The rich are thoroughly soaked
Those in the top 1% of income pay 40% of the income tax revenue in the U.S., so I think they are already pretty well fleeced, even though I'm not among them.
14 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Apr 2007
"we felt that the gains we would make in ability to control the look and feel of our product would outweigh this."
Ah, but that's misguided website design. Did you hire a bunch of designers with magazine/print backgrounds, where they had control over the placement of every pixel?
I shun the look and feel of your product anyway, and read using Opera in "user mode," where CSS is ignored entirely. I forget why I started doing that years ago, but it was probably because you made lousy typeface choices, or something like that. That flexibility is another of Opera's key features: You land on some abhorrent site whose "designer" decided purple text on a black background was K00l? Just type Shift-g (i.e., capital 'G') and CSS is instantly disabled, rendering the site with your default typeface in black on a white background.
All the comments about cold calls miss one important point: marketing calls are not permitted to mobile numbers in the U.S. In fact, that is one of the great things about dropping land line service and going mobile (aka cell) only. You simply don't ever get marketing calls.
That, along with the "do not call" list of numbers to which is forbidden to make marketing calls means that telemarketing in the U.S. should have one foot in the grave.
Beacon Power has flywheel-based technology at power plant scale for frequency regulation and storage: http://www.beaconpower.com/products/EnergyStorageSystems/index.htm
And Volkswagen has done the flywheel thing in their Ecomatic system, which turned off the engine when stopped, and used flywheel stored energy to start it up again once you wanted to go.
At least they did 4 years ago when I fled IBM. It was interesting to read internal forums, where there was an active Notes-loathing culture, with absolutely zero participation from Lotus employees.
Untold engineering effort went into adapting clunky workarounds, since the Domino server scalability was so poor that they couldn't take the performance hit of enabling IMAP or POP access.
The Prius charges its batteries exclusively via its own gasoline engine. You cannot plug it in to recharge. (This is at least true for U.S. market versions, though I'd be astonished if it were different elsewhere.)
As such, the _only_ benefit the Prius provides is recapturing energy during braking. That is why they have no real benefit in limited access highway driving.
... it is _required_ under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).
Joe user bought an XP system with a coupon for a vista "upgrade," all for X dollars. MS is not allowed to book the full (wholesale) price as revenue, as they have not delivered all of the value. To wit: The Vista upgrade, included as part of the purchase.
They defer that portion of the total revenue, and book it later when when they deliver the final component of value offered in the product. The breakdown of that portion of the value is theirs to determine, but it must appear reasonable to auditors based on pre-coupon sales, the value of the upgrade, and perhaps other factors.