Exactly. Corporations are people. People have first amendment right to free speech. Spending money is speech. So they have the right to spend unlimited amount of money in elections and campaigns. That is what SCOTUS ruled in the People's United decision.

But the employess are also people. They also have the first amendment right to free speech. But speaking about their salary is prohibited by their employment contract. So they can not speak under their free speech rights.

Welcome to the Union of Soviet States of America.

Only the top five highest paid executives have their pay disclosed to SEC. All the rest are confidential.

Humans are not the only one with trichromatic vision. In fact many of the primates do. So the theory that color vision evolved to tell blood flow and to pick emotional cues has it backwards. They had color vision already, they might have deployed it to detect emotional cues and that might have led to social groups where intent of other members could be predicted. This could have been the difference that led to the branching off of a set of social/gregarious primates (Chimps, Bonobos and Hominids) from the rest of the apes and primates.

Primates started specializing in a fruitarian diet some 10 or 20 million years ago. They had traded the sense of smell to stereoscopic vision earlier to become arboreal (to live in the tree branches and leap from one branch to another). So they developed the vision abilities further to tell a ripe fruit from raw one and to tell edible fresh shoots from mature leaves, that led to color vision. Another side effect of this shift is the lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C. All mammals could, but among the fruitarian primates, the loss is not debilitating because fruits were rich in vitamin C. Color vision and lack of vitamin C synthesis are the hallmarks of the primate line that became social and gregarious.

[It goes without saying, they did not do by deliberate thinking and planning.]

But... but... corporations are people my friend. So are you extending it to "corporations are generally good" too?

This is what Brain said when it secured the funding, "ya know what Pinky? My project go funding finally! It is trivial, less than a buck a neuron. But, still, it is something. Ya know what we gonna do?"

Pinky went, "er... I dunno... what? world dumb..i..ca..tion?"

Brain went, "World Dominiation you idiot!. World Domination!!"

Most of these CFD problems are time marching problems, governed by hyperbolic differential equations. Basically the state of fluid at some point X, at time t, is influenced only by the state of the fluid prior to that time. So when they are marching from t to t+delta(t), only the solution at the previous time step matters. Even in space, only a small region at T-Delta(t) affects any give point at T. Such problems are inherently parallel in data dependency. Such problems lend themselves for parallelism. This is not to minimize what they have achieved. If it was that easy, they would have done it long time ago. Physics governed by elliptical (and to some extent parabolic) equations are not that lucky.

For years we have been fed the myth of limited government, a notion that the Government is the biggest threat to our liberty. The shills were blatant, they openly longed for the government small enough to be drowned in a bathtub. But the moment the government becomes weaker than a strong person, he will promptly drown the government. Don't forget, companies are people my friend. At that point the greatest threat to our liberty would be those ungovernable companies. They are too big to jail. They can do anything they want and you can't do anything about it.

Free markets moderated by Democracy. B 4th July 1776. D Oct 2008. RIP.

The quality and reliability specs for FAA far exceeds space craft specs. For FAA passenger safety is the highest factor. For space craft weight is the highest factor. Spacecraft necessarily trade off safety for weight. At least NASA does not have as much cost constraints as private spacecraft consortia. So it would spend what it takes to get high safety at low weight. It would not go about jury-rigging automobile batteries, which themselves were jury-rigged laptop batteries into space craft. To me it looks like a blatant publicity ploy by the SapceX consortium.

ah, the assumption that every one must do one thing or every one must do the other thing!

Everyone does not have to use Open Source software with fanatical following. Depending on the circumstances each user would/should do whatever is best for them. But even for people who never use Open Source, it would serve as an insurance policy against their own vendors locking them in too tightly or jacking up the prices too much. Having a viable competitor is the best way to keep the prices down. So even if you use only commercial software, throwing a few cents towards Open Source projects is actually a good idea.

I won't fault individual users. But big corporations that spend so much of money on procuring commercial software, they can allocate a small percentage or a fraction of a percentage to support Open Source competitor to their vendors. Just to keep them in check. And hobbyists, anyone who knows enough to jump through the hoops to get Win 3.1 binaries to work through emulators in Android platform, could at least look at an Open Source alternative.

For the folks who have always believed in Trilateral Commission, who had seen UN insignia wearing officers in Oklahoma city bombing scene and among the wreckage inspectors of WTC, who had seen Chinese character instructions at the back of highway signs, the government + UN conspiracy to subdue the local population after disarming them, especially for the people who believed in black helicopters, Christmas came a little late. Enjoy the gifts folks.

But none of the patiently waiting fellas will chip in a little cash to provide a purse for someone to find the time and spend the energy. But will pay whatever the comerical software company asks. And it will ask (your_switching_costs - epsilon), epsilon tending to zero. But don't let that stop from ranting on slashdot.

Any one using any Google product, picasa, gmail, youtune, google apps, anything, are being roped in as google+ users.

Does Gimp suck so much that people are willing to go and beg Adobe for a 17 year old version, while they would not take the source code and compile Gimp in whatever platform they are working on?

Most likely people have simply given up taking the source code and building it themselves. If a prebuilt binary is not available they will simply give up.

That is why I have told all my acquaintances to always hibernate their computers instead of shutting down. Glad science is finally catching up to my powers of casual observations and inferences.

wait, it is not about the computer memory, is it? Darn it.

Hey, You, a student of Dr Swaminathan too? He too would give a D for any lab sheet turned in without calculating the estimate of experimental error, or if the reported result had too many significant digits. But he was doing freshman Physics at IIT-M, not chemistry.