There are two problems with this. First, it is extremely difficult to measure how much someone uses. How much do you use a road (this is actually an easy one - per gallon gas tax, all toll roads [might be impractical for surface streets], per mile car registration fees, etc.)? How much do you benefit from the presence of a fire department (even if your house doesn't catch fire, you benefit when they put out the fire down the block)? What about police? How much do you benefit from FDA regulations which ensure certain standards of food/drug quality? How much CDC or NASA do you use?

Second, often times the people who use a lot (i.e. those on welfare, receiving food stamps, etc.) are those least able to pay. It doesn't make much sense (when talking about the social safety net part of government) to say you can only receive a government benefit if you can pay for it.

So if Exxon wasn't contributing to the lighthouse fund, it would be best for the lighthouse to turn off it's light when the Exxon Valdez was trying to navigate the treacherous reef during a storm? What we're talking about here isn't so much public goods as externalities and the Tragedy of the Commons. In your analogy, the non-paying shipping company probably isn't bearing all the cost of not-paying for lighthouse coverage. Even if there isn't a damages cap, it's not always possible to put a monetary figure on the costs of pollution. What's the financial impact of the Deepwater spill? Chernobyl? Is it possible for a single entity to cause an incident which costs more than it's ability to pay?

But we're getting away from the question of taxation and how to pay for government. If we're talking about lighthouses, police/fire, roads, parks, CDC, FDA.... excludability costs money. It's more efficient (but perhaps not fairer in your view), to offer those benefits to everyone. It might cost X to have a lighthouse. It will cost X+Y to have a lighthouse with a mechanism to determine who's paid and who hasn't.

To me, the discussion shouldn't be "how do we handle the excludability," but rather "what services should the government be providing. Maybe it shouldn't be providing crop or flood insurance. Maybe it shouldn't be providing unemployment insurance. Maybe it shouldn't be providing fire services.

I'm not sure why you're using States in your analogy. The issue is if the individual would voluntarily contribute to fund the national defense. If everyone else is paying $100 per year to support our military, why should I pay anything? The proof of the free-rider effect is shown when you look at Canada's military spending versus ours. Canada (and Mexico, Europe, Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, etc.) don't have to pay for defense because they know we will.

OK, fair point on the SLA. Sounds like you have a pretty good storage solution.... but....

Glacier is at least 3 copies, each in separate disaster zones (they claim something ridiculous like 9 9's availability). Your solution sounds like 1 copy in the same disaster zone as you (which matters if this is backup storage).

Loading the data from storage to your production environment I'm not sure what's more expensive, the connectivity to be able to pull your data from Glacier at a reasonable rate, or the tape drives and controllers to unload the tapes. If you're only doing a couple tapes at a time, probably the latter; if your dealing with scores or hundreds of tapes, probably the former. (Don't forget to include labor costs for managing that hardware.)

Not to mention, I expect you don't have to play the game to rip it.

FWIW, I never had a problem with my uncracked version of KOTOR I.

Chances are, you use the same or similar layout when you are doing the same task. When you have a certain combination of windows open, you probably arrange them in a very similar way. The computer could learn this overtime.

Or failing that, it could simply allow you to save a configuration.

Finally! Now all those people can stop complaining about past predictions of flying car metaphors never materializing.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/11073/stupid-geek-tricks-tile-or-cascade-multiple-windows-in-windows-7/

So in Win7, I either have to install 3rd party programs to manage the windows, or use the *Task Manager*?? You'd think Windows would do windows better.

Note: the Task Manager hack does not work on my machine with a dual monitor setup.

I'd like to be able to tile windows in Windows the same way I tile multiple spreadsheets in Excel, at the very least.

Can you enlighten us, because I would love to be able to tile my program windows the same way I tile my Excel windows.

When I saw the ads for 7 showcasing the feature where you drag the window to the side and it automatically resizes to fill exactly half of the screen I thought, "Awesome, that would actually be useful." Turns out it doesn't work so easily.

I actually use a mouse with the left and magic fingers with my right hand (with different gestures). Very efficient, at least for me.

Oh wait, you're not talking about surfing porn, are you?

Does the menu take up the whole screen when it pops open? If so, I think that's the point. The Win7/XP start menu overlays a small portion of the desktop, so you maintain a cognitive connection with your work space while accessing the menu for whatever. I'm not sure I understand the benefit of this if you are opening a new program in full screen mode, but I guess the idea is that there is a difference in how our brain interprets the "work space" and the "start menu," so replacing a program in the work space is less cognitively challenging than replacing a program with a menu, then replacing that menu with a (new) program.

Assuming 50/50 split and 100% utilization of the tape space (i.e. 600 GB per tape), then $36k per month. What do you spend to store those 6k tapes? It sounds like you're storing them offline (so no 5 hour SLA to first byte read), so your not exactly comparing apple to apples.

Also, I'm guessing you had to pay for those tapes. If we take an average cost of $30 per tape (you bought some when the generation was new I'm guessing), that's about $180k. Amortized over 3 years that an additional $5k per month.

GP link
2011 Annual revenue for AT&T = $126B

AAPL
2011 Annual revenue for Apple = $108B

But you're right, in the last quarter ending June 30 Apple outsold AT&T. In fact, over the last 4 quarters, Apples revenues were $148.8B versus $127.4B for AT&T

Donny you're out of your element! Dude, Verizon is not the issue here!

You have to pay $80 to get a tape back? That's a lot more expensive than Glacier. There you can retrieve up to 5% of your archive for free every month. After that it is $0.01/GB. Even if the 4 hour option is $40, that's still equivalent to the cost of retrieving 4TBs from Glacier (assuming you've already retrieved the 5%).