Then you'd have ownership even more tied up into a very small number of families. Big buisness (I'm talking things like GM and Boeing, not Facebook) requires a lot of capital. You can get that two ways- a lot of small investors (which is what stock is) or a few very big investors. If you hold them personally liable, you can't go route A. Nobody would be able to afford the risk (not to mention the extreme difficulty of finding out who owes how much based on when shares were owned). The end result is that much of advanced industry wouldn't exist, and we'd have even more of a plutocracy.

The real answer is holding those who run the company liable. The CxOs, the board of directors, the presidents and vice-presidents. Any time a company is fined, someone from that company should be writing a check or going to jail- the highest level person who either knew or should have known had they been doing their job competently. That way you can maintain the benefits of distributed financing and bring accountability back into it.

There's a difference between having rank and being a leader. He may be both, but its far from assured.

Military tends to expect things done their way, without questioning or comment from their peons and tend to care more about processes than results (partly because when you're trying to make half trained recruits do things they don't really understand, detailed procedures actually can help). But that isn't an environment that fosters engineering talent.

Not all ex-military are like that, of course. But its a large subset, possibly a majority. I wouldn't refuse to hire ex-military, but I would consider any sign in that direction in the interview as a red flag.

Of course I wouldn't hire a straight out of MBA kid for anything at all. Get a few years experience doing real work and then get an MBA and you may be able to apply it. Get an MBA without experience and you're a liability.

Because at the moment, the DRM is easily broken and the file converted to pdf (or another format of your choice). When that changes, I'll be more worried.

I recently moved cross country. I had a choice- I could move over a thousand books, costing me hundreds of dollars. Or I could get rid of them, keep only the ones I'm most likely to reread, and rebuy the rest electronically as I want them. I picked option 2, because its more convenient- permanent access anywhere in the world. Instead of lugging books on trips, I take a Kindle. I can slip every book I own in my pocket.

I'm worried about DRM, but the Kindle has been cracked. With that barrier gone I prefer the convenience of the ebook to the slightly better experience of a real book. The only exception is for books I need to quickly flip through- references, cook books, and tour guides. Those the refresh time of an ebook are too high and too inconvenient, I keep them in paper.

Wait- why do the sites get to control this, rather than the user? If the sites get to specify who can share, that's a massive hole for tracking the way ad companies use cookies.

Nope, not kidding. I've never googled a prospective employee. I don't know anyone who has. I wouldn't trust the results if I did- how do I know its not someone else with the same name? I certainly don't care about their facebook or twitter feeds- even if I did for some reason do it, I'd just be checking technical sites.

If they specifically mention a site on their resume I may visit it, but that would be the limit.

Sure, a portfolio for a web designer type position is very useful. But they aren't checking to see how often you tweet or what your facebook status is- they're checking how pretty you can make a website and how clean the html is. Not quite the same thing as an online identity.

Nobody's going to even look. All we care about is can you do the job. The only exception is if the job is in marketing, then they may care about your use of social media.

There's tons of stuff they can do on the side that aren't programming related. Study math, physics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering. Build actual stuff. I'd rather hire someone who did any of that instead of program all day, less likely to burn out and more likely to see a non-intuitive answer than someone who only codes.

And watch the best people turn down your offer. I'm not taking a contract to hire position- it means you aren't willing to invest in me. I'll take a job with someone who is.

And the network already exists because it causes profit with other uses. Adding SMSes does not increase the cost of maintenance. So yes, SMSes are still actually free.

And do what? Do you actually read the license plates of cars you pass? And even if you do would you recognize that it was the same as a random string of letters and numbers of your phone?

As for the children- don't get me wrong, if I hear a child screaming "Get away from me, you're not my daddy" or "help I'm being kidnapped" I'll intervene. Short of that- do you stare at every little kid you see to check if they match the very vague description sent to your phone? Do you know the number of false positives and wasted police effort you'd cause if you did?

Nope, the AMBER alert stuff is useless. There's a point in emergency weather notices and major traffic conditions (flash floods, closed roads from earthquakes/rockslides, tornados, a bridge has collapsed, etc). There's a use for presidential (hey, we're at war and China is launching aircraft at us, you guys on the west coast go hide). The amber stuff is just feel good uselessness.

You're perpetuating a fallacy yourself. They aren't building a system to do this- the system already exists. So those fixed costs are already paid for, and would be paid for regardless of this service because it provides other profitable services. So the marginal costs are all that matters, unless we get to the point where the bandwidth used by SMS is enough to require additional hardware to be built (which for SMS is never going to happen).

If they had another way to monetize that small amount of bandwidth used you may have an opportunity cost of using the bandwidth in this. But the fixed costs don't factor in.

Inflation has multiple causes, and existed even before fiat currencies did. Increasing the money supply is one way to cause inflation, but not the only one.