You end up with a lot less "publicity driven voting driven by funding from biased sources" when no amount of money can buy win. So long as people contribute $X, enough to get your message out, the person with ten times as much money has little or no advantage - both names go into the hat. Campaign finance has extremely diminishing returns. If, in a given race, it takes $1 million in publicity to get 20% of the voters, two million will get you to 25%. Three million will get 27%. Ten million will get 35%. A hundred million will get 45%. One major reason for the ridiculous amount of money spent in elections is that candidates are chasing that last half of a percent. If you say that a 1% lead doesn't matter, that means 20% of the money doesn't matter.

* numbers are not accurate, but illustrate a point that is correct.

> Even so, to me it looks as if the system that you have proposed will act so as to maintain and increase the concentration of wealth and power among those that already have it, and squeeze out those on the edges of power.

In fact, it has not, precisely because "those on the edges of power" have an equal chance of getting elected - if they are truly on the edge.

Indeed, instead of using a plugin, author it in OpenFL and "compile" it as JavaScript. You get the nice Flash API and can use the Flashdevelop IDE if you want, without needing the Flash plugin.

The CS major can calculate the time complexity of the rollback algorithm.
The SE thinks that allowing for rollback might be a good idea.
The IS person cusses the PM who didn't allow for rollback because OF COURSE you should plan for contingencies.

Wow, that's great. Windows ran a few months without a blue screen of death. Meanwhile over here where we use reliable operating systems, a contractor hotswapped a CPU in one of my machines. It kept running fine. That machine has had two replacements of the boot drive in the last few years. No reboots needed for those either.

Analog vs. digital, fully connected vs less connected - all can fail in similar ways. If it's really critical, like nuclear power plant critical, use simple, basic physics. The simpler the better.

You need to protect against excessive pressure rupturing a tank. Do you use a digital pressure sensor or an analog one? Use either, but how also add a blowout disc made of metal 1/4th as thick as the rest of the tank. An analog sensor may fail. A digital sensor may fail. A piece of thin, weak material is guaranteed to rupture when the pressure gets to high.

Monitoring temperature in a life safety application? Pick analog or digital sensors, ei ther one, but you better have something simple like the vials used in fire sprinklers, or a wax piece that melts, something simple as hell based on physics. Ethanol WILL boil and wax WILL melt before it gets to be 300 F. That's guaranteed, everytime.

New nuclear reactor designs do that. If the core gets to hot, something melts and it falls into a big pool of water. Gravity is going to keep working when all of the sophisticated electronics doesn't work because "you're not holding it right".

Motorola Mobility was losing a billion dollars a year before Google came in. To claim Google screwed the company up is ridiculous.

However, as the inventor of the cell phone and a major market leader in earlier years with billions in R&D investment, Motorola had something Google wanted.
Google bought MM for about $7.5B net of cash and accrued losses, then sold the parts they didn't want for about $6B. Bottom line, they paid $1.5B for a patent portfolio with a book value of $5.5B. That's a $4B gain for Google, by flipping a company that was headed toward bankruptcy. Why did Google flip it so quickly? Remember Moto was losing a billion dollars a year. By moving quickly, Google limited the time they were paying Moto's operating expenses.
After ssubtracting the continued operating expenses, Google walks with a bottom line gain of $2 billion.

How did YOU make $2 billion in two years? Yeah, me neither.

Less than half of Google's revenue is from search. Youtube is a big part and Hulu. They make money alot of ways - the AOL home page, CBS pay-per-view, many ways. They in fact have dozens of highly successful products and services. See https://investor.google.com/ea...

In all, they are about thirty three billion dollars smarter than me or you. You're pretty good at saying stuff that _sounds_ smart, so clearly you have some real intelligence. The one thing where I see you consistently make yourself sound and act stupid, even though you're not stupid, is your absurd ego where you think you're so much smarter than Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg, and everyone else who has proven they know what the heck they're doing. Your writing makes it clear that you've got some brains, but your brains are completely wasted when you refuse to learn from others' success.

The million dollar exemption in IRC 2057 was last effective for tax year 2003.
This is why we don't start our posts with "Wrong ..." - feet taste bad.

If you research it, and research stuff from the past ten years, you can of course find some ways to pass some assets before death and pay other taxes instead of the estate tax. Certain types of property are exempt. I posted the simple version because there are hundreds of pages of applicable law and regulations and this is Slashdot, not CPAnet. In some cases, some portion may be exempt, so if you had a business worth $500K and of that $200K was exempt, you'd have $300K taxable. You'd need $135K in cash or insurance to pay the tax without selling or liquidating the business.

I can relate to what you're saying. However, if by "the ruling class" you mean people in leadership positions - people who have built a successful business, people who have successfully organized large events like the Olympics, etc., you end up attacking anyone who has proven they can do a good job on big things - precisely the people we need to have leading.

Another option takes more work, but gets better results:
Identify the bad leaders, the morally corrupt and the incompetent. That would include Bush II, Obama, Ray Nagen, etc. Get rid of the bad ones and find good leaders. Good leaders might include Colin Powell and Robert Gates.

Third, along with identifying and eliminating bad leaders, we need structural changes. Other countries have better election systems we should consider, where you have to build a broad coalition to get elected. We need to look at ways to move away from the "American Idol" style popularity contest. There's some truth to calling Obama "President Kardashian" - many of his voters had no idea why they were voting for him, zero knowledge of the issues. We need to try to fix that.

In one organization, unless someone wins 2/3rds of the vote, they draw straws from among the finalists. It works quite well, achieving what campaign finance reform is intended to achieve, without the free speech issues involved such as potentially making it illegal for a blogger to speak their opinion.

It makes a lot of dog-eat-dog campaigning unnecessary because the candidates aren't fighting tooth and nail for that extra 0.1% of the vote - just put up a pretty good candidate, who can get at least 20%-35% of the vote to get their name in the hat. Primaries, and therefore pandering to the extremes, aren't critical when someone can get elected without being chosen by either major party.

On the other hand, if JFK came back to life he'd win 2/3rds and win, as he should.

He wasn't lying, we all just heard him wrong. He made us hope for change. I'm sure hoping for a change right now. Right now I'm just hoping for a GOOD president next time, liberal or conservative hardly matters. Either Kennedy or Reagan would be a thousand times better than our last few presidents.

The whole point of the insurance is so that the taxes WILL be paid.

Suppose a dude has a business. It's worth $1 million. Maybe it's a well-run McDonald's., or a family farm. When the dude dies, his estate is taxed $450,000. Without insurance, his wife and kids have to sell the McDonald's in order to pay the tax. That sucks, so what the guy does is spend $20,000 / year to buy $500,000 in life insurance. When he croaks, the wife and kids use that insurance money to pay the taxes. That way, the taxes are paid and they don't have to sell the business.

It's better for the government too, because whose knows if the business will actually sell for a million now that the guy leading it is dead.

You say some of the students in your district can attend the #1 school in country. Did it occur to you that "#1 in the country" by definition means that yours is the ONLY district in the country that offers that opportunity? No other district anywhere in the country offers that, by definition.

There were plenty of people trying to take the place of MySpace. I assisted one such company. Only Facebook succeeded, beating not only MySpace but also all of the others trying to do the same thing. Clearly, Zuck did a lot of things right. In all likelihood, he must have been very good at hiring really good people, keeping them, and motivating them, along with leading them toward a unified vision.

Then Google spent a billion dollars or whatever trying to compete . With all of Google's resources - money, great engineers, captive eyeballs - they couldn't touch Facebook. They are obviously doing a lot of smart things.

The guy might be an asshole, I don't know. I'd bet he's obsessive, most people who are ridiculously successful in one area of their life get there by being obsessive about a goal. Most certainly, though, he achieved what thousands of other smart people couldn't.

"I worked at the school ... I work at the same university", you said. I guess that's the big difference - people got to know you while you were in college, and you've stuck close to those people who know you. I didn't stick in one circle - couldn't. I was working in cybersecurity and had to leave my entire circle of acquaintances behind when moral issues forced me to leave that sphere. I couldn't, in good conscience, work with those people anymore. (I'll let you decipher what that means.)

It's interesting that your story starts and ends at a university.

You asked what it's like to compete for a job. It fucking sucks to go from well-known (in the field) to "I hope to get an interview". A few years ago, people sometimes got excited when they heard it was me calling. After two years at the agency I work for now, the leadership has finally begun to notice me. This week may be very interesting in that regard. The last two years HAVE been a nice break from management, though.