the only place I have ever seen with a 360 view of a completely roadless area
Then you haven't spent much time in the Oregon Cascades, have you?
I have. I've gone backpacking in the area of the bulge. Just got back a week ago from another wilderness trip, in fact. Go to my website to see some stunning photos of various Oregon wilderness areas.
Yeah, I'm a Wilderness user -- AND I vehemently oppose the environmentalist agenda. Guess what? I'm not a "black-or-white" thinker.
But this is all beside the point. The point is that the environmentalists have no concept of the wise use of resources.... that their self-contradictory absolutism is creating problems, not solving them.
The myth isn't whether the Earth is warming. There IS a slight (very slight) warming ever since the Little Ice Age ended a hundred or so years ago. No responsible climatologist disputes that.
It's the rest of the environmentalist mythmaking that is causing serious havoc in our nation & world: That the warming is human-caused, that it will continue increasing for a century or more, and that it will have devastating effects on Earth's ecosystems and climates.
A lie, no matter how often repeated, no matter how popularly it is believed, is still a lie. The FACTS remain that THERE IS NO SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS that the recent short-term temperature fluctuations are human-caused, and history shows that there are no devastating effects from global warming.
Indeed, if the 200-year-long Medieval Warming Period of a thousand years ago (when global temperatures rose a little bit higher than is forcasted for our time) is any indication -- and it is -- then we are in for a period of peace, social progress, and calmer weather. Check your history books: there were some significant advances in human culture during that time, and none of the global catastophes that are being predicted by the left-wing doomsayers ever happened.
That's why I'm not a Leftist any more. Lies are all they have to offer -- in any debate in which they engage.
At the time the Portland (read: ignorant city people) TV stations were saying, "The South Sister is getting ready to blow! Details at 11 pm."
But no, it isn't getting ready to erupt. Well, MAYBE... sometime in the next 100 years... IF the pool of magma keeps moving...
And no, we can't tap it for geothermal energy. It's in a Wilderness area, and no matter how much the Environmentalist Wackos scream about their glo-bull warming myth, there's no way they're going to allow a geothermal plant in a Wilderness area.
So I guess you didn't know... that NO American administration would be friendly to an agent of Moscow?
Oh no, especially not in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, who had known Soviet spies in all kinds of sensitive positions, despite repeated warnings from J. Edgar about these guys....
I presume that you've never heard of the Venona Project? (sorry, but my reference cites are at home and I'm at work)
the nationally well-regarded Union of Concerned Scientists - a non-partisan body
"Well-regarded?" "non-partisan??" What a crock of Brown Sticky Stuff. The UCS is well-known for their left-wing advocacy -- and also well-known for ignoring any science that contradicts their preconcieved beliefs.
Of COURSE the UCS is unhappy. They HATE pres. Bush and will do anything, including sacrificing their integrity, to try to make him look bad.
This is nothing more than another pathetic attempt by the left-wing Press to try to discredit a Repugnican -- nothing new here, folks, move along. Funny how none of President Clinton's political manipulations of science never got any press....
Re:Seriously... Why would you use this?
on
GIMP 2.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
Amen. I use The Gimp all the time because I cannot afford PS. But The Gimp still is NOT a serious product for photographers, and never will be until they support:
* at least 16 bits per channel color, and
* Color management (i.e., icc profiles, colorspaces, and conversions thereof)
I can get color management by using ImageMagick. But it isn't easy, and it certainly is NOT for the non-geek.
and a few other things that aren't very nice to say. Before he moved to Dallas, J.R. Ewing lived in Portland. Before living in Portland, he was a nice guy. And Tonya Harding lives in Portland in real life.
When Linus finds out how miserable the commute is from Portland to his job in Beaverton, and finds how BAD the Portland public school system is, he's going to wish to hell he'd located in Washington County instead. He'll get cut off, and flipped off, in traffic EVERY DAY. Some people have even been shot and killed on that road.
I'm personally so disgusted with the R party I don't even call myself conservative any more... what passes for a defintion now as liberal has nothing to do with a classical liberal... I consider myself now just a traditional Constitutionalist....
I, too, am a Classical Liberal who is disgusted with what now passes for both "conservative" and "liberal."
You, sir, are what is now called a "small-L libertarian."
Bu$h administration officials were quoted in the Washington Post as stating they thought out sourcing was good for the economy
I know the current President gives us ample reasons to criticize him, but give him credit when he happens to get something right.
In this case, he happens to be right.
The current issue of Reason magazine arrived in my mailbox yesterday with a cover story titled "10 Truths About Trade: Hard facts about offshoring, imports, and jobs" that unimpeachably presents the facts: Offshoring is not a threat to high-tech employment; challenging, high-paying jobs are becoming more plentiful, not less; offshoring creates new jobs and boosts economic growth; and the popular myth that the US economy is running out of jobs has been with us a very long time -- and has always been untrue. It won't be on line for another month, so you'll have to get it from a news stand if you want to read it.
I'm out of work too, and it's not due to offshoring (I'm a network administrator); it's due to conditions caused by brainless politicians who don't understand economics.
Bush (43) is not responsible for the recent recession from which we're now in recovery; that recession started during Clinton's term, just as the recovery eight years earlier started during Bush (41)'s term. I, too, would like to see Bush (43) out of office; unfortunately, the alternative offered to us by the Democrats will be an order of magnitude worse if he wins.
Gore took the initiative in creating the Internet by taking the initiative to support the legislation required to get it going.
And just how, exactly, did he do that? He wasn't even in Congress at that time. IIRC he was in college, or high school, or something.
nothing in his statement could be properly construed to imply such
Look it up. He clearly implied that he was present at the creation of the Internet, and actively made it happen -- which is clearly a falsehood.
Yes, he apparently DID do some things to help the Internet while in Congress -- for which he deserves credit -- but the Internet already existed; he sure as hell didn't 'invent' it.
And it has nothing to do with which team (Bush v. Gore) you were rooting for. Everyone SHOULD be able to rationally sort out the facts regardless of ideology. Of course, the Gore people still have trouble being rational, but that's another thread....
First, I'll confess that the only reason I decided to read the Slashdot comments (which, frankly, are an incredible waste of time) was the entertainment value in reading all of the stupid/clueless "Dude, she's a babe!" / "Nah, she's not a babe, but she's do-able" nonsense. I don't know why I get such a kick out of that. Maybe because stupidity really, truly IS funny. I think it's even funnier that she is serving you guys for lunch.
I grok her as one of the extremely rare people who not only has a very high IQ and thinks for zirself, but has also been able to shed the shame-based human-sexuality baggage with which most of us are saddled.
This is a person who has my utmost respect and admiration. This is the kind of person I like to have in my social circle. Unfortunately, they are all too rare. Fortunately, I have found a few. Very few. Unfortunately, the world is still full of clueless morons who reduce us to a one-dimensional target of shame-based name-calling because they just don't have the IQ to think in any other terms.
Oh well. Her geographic area isn't exactly an intellectual backwater. It's not very likely that her social circle leaves her feeling intellectually deprived.
My TV goes for weeks at a time without ever being turned on. When it is, it's usually to watch a video.
There is simply NOTHING offered on TV these days that is worth watching -- that can't be obtained on-line. I was glued to the NASA TV web site during the recent Mars landings. And I'm a news addict on Election Night. But all that can be watched on line these days.
If people want to rot their brains, let them do it. It isn't anybody's business anyway. All of these busybodies worrying about whether this or that cultural phenomenon is sending us to Hell -- well, they need to go visit a brothel, or get an enema, or do something to get over their g*****n anal fixation with other people's personal choices.
Photoshop also supports color management through and through- GIMP never has out of the box and never will, because there's no such thing as color management under linux
Not true. Color management in Linux is in its infancy, but it's not nonexistent.
But Color Management is the reason I won't be switching to Gimp 2 anytime soon. Frankly, ANY photo editing software is useless without CM, and I doubt that the Color Manager Plug-in for The Gimp will be revamped any time soon to work with Gimp 2.
So until I see some serious effort to support Color Management by Gimp's developers, I'll be sticking to Photoshop and Gimp 1.2, thank you. And yes, I use both.
The real question I have for the developers is this: when will we ever see decent PGP/GPG support for Evolution? [snip] I don't pretend to know more than the developers, and I'm sure there may be reasons why they've chosen to leave this feature broken, but if every other OSS Email project can nail it, why can't they?
I had that same question for them a couple of years ago, and I asked them on their developers' mailing list. The reason is because one of their developers has an attitude the size of Jupiter regarding in-line encryption. So the answer to your question is probably "never."
But that doesn't bother me any. KMail does EVERYTHING I need an email client to do, and does it well. And it's light-years ahead of Evo in the way it handles threaded messages too.
This is all interesting news to me, but I doubt that I'll ever actually use Evo.
There is a rather unique router operated within the campus of the University of Oregon ( www.route-views.org).
"Rather unique?" There is no such thing. Uniqueness is binary: either something is unique, or it is not. There are no degrees, and there are no such things as "rather unique," "very unique" or any other qualifier.
Grumble. I wish publishers would accept copy only from people who can actually WRITE...
The Progressive movement was based on belief in the Scientific Method and it's application to politics.
First of all, I presume that by "progressive" you're talking about the Leftists and Socialists who were formerly known (incorrectly) as "Liberals"...
"...based on belief in the Scientific Method"? I think not! They ignore HUGE chunks of science in order to promulgate their irrational beliefs into some kind of a Socialist Utopia.
These are the same people claiming that so-called "Global Warming" is going to incinerate the planet, that cultivating trees in the Pacific Northwest is going to precipitate a global ecological disaster and that nuclear power "dangerous." And let's not forget their abject ignorance of the field of economics with their armed-robbery-by-the-State-is-the-solution-to-all- social-problems philosophy....
No, so-called "Progressives" are worse than their enemies on the other end of the political spectrum when it comes to ignoring Science and promoting "junk science." At least the Right Wing keeps their focus on human sexuality and "creationism," which is evil enough without trying to destroy an entire economic system and send us all back to the Stone Age as the "Progressives" are wont to doing.
The mailings are popularly known as "spam" in the Web world.... But in the early 1990s, not many people had even heard of the Internet.... Prior to that, the Internet was mainly used by the government and military.... When the Web became accessible to the general public, Wallace's entrepreneurial mind began churning.... Wallace found ways to collect a massive list of personal e-mail addresses.... He would create advertisements, and send them off into the World Wide Web.
Stupid clueless reporter. Doesn't even know the difference between the Web, email and the Internet.
With people such as this bringing us our news and information every day, no wonder the American public is so hopelessly uninformed....
You're forgetting something very important: Gates never wrote DOS, and therefore could not have said that.
MS-DOS (aka PCDOS) was written by Seattle Computer. One of Gates' sidekicks (I think it was Paul Allen) bought the rights to Seattle DOS after IBM offered M$ the contract to write the OS for their new PC.
Gates got offered the contract because his mother, a wealthy Seattle socialite, had connections inside IBM. After IBM got snubbed by Digital Research (authors of CP/M), someone suggested they talk to "Mary Gates' boy."
... but Teksystems has treated me very well in the past.
Lately, though, they seem to be slipping... getting more like their slimy competitors. I hope it ain't so, 'coz they treated me VERY well when I worked for them a few years ago.
Yeah, that's what I thought when I was fired almost two years ago for telling the truth about Micro$oft's threat to national security. I'm still looking.
What happened to this country?? Has the average intelligence dropped that fucking much??
Short answer: yes. But there's more to it than that.
When the fuck did I get sucked into the Twilight Zone? And whatever happened to personal responsibility??
It isn't just the drop in American IQ that's at work here; indeed, that's only a minor factor. The group most responsible for bringing this stupidity to our once-great nation is the American Trial Lawyers Association.
IANAL, but as I understand it the source of the problem is the "joint and several liability" clause in current tort law, which makes anyone who can be shown to be even one percent responsible for a loss liable for the entire amount of the loss. With laws like this, it's only inevitable that lawyers, being the carnivorous predators that they are (actually, they're more like parasites but I'm inclined to be nice to them today and just call them vicious carnivores), are going to go after the deepest pockets.
Congress actually passed tort reform legislation in the 1990's that would have corrected these abuses, but Bill Clinton vetoed it. It seems that the American Trial Lawyers Association was either the biggest or the second-biggest fundraiser for the Democratic Party...
And THAT is what happened to personal responsibility. The Democrites are no better than the Repugnicans when it comes to individual liberty and personal responsibility issues. I would strongly suggest that Slashdot readers carefully consider supporting the third-party candidate of their choice in future elections.
News like this... makes me want to move to the most remote tropical island in the world and set up a benevolent technocracy. Who's with me?
About 20,000 people, that's who. Check out the Free State Project in which 20K people plan to move to one of the lesser-populated US states en masse, register to vote, and begin changing that state into a bastion for freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
the only place I have ever seen with a 360 view of a completely roadless area
Then you haven't spent much time in the Oregon Cascades, have you?
I have. I've gone backpacking in the area of the bulge. Just got back a week ago from another wilderness trip, in fact. Go to my website to see some stunning photos of various Oregon wilderness areas.
Yeah, I'm a Wilderness user -- AND I vehemently oppose the environmentalist agenda. Guess what? I'm not a "black-or-white" thinker.
But this is all beside the point. The point is that the environmentalists have no concept of the wise use of resources.... that their self-contradictory absolutism is creating problems, not solving them.
The myth isn't whether the Earth is warming. There IS a slight (very slight) warming ever since the Little Ice Age ended a hundred or so years ago. No responsible climatologist disputes that.
It's the rest of the environmentalist mythmaking that is causing serious havoc in our nation & world: That the warming is human-caused, that it will continue increasing for a century or more, and that it will have devastating effects on Earth's ecosystems and climates.
A lie, no matter how often repeated, no matter how popularly it is believed, is still a lie. The FACTS remain that THERE IS NO SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS that the recent short-term temperature fluctuations are human-caused, and history shows that there are no devastating effects from global warming.
Indeed, if the 200-year-long Medieval Warming Period of a thousand years ago (when global temperatures rose a little bit higher than is forcasted for our time) is any indication -- and it is -- then we are in for a period of peace, social progress, and calmer weather. Check your history books: there were some significant advances in human culture during that time, and none of the global catastophes that are being predicted by the left-wing doomsayers ever happened.
That's why I'm not a Leftist any more. Lies are all they have to offer -- in any debate in which they engage.
This was news two years ago. It isn't news now.
At the time the Portland (read: ignorant city people) TV stations were saying, "The South Sister is getting ready to blow! Details at 11 pm."
But no, it isn't getting ready to erupt. Well, MAYBE... sometime in the next 100 years... IF the pool of magma keeps moving...
And no, we can't tap it for geothermal energy. It's in a Wilderness area, and no matter how much the Environmentalist Wackos scream about their glo-bull warming myth, there's no way they're going to allow a geothermal plant in a Wilderness area.
So I guess you didn't know ... that NO American administration would be friendly to an agent of Moscow?
Oh no, especially not in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, who had known Soviet spies in all kinds of sensitive positions, despite repeated warnings from J. Edgar about these guys....
I presume that you've never heard of the Venona Project? (sorry, but my reference cites are at home and I'm at work)
from TFA:
the nationally well-regarded Union of Concerned Scientists - a non-partisan body
"Well-regarded?" "non-partisan??" What a crock of Brown Sticky Stuff. The UCS is well-known for their left-wing advocacy -- and also well-known for ignoring any science that contradicts their preconcieved beliefs.
Of COURSE the UCS is unhappy. They HATE pres. Bush and will do anything, including sacrificing their integrity, to try to make him look bad.
This is nothing more than another pathetic attempt by the left-wing Press to try to discredit a Repugnican -- nothing new here, folks, move along. Funny how none of President Clinton's political manipulations of science never got any press....
Amen. I use The Gimp all the time because I cannot afford PS. But The Gimp still is NOT a serious product for photographers, and never will be until they support:
* at least 16 bits per channel color, and
* Color management (i.e., icc profiles, colorspaces, and conversions thereof)
I can get color management by using ImageMagick. But it isn't easy, and it certainly is NOT for the non-geek.
... and in my opinion, Portland is:
An unflushed toilet;
A festering sore;
The hemorrhoid of the Pacific Northwest;
The Rectum of the Willamette Valley;
Oregon's raised middle finger;
and a few other things that aren't very nice to say. Before he moved to Dallas, J.R. Ewing lived in Portland. Before living in Portland, he was a nice guy. And Tonya Harding lives in Portland in real life.
When Linus finds out how miserable the commute is from Portland to his job in Beaverton, and finds how BAD the Portland public school system is, he's going to wish to hell he'd located in Washington County instead. He'll get cut off, and flipped off, in traffic EVERY DAY. Some people have even been shot and killed on that road.
Welcome to Portland. City of assholes.
I'm personally so disgusted with the R party I don't even call myself conservative any more... what passes for a defintion now as liberal has nothing to do with a classical liberal... I consider myself now just a traditional Constitutionalist....
I, too, am a Classical Liberal who is disgusted with what now passes for both "conservative" and "liberal."
You, sir, are what is now called a "small-L libertarian."
Bu$h administration officials were quoted in the Washington Post as stating they thought out sourcing was good for the economy
I know the current President gives us ample reasons to criticize him, but give him credit when he happens to get something right.
In this case, he happens to be right.
The current issue of Reason magazine arrived in my mailbox yesterday with a cover story titled "10 Truths About Trade: Hard facts about offshoring, imports, and jobs" that unimpeachably presents the facts: Offshoring is not a threat to high-tech employment; challenging, high-paying jobs are becoming more plentiful, not less; offshoring creates new jobs and boosts economic growth; and the popular myth that the US economy is running out of jobs has been with us a very long time -- and has always been untrue. It won't be on line for another month, so you'll have to get it from a news stand if you want to read it.
I'm out of work too, and it's not due to offshoring (I'm a network administrator); it's due to conditions caused by brainless politicians who don't understand economics.
Bush (43) is not responsible for the recent recession from which we're now in recovery; that recession started during Clinton's term, just as the recovery eight years earlier started during Bush (41)'s term. I, too, would like to see Bush (43) out of office; unfortunately, the alternative offered to us by the Democrats will be an order of magnitude worse if he wins.
Gore took the initiative in creating the Internet by taking the initiative to support the legislation required to get it going.
And just how, exactly, did he do that? He wasn't even in Congress at that time. IIRC he was in college, or high school, or something.
nothing in his statement could be properly construed to imply such
Look it up. He clearly implied that he was present at the creation of the Internet, and actively made it happen -- which is clearly a falsehood.
Yes, he apparently DID do some things to help the Internet while in Congress -- for which he deserves credit -- but the Internet already existed; he sure as hell didn't 'invent' it.
And it has nothing to do with which team (Bush v. Gore) you were rooting for. Everyone SHOULD be able to rationally sort out the facts regardless of ideology. Of course, the Gore people still have trouble being rational, but that's another thread....
She's a butch, man-hating dyke.
Then you didn't read it very carefully.
First, I'll confess that the only reason I decided to read the Slashdot comments (which, frankly, are an incredible waste of time) was the entertainment value in reading all of the stupid/clueless "Dude, she's a babe!" / "Nah, she's not a babe, but she's do-able" nonsense. I don't know why I get such a kick out of that. Maybe because stupidity really, truly IS funny. I think it's even funnier that she is serving you guys for lunch.
I grok her as one of the extremely rare people who not only has a very high IQ and thinks for zirself, but has also been able to shed the shame-based human-sexuality baggage with which most of us are saddled.
This is a person who has my utmost respect and admiration. This is the kind of person I like to have in my social circle. Unfortunately, they are all too rare. Fortunately, I have found a few. Very few. Unfortunately, the world is still full of clueless morons who reduce us to a one-dimensional target of shame-based name-calling because they just don't have the IQ to think in any other terms.
Oh well. Her geographic area isn't exactly an intellectual backwater. It's not very likely that her social circle leaves her feeling intellectually deprived.
Eat your hearts out.
My TV goes for weeks at a time without ever being turned on. When it is, it's usually to watch a video.
There is simply NOTHING offered on TV these days that is worth watching -- that can't be obtained on-line. I was glued to the NASA TV web site during the recent Mars landings. And I'm a news addict on Election Night. But all that can be watched on line these days.
If people want to rot their brains, let them do it. It isn't anybody's business anyway. All of these busybodies worrying about whether this or that cultural phenomenon is sending us to Hell -- well, they need to go visit a brothel, or get an enema, or do something to get over their g*****n anal fixation with other people's personal choices.
Photoshop also supports color management through and through- GIMP never has out of the box and never will, because there's no such thing as color management under linux
Not true. Color management in Linux is in its infancy, but it's not nonexistent.
But Color Management is the reason I won't be switching to Gimp 2 anytime soon. Frankly, ANY photo editing software is useless without CM, and I doubt that the Color Manager Plug-in for The Gimp will be revamped any time soon to work with Gimp 2.
So until I see some serious effort to support Color Management by Gimp's developers, I'll be sticking to Photoshop and Gimp 1.2, thank you. And yes, I use both.
The real question I have for the developers is this: when will we ever see decent PGP/GPG support for Evolution? [snip] I don't pretend to know more than the developers, and I'm sure there may be reasons why they've chosen to leave this feature broken, but if every other OSS Email project can nail it, why can't they?
I had that same question for them a couple of years ago, and I asked them on their developers' mailing list. The reason is because one of their developers has an attitude the size of Jupiter regarding in-line encryption. So the answer to your question is probably "never."
But that doesn't bother me any. KMail does EVERYTHING I need an email client to do, and does it well. And it's light-years ahead of Evo in the way it handles threaded messages too.
This is all interesting news to me, but I doubt that I'll ever actually use Evo.
Drudge doesn't stand a chance. Robert X. Cringely has been using a fedora as HIS trademark (Infoworld column) since at least the late 1980's.
From the article:
There is a rather unique router operated within the campus of the University of Oregon ( www.route-views.org).
"Rather unique?" There is no such thing. Uniqueness is binary: either something is unique, or it is not. There are no degrees, and there are no such things as "rather unique," "very unique" or any other qualifier.
Grumble. I wish publishers would accept copy only from people who can actually WRITE...
The Progressive movement was based on belief in the Scientific Method and it's application to politics.
First of all, I presume that by "progressive" you're talking about the Leftists and Socialists who were formerly known (incorrectly) as "Liberals"...
"...based on belief in the Scientific Method"? I think not! They ignore HUGE chunks of science in order to promulgate their irrational beliefs into some kind of a Socialist Utopia.
These are the same people claiming that so-called "Global Warming" is going to incinerate the planet, that cultivating trees in the Pacific Northwest is going to precipitate a global ecological disaster and that nuclear power "dangerous." And let's not forget their abject ignorance of the field of economics with their armed-robbery-by-the-State-is-the-solution-to-all- social-problems philosophy....
No, so-called "Progressives" are worse than their enemies on the other end of the political spectrum when it comes to ignoring Science and promoting "junk science." At least the Right Wing keeps their focus on human sexuality and "creationism," which is evil enough without trying to destroy an entire economic system and send us all back to the Stone Age as the "Progressives" are wont to doing.
Quoting from the article:
The mailings are popularly known as "spam" in the Web world.... But in the early 1990s, not many people had even heard of the Internet.... Prior to that, the Internet was mainly used by the government and military.... When the Web became accessible to the general public, Wallace's entrepreneurial mind began churning.... Wallace found ways to collect a massive list of personal e-mail addresses.... He would create advertisements, and send them off into the World Wide Web.
Stupid clueless reporter. Doesn't even know the difference between the Web, email and the Internet.
With people such as this bringing us our news and information every day, no wonder the American public is so hopelessly uninformed....
"640K ought to be enough for anybody"
You're forgetting something very important: Gates never wrote DOS, and therefore could not have said that.
MS-DOS (aka PCDOS) was written by Seattle Computer. One of Gates' sidekicks (I think it was Paul Allen) bought the rights to Seattle DOS after IBM offered M$ the contract to write the OS for their new PC.
Gates got offered the contract because his mother, a wealthy Seattle socialite, had connections inside IBM. After IBM got snubbed by Digital Research (authors of CP/M), someone suggested they talk to "Mary Gates' boy."
ROFL!!
... but Teksystems has treated me very well in the past.
Lately, though, they seem to be slipping... getting more like their slimy competitors. I hope it ain't so, 'coz they treated me VERY well when I worked for them a few years ago.
Yeah, that's what I thought when I was fired almost two years ago for telling the truth about Micro$oft's threat to national security. I'm still looking.
In the language of the 18th Century, "well-regulated" meant "well-supplied".
What happened to this country?? Has the average intelligence dropped that fucking much??
Short answer: yes. But there's more to it than that.
When the fuck did I get sucked into the Twilight Zone? And whatever happened to personal responsibility??
It isn't just the drop in American IQ that's at work here; indeed, that's only a minor factor. The group most responsible for bringing this stupidity to our once-great nation is the American Trial Lawyers Association.
IANAL, but as I understand it the source of the problem is the "joint and several liability" clause in current tort law, which makes anyone who can be shown to be even one percent responsible for a loss liable for the entire amount of the loss. With laws like this, it's only inevitable that lawyers, being the carnivorous predators that they are (actually, they're more like parasites but I'm inclined to be nice to them today and just call them vicious carnivores), are going to go after the deepest pockets.
Congress actually passed tort reform legislation in the 1990's that would have corrected these abuses, but Bill Clinton vetoed it. It seems that the American Trial Lawyers Association was either the biggest or the second-biggest fundraiser for the Democratic Party...
And THAT is what happened to personal responsibility. The Democrites are no better than the Repugnicans when it comes to individual liberty and personal responsibility issues. I would strongly suggest that Slashdot readers carefully consider supporting the third-party candidate of their choice in future elections.
News like this ... makes me want to move to the most remote tropical island in the world and set up a benevolent technocracy. Who's with me?
About 20,000 people, that's who. Check out the Free State Project in which 20K people plan to move to one of the lesser-populated US states en masse, register to vote, and begin changing that state into a bastion for freedom.