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.

I've experienced the same frustration. There are certain technical circles in which I am well known, yet when I decided to get an 8-5 I had a heck of a time because I left college to run my business. I eventually took a job making half as much as someone with my experience would normally make.*

Not long ago, my boss ask me to look over some resumes for an opening we have. Most of the resumes looked pretty similar. It's one page, after all, and they are all applying for the same position. Those that were different had positives and negatives, so they all "scored" about the same. How to decide who to call first? It felt like forensic science, trying to find some clue of who might be better among the pile of nearly identical resumes. A typo MIGHT hint that the person isn't as careful with their work. That seems silly, but those were the kind of clues we had to go on.

We interviewed a couple of people and it was similarly "tied" - both seemed like they would be a decent fit. Without actually knowing either of the candidates, we had to choose one based on the tiny bits of information we had. Compared to the tiny clues we were looking for, a degree vs. no degree would have been huge. It's not a great indicator, but it sure is better than any of the other differences between two otherwise good resumes.

To look at it another way, suppose you have ten resumes that look okay, ten that made it past the "obviously no" filter. You have to find some way to narrow it down by eliminating nine of the ten candidates. Four years of study and carrying a four year project to successful completion obviously helps narrow it down.

It's now time for me to get off Slashdot and get back to my studies. With 17 years of experience I don't want to be narrowed down for lack of a degree, so I'm getting my degree from WGU. The "final exam" for most courses is an industry-recognized certification exam, so I'll end up with a degree and about a dozen certifications.

* The "low paying" job turned out to be a blessing, due to working with wonderful people.

Under Reagan, tax revenue increased from $600 billion to $1 trillion. The assertion that Reagan slashed tax revenue is therefore ridiculous.

* note for the occupy crowd - trillion is more than billion.

Further, the Reagan deficits were a few billion.
The Obama deficits are a few trillion.

Clearly you learned your American history from comedy central. For example, federal revenue INCREASED under Reagan. Debt? Republicans racking up debt? Almost half the federal debt has was incurred under one president - Barak Obama. He overspent by as much as all other presidents combined for the previous 200 years.

Your conclusions would be sound if the "facts" you've based them on were true, but they aren't. Your factual basis is pure fiction.

TFA and TFS don't make it quite clear - would the SCHOOL lose eligibility, or a specific degree plan? If a student gets a degree in art history or women's studies that probably won't do much for their employment prospects, regardless of whether the school is good or not.

How well does that energy source work?
    It sinks energy instead of sourcing it.

I'd say an energy source that doesn't source energy
doesn't "work well".