Excellent point. Instead of "up to", they should make claims like "at least". Then that's substantial.

Wait, you really think that the reason there are poor and hungry people in this country is because we don't grow enough food here in the US? Seriously? We export our food! It's not a technological problem here in the US.

So usually these technology don't progress without the corresponding technology acting in response. Has radar or any detection technology made any progress in detecting stealth aircraft? Just curious.

They did also mention that the base get 16,500 condoms a year. It gets cold and lonely there in Antarctica with nothing else to do except for each other.

Composite has been used in aerospace well before cycling. The 787 is the first all composite airliner but other aircraft have used composites in various parts well before that. Military aircraft such as the B2, F-22, and F-35 are composite aircraft.

I can almost feel your frustration at being an expert in a crowd of Slashdot self-appointed experts. Thanks for the post and insights.

I think you know little of how waiters work then. They already don't declare their tips fully. Most of them don't and they already know that they won't be caught so the situation is no worse in either case.

Your point isn't bad but I think if you were the type that have serious finances to hide, you wouldn't be the type that would volunteer that kind of information regardless of pre-filled or not. What I mean is that under the current system, you wouldn't reveal that information anyways if you had gone out of your way to hide it.

It's however much you are willing to pay for the game. Done.

Seriously. One of the beautiful things about economics and capitalism is this principle of encapsulating the value of something with a price. Different people look for different virtues in an object. You might think time played is the correct measurement but a long game that goes bad in the end might be less valuable to me than a good, short and fun game. It's all relative but we can all get to common unit of worth through by stating the price.

If after $30 for the game and playing it, you regretted it, then it was worth less than $30. If you were happy about it, then it was worth more than $30 to you. What the game can sell for in a free market is what it is worth. That's the beauty of a free market. It's not just an exchange for goods and services, it's a good information discovery tool.

Well except for the case of information/software where the marginal cost is basically zero. Once you've written the story, article, software, or music, the next copy is essentially free to reproduce. I'm not saying that should drive your business model though but there are cases when free can be good too.

The reason medical devices are so expensive has little to do with lawsuits when compared with the number one reason: the market for health care is distorted because the decision maker (doctor) is not the person paying for the decision (the patient or insurance). Medical device companies just market directly to doctors. Medical conferences are like industry paid vacations for doctors. Even if you tell your doctor that your Wii balance board does the same thing as the $18,000 device, he's still not going to prescribe it because he has no incentive to. He doesn't bear the cost of paying for it. You do or most likely your insurance do. You see the exact same thing in the textbook industry. The professors make the decision and the students pay for it. When the two entities are not the same, you have a market that's distorted and normal mechanisms of capitalism don't lead to lower costs and greater efficiency like they do in other areas. Of course FDA approval definitely plays into this by making it easier for doctors to have support for their decisions.

Newspapers are losing money. They're trying to figure out how to get "this Internet thing" to work for them. I know a lot of you have ideas and think that they're good but, to be honest, I doubt most of us here knows the intricacies of newspapers. It's their trade and their business. Let them try and figure it out how to make it work. That's what capitalism is all about after all. Good ideas live and bad ideas die off. Their current business model is apparently not working. Something has to change. If it works, then good for them. If you don't like it, don't pay for it. Not everything that has a price is bad. Until they go around suing people for inflated sums of money, I have no objections to what they're doing.

Making the workplace less pleasant is only going to backfire. If I was running a company I would make the place as nice as possible so my workers would want to stick around for as long as possible. The highest cost to almost any company is labor. Since IT workers are often paid on a salary basis, free coffee and even free dinner is a bargain for the extra work I can get out of them. Many tech companies do this. Cutting 401k, laying off some people, or hiring less people are one thing but making the work environment unpleasant simply has a bad return on "investment". You save peanuts on the actual cost and lose way more on productivity. Also, as another commenter pointed out, people will work as hard as they think is due. When you start nickel and dime-ing your workers, they'll do the same back. Don't expect "above and beyond" type of effort when you don't seem to be doing the same for them.

VMware's solution for test and dev allows you to access the VMs over your browser: http://www.vmware.com/products/labmanager/

VMware even makes a product just for that use case: http://www.vmware.com/products/labmanager/