revenue to recover costs.