eBay has been pissing people off for years, but the main problem is that a functioning marketplace requires a critical mass of buyers and sellers, and none of the competitors (e.g. Yahoo Auctions) have managed to build nearly enough of a critical mass. Just about the only exceptions are in product-specific areas, for example eBay has never really owned the used book market, where Amazon Marketplace et al do a brisk business.
Indeed in my field (a sub-area of computer science) people are usually highly skeptical of any supposedly important new result in the field that was first published in one of the highly prestigious but generalist journals, like Nature or Science. These often end up being, if not outright wrong, at the very least seriously over-extending their claims or the importance of their claims, in a way that would never get them published in a specialized journal filled with an editorial board who were actually experts in the specific area in question.
This is only exacerbated by the fact that, because generalist publications know they don't have expertise in every specialized area on staff, they often ask the authors to suggest potential reviewers of their own papers. Of course, authors are likely to suggest reviewers who they think will like the paper, not the ones who would give it a grilling.
I think the interest of this particular study is not so much that a lot of science turns out to be wrong, but that a lot of the most prestigious publication venues turned out to be wrong more often.
While the software is still fully proprietary and you hold full copyright with no public license grant, you could donate it to an organization like the FSF, which would then in turn GPL it. That way at the time of donation, you're donating software with higher fair-market value (as it isn't yet open source), and the charitable recipient is choosing to open-source it after receiving the donation in order to further their charitable mission.
This sort of thing is done semi-frequently with patents. You hold a patent that you could license on commercial terms, say for some new medical technique, and get its fair-market value appraised. But then instead of actually commercializing it, you donate it to a charity, and deduct that appraised fair-market value. The charity might then grant a blanket royalty-free license for anyone to use the patent, in order to promote their mission (e.g. if you donated a cancer-treatment patent to a cancer charity), but this doesn't affect the deductibility of your donation.
For intellectual property, the IRS doesn't require that you compute a basis, since it's always zero. The deductibility of properly appraised donated patents is already well established, for example.
It seems like it'd be a lot easier to get this by the IRS if there were an established category of "software appraisers" who were considered qualified third parties who could give you a valuation the IRS would accept, much like real-estate appraisers do for real estate. I'm not aware of any though, and some googling doesn't turn anything up.
Clearly his "donation" of the book to premed students by giving it to them for free isn't a deductible contribution, but he could donate the book's copyright to a registered charity, which then went about distributing it for free.
You're correct in that he can't deduct his time as a donation, but if he were to donate the copyright in the book, that's an asset ("intellectual property"), which apparently has value.
To claim a deduction, he would have to donate the book's copyright to a registered charity, which agreed to receive it. To figure out how much he could claim as a deduction as a result, he'd have to get the value of the book's copyright appraised by someone with expertise to do so who is neither affiliated with himself nor with the charity it was being donated to.
Now how to do that in particular, I don't know. I don't know what sorts of registered charities would receive a donated copyright for a book. I also don't know who is qualified to appraise the value of unpublished book copyrights.
I've been at plenty of places that run their own mailservers where uptime is considerably worse than Gmail's, so it'd be an improvement to offload it. The biggest problem seems to be at medium-sized shops: big enough for there to be problems, but not so big that you have some sort of massively redundant setup with transparent failover and 24/7 staffing. The ideal of the cloud-computing style of outsourcing is that you'd outsource to someone who was big enough to have a massively redundant setup with transparent failover and 24/7 staffing. However Google seems not to have delivered on that ideal.
Ada is still a de facto standard in a lot of aerospace applications and various other stuff that has a strong institutional desire for design-by-contract. SmallTalk was kind of shoved into C to make Objective-C, which is the standard language for much of OS X app programming (and iPhone app programming).
The sort of person who has demonstrated at least once that they're willing to assault someone with a deadly weapon not in self defense is a violent sort of person who could well do it again. Yet, assault with a deadly weapon isn't an automatic life sentence without parole, and so some potentially dangerous people are released, and yes, some of these people subsequently assault another person. We make tradeoffs between protecting society and locking everyone up all the time.
Although demand for gas is relatively inelastic compared to a lot of other retail products (other than basic groceries, I suppose), it certainly isn't perfectly inelastic. Total US demand has dropped 2-4% over last year due largely to the increase in gas prices, compared to a usual year-on-year increase of about 2%, for about a 4-6% relative demand reduction due to price increases.
"Affirmative defense" and "right" aren't wholly distinct things. For example, raising First Amendment rights in litigation is generally done as an affirmative defense, and there too, "courts weigh several different highly 'fuzzy' factors" in their determinations.
This is being extensively litigated in the RIAA cases and has gone both ways, but in the few instances where an appellate circuit has made a clear statement on the matter, it's been that there ought to be a presumption in favor of awarding attorneys' fees to prevailing defendants in copyright cases. The presumption is strengthened if the plaintiff brought a case that they ought to have known was frivolous, or if the plaintiff has much greater resources available than the defendant. To my knowledge, the first, sixth, and seventh circuits have all explicitly ruled to that effect.
At unnamed university where I've spent some time, we basically keep around a wireless router to power on during visits so our visitors can get online from our lab. (It gets powered down the rest of the time to avoid getting spotted by the network police.)
In technical areas (e.g. engineering), reputation within the field matters a lot more than generic reputation. People at Boeing know what the good aerospace engineering places are, and hire accordingly. If you graduated from an Ivy with an unknown engineering program, you're more likely to get responses like, "huh, I didn't even know Yale had an engineering program". Meanwhile, if you graduated from a generally lesser-known school with a top-rated engineering program (e.g. Rose-Hulman or Harvey Mudd) you're going to get plenty of offers.
It seems to be popular to turn off traction control for parking-lot drag races, probably mainly for the visual/aural effect. On some cars where there was no way to switch it off, people would even install aftermarket firmware to let them do so (or on occasion there were undocumented button sequences to do so in the stock firmware); I seem to recall that being a big thing with BMWs for a while.
Probably not much of this frequently applies to a Ford Focus, though.
The ability to sell on the loans to government-backed guaranteers certainly exacerbated the problem, but for whatever reason, a number of banks didn't do so. When the loans started defaulting and dropping precipitously in value, a number of banks had large quantities of these loans, or derivatives backed by them, on their balance sheets. That's the entire reason the feds just voted through a $700b fund to buy up toxic mortgage-backed securities. If the mortgage risk was all already owned by Fannie Mae & co., then the problem would've ended when the feds took over the mortgage guaranteers a few weeks ago, but clearly lots of the mortgage risk is still festering on banks' balance sheets.
Is that the Czars' rule was so unpopular that they basically brought the Bolsheviks to power by antagonizing the population to the point where they supported a revolution.
Sure, you could say that the lender and lendee are each about half responsible. But the difference is that the lender is supposed to have known better: their job is finance. By contrast, the average homeowner has no financial expertise.
Thus two sides mutually entered a stupid contract, but one of the sides was actually staffed by full-time professionals whose supposed expertise lay precisely in evaluating contracts for non-stupidity.
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eBay has been pissing people off for years, but the main problem is that a functioning marketplace requires a critical mass of buyers and sellers, and none of the competitors (e.g. Yahoo Auctions) have managed to build nearly enough of a critical mass. Just about the only exceptions are in product-specific areas, for example eBay has never really owned the used book market, where Amazon Marketplace et al do a brisk business.
Indeed in my field (a sub-area of computer science) people are usually highly skeptical of any supposedly important new result in the field that was first published in one of the highly prestigious but generalist journals, like Nature or Science. These often end up being, if not outright wrong, at the very least seriously over-extending their claims or the importance of their claims, in a way that would never get them published in a specialized journal filled with an editorial board who were actually experts in the specific area in question.
This is only exacerbated by the fact that, because generalist publications know they don't have expertise in every specialized area on staff, they often ask the authors to suggest potential reviewers of their own papers. Of course, authors are likely to suggest reviewers who they think will like the paper, not the ones who would give it a grilling.
I think the interest of this particular study is not so much that a lot of science turns out to be wrong, but that a lot of the most prestigious publication venues turned out to be wrong more often.
While the software is still fully proprietary and you hold full copyright with no public license grant, you could donate it to an organization like the FSF, which would then in turn GPL it. That way at the time of donation, you're donating software with higher fair-market value (as it isn't yet open source), and the charitable recipient is choosing to open-source it after receiving the donation in order to further their charitable mission.
This sort of thing is done semi-frequently with patents. You hold a patent that you could license on commercial terms, say for some new medical technique, and get its fair-market value appraised. But then instead of actually commercializing it, you donate it to a charity, and deduct that appraised fair-market value. The charity might then grant a blanket royalty-free license for anyone to use the patent, in order to promote their mission (e.g. if you donated a cancer-treatment patent to a cancer charity), but this doesn't affect the deductibility of your donation.
For intellectual property, the IRS doesn't require that you compute a basis, since it's always zero. The deductibility of properly appraised donated patents is already well established, for example.
It seems like it'd be a lot easier to get this by the IRS if there were an established category of "software appraisers" who were considered qualified third parties who could give you a valuation the IRS would accept, much like real-estate appraisers do for real estate. I'm not aware of any though, and some googling doesn't turn anything up.
Clearly his "donation" of the book to premed students by giving it to them for free isn't a deductible contribution, but he could donate the book's copyright to a registered charity, which then went about distributing it for free.
You're correct in that he can't deduct his time as a donation, but if he were to donate the copyright in the book, that's an asset ("intellectual property"), which apparently has value.
To claim a deduction, he would have to donate the book's copyright to a registered charity, which agreed to receive it. To figure out how much he could claim as a deduction as a result, he'd have to get the value of the book's copyright appraised by someone with expertise to do so who is neither affiliated with himself nor with the charity it was being donated to.
Now how to do that in particular, I don't know. I don't know what sorts of registered charities would receive a donated copyright for a book. I also don't know who is qualified to appraise the value of unpublished book copyrights.
I've been at plenty of places that run their own mailservers where uptime is considerably worse than Gmail's, so it'd be an improvement to offload it. The biggest problem seems to be at medium-sized shops: big enough for there to be problems, but not so big that you have some sort of massively redundant setup with transparent failover and 24/7 staffing. The ideal of the cloud-computing style of outsourcing is that you'd outsource to someone who was big enough to have a massively redundant setup with transparent failover and 24/7 staffing. However Google seems not to have delivered on that ideal.
Ada is still a de facto standard in a lot of aerospace applications and various other stuff that has a strong institutional desire for design-by-contract. SmallTalk was kind of shoved into C to make Objective-C, which is the standard language for much of OS X app programming (and iPhone app programming).
what kind of self-respecting engineering school lets the students out of the basement labs?
The sort of person who has demonstrated at least once that they're willing to assault someone with a deadly weapon not in self defense is a violent sort of person who could well do it again. Yet, assault with a deadly weapon isn't an automatic life sentence without parole, and so some potentially dangerous people are released, and yes, some of these people subsequently assault another person. We make tradeoffs between protecting society and locking everyone up all the time.
Although demand for gas is relatively inelastic compared to a lot of other retail products (other than basic groceries, I suppose), it certainly isn't perfectly inelastic. Total US demand has dropped 2-4% over last year due largely to the increase in gas prices, compared to a usual year-on-year increase of about 2%, for about a 4-6% relative demand reduction due to price increases.
It's perfectly easy to flip back and forth between neutral and drive in most automatic transmissions; I coast down hills in neutral all the time.
Bertrand Russell, possibly paraphrasing Yeats (possibly unintentionally):
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
(From his 1933 essay "The Triumph of Stupidity".)
"Affirmative defense" and "right" aren't wholly distinct things. For example, raising First Amendment rights in litigation is generally done as an affirmative defense, and there too, "courts weigh several different highly 'fuzzy' factors" in their determinations.
The EFF has a small bit about this in q5 of their FAQ.
This is being extensively litigated in the RIAA cases and has gone both ways, but in the few instances where an appellate circuit has made a clear statement on the matter, it's been that there ought to be a presumption in favor of awarding attorneys' fees to prevailing defendants in copyright cases. The presumption is strengthened if the plaintiff brought a case that they ought to have known was frivolous, or if the plaintiff has much greater resources available than the defendant. To my knowledge, the first, sixth, and seventh circuits have all explicitly ruled to that effect.
Maybe not quite in the discomfort-with-lack-of-openness sense that he meant it, but the iPhone is supposed to be a temperamental item to own, much like a Chihuaha.
At unnamed university where I've spent some time, we basically keep around a wireless router to power on during visits so our visitors can get online from our lab. (It gets powered down the rest of the time to avoid getting spotted by the network police.)
In technical areas (e.g. engineering), reputation within the field matters a lot more than generic reputation. People at Boeing know what the good aerospace engineering places are, and hire accordingly. If you graduated from an Ivy with an unknown engineering program, you're more likely to get responses like, "huh, I didn't even know Yale had an engineering program". Meanwhile, if you graduated from a generally lesser-known school with a top-rated engineering program (e.g. Rose-Hulman or Harvey Mudd) you're going to get plenty of offers.
Apologies for the redundant correction!
A meteoroid is an object in space, not in the atmosphere, that is smaller than about 10m; objects in space larger than that are asteroids.
When a meteroid enters the atmosphere, it becomes a meteor.
It seems to be popular to turn off traction control for parking-lot drag races, probably mainly for the visual/aural effect. On some cars where there was no way to switch it off, people would even install aftermarket firmware to let them do so (or on occasion there were undocumented button sequences to do so in the stock firmware); I seem to recall that being a big thing with BMWs for a while.
Probably not much of this frequently applies to a Ford Focus, though.
The ability to sell on the loans to government-backed guaranteers certainly exacerbated the problem, but for whatever reason, a number of banks didn't do so. When the loans started defaulting and dropping precipitously in value, a number of banks had large quantities of these loans, or derivatives backed by them, on their balance sheets. That's the entire reason the feds just voted through a $700b fund to buy up toxic mortgage-backed securities. If the mortgage risk was all already owned by Fannie Mae & co., then the problem would've ended when the feds took over the mortgage guaranteers a few weeks ago, but clearly lots of the mortgage risk is still festering on banks' balance sheets.
Is that the Czars' rule was so unpopular that they basically brought the Bolsheviks to power by antagonizing the population to the point where they supported a revolution.
Sure, you could say that the lender and lendee are each about half responsible. But the difference is that the lender is supposed to have known better: their job is finance. By contrast, the average homeowner has no financial expertise.
Thus two sides mutually entered a stupid contract, but one of the sides was actually staffed by full-time professionals whose supposed expertise lay precisely in evaluating contracts for non-stupidity.