Why does it matter which of the Fridays you get paid on? As long as ((money in) >= (money out)) over any reasonable length of time greater than two weeks, shouldn't it all come out the same at the end?

It's not a function of payables vs. receivables. It's a function of happiness. Seeing more money in your account than the day before should make one happy. ;)

The company I work for just switched to a 9/80 a few months ago. We're a little different since we have a schedule A and a schedule B, so only 1/2 the people are at work any given Friday. It's had some ups & downs.

Here's what I see as the positives:
1. Having a 4 day work week every other week rocks!
2. Getting paid on the Friday where I work 5 days makes it all the more bearable.
3. Easier to get chores, errands done since everyone else is at work.
4. I get more work done during the last hour of every 9 hour day than any other hour.

Here's the negatives:
1. It's a PITA to schedule meetings.
2. Sometimes I travel and it seems to always fall on a week where I'm supposed to be off that Friday.
3. Customers are annoyed because they're not on the same schedule and aren't understanding that it won't be until Monday before I get back to them.
4. I feel like I have less time to get work done since every other week I only work 4 days.
5. More free time means I spend more money.
6. Getting to work while it's dark & leaving when it's dark is depressing.

Oh, its a lot worse than what the article claims. I suggest everyone living in the state of Georgia (US) to go read the bill. SB474 - Located here. This bill lets the state do all kinds of nasty things to "sex offendres" (I'll let others define that and argue about it).

Guess its time to write to my local Senator.

Mirror of the files. My webhost claims I have unlimited bandwidth.. :-)

Inflation was a lot higher over the last decade than the "official figures", because food, fuel, and housing were removed from the index. Under the same rationale, fuel and housing price decreases shouldn't be figured into any "deflation index" - so either the books were cooked all along (which we now know to be the case), or this sectors' deflation is just an adjustment to reality.

My economics teacher in college pointed this same thing out 4 years ago. He already viewed the Federal Reserve system with a bit of disdain and was concerned that the various indexes they use to measure things were inaccurate at best.

I learned a lot in that class. The main thing I learned was to not trust any numbers without finding out exactly where they came from.

Thanks for the link to the BBC! I've been trying to find a good resource to help me learn a bit of Spanish in a fun way.

It's my understanding that a DMCA take down notice has to be signed "under penalty of perjury" in order be valid.

No, you have to sign "under penalty of perjury" that you represent the company whose rights are being infringed, and that you have a "good faith" belief that the work is infringing.

The work (CoreAVC for Linux), did in fact have a reverse-engineered system for emulating (breaking) the copy protection in CoreAVC. The DMCA takedown itself wasn't bogus, nor was any perjury involved.

It's use was inappropriate, however, as the software was designed to benefit our customers, rather than principally as a "circumvention device" (keygen, crack, etc.). Our policy is to go after people distributing illegal copies of our software, not customers finding new ways to use it.

Which "scarce natural resources" in particular are we talking about?
Pro-government, pro-taxation arguments that put government needs first inevitably devolve onto government as a religion, and high taxes as its catechism. The end game of that approach is to simply take everything from anybody earning any income or making any kind of transaction; this, of course, is what we used to call feudalism, and chasing that off was one of the side effects of the Enlightenment. The idealists who claim, with a straight face, that this is not so will never tell you just where their plans should end or how much is "fair", just more than is currently being collected. So grows the State, and their mad plans for running things on somebody else's nickel, coin they didn't have to earn.

The scarce natural resources would be land, labor, and entrepreneurial ability. I'm not sure why you've chosen to try and devolve this conversation towards the condescending but it has no place here. I will ignore your rant of a history lesson, but I do not appreciate your ctone and it will stop for this conversation to continue. I have absolutely no problem laying out exactly was I believe is fair in this situation. What's more, it's easily testable. If a reasonable, neutral person were to look at the situation and ask why Company X, which does a similar amount of business in Washington pays Y amount, why does MS get to pay close to nothing? If it's because of some special consideration, is that consideration worth examining further? Are the taxpayers getting a raw deal? Is it so that MS stock holders can get a bigger return?