Sniping is *not* an inherent characteristic of online auctions. If you had ever participated in a SnapNames domain auction, you would know this - they address this problem by forcibly extending an auction by up to 24 hours if somebody places a new bid in the final minutes of an auction.
It is technologically trivial to engineer away the incentive to do this sort of thing.
This has nothing to do with your knowledge of English and everything to do with your knowledge of Latin. "Sic transit gloria mundi" means "thus passes the glory of the world". It's apparently recited as part of the papal coronation ceremony. Anyway, 98% of Americans would not get this either. But that's not the point - for those who do, it's funny.:)
"Close but no cigar"
Not a pun at all. There's nothing to get here - it's just a saying that means "close, but you missed the target". Either you know what the saying means or not, there's no way to figure it out. Apparently a reference to the mid-1900s practice of giving out cigars as prizes at local fairs for winning contests.
"Foot Heads Arms Body" This would mean nothing to an American either (well, an American would get the pun value, but not know who Foot was or what Arms Body they were talking about).
"COPS MAKE BUTT-ER KNIFE CON SPREAD 'EM"
This one I didn't get until I looked at the story either, it doesn't really parse even to a well-educated native English speaker. Basically, this pun is only funny even to a native speaker if you know the story behind it (that the con was hiding the butter knife in his butt and the cops had to umm... search his orifices for the knife).
So... give yourself more credit. Most of what you didn't get was pretty much impossible to get, or has nothing to do with the English language.:)
Holy crap, I thought of the same thing when I saw this story. It wasn't 1995 when it originally came out, it was earlier though - I believe 1993 (I distinctly recall living in Florida when that happened, and I left in '93). This program made the BBS circuit at the time, and it was commonly used as a vector for viruses as well.
Clever hoax, took a good 10 minutes to figure out what the heck it was actually doing.
Agreed that IQ is a decent indicator of future success, but I don't know that it's the best one and it's definitely not the only one.
What about socioeconomic status? That's a pretty good one. And what about effort? Harder to quantify but somebody's dedication and work ethic seem to be more highly correlated to success than IQ to my subjective measurement. I'm guessing a combination of these factors would be a much better predictor (higher R^2) than any one of them alone.
The "content economy" thing is BS. I understand that advertising pays for content, as it always has on TV, and we put up with it because the content is valuable and we don't want to pay the full costs of production+profits to the producers and distributors.
But I would never intentionally put a device in my home that broadcast ads at me all day and night just so I could watch an hour of TV a day. Imagine if your TV prompted you in small print whether you wanted to "install" such a program on the TV in exchange for watching a half-hour show. People would be furious. Fuck that - if that's what these guys think the "content economy" is, then they are dreaming.
I fail to see how any judge in a US court would think that a reasonable person would ever agree to such a contract knowingly, and that is exactly the same as what these sorts of adware companies are doing. These "agreements" between adware/spyware companies and users are almost universally deceptive and coercive and thus should be deemed illegal and unenforceable.
Since consent to install would be presumed to be coerced and installing a program without such consent on somebody's computer is obviously illegal, this would have the pleasant effect of making all such adware crap illegal. I would love to see all these "innovators" shut down.
There is such a continuum, but the problem is that different types of software projects have different optimal points on that continuum. Most "enterprise" products I've ever been involved with would be optimally served by *more* cowboy coder and far less process paralysis than they exhibited, because realistically the stuff we were writing wasn't complicated enough to justify the amount of process being used. Lots of process + rapidly shifting customer requirements pretty much guarantees that you'll never ship a working product that satisfies anybody.
On the other hand, if I were working on something as massive and complicated as a modern Windows OS codebase, I'd probably want to fall quite a bit heavier on the process side.
Sorry, you're totally wrong. Kneeing somebody in the face is absolutely a justifiable response to a mugging. He didn't tell his daughter to shoot to kill, though depending on the severity of a mugging, the law might look at that as a justifiable response as well (in this case, probably not).
If somebody has beaten and bloodied you in order to steal your money or possessions and attempts to do so again, then beating and bloodying them when attacked (not as a retributive move) could not possibly be seen as excessive force.
If they choose to escalate further from there, and somebody were to say, put a bullet in their head in self-defense, then it is entirely justified too. The police are there to protect and serve, but they can't watch your back every minute. Self-defense from violent criminals is a constitutionally-guaranteed right (this is coming from a fairly liberal Democrat too, though I am admittedly pro-Second Amendment, within a reasonable context).
Sorry, I didn't read your last sentence terribly carefully - I saw "instead, you pay 40 large per processor", rather than "plus, you pay 40 large per processor", which led to a totally different reading.
My bad. I'm not usually the annoying guy who misreads other people's posts, but I had a nasty cold and fever the other night, so chalk it up to that.
Well, it's not so much that it's hard, just that the current way is "good enough" and replacing it all is very expensive. So it's hard to be innovative in the software space within the constraints of real world usage, yes.
It's much easier to do interesting, innovative things in other business areas, which is why I personally left the software industry. Software went in a matter of a few short years from being one of the most to one of the least innovative industries out there.
If you're a genuine computer scientist as you suggest (not an IT plumber, or even software engineer), my guess is you have the brains to be successful in a wide variety of other fields that will be more receptive to your innovations.
To his credit, this is not entirely the guy's fault. Italy is one of the most entrepreneurship-unfriendly countries out there. You can't just set up a new company to build a new product, hire a few smart friends on the cheap, with the knowledge that if things don't work out, you'll all have to go off and get jobs working for The Man in a year or two.
Why? Well, because you can't fire people. Literally. My friend's California-based hardware company (with some cool networking technology, before that whole sector in the earlier part of this decade), bought out a small Italian group from another company and set it up as a subsidiary in Italy. So they had about 10 engineers in Italy working for them. When the economy went tits-up, the company went kaboom and they had to lay everybody off. This happened to almost everybody I know in the US at some point, but in Italy, you can't just lay people off. So the government sued my friend, who was on the legal documents as the Managing Director of their Italian subsidiary. They basically wanted a year's worth of pay and then some for these people. In short, the shutdown costs for a small group would end up equaling perhaps 18 months of operating costs for that group.
Since that money didn't exist, of course, they threatened to arrest my friend if he ever returned to Italy. After 2 or 3 years some sort of settlement was finally reached with the financiers (not my friend, of course, who didn't have millions of dollars pouring forth from his arsehole), luckily, but it was absurd. Suffice it to say that no company backed by those investors will EVER do business in Italy again.
Anybody who has taken Strategy 101 in business school knows that one of the absolute most effective forms of barriers to entry in any business is exit costs. Most startup companies never have more than a year's worth of cash on hand. And when things hit a dry spell, often far less than that. Well, this will get you arrested in Italy, so it's pretty easy to understand why people don't start scrappy new businesses.
Funny, but utterly false. You need the same level of talent on board to deal with Oracle properly as you do to deal with MySQL, Postgres, etc. A highly skilled Oracle DBA or programmer is as expensive as any other similarly skilled technical talent.
Not to say you don't get anything for the 40 large a processor, you definitely do, but let's not pretend you get some trivial to manage, point-and-click product that you can hire a monkey to deal with. That's absurd.
As much as I dislike the amount of information that many companies collect on me, at least I can sleep comfortably at night knowing that companies are quite predictable in how they act and what they do - they generally act to maximize profits and accrued value to shareholders. So companies will probably abuse my information in predictable ways, trying to spam me and sell me crap. Additionally, companies are still restricted to some degree by laws set by the government, and by excessively bad PR, which prevent them from some of the most egregious abuses of my privacy imagineable.
The government, on the other hand, is not terrible resource-constrained, lacks the profit motive and instead generally is run by bureaucrats and their institutional imperative to maximize their own power and importance in the world, and politicians seeking to score populist brownie points. This means it can be reactionary, illogical and unprofitable, while seeking to maximize control and power for itself, and suppress those it sees as a threat.
As somebody pointed out, the only thing that constrains this beast is accountability through the electoral process for politicians, and the fear of losing their jobs for bureaucrats.
In short, I think I am right to be far more distrustful of the government having oodles of personal data to mine as it pleases than any corporation.
Secondly, that's a non-sequitur. Firefox's success is dependent upon convincing people that it is dominating? Since when?
No, it's called "demand side increasing returns" or "network externalities". This effect and the strategies that lead to success in markets that exhibit it are part of any basic strategy class in business school.
Web browsers and operating systems exhibit network externalities (the more people using a product, the more value using that product has). In any such market, long term success depends on capturing market share, and once you've already got the early adopters, getting at the mainstream market often requires convincing them that everybody else is adopting a product.
Funny you should say that, as the stomach is innervated with neurons, most of which are connected to the parasympathetic nervous system.
I would be highly surprised if capsaicin didn't bind to these neurons in your stomach. It's just that the result is likely to be quite different since these neurons are wired up to your nervous system very differently than those around your face and anus.
Yes, well, there are many ways to make money out there. I personally prefer finding niches where real demand exists, you can actually generate cash flow, run a profitable business, and create a sustainable competitive advantage. This means you actually create real economic and financial value for yourself and your investors, and don't just hope you can sell out to a potential acquirer before your competitors do. There are a very limited number of buyers for social networking sites, and only a very limited number of social networking sites that can be successful in the long run (I am just using this as an example - applies to many dot-commish businesses that hope for acquisition-based exit).
Not to say you can't make money with an acquisition-only exit strategy business, you obviously can, but for every winner, there are going to be many losers in every internet niche with that sort of strategy. Which is why the average VC firm has a 10-20% success rate in their portfolio companies.
There are tons of fantastic non-internet areas to innovate in. I am a former software industry entrepreneur, and now strictly focus on non-software areas where I think it's easier to out-compete the rest of your space, customers are more brand loyal, and it's easier to establish barriers to entry. Not to mention easier to create revenue generating sales and create a cash flow positive business which can be used to eventually finance growth and expansion internally or at least make it much cheaper to raise additional growth capital.
Too many smart people focus on innovating in the traditional "growth" sectors, i.e. tech or biotech, or waste their effort fighting over the scraps of capitalism (to quote Warren Buffet describing the mainstream finance professions). There are tons of opportunities for entrepreneurs and innovators that are just as challenging and interesting as tech or biotech, in less obvious areas. You just have to look around and be open-minded.
And of course, success in most of these business areas depends on a diverse set of skills, including marketing and finance, not just having a good idea and writing some code. This may turn some people off, but it just makes it more interesting to me.
Citing Socrates' thoughts on truth in a discussion about marketing and PR is absurd. It's a press release. It's marketing tripe. Just because Mozilla is a non-profit doesn't mean they are above marketing. As another poster pointed out, McDonald's claims billions and billions served, and it's equally ambiguous and potentially "misleading".
Marketing material is supposed to convince you to use a product. Certain markets exhibit inherent features known as demand-side increasing returns. Browsers are an example of such a market. In these markets, gaining market share by convincing users of the inevitability of your market share gain is actually the most logical strategy.
Clearly if you believe that strict honesty is a moral absolute, then you must inherently oppose any and all marketing efforts for any and all products. I would imagine it would be hard to be successful in a capitalist world with that sort of belief system.
If Mozilla can convince people that Firefox is dominating, and therefore Firefox ends up being successful, then I'm all for it, since I think that outcome is far preferable to the alternative of Microsoft domination.
It seems pretty clear that it's just a standard diesel engine. Any diesel engine will run on biodiesel, and on unprocessed vegetable oil with a few minor modifications (specifically, you may need some preheating of the fuel when the car first starts to bring its viscosity down enough for combustion).
So yes, you could run this car on any biodiesel or standard diesel. Everyone keeps commenting on the soybean thing which has nothing to do with anything. Just one possible source of biodiesel. You can also harvest oils from algae if you run a big enough operation at scale. Or use rapeseed like the Europeans do. And so on - that's the bio-agricultural problem, and has nothing to do with engineering an attractive consumer vehicle that runs on such fuels.
I know you're just joking, but one reason for the thriving kidney trade is that kidneys from living donors tend to be much healthier and last much longer than kidneys from dead donors.
Apparently the quality of the kidney degrades very rapidly after death, or something about the way the body or organ is handled causes this damage. A cadaver kidney, treated properly, and assuming no organ rejection will generally last about a decade before it fails. A living donor kidney can apparently last up to 25 years or more under similar circumstances, and thus often retransplantation is less of an issue.
I see people running around with solid state USB keychain devices all the time. A large number of people at my university seem to have them. They are no more or less suspicion inducing than an iPod. A large, clunky external USB harddrive might be suspicious, but that's irrelevant.
The point is that any device that plugs into the USB port is a real threat, and this needs to be dealt with in corporate networks by assuming that any mounted USB drive of any sort is presumed to contain malicious code.
Almost every part of your post is wrong. The US government's debt (Federal debt only) is about 40% of US GDP. Compare this to countries like Japan which are well over 100%.
Gold, historically has underperformed any other asset class. Over the last 200 years. Over the last 50 years. And over the last 10 years. Gold is traditionally seen as a good inflation hedge, for obvious reasons, but it's not a good long term investment.
The US government will never resort to seignorage (printing of money) as you seem to suggest. Any macroeconomist knows this is a recipe for disaster.
Compare, by the way, the current debt load as a fraction of GDP to that during WWII - it was well over 100% by the end of WWII, vs. ~60% now (including all levels of government). Also remember that because of nominal (and real) GDP growth, this fraction changes over time.
Anyway, what you are predicting is a complete collapse of sound management of the US economy. I sincerely doubt this will happen in our lifetimes. Stagnation, maybe, inflation, at times, boom and bust cycles, sure, but your prediction is completely alarmist and I see no justification for it at all.
Simple - smarter analysts long ago moved to the buy side. The people left on the sell side are either dumb or young and inexperienced and want to move to the buy side.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not gigawatts, it's jigawatts!
Jigga, watt?
Sniping is *not* an inherent characteristic of online auctions. If you had ever participated in a SnapNames domain auction, you would know this - they address this problem by forcibly extending an auction by up to 24 hours if somebody places a new bid in the final minutes of an auction.
It is technologically trivial to engineer away the incentive to do this sort of thing.
"Sick Gloria in transit Monday": Don't get it.
This has nothing to do with your knowledge of English and everything to do with your knowledge of Latin. "Sic transit gloria mundi" means "thus passes the glory of the world". It's apparently recited as part of the papal coronation ceremony. Anyway, 98% of Americans would not get this either. But that's not the point - for those who do, it's funny.
"Close but no cigar"
Not a pun at all. There's nothing to get here - it's just a saying that means "close, but you missed the target". Either you know what the saying means or not, there's no way to figure it out. Apparently a reference to the mid-1900s practice of giving out cigars as prizes at local fairs for winning contests.
"Foot Heads Arms Body"
This would mean nothing to an American either (well, an American would get the pun value, but not know who Foot was or what Arms Body they were talking about).
"COPS MAKE BUTT-ER KNIFE CON SPREAD 'EM"
This one I didn't get until I looked at the story either, it doesn't really parse even to a well-educated native English speaker. Basically, this pun is only funny even to a native speaker if you know the story behind it (that the con was hiding the butter knife in his butt and the cops had to umm... search his orifices for the knife).
So... give yourself more credit. Most of what you didn't get was pretty much impossible to get, or has nothing to do with the English language.
But at least you have a charming personality!
Holy crap, I thought of the same thing when I saw this story. It wasn't 1995 when it originally came out, it was earlier though - I believe 1993 (I distinctly recall living in Florida when that happened, and I left in '93). This program made the BBS circuit at the time, and it was commonly used as a vector for viruses as well.
Clever hoax, took a good 10 minutes to figure out what the heck it was actually doing.
Agreed that IQ is a decent indicator of future success, but I don't know that it's the best one and it's definitely not the only one.
What about socioeconomic status? That's a pretty good one. And what about effort? Harder to quantify but somebody's dedication and work ethic seem to be more highly correlated to success than IQ to my subjective measurement. I'm guessing a combination of these factors would be a much better predictor (higher R^2) than any one of them alone.
Anybody have any good studies on this?
The "content economy" thing is BS. I understand that advertising pays for content, as it always has on TV, and we put up with it because the content is valuable and we don't want to pay the full costs of production+profits to the producers and distributors.
But I would never intentionally put a device in my home that broadcast ads at me all day and night just so I could watch an hour of TV a day. Imagine if your TV prompted you in small print whether you wanted to "install" such a program on the TV in exchange for watching a half-hour show. People would be furious. Fuck that - if that's what these guys think the "content economy" is, then they are dreaming.
I fail to see how any judge in a US court would think that a reasonable person would ever agree to such a contract knowingly, and that is exactly the same as what these sorts of adware companies are doing. These "agreements" between adware/spyware companies and users are almost universally deceptive and coercive and thus should be deemed illegal and unenforceable.
Since consent to install would be presumed to be coerced and installing a program without such consent on somebody's computer is obviously illegal, this would have the pleasant effect of making all such adware crap illegal. I would love to see all these "innovators" shut down.
There is such a continuum, but the problem is that different types of software projects have different optimal points on that continuum. Most "enterprise" products I've ever been involved with would be optimally served by *more* cowboy coder and far less process paralysis than they exhibited, because realistically the stuff we were writing wasn't complicated enough to justify the amount of process being used. Lots of process + rapidly shifting customer requirements pretty much guarantees that you'll never ship a working product that satisfies anybody.
On the other hand, if I were working on something as massive and complicated as a modern Windows OS codebase, I'd probably want to fall quite a bit heavier on the process side.
Sorry, you're totally wrong. Kneeing somebody in the face is absolutely a justifiable response to a mugging. He didn't tell his daughter to shoot to kill, though depending on the severity of a mugging, the law might look at that as a justifiable response as well (in this case, probably not).
If somebody has beaten and bloodied you in order to steal your money or possessions and attempts to do so again, then beating and bloodying them when attacked (not as a retributive move) could not possibly be seen as excessive force.
If they choose to escalate further from there, and somebody were to say, put a bullet in their head in self-defense, then it is entirely justified too. The police are there to protect and serve, but they can't watch your back every minute. Self-defense from violent criminals is a constitutionally-guaranteed right (this is coming from a fairly liberal Democrat too, though I am admittedly pro-Second Amendment, within a reasonable context).
Sorry, I didn't read your last sentence terribly carefully - I saw "instead, you pay 40 large per processor", rather than "plus, you pay 40 large per processor", which led to a totally different reading.
My bad. I'm not usually the annoying guy who misreads other people's posts, but I had a nasty cold and fever the other night, so chalk it up to that.
Well, it's not so much that it's hard, just that the current way is "good enough" and replacing it all is very expensive. So it's hard to be innovative in the software space within the constraints of real world usage, yes.
It's much easier to do interesting, innovative things in other business areas, which is why I personally left the software industry. Software went in a matter of a few short years from being one of the most to one of the least innovative industries out there.
If you're a genuine computer scientist as you suggest (not an IT plumber, or even software engineer), my guess is you have the brains to be successful in a wide variety of other fields that will be more receptive to your innovations.
Dude, you're blowing ten grand!
To his credit, this is not entirely the guy's fault. Italy is one of the most entrepreneurship-unfriendly countries out there. You can't just set up a new company to build a new product, hire a few smart friends on the cheap, with the knowledge that if things don't work out, you'll all have to go off and get jobs working for The Man in a year or two.
Why? Well, because you can't fire people. Literally. My friend's California-based hardware company (with some cool networking technology, before that whole sector in the earlier part of this decade), bought out a small Italian group from another company and set it up as a subsidiary in Italy. So they had about 10 engineers in Italy working for them. When the economy went tits-up, the company went kaboom and they had to lay everybody off. This happened to almost everybody I know in the US at some point, but in Italy, you can't just lay people off. So the government sued my friend, who was on the legal documents as the Managing Director of their Italian subsidiary. They basically wanted a year's worth of pay and then some for these people. In short, the shutdown costs for a small group would end up equaling perhaps 18 months of operating costs for that group.
Since that money didn't exist, of course, they threatened to arrest my friend if he ever returned to Italy. After 2 or 3 years some sort of settlement was finally reached with the financiers (not my friend, of course, who didn't have millions of dollars pouring forth from his arsehole), luckily, but it was absurd. Suffice it to say that no company backed by those investors will EVER do business in Italy again.
Anybody who has taken Strategy 101 in business school knows that one of the absolute most effective forms of barriers to entry in any business is exit costs. Most startup companies never have more than a year's worth of cash on hand. And when things hit a dry spell, often far less than that. Well, this will get you arrested in Italy, so it's pretty easy to understand why people don't start scrappy new businesses.
Funny, but utterly false. You need the same level of talent on board to deal with Oracle properly as you do to deal with MySQL, Postgres, etc. A highly skilled Oracle DBA or programmer is as expensive as any other similarly skilled technical talent.
Not to say you don't get anything for the 40 large a processor, you definitely do, but let's not pretend you get some trivial to manage, point-and-click product that you can hire a monkey to deal with. That's absurd.
If you think Slashdot is one of the largest collections of morons on the Internet, you haven't looked very hard.
As much as I dislike the amount of information that many companies collect on me, at least I can sleep comfortably at night knowing that companies are quite predictable in how they act and what they do - they generally act to maximize profits and accrued value to shareholders. So companies will probably abuse my information in predictable ways, trying to spam me and sell me crap. Additionally, companies are still restricted to some degree by laws set by the government, and by excessively bad PR, which prevent them from some of the most egregious abuses of my privacy imagineable.
The government, on the other hand, is not terrible resource-constrained, lacks the profit motive and instead generally is run by bureaucrats and their institutional imperative to maximize their own power and importance in the world, and politicians seeking to score populist brownie points. This means it can be reactionary, illogical and unprofitable, while seeking to maximize control and power for itself, and suppress those it sees as a threat.
As somebody pointed out, the only thing that constrains this beast is accountability through the electoral process for politicians, and the fear of losing their jobs for bureaucrats.
In short, I think I am right to be far more distrustful of the government having oodles of personal data to mine as it pleases than any corporation.
Secondly, that's a non-sequitur. Firefox's success is dependent upon convincing people that it is dominating? Since when?
No, it's called "demand side increasing returns" or "network externalities". This effect and the strategies that lead to success in markets that exhibit it are part of any basic strategy class in business school.
Web browsers and operating systems exhibit network externalities (the more people using a product, the more value using that product has). In any such market, long term success depends on capturing market share, and once you've already got the early adopters, getting at the mainstream market often requires convincing them that everybody else is adopting a product.
Funny you should say that, as the stomach is innervated with neurons, most of which are connected to the parasympathetic nervous system.
I would be highly surprised if capsaicin didn't bind to these neurons in your stomach. It's just that the result is likely to be quite different since these neurons are wired up to your nervous system very differently than those around your face and anus.
Yes, well, there are many ways to make money out there. I personally prefer finding niches where real demand exists, you can actually generate cash flow, run a profitable business, and create a sustainable competitive advantage. This means you actually create real economic and financial value for yourself and your investors, and don't just hope you can sell out to a potential acquirer before your competitors do. There are a very limited number of buyers for social networking sites, and only a very limited number of social networking sites that can be successful in the long run (I am just using this as an example - applies to many dot-commish businesses that hope for acquisition-based exit).
Not to say you can't make money with an acquisition-only exit strategy business, you obviously can, but for every winner, there are going to be many losers in every internet niche with that sort of strategy. Which is why the average VC firm has a 10-20% success rate in their portfolio companies.
There are tons of fantastic non-internet areas to innovate in. I am a former software industry entrepreneur, and now strictly focus on non-software areas where I think it's easier to out-compete the rest of your space, customers are more brand loyal, and it's easier to establish barriers to entry. Not to mention easier to create revenue generating sales and create a cash flow positive business which can be used to eventually finance growth and expansion internally or at least make it much cheaper to raise additional growth capital.
Too many smart people focus on innovating in the traditional "growth" sectors, i.e. tech or biotech, or waste their effort fighting over the scraps of capitalism (to quote Warren Buffet describing the mainstream finance professions). There are tons of opportunities for entrepreneurs and innovators that are just as challenging and interesting as tech or biotech, in less obvious areas. You just have to look around and be open-minded.
And of course, success in most of these business areas depends on a diverse set of skills, including marketing and finance, not just having a good idea and writing some code. This may turn some people off, but it just makes it more interesting to me.
Citing Socrates' thoughts on truth in a discussion about marketing and PR is absurd. It's a press release. It's marketing tripe. Just because Mozilla is a non-profit doesn't mean they are above marketing. As another poster pointed out, McDonald's claims billions and billions served, and it's equally ambiguous and potentially "misleading".
Marketing material is supposed to convince you to use a product. Certain markets exhibit inherent features known as demand-side increasing returns. Browsers are an example of such a market. In these markets, gaining market share by convincing users of the inevitability of your market share gain is actually the most logical strategy.
Clearly if you believe that strict honesty is a moral absolute, then you must inherently oppose any and all marketing efforts for any and all products. I would imagine it would be hard to be successful in a capitalist world with that sort of belief system.
If Mozilla can convince people that Firefox is dominating, and therefore Firefox ends up being successful, then I'm all for it, since I think that outcome is far preferable to the alternative of Microsoft domination.
It seems pretty clear that it's just a standard diesel engine. Any diesel engine will run on biodiesel, and on unprocessed vegetable oil with a few minor modifications (specifically, you may need some preheating of the fuel when the car first starts to bring its viscosity down enough for combustion).
So yes, you could run this car on any biodiesel or standard diesel. Everyone keeps commenting on the soybean thing which has nothing to do with anything. Just one possible source of biodiesel. You can also harvest oils from algae if you run a big enough operation at scale. Or use rapeseed like the Europeans do. And so on - that's the bio-agricultural problem, and has nothing to do with engineering an attractive consumer vehicle that runs on such fuels.
I know you're just joking, but one reason for the thriving kidney trade is that kidneys from living donors tend to be much healthier and last much longer than kidneys from dead donors.
Apparently the quality of the kidney degrades very rapidly after death, or something about the way the body or organ is handled causes this damage. A cadaver kidney, treated properly, and assuming no organ rejection will generally last about a decade before it fails. A living donor kidney can apparently last up to 25 years or more under similar circumstances, and thus often retransplantation is less of an issue.
I see people running around with solid state USB keychain devices all the time. A large number of people at my university seem to have them. They are no more or less suspicion inducing than an iPod. A large, clunky external USB harddrive might be suspicious, but that's irrelevant.
The point is that any device that plugs into the USB port is a real threat, and this needs to be dealt with in corporate networks by assuming that any mounted USB drive of any sort is presumed to contain malicious code.
Almost every part of your post is wrong. The US government's debt (Federal debt only) is about 40% of US GDP. Compare this to countries like Japan which are well over 100%.
Gold, historically has underperformed any other asset class. Over the last 200 years. Over the last 50 years. And over the last 10 years. Gold is traditionally seen as a good inflation hedge, for obvious reasons, but it's not a good long term investment.
The US government will never resort to seignorage (printing of money) as you seem to suggest. Any macroeconomist knows this is a recipe for disaster.
Compare, by the way, the current debt load as a fraction of GDP to that during WWII - it was well over 100% by the end of WWII, vs. ~60% now (including all levels of government). Also remember that because of nominal (and real) GDP growth, this fraction changes over time.
Anyway, what you are predicting is a complete collapse of sound management of the US economy. I sincerely doubt this will happen in our lifetimes. Stagnation, maybe, inflation, at times, boom and bust cycles, sure, but your prediction is completely alarmist and I see no justification for it at all.
Simple - smarter analysts long ago moved to the buy side. The people left on the sell side are either dumb or young and inexperienced and want to move to the buy side.