But it sure seems like a tsunami would take it out.
In San Francisco Bay? While perhaps theoretically possible, I don't think a tsunami that would be likely to take out such a floating data center has occurred in recorded history, and given the geography of the region it would pretty hard (if it was in the ocean off the SF coast, it would be in more danger.)
Every time I see a restaurant cut Wi-Fi, they go out of business in six to eight months. Most often it's because the owners are delusional about how many turns a WiFi camper is preventing.
Maybe its just that most restaurants that cut wifi are often doing it as a cost-cutting measure that they think will have minimal impact when they are already on the way down, and wifi doesn't really have a big effect one way or the other.
Who needs that? The "something like table service" suggestion was for making it easier for people using the establishment's wifi connection to order food and drinks without the hastle of leaving their table.
I think, especially with Slashdotters, one could easily come up with a method of ordering from the table for those customers that would not require someone walking around taking orders.
Only the American "poor" (where poor is defined as not being able to afford the second SUV or 50" TV). The actual poor people -- you know, the ones in Mexico, China and India who formerly would have had to farm for subsistence or work in mines as they are cheaper than machines -- they will get richer.
Most of the studies I've shown have shown mixed overall results on both ends (developed and less developed) from so-called "free" trade, with the far more consistent effect of increasing the gap between the rich and the poor on both ends. Neo-liberal "free trade" seems to be much better at increasing the share of the economy held by a narrow capital-holding class than it is at promoting broad development.
It probably wouldn't be that hard, in terms of designing rules, to improve trade regimes so that they consistently improved the lot of workers in the less developed partner countries -- even without actually making things worse for workers in the more developed partner (under ideal conditions, specialization is efficient and mutually beneficial.) The problem is that the existing large-scale holders of capital are naturally the dominant class in terms of political power and control of the information resources everywhere, so that its very hard to implement a change to existing regimes which they designed and which they correctly perceive are working better for them than any alternative is likely to.
Larry Ellison has repeated been accused of sexually harassing, then paying off his personal secretaries, but he's still CEO of Oracle... go figure.
I'm guessing that the difference here isn't the accusations, its the fact that in Hurd's case, investigation based on the allegations turned up all kinds of misconduct against the company.
Sexual harassment allegations (especially when made by someone else where the alleged victim isn't backing them up, whether or not they have been paid off) can be difficult to substantiate even if true, and people in power can draw lots of false allegations -- OTOH, things like misappropriating company resources for personal use are often leave evidence that is far more cut and dried.
True, but if you use company funds for your peccadilloes it's a lot harder for your wife to find out.
If you have the restraint to do it carefully, and do it so that the company doesn't find out about it, that might be true in something other than the very short run.
OTOH, I suspect that people that use company funds to hide actual or attempted fooling around from their spouses are not generally people for whom that kind of restraint is normal.
I think that it is more the case that, when drunk on your own power, its sometimes easy to imagine that using company resources as if they were your own personal slush fund will make it easier to get away without being discovered rather than that it actually helps all that much.
I'd refine that to "they're not hard sciences - yet". There's a dispute that's older than me (by a long way) as to whether soft/social sciences and social sciences are sciences at all and I won't get into that. What I will say is that there is absolutely nothing in any physical science which strictly prohibits any of the soft/social sciences becoming hard sciences eventually.
Sure there is. There is no real definition of "hard sciences" except by subject matter, so as long as "soft sciences" study what they currently study, they won't become "hard sciences".
Particularly, the kinds of experimental difficulties that require non-laboratory kind of experiments in the social sciences are also found in many areas in the physical (and, for those who distinguish them, life) sciences, as well. They may be somewhat more prevalent in the social sciences generally, but that's not a difference of kind.
The soft sciences (whether or not they really are science) often do not use the scientific method and frequently are more opinion-based than anything.
There are certainly people who write about the subject matter of social sciences who do not use the scientific method, but that is also true of the physical (or life sciences.)
There are certainly also people in the social sciences that adopt the form of the scientific method but misapply it, but that, too, is also true of the physical and life sciences.
Check the political climate back in 1912/1913. Woodrow Wilson had just come into power, the 16th Amendment (income tax) had just passed ratification by the skin of its teeth, and the progressives had all kinds of things they wanted to do at the federal level like eugenics/forced abortion/sterilization (never got much farther than the "talk about" stage in terms of national policy), the Federal Reserve system, prohibition, creating a new layer of government at the world level, etc but were worried about the states standing in their way (that is, they wanted to usurp power from the states).
So, they pushed for the popular election of Senators as a means of manipulating the people through propaganda to empower the people that favored big government.
The problem with this theory of the rationale for the 17th Amendment is that when the Congress proposed it, 29 states already had systems of direct election of Senators, and nearly enough state legislatures had passed demands for a Constitutional convention to adopt an amendment on the matter to make such a convention mandatory -- the Congressional action to formally propose the amendment was bowing to the manifest will of the States and attempting to exert some control of the specific language of the amendment and prevent it from drifting into other topics as well, since once a convention is called, there's no telling what it will produce (this is especially well illustrated by the results of the convention called to do a few quick nips and tucks on the corners of the Articles of Confederation.)
Please explain how the Civil War and subsequent Reconstruction can be viewed as anything other than federal coercion of several States.
but you'll note the amendment was forced into place immediately after the Civil War
The Civil War ended in 1865. The 17th Amendment was proposed by Congress to the States in 1912 and ratified in 1913.
So it takes a particularly elastic concept of immediacy to suggest that the latter was forced into place immediately after the former.
Another point I failed to make in the initial post - if the senate is directly elected then what's the point of it?
It still serves its principal original purpose of apportioning part of the legislative (and presidential electoral, since the electoral college is apportioned by total congressional representation, not just representation in the House, as well as executive, since since certain executive acts and appointments are subject to the Senate's [not the Congress as a whole's] approval) equally among the States. In addition, the staggered six year terms, even without State appointment, produce a Senate that is, while popularly elected, still less moved by transitory popular mood than the House whose entire membership is elected every other year.
Unite the houses into a single legislature and be done with it.
Since a sufficiently large number of States would lose political power if that were done, its pretty much politically impossible to pass an Amendment that would abolish the Senate (which itself could be Constitutionally problematic, since it runs into one of the few express limits on the Amendment process) or even to substantially reduce its powers.
If the states are little more than provinces that exist at the whim of the Federal government and deserve no representation in Congress then there is no point.
The states' status as separate soveriegnties is in not eliminated by direct election of Senators. It is true that many changes in the US system of government in the past 220 or so years -- especially the adoption of the Constitution, and subsequently the 14th, 16th, 17th, and 23rd Amendments -- have transformed the United States in stages from a loose confederation barely more tightly held together than the modern UN with no direct accountability to its citizens into a directly-accountable government with a similar degree of legitimacy to its constituent states. OTOH, I don't see that as a bad thing.
The major reason to be rid of the 17th amendment is prior to its instatement Congress couldn't coerce the states.
Federal coercion of the states prior to the 17th Amendment was quite possible, as demonstrated quite dramatically in the period from 1861 to the end of Reconstruction.
I can't think of any post-17th Amendment example of federal coercion of the states that could compare to that, really; seat belt laws really don't come close.
Anyone else's skin crawl as they read the rehearsed and empty words? Reeks of a sociopath saying what he thinks folks want to hear to let him off the hook.
It sounds more like the words of an agreed-to statement made as part of a deal that involves the person making a statement and resigning while the other party to the agreement (in this case, the HP board) elects not to pursue some of the other remedies it might have available for the misconduct at issue, so that the offender merely loses the job (notionally voluntarily) and everyone moves on with a minimum expenditure of resources on further proceedings (litigation, etc.)
Just wait until more electric cars are on the road requiring some type of toll or other form of tracking so that people can be sent "use taxes/road taxes" since folks aren't fueling up with liquid fuels that are normally taxed for this purpose.
Electric cars don't require that. Many states already require periodic license fees and some form of periodic inspection for vehicles licensed for use on public roads. All you have to do to charge use taxes on electric (or, for that many, any other) vehicles when such a framework exists is include odometer checks in those inspections and charge (some amount) * (mileage since last inspection) as part of the registration fee.
Prevalence of electric cars may be used as an excuse for toll roads and, expedience in toll collection may be used to justify electronic monitoring devices, but there is a difference between making something necessary and providing an excuse or justification.
I don't know that we need a better electorate as we need a better election system.
You need to get a better electoral system adopted within the current political framework. Given that that will require action by at least the federal Congress and possibly both that and state action through either the regular legislative process or citizen initiative processes, I don't think the fact that securing it requires a better electoral system changes the fact that establishing it requires a better electorate in the current system.
I suppose you can dispense with that requirement if you assume that such a better electoral system being would be installed from the top through a coup d'etat by electoral reformers or an invasion and conquest by a foreign power that has a real problem with our current electoral system. But those mechanisms don't seem particularly likely, and would probably be widely regarded as having downsides far outweighing any likely benefits.
Show me an example of constantly unresolved point of the constitution.
I'm not sure what this means: the points that were left vague in the text were left to be resolved by experience (both through political means and through judicial interpretation in light of specific cases, something the founders would well have been aware would occur, as they were widely familiar with the common law practices that the courts they designed would inherit.)
I never suggested anything about "constant unresolved" points of any kind.
Keep in mind that the vast majority of us don't live in a situation where some neighbor would for various reasons consistently try to kill us. It's reasonable to expect early Mars colonization to be similar to current human civilization in that regard.
I think that's no more reasonable than assuming that early Mars colonization would largely be drawn from people on Earth who don't have neighbors consistently trying to kill them, which it makes it a wash.
What I don't think is reasonable to assume is that early Mars colonization would consist largely of people moving out of places where people are consistently trying to kill them, but would not result in them living in conditions where people are trying to kill them.
There are, I suppose, scenarios that aren't completely implausible (even if they seem rather unlikely) where that might be the case. For instance, one might imagine that the US would run Mars as a prison colony, and divert non-violent convicts to Mars instead of its domestic prisons.
The Constitution of the US is -very- clear if you don't try to view it in tinted glasses of various political affiliations.
Actually, its clear only when you try to do that, because then the tint you choose to use resolves all the inherent ambiguities and conflicts for you -- in the favor of whatever ideological tint you've selected.
The founders didn't just write a constitution and nothing else, they all wrote lots of books, lots of papers.
Yes, and in some of those books and papers, some of them write about how they were deliberately vague in writing some provisions of the Constitution, in order to let some aspects be resolved by experience because of the inability to come to a consensus on resolution on some points. Because, believe it or not, the political elites of the United States were no more united and homogenous in their ideology of government in the late 18th Century than they are in the early 21st; they were more able to work together, perhaps, but largely because they were more keenly aware of the potential consequences if they failed to do so.
Well "the Supreme Court" is ambiguous, since there are lots of Supreme Courts. Several countries have them, and most US states have them as the highest court of appeals in the state court system (and New York has "Supreme Court" as, oddly enough, a lower court.)
SCOTUS -- or the longer "U.S. Supreme Court" or "Supreme Court of the United States" avoid the ambiguity associated with just syaing "the Supreme Court".
Nothing wrong with a SC nominee having no judicial or even trial advocacy experience, though you'd hope they'd at least have a significant body of legal scholarship.
The polarization of the confirmation process for Justices has made having either a substantial body of legal scholarship, substantive judicial experience, or substantive trial advocacy experience weaknesses in confirmation proceedings, since the processes is almost completely one of opponents of the nomination seeking choice tidbits -- often out of context -- that make good political soundbites to embarrass anyone who would vote to confirm.
This has been increasingly true over time, independently of which party is doing the appointing and which side is inclined to oppose the nomination, so the results in terms of who gets appointed are fairly predictable.
If you want better (by the standards suggested in the parent post) judicial nominees, you need to get better Senators first. And since the behavior of Senators is driven essentially by what works in producing reactions in the electorate to bring pressure to bear on other Senators, you need a better electorate to get that.
In other words, the hazards of an uninhabited world are far different and less dangerous from the hazards of an inhabited world where some of the inhabitants are trying to kill you.
Well, that's fine for the -- literally -- solitary inhabitant of a world. (Though both the absence of support and the psychological effects inherent in that isolations are their own kind of hazards, which may more than offset the hazards, so I'm not sure that, even initially, the conditions are as favorable as you present.)
OTOH, once more people go to the world -- which they will as soon as it is feasible -- you have the natural environmental hazards plus the social hazards associated with an inhabited world.
Without that, we'd just be dealing with the tumors those genes are designed to stop.
What would this imply? (I'll give you a hint, the first word is 'Intelligent')
"Intelligent people often anthropomorphize impersonal processes (e.g., evolution) in where this enables them to make more succinct statements that are more focussed on the point they wish to communicate, which often is not about the mechanics of the process."
At least, that's what it implies to me...is that what you were thinking of?
Yes but it's ill-considered if you actually want users to adopt your software.
Its worked pretty well for products like Gmail and GVoice; since you control the availability of invites (both those issued to existing users to send to others and those issued directly via waiting lists), you can essentially calibrate things to what you feel you are prepared to handle, which is probably the best way to handle introduction and scale-up when you are Google, and so visible that if you don't do something, you'll be swamped on day 1.
Wave didn't fail to thrive as a product because Google used the exact same strategy to manage growth prior to general public release that it used with successful products like Gmail and GVoice.
Of course, we're still playing on a cylindrical world. How about going spherical, so I could finally build that city beneath Antarctican mountains for explorers from future civilizations to find
Assuming you don't want to use triangles as your tiles, that requires some tricks to do with a tile-based map (you could do what some pen-and-paper games with hex-based world maps do, and use an icosahedral projection where your twenty "corner" tiles are actually pentagons rather than hexagons.) This probably gets really ugly for keyboard-controlled movement, though with point-and-click it would be fine.
Westinghouse is currently in General Assignment, an alternative to bankruptcy under California state law
I don't get this at all. The US Constitution says bankruptcies are in Federal court and not a state matter.
General Assignment is not bankruptcy, it is a procedure governed by state law which can provide an alternative to bankruptcy in the dissolution of a concern in some circumstances. Unlike bankruptcy, it is not a judicial process (which can often make it more expedient and less costly.)
It also sets precedent that the GPL is valid for use in future cases.
That the GPL is a "valid license" isn't really a seriously debated proposition in the first place, and a trial court decision isn't precedent of any weight (its not binding as precedent in any other case in any court, though in a dispute between the same parties res judicata applies), so I'm not particularly impressed.
4) Also, they had a totally cheap and reasonable soda and snack machines tucked to the side of the entrance once you walk in! Totally surprising - but nice
Subsidized with your tax dollars.
Are you sure? I've known places to have soda/snack machines that were "totally cheap and reasonable" compared to usual costs that weren't subsidized at all, they just were priced to cover maintenance on the machine plus the bulk purchase cost of the goods sold, rather than priced to make a profit.
Slashdot Mirror
In San Francisco Bay? While perhaps theoretically possible, I don't think a tsunami that would be likely to take out such a floating data center has occurred in recorded history, and given the geography of the region it would pretty hard (if it was in the ocean off the SF coast, it would be in more danger.)
Maybe its just that most restaurants that cut wifi are often doing it as a cost-cutting measure that they think will have minimal impact when they are already on the way down, and wifi doesn't really have a big effect one way or the other.
Who needs that? The "something like table service" suggestion was for making it easier for people using the establishment's wifi connection to order food and drinks without the hastle of leaving their table.
I think, especially with Slashdotters, one could easily come up with a method of ordering from the table for those customers that would not require someone walking around taking orders.
Most of the studies I've shown have shown mixed overall results on both ends (developed and less developed) from so-called "free" trade, with the far more consistent effect of increasing the gap between the rich and the poor on both ends. Neo-liberal "free trade" seems to be much better at increasing the share of the economy held by a narrow capital-holding class than it is at promoting broad development.
It probably wouldn't be that hard, in terms of designing rules, to improve trade regimes so that they consistently improved the lot of workers in the less developed partner countries -- even without actually making things worse for workers in the more developed partner (under ideal conditions, specialization is efficient and mutually beneficial.) The problem is that the existing large-scale holders of capital are naturally the dominant class in terms of political power and control of the information resources everywhere, so that its very hard to implement a change to existing regimes which they designed and which they correctly perceive are working better for them than any alternative is likely to.
I'm guessing that the difference here isn't the accusations, its the fact that in Hurd's case, investigation based on the allegations turned up all kinds of misconduct against the company.
Sexual harassment allegations (especially when made by someone else where the alleged victim isn't backing them up, whether or not they have been paid off) can be difficult to substantiate even if true, and people in power can draw lots of false allegations -- OTOH, things like misappropriating company resources for personal use are often leave evidence that is far more cut and dried.
If you have the restraint to do it carefully, and do it so that the company doesn't find out about it, that might be true in something other than the very short run.
OTOH, I suspect that people that use company funds to hide actual or attempted fooling around from their spouses are not generally people for whom that kind of restraint is normal.
I think that it is more the case that, when drunk on your own power, its sometimes easy to imagine that using company resources as if they were your own personal slush fund will make it easier to get away without being discovered rather than that it actually helps all that much.
Sure there is. There is no real definition of "hard sciences" except by subject matter, so as long as "soft sciences" study what they currently study, they won't become "hard sciences".
Particularly, the kinds of experimental difficulties that require non-laboratory kind of experiments in the social sciences are also found in many areas in the physical (and, for those who distinguish them, life) sciences, as well. They may be somewhat more prevalent in the social sciences generally, but that's not a difference of kind.
There are certainly people who write about the subject matter of social sciences who do not use the scientific method, but that is also true of the physical (or life sciences.)
There are certainly also people in the social sciences that adopt the form of the scientific method but misapply it, but that, too, is also true of the physical and life sciences.
The problem with this theory of the rationale for the 17th Amendment is that when the Congress proposed it, 29 states already had systems of direct election of Senators, and nearly enough state legislatures had passed demands for a Constitutional convention to adopt an amendment on the matter to make such a convention mandatory -- the Congressional action to formally propose the amendment was bowing to the manifest will of the States and attempting to exert some control of the specific language of the amendment and prevent it from drifting into other topics as well, since once a convention is called, there's no telling what it will produce (this is especially well illustrated by the results of the convention called to do a few quick nips and tucks on the corners of the Articles of Confederation.)
Please explain how the Civil War and subsequent Reconstruction can be viewed as anything other than federal coercion of several States.
The Civil War ended in 1865.
The 17th Amendment was proposed by Congress to the States in 1912 and ratified in 1913.
So it takes a particularly elastic concept of immediacy to suggest that the latter was forced into place immediately after the former.
It still serves its principal original purpose of apportioning part of the legislative (and presidential electoral, since the electoral college is apportioned by total congressional representation, not just representation in the House, as well as executive, since since certain executive acts and appointments are subject to the Senate's [not the Congress as a whole's] approval) equally among the States. In addition, the staggered six year terms, even without State appointment, produce a Senate that is, while popularly elected, still less moved by transitory popular mood than the House whose entire membership is elected every other year.
Since a sufficiently large number of States would lose political power if that were done, its pretty much politically impossible to pass an Amendment that would abolish the Senate (which itself could be Constitutionally problematic, since it runs into one of the few express limits on the Amendment process) or even to substantially reduce its powers.
The states' status as separate soveriegnties is in not eliminated by direct election of Senators. It is true that many changes in the US system of government in the past 220 or so years -- especially the adoption of the Constitution, and subsequently the 14th, 16th, 17th, and 23rd Amendments -- have transformed the United States in stages from a loose confederation barely more tightly held together than the modern UN with no direct accountability to its citizens into a directly-accountable government with a similar degree of legitimacy to its constituent states. OTOH, I don't see that as a bad thing.
Federal coercion of the states prior to the 17th Amendment was quite possible, as demonstrated quite dramatically in the period from 1861 to the end of Reconstruction.
I can't think of any post-17th Amendment example of federal coercion of the states that could compare to that, really; seat belt laws really don't come close.
It sounds more like the words of an agreed-to statement made as part of a deal that involves the person making a statement and resigning while the other party to the agreement (in this case, the HP board) elects not to pursue some of the other remedies it might have available for the misconduct at issue, so that the offender merely loses the job (notionally voluntarily) and everyone moves on with a minimum expenditure of resources on further proceedings (litigation, etc.)
Electric cars don't require that. Many states already require periodic license fees and some form of periodic inspection for vehicles licensed for use on public roads. All you have to do to charge use taxes on electric (or, for that many, any other) vehicles when such a framework exists is include odometer checks in those inspections and charge (some amount) * (mileage since last inspection) as part of the registration fee.
Prevalence of electric cars may be used as an excuse for toll roads and, expedience in toll collection may be used to justify electronic monitoring devices, but there is a difference between making something necessary and providing an excuse or justification.
You need to get a better electoral system adopted within the current political framework. Given that that will require action by at least the federal Congress and possibly both that and state action through either the regular legislative process or citizen initiative processes, I don't think the fact that securing it requires a better electoral system changes the fact that establishing it requires a better electorate in the current system.
I suppose you can dispense with that requirement if you assume that such a better electoral system being would be installed from the top through a coup d'etat by electoral reformers or an invasion and conquest by a foreign power that has a real problem with our current electoral system. But those mechanisms don't seem particularly likely, and would probably be widely regarded as having downsides far outweighing any likely benefits.
I'm not sure what this means: the points that were left vague in the text were left to be resolved by experience (both through political means and through judicial interpretation in light of specific cases, something the founders would well have been aware would occur, as they were widely familiar with the common law practices that the courts they designed would inherit.)
I never suggested anything about "constant unresolved" points of any kind.
I think that's no more reasonable than assuming that early Mars colonization would largely be drawn from people on Earth who don't have neighbors consistently trying to kill them, which it makes it a wash.
What I don't think is reasonable to assume is that early Mars colonization would consist largely of people moving out of places where people are consistently trying to kill them, but would not result in them living in conditions where people are trying to kill them.
There are, I suppose, scenarios that aren't completely implausible (even if they seem rather unlikely) where that might be the case. For instance, one might imagine that the US would run Mars as a prison colony, and divert non-violent convicts to Mars instead of its domestic prisons.
Actually, its clear only when you try to do that, because then the tint you choose to use resolves all the inherent ambiguities and conflicts for you -- in the favor of whatever ideological tint you've selected.
Yes, and in some of those books and papers, some of them write about how they were deliberately vague in writing some provisions of the Constitution, in order to let some aspects be resolved by experience because of the inability to come to a consensus on resolution on some points. Because, believe it or not, the political elites of the United States were no more united and homogenous in their ideology of government in the late 18th Century than they are in the early 21st; they were more able to work together, perhaps, but largely because they were more keenly aware of the potential consequences if they failed to do so.
Well "the Supreme Court" is ambiguous, since there are lots of Supreme Courts. Several countries have them, and most US states have them as the highest court of appeals in the state court system (and New York has "Supreme Court" as, oddly enough, a lower court.)
SCOTUS -- or the longer "U.S. Supreme Court" or "Supreme Court of the United States" avoid the ambiguity associated with just syaing "the Supreme Court".
The polarization of the confirmation process for Justices has made having either a substantial body of legal scholarship, substantive judicial experience, or substantive trial advocacy experience weaknesses in confirmation proceedings, since the processes is almost completely one of opponents of the nomination seeking choice tidbits -- often out of context -- that make good political soundbites to embarrass anyone who would vote to confirm.
This has been increasingly true over time, independently of which party is doing the appointing and which side is inclined to oppose the nomination, so the results in terms of who gets appointed are fairly predictable.
If you want better (by the standards suggested in the parent post) judicial nominees, you need to get better Senators first. And since the behavior of Senators is driven essentially by what works in producing reactions in the electorate to bring pressure to bear on other Senators, you need a better electorate to get that.
Well, that's fine for the -- literally -- solitary inhabitant of a world. (Though both the absence of support and the psychological effects inherent in that isolations are their own kind of hazards, which may more than offset the hazards, so I'm not sure that, even initially, the conditions are as favorable as you present.)
OTOH, once more people go to the world -- which they will as soon as it is feasible -- you have the natural environmental hazards plus the social hazards associated with an inhabited world.
Without that, we'd just be dealing with the tumors those genes are designed to stop.
What would this imply? (I'll give you a hint, the first word is 'Intelligent')
"Intelligent people often anthropomorphize impersonal processes (e.g., evolution) in where this enables them to make more succinct statements that are more focussed on the point they wish to communicate, which often is not about the mechanics of the process."
At least, that's what it implies to me...is that what you were thinking of?
Its worked pretty well for products like Gmail and GVoice; since you control the availability of invites (both those issued to existing users to send to others and those issued directly via waiting lists), you can essentially calibrate things to what you feel you are prepared to handle, which is probably the best way to handle introduction and scale-up when you are Google, and so visible that if you don't do something, you'll be swamped on day 1.
Wave didn't fail to thrive as a product because Google used the exact same strategy to manage growth prior to general public release that it used with successful products like Gmail and GVoice.
Assuming you don't want to use triangles as your tiles, that requires some tricks to do with a tile-based map (you could do what some pen-and-paper games with hex-based world maps do, and use an icosahedral projection where your twenty "corner" tiles are actually pentagons rather than hexagons.) This probably gets really ugly for keyboard-controlled movement, though with point-and-click it would be fine.
General Assignment is not bankruptcy, it is a procedure governed by state law which can provide an alternative to bankruptcy in the dissolution of a concern in some circumstances. Unlike bankruptcy, it is not a judicial process (which can often make it more expedient and less costly.)
That the GPL is a "valid license" isn't really a seriously debated proposition in the first place, and a trial court decision isn't precedent of any weight (its not binding as precedent in any other case in any court, though in a dispute between the same parties res judicata applies), so I'm not particularly impressed.
Are you sure? I've known places to have soda/snack machines that were "totally cheap and reasonable" compared to usual costs that weren't subsidized at all, they just were priced to cover maintenance on the machine plus the bulk purchase cost of the goods sold, rather than priced to make a profit.