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Comment Re:Nothing to see here (Score 4, Informative) 418

This doesn't stop Amazon from just cancelling your account anytime they feel like it.

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/oct/22/amazon-wipes-customers-kindle-deletes-account

Or maybe just dropping their video biz.

Not to mention you can't transfer ownership, will it to your kids etc.

Sorry DRM is stupid all day. Give me the physical media every time.

Comment Binge Viewing FTW (Score 1) 261

I really have come to despise watching TV on most channels because of the overwhelming advertising content, so generally I wait until shows are available for streaming. And then BINGE.

The last binge I went on was Breaking Bad. Watched the entire 5 year series over 3 days. It was a great experience.

The first binge I did was watching LOST over a 4 day period. That was really cool too.

The exceptions are mostly shows that are on HBO or PBS - which are aired without commercials. These I can tolerate.

Eventually I imagine I will cut the cord, but there are a few things like live sports that I haven't found a way to get around the franchises for.

Comment Re:What is the cost basis? (Score 1) 245

The stock certificates are a representation of the ownership right to the company. When you sell a share of stock you are selling your interest in the company.

So the shares of stock DID exist previously, in the form of the property rights of the people who own the company.

When the owners sell their stock you can bet damn well they have to pay a tax on that sale. The magnitude of that tax can be huge. It's one of the reasons people like Zuck take out loans rather than sell their stock.

Comment Re:Boston PD (Score 3, Interesting) 110

That's nothing compared to Claude Shannon's master's thesis which laid out the use of boolean logic to solve general problems.

Here's a list (just from MIT, which is one of the 100 or so universities in Metro Boston).

1802 -- Modern navigation -- Bowditch
1886 -- Management consulting -- Little
1901 -- Disposable safety razor -- Gillette et al.
1914 -- "Tech"nicolor -- Founded in Boston by Kalmus et al.
1919 -- Trans-Atlantic aircraft -- Hunsaker et al.
1929- -- Instant photography (Polaroid) -- Land
1931 -- Stroboscopy -- Edgerton, Germeshausen et al.
1937 -- Use of Boolean logic to design "digital" circuits -- Shannon
1940-45 -- Practical radar -- Anglo-American military collaboration at MIT
1944 -- Mark I/II computers and first computer "bug" -- Aiken, Hopper et al.
1945 -- Hypertext -- Vannevar Bush
1951 -- Huffman code
1951 -- Random access memory ("core")-- Project Whirlwind
1953 -- PET scan -- Brownell
1953- -- Doppler radar -- Gordon
1956- -- Chomsky hierarchy
1957- -- Generative grammar -- Chomsky
1957 -- Confocal microscope -- MInsky
1957-61 -- Time-sharing (and some of what we now call virtualization) -- Project MAC
1958 -- LISP -- McCarthy
1961 -- Chaos theory -- Lorenz (and many others)
1961-2 -- Digital videogame (Spacewar!) -- Graetz, Russel, Wiitanen, Kotok
1963 -- CAD -- Sutherland
1964 -- Minicomputer -- DEC
1964-5 -- Electronic mail -- Van Vleck / Morris on CTSS (also network email, Tomlinson in 1971)
1969 -- Apollo guidance computer that navigated to and landed on moon -- Instrumentation (now Draper) Laboratory
1970-90 -- Object-oriented programming and data hiding -- Liskov (and many others)
1972 -- Packet-switching and ARPANET -- Kahn, BBN, etc.
1973 -- Black-Scholes option pricing model -- Black, Scholes, Merton
1978 -- Practical public-key cryptography (RSA) -- Rivest, Shamir, Adelman
1979 -- Spreadsheet -- Bricklin and Frankston
1981-89 -- Copyleft/sharealike, GNU and free software movement -- Stallman
1995- - E-ink -- Jacobsen et al.
2000 -- Zipcar -- Danielson, Chase

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