Slashdot Mirror

Prop 13 was a drop in the bucket. The state made up for the shortfall in state income in other areas. As mentioned by a grandparent post, the State Governement spending as a portion of GDP is too high. Someone is getting the bill and leaving for greener pastures.

California, once a business friendly state, continues to conduct a war on its own economy. According to the Pacific Research Institute, it has the fourthlargest government of all U.S. states, with spending equal to 18.3 percent of GDP. The comparable figure for Texas is 12.1 percent. Survey respondents uniformly say the state’s regulators are hostile. “No one in his right mind would start a new manufacturing concern here,” said one California CEO.

http://chiefexecutive.net/best-worst-states-for-business

The root cause is not fixed. It has a few band aids, but it is still broken.

over taxes and regulation. According to this blog (LOL, only "business relocation coaches" have secure employment in CA) companies leaving CA has increased 5-fold since 2009, an average of 5.4 per week! And Chief Executive magazine has again ranked California last of 50 states to have a business. 14 states have tasked their economic development agencies with luring away California companies tired of high taxes, profuse regulations, and an extortionate legal system. So let's not just make this about Amazon. Everyone is fleeing CA. In fact, WA is not even safe. With the NLRB's overreaching against Boeing, their next move might be to China.

Teleshuttle Technologies, LLC - software updates

Eolas - browser plugins

Interactive Data (TVI) - autoplay of cds

Research Corporation Technologies - resolution enhancement

InterTrust Technologies - software registration and activation

And don't forget Allan M. Konrad, who sued hotels and airlines for using MS (and other) software to accept reservations online. He didn't sue Microsoft. Why? Because Redmond's revenues were chump change compared to the revenue from all those travel reservations. Konrad lost, but he won't be the last to try.

Sums it up, really. By the way, not everyone wants to innovate. Look at DELL, all they do is look at the competition and deliver the same cheaper. Dell says it himself in an interview (if you can survive the fawning interviewer, berk): they look at the market and decide what's worth making in high volume, low cost. And judging from a quick google search, that seems to be equated with genius by marketroids and their journalists.

I still don't understand why this made the front page on /., but anyway, bummer about your G5.

My guess is this system was likely not designed for use by run-of-the-mill merchants with transaction volume below the millions (and conceivably billions). Like many have pointed out, your typical store merchant would laugh at the prospect of roulette-based revenue.

This system was designed to solve the problem of handling billing and payment collection for A LOT of transactions per unit time. Think NASDAQ. Think VisaNet. Think McDonald's-years. Think pay per wireless packet, a concept routinely floated by Rivest's MIT colleagues including Dr. David Clark.

Coupled with a computationally efficient token verification scheme, I could see how this system could turn standard billing practice/procedures on its head, provided the big corporations have enough smart people in their stables to say, "Rivest is right." For instance, if my statistics memory serves, this system should effectively enable stepless billing (without increments or round-off issues) - in other words, finest-grain discrete-time pro-rating for services provided, tunable per application to some arbitrary epsilon.

I think music downloads are a red herring. It's entirely possible that PepperCoin will never see the light of day as a consumer payment service. But I'm very curious to see what the world's largest accounts receivable departments have to say about it.

There are innumerable variations of this quote, which is attributed to Lenin.

• When it comes time to hang the capitalists they will compete with each other to sell us the rope at a lower price.
• The capitalists will sell us the rope by which we hang them
• Greedy capitalists will sell us the rope by which we will hang them
• If we were to announce today that we intend to hang all capitalists tomorrow, they would trip over each other trying to sell us the rope.
• When Communism finally hangs Capitalism, a Capitalist will sell us the rope
• A capitalist would sell the rope to his own hangman."
• Western business men will sell us the rope with which to hang them.

Unfortunately, no source for these quotations has ever been found in Lenin's collected works.

It may have been fabricated originally by the John Birch Society 40 years ago as part of their anti-Communist propaganda.

Curiously, Lenin actually said some things the John Birch Society might agree with: "While the State exists there can be no freedom; when there is freedom there will be no State."