Anybody remember years ago, back when Slashdot wasn't just another popularity/group-think cesspool?
Yes, but I didn't sign up in time to get a three-digit userid.
Anybody know of a smaller site that hasn't completely sold its soul (yet)?
I recommend you look for wordpress or pure html/css sites with no gravatars or disqus, and the kind of high-contrast ergonomic theming that makes liberal arts majors run screaming for the hills (i.e. no eye-destroying grey-on-white text, no extraneous images or banners). If you use a black background and green or orange text you'll pretty much eliminate the non-technicals and the group-thinkers at one stroke.
Which is more believable, that the author made something up because he hates electric cars, or that Tesla told him something qualitatively correct but quantitatively incorrect?
Given the record of previous behavior and the incentives to each party, it's far more believable that the author made something up because it would give him fame and fortune while justifying his documented pre-existing dislike of currently shipping electric vehicles. Occam's razor, amirite? One party has something to gain, and a record of such behavior, but the other sure doesn't have anything to gain by telling people to ignore their dash readouts!
Anyway, without tapes, it cannot ever be known.
And that's the takeaway - you're dead right! It's a "he said/she said" situation so the test data has to be discarded. Repeat the test multiple times if you want the truth, or, if you don't care about truth, pick whichever side of the argument agrees with your existing biases.
I never have any time to play video games, I'm too busy adopting children, running elections, and restoring antique electric vehicles.
Ka-zing!!! That had to get me at least ten more!
Although, more seriously: I played "Journey" the other night, at my son's insistence, and I really liked it. A pleasant change from the first-person-murderer genre.
Too bad our government is owned by the mega corporations now.
You can't buy what isn't for sale. When are people going to face the fact that the government's elite are taking in just as much as the corporations and finally set it straight?
Well, see, I punched the button on the voting machine for "no corruption" and it read back THANK YOU FOR VOTING FOR CORRUPTION HAVE A NICE DAY.
maybe your linux box will have some awesome graphics to play games on
Yeah, like, Team Fortress 2, Counter strike Source, and MORE SHIT IS COMING.
Anything that isn't violent like the popular first-person shooters?
Not a lot, but I'm betting that's because the most profitable target market for big-screen games is young people who are physically impaired by sloth and overconsumption. Healthy young people will play football, rugby, soccer, or go chase the opposite sex in order to satisfy their glandular systems, but couch potatoes with muscles like limp spaghetti need first-person shooters to satisfy their normal, evolution-driven desire for excitement and conquest.
50 years ago, most students walked to and from school, and spent most of their free time outdoors, doing exciting, physically taxing things like playing stickball or kick-the-can. Behavior has changed along with culture and technology, but the human body hasn't evolved to need less adrenaline in the same time period.
As Valve/Steam drives linux gaming forward, there will be more games that aren't murder-oriented. But the percentage overall, regardless of platform, is always going to be low in our lifetimes. Mainstream western culture has no major problem with games that amount to assassination fantasies (at least as long as they don't feature any harmless nudity or consensual, loving sexual activity) and game developers have to pay the bills.
Right, the power needs to come from somewhere. But electricity transmission is significantly more efficient than gas transmission, there's the difference. A non-trivial amount of gas is used to drive gas to a station so you can get it. Last time I checked, the EPA estimates that electrical transmission is 10% more efficient than taking gas to a gas station.
Yep, and electric motors are more than 50% more efficient than gasoline engines - most of the gas engine's energy is being wasted as heat.
And pollution mitigation and valuable element capture is far more economical at a power plant than at a million tailpipes - the coal plants that Reagan did not exempt from pollution controls sell the pollutants that they extract from their stacks, which is not feasible for automobile owners.
Doesn't change the fact that coal is shitty, but you can't really polish a turd.
You sure got that right! However, keep in mind that using electricity is like using a well-understood API or software layer - think, for example, of the Internet Protocol, which is able to run over many different media (including carrier pigeons and lasers). In my area, electricity is generated by natural gas and hydro - there's no coal in the mix, locally - and many electric car enthusiasts use solar power to charge their cars. That's the beauty of electricity - if I build a windmill tomorrow, I can cut down on my grid power consumption right away! Electric cars are a technology worth pursuing in order to allow true fueling diversity and get us off the petroleum teat.
Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your point of view, the energy density of gasoline is astoundingly high. Even Lithium-Ion can't compete when you measure miles per unit of weight (and hydrogen's a complete joke - containment weight is high, energy density is low, and you have to make the hydrogen since hydrogen gas does not occur in nature like wind, sunlight, and plants do). This is unfortunate in that it makes it hard to get people away from gasoline, but fortunate in that it sets a high standard, so people like Musk are forced to innovate like crazy in order to compete.
Most of the complaints here remind me of my Aunt, who only drives red cars. All other cars are chromatically inferior, in her opinion, and therefore undriveable.
My car will bluetooth pair with a phone, and then I can get network access through the phone's data plan.
But, I don't want a phone, dammit. If I had a phone, people would call me. I get enough of that nonsense at work!
All I want is the ability to use my home wifi on the car console when I'm sitting in my driveway. Without paying any monthly bills other than the one I'm already paying for my home Internet connection.
For starters, you need a compiler... something like gcc might work, I suppose... who wrote that thing? Oh, yeah, it was some Richard Stallman guy, starting in 1983 or thereabouts.;)
These guys make smit look good, and that's quite an achievement.
If you're talking about AIX smit, you're sadly right.
Maybe SuSE is the way to go for servers now. Red Hat EL6 isn't any cheaper or more effective than Windows server 2012, which is a real shame since RHEL3 totally pantsed Windows 2003 server, and linux has the better architecture if you don't load it down with laptoppie nonsense.
The Red Hat Network has become a travesty of its former elegance, too. It used to be a quick, strong interface - you logged in and immediately were presented with the status of your systems, and were one or two clicks away from making constructive changes. Nowadays it looks like Yahoo mail... Red Hat doesn't seem to remember that Google trounced Alta Vista, and are allowing marketing department drones to design RHN.
Sounds great, but I loaded OS from paper tape (TSX and RSX-11) in the 70s and 80s and I've never used that as an excuse for stupidity. Every app I ever wrote assumed that years would increment predictably.
And I know at least a half dozen mainframe programmers who were still storing two-digit EBCDIC dates in mid-1999 - that's in NEW processes, mind you! More bytes for less data.
And in the 1970s my grandfather, who was born in 1899, was still very much alive - despite constant computer malfs at the veteran's administration and IRS due to retarded programming. There was never a time where 2 digit years were really an acceptable practice, ever. Not ever.
I actually wrote code to find and flag perl applications using two-digit ASCII dates somewhere around March of 2000. It was still periodically triggering in 2004. I kid you not.
The raw fact is that some programmers are idiots. And some of them wrote commercial OSes. But like I said, I'm willing to give *nix a pass since it was not originally built for end-users, and willing to give NetBSD credit for making the required change.
Oh, no, wait, those OSes were actually designed by people who could tell that years do add up... those guys must have been so smart - they probably passed third grade math!
Kidding aside, we can note that *nixes do have a reasonable excuse, since they grew from a Ritchie/Kernighan hobby project originally intended as therapeutic relief from working on MULTICS. Unix wasn't designed for long-term success, and it was designed to be hacked as necessary, so this wasn't a case of egregiously stupid design decisions.
PCs and IBM mainframes had no such excuse in 1999. The design and practices were just insanely stupid, from silicon all the way up to applications - who the hell can design and program a computer, but can't figure out that the human experience of time is a continuous function?
And thus the once-mighty Red Hat server fails to keep up with competition, or even with its own previous versions. It seems like it's been falling apart ever since Erik Troan left the company, but I wonder if that was cause or effect, you know?
So many poorly executed steps backwards... up2date replaced by yum, openssl replaced by nss, OpenLDAP replaced by FreeIPA, anacron bundled with cron and installed by default, the abominable excrescence that is Network Manager on a wired machine... it seems like Fedora/RHEL is turning into a college student's laptop distribution, where it largely fails to compete with Windows, MacOS or Ubuntu. I mean, come on, how much offline optimization does a server OS need? Anacron, NM, and user credential caching all turned on by default? It's madness. Try to get a recent Fedora or RHEL to work without a GUI or a caching LDAP client, for a quick and easy real good time (not).
With ever increasing dependency chains (anybody still remember mocking Ms-windows DLL hell?) "more stuff to fail" has become the Fedora way.... every version looks more like HP-UX or Windows, with any semblance of elegance or manageable simplicity eroding away like a rich man's taxpayer-insured beachfront.
Well, now you're mixing entirely different things. Pensions, insurance, retirement funds and other forms of investment income that are paid for by successful individuals or arranged through private contract are not equivalent to intellectual property rights that are paid for by society.
You can argue that inheritable investments should or shouldn't be legal, but that's a completely separate argument from anything to do with copyrights or patents.
My great-grandfather was a bricklayer, and he continued working until he was well over 90 years old. During that time he created many beautiful structures and no doubt invented many artful methods of achieving his goals. Neither he nor his heirs ever received one single penny from any other bricklayer who used his designs, reinvented his techniques, or created identical structures. The inheritance he left was created by him during his lifetime and was not collected by fiat after his death. He actually worked continuously for it, just like your Dad. He didn't do some up front work, invest none of the proceeds, and then tax the work of others while laying about on the sofa and attending society balls! We The People allow artists and authors this truly extraordinary privilege specifically to enhance the useful arts and sciences - it's not a God-given right, it's a straight-up, blatant, costly bribe that we simply don't extend to machinists and bricklayers, because we don't have to. It's not because laborers are genetically inferior trash that don't deserve any consideration regardless of how hard or cleverly they work. So if an artist or author did not provide for his or her heirs, why should that be treated differently from a machinist or bricklayer who also did not make such provisions? We've already rewarded artists and authors far beyond machinists, must we also discriminate against the children of machinists? Creating a hereditary aristocracy is highly damaging to nations and economies, so where's the payoff?
Extending the same extraordinary privileges to corporations, heirs, foundations etc. that we extend to living, breathing authors and artists has never achieved any valid social goal so it is not morally or economically defensible on the same terms. The crocodile tears of giant corporations that exist on others' legacies are really just a manipulative appeal to emotion "think of the poor widows and starving orphans", they cry... although in fact such organizations do everything they can to ensure that inherited rights never rest with such people, but instead with ultra wealthy corporate entities that use their income to stifle innovation.
Personally, I still think that society has a vested interest in providing for all children and all disabled persons, so it should never be necessary for intellectual property rights to be heritable or transferable. There should be no starving orphans or crippled widows on the streets regardless of what the occupations of their parents and spouses were. This argument should not be necessary.
The key in all cases is that copyright should be short, not the bastardized version we have now where Elvis makes more money dead then he ever did alive.
Absolutely true. We're entirely in agreement on that!
But on the other point, a well structured society should not favoritize the children of certain tradesmen or social classes above others in regards to "getting a start in life" to use your phrase. This is the very definition of a moral hazard - if the children of authors are designated a privileged class, why not the children of bricklayers or sanitation engineers or college professors? As soon as you make a value judgement that explicitly makes some children inherently better than others by virtue of parentage rather than by their own abilities or earned merit, you've created an aristocracy which will in turn do damage to your entire culture. The solution is to make sure either all orphans are supported, or none of them, not to create a special case for the orphans of artists and authors. I vote we give all children the chance to make something of themselves, personally, although I do understand the point of social darwinists who would say give none of them a leg up.
That's not restricted to mammals. In fact the only creatures that will never eat their young under any circumstances are those that are physically incapable of it, such as for instance pelagic snails. Your off-topic pedant moment for the day; I just couldn't resist.
PS: the best things that could happen to the USA (and to the average US citizen) would be cutting government spending, raising government income, and driving the price of petroleum products up to the point where sustainable alternatives are economically viable in the marketplace.
If someone writes a best seller then dies, what is wrong with their heirs being able to profit for a reasonable time?
Depends on whether the heirs supported you while you wrote - there's nothing inherently wrong with your spouse, for example, getting some return on helping you create the work (for a limited period, of course, as you say). Even if all s/he did was bring you an occasional bowl of hot soup it's still easier to create when you have a family support structure.
But if you're talking about heirs that are your children (or any sort of corporation or third party) then what's wrong with that idea is the same thing that is wrong with a person never having to work by virtue of being born a lord, while others were born to be your slaves. Inheritances that create and sustain a nonproductive aristocracy are toxic to individual morals and behavior and destructive to a well ordered egalitarian society.
I don't think I ever saw a 5-gallon spill from that particular mistake, but we definitely learned to keep a sharp eye on anyone filling a gas can. Like you said, they'd run it full flow, and then sometimes they'd even try to peer past the nozzle to see how full the can was, and end up with a face full of gasoline.
We had one lady take the nozzle out of the car while still holding the valve open. In a total panic she sprayed down the whole area - other cars, other customers, etc. because she was too frightened to let go and she kept pivoting wildly and screaming. Before any of the staff managed to get to her another customer smacked the thing out of her hand. We had to close the station for nearly an hour, and all it would have taken was one drive-by flicking a burning match out of the window, we'd have burned down the whole block. We literally hosed the customers down with a garden hose, and a couple of cars too.
Best idea I ever heard was that the US Post Office should become a CA, I'd use them instead of the current bunch of swindlers who do the minimum acceptable job at the highest acceptable price.
it's basically impossible for drivers (especially those from out of town) to price shop because they don't know how much gasoline they'll actually get for the listed price per gallon.
I agree with your concept, but in this case it's pretty easy to measure out gas into a marked measuring container..
Having worked for years in a gas station, and having actually managed one for a while, I can tell you that what you're recommending here involves a huge increase in fatal fires, possibly burning down entire cities.
Because believe me, the last thing you want is Joe Average trying to measure his own portions of a highly flammable liquid while on the premises of a fuel transfer station. I speak from bitter experience; I can't tell you how many times I've seen people calmly light a cigarette while pumping gas. I can tell hours worth of stories of incredibly insane and dangerous things I've seen people do in gas stations.
I think our problems stem less from the size and pervasiveness of our bureaucracy, and more from the extreme corruption of that bureaucracy. The problem isn't government, the problem is that government is for sale. Getting rid of government would just make sociopathic behavior cheaper and more evenly available.
I wouldn't be suprised if it's just Bayes. The majority of messages with links leading to those registrars' domains were categorized by human readers as spam, so automated bayesian analysis picked it up.
As long as you have Internet governance that is primarily concerned with eliminating certain forms of political speech (Great FireWall of [insert name of nation here]) rather than ensuring a free market and fair trade, you're going to have this problem. The same low-rent registrars are going to be used for criminal spam as for legit filter avoidance technologies, because they are looking for the same service (temporary domain names at minimum price).
Here in the USA companies are going to PAT time which means your sick time comes from your vacation.
The company says it the other way around - "you get to take any unused sick days as vacation, aren't we nice?"
But obviously, if you are sick as hell, you only have two choices:
1) Stay home, be sick, get one less vacation day to enjoy while you're healthy.
2) Go to work, infect everyone, do your job poorly, enjoy your well earned vacation.
Wages are flat or dropping, staffing is dwindling while workloads increase, the CEO / company owner class of society is getting richer while everyone else struggles more and more, so which choice is the average wage slave going to make?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but I didn't sign up in time to get a three-digit userid.
I recommend you look for wordpress or pure html/css sites with no gravatars or disqus, and the kind of high-contrast ergonomic theming that makes liberal arts majors run screaming for the hills (i.e. no eye-destroying grey-on-white text, no extraneous images or banners). If you use a black background and green or orange text you'll pretty much eliminate the non-technicals and the group-thinkers at one stroke.
Dry troll, or fundamental cognitive dissonance?
A lot of DMV workers just got new tech for their homes!
Given the record of previous behavior and the incentives to each party, it's far more believable that the author made something up because it would give him fame and fortune while justifying his documented pre-existing dislike of currently shipping electric vehicles. Occam's razor, amirite? One party has something to gain, and a record of such behavior, but the other sure doesn't have anything to gain by telling people to ignore their dash readouts!
And that's the takeaway - you're dead right! It's a "he said/she said" situation so the test data has to be discarded. Repeat the test multiple times if you want the truth, or, if you don't care about truth, pick whichever side of the argument agrees with your existing biases.
Only 15? Let's see if I can increase my score!
I never have any time to play video games, I'm too busy adopting children, running elections, and restoring antique electric vehicles.
Ka-zing!!! That had to get me at least ten more!
Although, more seriously: I played "Journey" the other night, at my son's insistence, and I really liked it. A pleasant change from the first-person-murderer genre.
Well, see, I punched the button on the voting machine for "no corruption" and it read back THANK YOU FOR VOTING FOR CORRUPTION HAVE A NICE DAY.
Not a lot, but I'm betting that's because the most profitable target market for big-screen games is young people who are physically impaired by sloth and overconsumption. Healthy young people will play football, rugby, soccer, or go chase the opposite sex in order to satisfy their glandular systems, but couch potatoes with muscles like limp spaghetti need first-person shooters to satisfy their normal, evolution-driven desire for excitement and conquest.
50 years ago, most students walked to and from school, and spent most of their free time outdoors, doing exciting, physically taxing things like playing stickball or kick-the-can. Behavior has changed along with culture and technology, but the human body hasn't evolved to need less adrenaline in the same time period.
As Valve/Steam drives linux gaming forward, there will be more games that aren't murder-oriented. But the percentage overall, regardless of platform, is always going to be low in our lifetimes. Mainstream western culture has no major problem with games that amount to assassination fantasies (at least as long as they don't feature any harmless nudity or consensual, loving sexual activity) and game developers have to pay the bills.
Yep, and electric motors are more than 50% more efficient than gasoline engines - most of the gas engine's energy is being wasted as heat.
And pollution mitigation and valuable element capture is far more economical at a power plant than at a million tailpipes - the coal plants that Reagan did not exempt from pollution controls sell the pollutants that they extract from their stacks, which is not feasible for automobile owners.
You sure got that right! However, keep in mind that using electricity is like using a well-understood API or software layer - think, for example, of the Internet Protocol, which is able to run over many different media (including carrier pigeons and lasers). In my area, electricity is generated by natural gas and hydro - there's no coal in the mix, locally - and many electric car enthusiasts use solar power to charge their cars. That's the beauty of electricity - if I build a windmill tomorrow, I can cut down on my grid power consumption right away! Electric cars are a technology worth pursuing in order to allow true fueling diversity and get us off the petroleum teat.
Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your point of view, the energy density of gasoline is astoundingly high. Even Lithium-Ion can't compete when you measure miles per unit of weight (and hydrogen's a complete joke - containment weight is high, energy density is low, and you have to make the hydrogen since hydrogen gas does not occur in nature like wind, sunlight, and plants do). This is unfortunate in that it makes it hard to get people away from gasoline, but fortunate in that it sets a high standard, so people like Musk are forced to innovate like crazy in order to compete.
Most of the complaints here remind me of my Aunt, who only drives red cars. All other cars are chromatically inferior, in her opinion, and therefore undriveable.
My car will bluetooth pair with a phone, and then I can get network access through the phone's data plan.
But, I don't want a phone, dammit. If I had a phone, people would call me. I get enough of that nonsense at work!
All I want is the ability to use my home wifi on the car console when I'm sitting in my driveway. Without paying any monthly bills other than the one I'm already paying for my home Internet connection.
For starters, you need a compiler... something like gcc might work, I suppose... who wrote that thing? Oh, yeah, it was some Richard Stallman guy, starting in 1983 or thereabouts. ;)
If you're talking about AIX smit, you're sadly right.
Maybe SuSE is the way to go for servers now. Red Hat EL6 isn't any cheaper or more effective than Windows server 2012, which is a real shame since RHEL3 totally pantsed Windows 2003 server, and linux has the better architecture if you don't load it down with laptoppie nonsense.
The Red Hat Network has become a travesty of its former elegance, too. It used to be a quick, strong interface - you logged in and immediately were presented with the status of your systems, and were one or two clicks away from making constructive changes. Nowadays it looks like Yahoo mail... Red Hat doesn't seem to remember that Google trounced Alta Vista, and are allowing marketing department drones to design RHN.
Sounds great, but I loaded OS from paper tape (TSX and RSX-11) in the 70s and 80s and I've never used that as an excuse for stupidity. Every app I ever wrote assumed that years would increment predictably.
And I know at least a half dozen mainframe programmers who were still storing two-digit EBCDIC dates in mid-1999 - that's in NEW processes, mind you! More bytes for less data.
And in the 1970s my grandfather, who was born in 1899, was still very much alive - despite constant computer malfs at the veteran's administration and IRS due to retarded programming. There was never a time where 2 digit years were really an acceptable practice, ever. Not ever.
I actually wrote code to find and flag perl applications using two-digit ASCII dates somewhere around March of 2000. It was still periodically triggering in 2004. I kid you not.
The raw fact is that some programmers are idiots. And some of them wrote commercial OSes. But like I said, I'm willing to give *nix a pass since it was not originally built for end-users, and willing to give NetBSD credit for making the required change.
Just like VMS and others did in the early 1980s?
Oh, no, wait, those OSes were actually designed by people who could tell that years do add up... those guys must have been so smart - they probably passed third grade math!
Kidding aside, we can note that *nixes do have a reasonable excuse, since they grew from a Ritchie/Kernighan hobby project originally intended as therapeutic relief from working on MULTICS. Unix wasn't designed for long-term success, and it was designed to be hacked as necessary, so this wasn't a case of egregiously stupid design decisions.
PCs and IBM mainframes had no such excuse in 1999. The design and practices were just insanely stupid, from silicon all the way up to applications - who the hell can design and program a computer, but can't figure out that the human experience of time is a continuous function?
And thus the once-mighty Red Hat server fails to keep up with competition, or even with its own previous versions. It seems like it's been falling apart ever since Erik Troan left the company, but I wonder if that was cause or effect, you know?
So many poorly executed steps backwards... up2date replaced by yum, openssl replaced by nss, OpenLDAP replaced by FreeIPA, anacron bundled with cron and installed by default, the abominable excrescence that is Network Manager on a wired machine... it seems like Fedora/RHEL is turning into a college student's laptop distribution, where it largely fails to compete with Windows, MacOS or Ubuntu. I mean, come on, how much offline optimization does a server OS need? Anacron, NM, and user credential caching all turned on by default? It's madness. Try to get a recent Fedora or RHEL to work without a GUI or a caching LDAP client, for a quick and easy real good time (not).
With ever increasing dependency chains (anybody still remember mocking Ms-windows DLL hell?) "more stuff to fail" has become the Fedora way.... every version looks more like HP-UX or Windows, with any semblance of elegance or manageable simplicity eroding away like a rich man's taxpayer-insured beachfront.
Three times a year.
Not when they are needed, or when they are wanted, or when they are actually ready... but rather, three times a year.
All you need to know about Oracle is contained in the parent post. They think "three times a year" is taking "security exploits incredibly seriously".
Reminds me of the sewer worker who's proud to take a bath every year, whether he needs it or not, because he's incredibly serious about hygiene.
Well, now you're mixing entirely different things. Pensions, insurance, retirement funds and other forms of investment income that are paid for by successful individuals or arranged through private contract are not equivalent to intellectual property rights that are paid for by society.
You can argue that inheritable investments should or shouldn't be legal, but that's a completely separate argument from anything to do with copyrights or patents.
My great-grandfather was a bricklayer, and he continued working until he was well over 90 years old. During that time he created many beautiful structures and no doubt invented many artful methods of achieving his goals. Neither he nor his heirs ever received one single penny from any other bricklayer who used his designs, reinvented his techniques, or created identical structures. The inheritance he left was created by him during his lifetime and was not collected by fiat after his death. He actually worked continuously for it, just like your Dad. He didn't do some up front work, invest none of the proceeds, and then tax the work of others while laying about on the sofa and attending society balls! We The People allow artists and authors this truly extraordinary privilege specifically to enhance the useful arts and sciences - it's not a God-given right, it's a straight-up, blatant, costly bribe that we simply don't extend to machinists and bricklayers, because we don't have to. It's not because laborers are genetically inferior trash that don't deserve any consideration regardless of how hard or cleverly they work. So if an artist or author did not provide for his or her heirs, why should that be treated differently from a machinist or bricklayer who also did not make such provisions? We've already rewarded artists and authors far beyond machinists, must we also discriminate against the children of machinists? Creating a hereditary aristocracy is highly damaging to nations and economies, so where's the payoff?
Extending the same extraordinary privileges to corporations, heirs, foundations etc. that we extend to living, breathing authors and artists has never achieved any valid social goal so it is not morally or economically defensible on the same terms. The crocodile tears of giant corporations that exist on others' legacies are really just a manipulative appeal to emotion "think of the poor widows and starving orphans", they cry... although in fact such organizations do everything they can to ensure that inherited rights never rest with such people, but instead with ultra wealthy corporate entities that use their income to stifle innovation.
Personally, I still think that society has a vested interest in providing for all children and all disabled persons, so it should never be necessary for intellectual property rights to be heritable or transferable. There should be no starving orphans or crippled widows on the streets regardless of what the occupations of their parents and spouses were. This argument should not be necessary.
Absolutely true. We're entirely in agreement on that!
But on the other point, a well structured society should not favoritize the children of certain tradesmen or social classes above others in regards to "getting a start in life" to use your phrase. This is the very definition of a moral hazard - if the children of authors are designated a privileged class, why not the children of bricklayers or sanitation engineers or college professors? As soon as you make a value judgement that explicitly makes some children inherently better than others by virtue of parentage rather than by their own abilities or earned merit, you've created an aristocracy which will in turn do damage to your entire culture. The solution is to make sure either all orphans are supported, or none of them, not to create a special case for the orphans of artists and authors. I vote we give all children the chance to make something of themselves, personally, although I do understand the point of social darwinists who would say give none of them a leg up.
That's not restricted to mammals. In fact the only creatures that will never eat their young under any circumstances are those that are physically incapable of it, such as for instance pelagic snails. Your off-topic pedant moment for the day; I just couldn't resist.
PS: the best things that could happen to the USA (and to the average US citizen) would be cutting government spending, raising government income, and driving the price of petroleum products up to the point where sustainable alternatives are economically viable in the marketplace.
Depends on whether the heirs supported you while you wrote - there's nothing inherently wrong with your spouse, for example, getting some return on helping you create the work (for a limited period, of course, as you say). Even if all s/he did was bring you an occasional bowl of hot soup it's still easier to create when you have a family support structure.
But if you're talking about heirs that are your children (or any sort of corporation or third party) then what's wrong with that idea is the same thing that is wrong with a person never having to work by virtue of being born a lord, while others were born to be your slaves. Inheritances that create and sustain a nonproductive aristocracy are toxic to individual morals and behavior and destructive to a well ordered egalitarian society.
Slashdot discussions exist for pushing your favored social and political memes, not for your troublesome facts, you backwards heathen!
As Homer Simpson teaches us, "Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!"
I don't think I ever saw a 5-gallon spill from that particular mistake, but we definitely learned to keep a sharp eye on anyone filling a gas can. Like you said, they'd run it full flow, and then sometimes they'd even try to peer past the nozzle to see how full the can was, and end up with a face full of gasoline.
We had one lady take the nozzle out of the car while still holding the valve open. In a total panic she sprayed down the whole area - other cars, other customers, etc. because she was too frightened to let go and she kept pivoting wildly and screaming. Before any of the staff managed to get to her another customer smacked the thing out of her hand. We had to close the station for nearly an hour, and all it would have taken was one drive-by flicking a burning match out of the window, we'd have burned down the whole block. We literally hosed the customers down with a garden hose, and a couple of cars too.
Set up a few servers and mint cash.
Best idea I ever heard was that the US Post Office should become a CA, I'd use them instead of the current bunch of swindlers who do the minimum acceptable job at the highest acceptable price.
Having worked for years in a gas station, and having actually managed one for a while, I can tell you that what you're recommending here involves a huge increase in fatal fires, possibly burning down entire cities.
Because believe me, the last thing you want is Joe Average trying to measure his own portions of a highly flammable liquid while on the premises of a fuel transfer station. I speak from bitter experience; I can't tell you how many times I've seen people calmly light a cigarette while pumping gas. I can tell hours worth of stories of incredibly insane and dangerous things I've seen people do in gas stations.
I think our problems stem less from the size and pervasiveness of our bureaucracy, and more from the extreme corruption of that bureaucracy. The problem isn't government, the problem is that government is for sale. Getting rid of government would just make sociopathic behavior cheaper and more evenly available.
I wouldn't be suprised if it's just Bayes. The majority of messages with links leading to those registrars' domains were categorized by human readers as spam, so automated bayesian analysis picked it up.
As long as you have Internet governance that is primarily concerned with eliminating certain forms of political speech (Great FireWall of [insert name of nation here]) rather than ensuring a free market and fair trade, you're going to have this problem. The same low-rent registrars are going to be used for criminal spam as for legit filter avoidance technologies, because they are looking for the same service (temporary domain names at minimum price).
Here in the USA companies are going to PAT time which means your sick time comes from your vacation.
The company says it the other way around - "you get to take any unused sick days as vacation, aren't we nice?"
But obviously, if you are sick as hell, you only have two choices:
1) Stay home, be sick, get one less vacation day to enjoy while you're healthy.
2) Go to work, infect everyone, do your job poorly, enjoy your well earned vacation.
Wages are flat or dropping, staffing is dwindling while workloads increase, the CEO / company owner class of society is getting richer while everyone else struggles more and more, so which choice is the average wage slave going to make?