People are still moving to the central valley and commuting to jobs on the coast

Why are there only jobs on the coast?

I think this is the real root of the problem. Everybody wants to cram into (for example) Silicon Valley - because it's where the best paying, most stable jobs are. Why can't these employers employ workers elsewhere. I've actually worked for a company that tried that tactic. Guess what? During hard times, (or mergers), they tend to shut remote sites down, and the workers are laid off or uprooted.

But yeah - a lot of problems would be resolved if employment were more distributed.

And as your cited quote said, its application to a discussion of other totalitarian regimes or ideologies is debatable. You may interpret it that way, but it does not actually make it part of Godwin's Law. Your interpretation may guide your usage of it, but you can't actually say that other people's usage is incorrect.

In any case, the reference to the law was purely a humorous statement, and really not worthy of this debate.

That's not a new interpretation; that dates back to the 90s. But it also does not in any way defend the actions of Nazis as you claimed. It was merely (and generally humorously) used as an indication that a thread had exhausted all the valid arguments and had devolved to the old fall back line of the Hitler comparison.

As we have seen here, the original mention of Godwin's Law did not stop the postings here, and nor did it request the end of the discussion (although it has sidetracked it).

It does not shut anything down. The word "law" in this case does not refer to rule of law, but rather a universal principle. It is not a serious thing that has any real effect, and nor is it something that is ever really used when actually discussing the Nazis. It is used when something else is compared to them. I think that you would be hard pressed to find any examples of a discussion about Nazism actually being being stopped by the application of Godwin's Law.

Godwin's Law makes no reference to the aptness of the comparison to the Nazis or Hitler. Here is the law as stated by Wikipedia:

The only problem with that argument is that it flies in the face of the facts. Nobody defended the Nazis. Nobody said anything about wanting to murder all Jews. And as far as I am aware, the Nazis didn't implement surveillance on Internet traffic.

This was the correct usage of Godwin's Law, where a discussion that was completely unrelated to the Nazis was likened to that regime. I think that you have been a bit over-sensitive to the adage.

Etymology isn't your strong suit, nor logic, nor much else.

BTW, what is Louis in German?

No dispute there. The problem, though, is not that we make easy things simple and hard things possible (pace, Larry Wall). It's that we have of late developed a tendency to simplify too far. Microsoft is famous for making systems administration and certain types of programming 'click-and-drool' easy. And hyperbole aside, the cost to society of the half-competent people who found gainful employment due to this charade can be measured in the many billions.

You're absolutely right in that commercial flying is safer than ever, notwithstanding the tendency in airlines to pressure senior pilots out in favour of cheaper, younger staff. And those working in HFT would likely be wreaking havoc by other means if they didn't have software and fibre-optics to enable them. I guess my tongue hadn't entirely left my cheek when I wrote that last para.

BUT... Microsoft has contributed significantly to a general downward trend in the quality of software and systems integrity. And they've done so by marketing the idea that with the right tools, tool users can be commoditised. And that really, really sucks.

Agreed. 'Software that makes it easy for non-experts to do expert tasks' will one day be recognised for its role in causing the downfall of civilisation as we know it. By then, of course, it will be too late.

Some among you may think that's overstating things. Some among you are also .NET developers, so what do you know?

Seriously, though: From the Airbus crash to high frequency trading to the Sony hack, examples abound of how enabling and empowering mediocrity is the first ingredient of every modern tragedy.

Science fiction isn't fiction that has elements that aren't science but might appeal to geeks who like science....Science fiction is science that is fictional. Very different animal and naturally restrictive.

You are using a defintion of a term, which is at odds with the defintions of that term used by almost every other educated native speaker of English. This will probably make it hard for you to communicate. You might want to look to that.

Luckily, he is James Risen from the New York Times... If he were James Rosen from Fox News...he would be labeled a criminal co-conspirator and flight risk by Eric Holder so that they could trace his phone calls and emails.

They snooped on Rosen. That's bad.

They snooped on Risen and threatened, repeatedly over the past six years, to lock him up. That's worse.

Both journalists were attempting to enable the American people to keep tabs on the U.S. government (supposedly "theirs", in reality owned by corporate interests and the security-industrial complex). Your partisan take on the matter is counter-factual.

Says AC so inept that he cannot begin a sentence with a capitalized word, actually spell "dark matter" or end his sentence with a period.

Not to mention it's a bloody AC who has indicated no level of expertise in physics or cosmology.

Actually what I find most awful about CSI shows is the notion that police investigations are akin to unbeatable magical formulas. If investigators zero in on a suspect, almost inevitably that suspect is guilty, and found to be so by incredible technologies used by beautiful people in sci-fi like laboratories. Even in slightly more realistic portrayals of criminal investigations, like the original Law And Order, seldom is the accused actually innocent, but rather he or she manages to elude justice through some combination of sloppy police work and prosecutorial errors.

But even worse than all those cop and CSI dramas to my mind are the police investigation news magazines like 48 hours, where the police zero in on a suspect, arrest him, and the prosecutors successfully see the accused right through conviction. They usually pay lip service to the notion of the presumption of innocence by allowing the inevitably evil convict to assert "I'm innocent!", though with a weary and bemused postscript by the narrator indicating that justice was done, the cops always get their man, and the DA is godlike in his or her ability to convince a jury of guilt.

I think you're confusing the actors and directors with the studios. Those groups have very often been very liberal, but the studio heads care only about money, and they will cozy up with anyone they think has it, and attack anyone who dares threaten it. If real fascists took over the United States tomorrow, Hollywood would quite happily begin producing films supporting that ideology. Essentially, the heads of the big studios are soulless accountants and lawyers.

If quality was the primary determinant in operating system choice, we'd be running OS/2 version 9 right now. Sometimes OSs have momentum, and vxWorks has a helluva lot of developers.

I'm not bashing QNX, but the fact is that the Blackberry faithful seem to have some sort of idea that QNX is some sort of dominant RTOS that dwarfs all others. It feeds into their bizarre religious need to have everyone believe that BB is going to make a comeback any day now.

By now you must know the denizens of /. are leading lights in fields as diverse as biology, geology, climatology, economics and physics. It's a goddamned wonder that half the posters here don't have Nobel prizes in their back pockets.

And yet, generous souls that they are, they still have time to complain about Ruby on Rails. We truly live in an age of giants!