Forget downvoting. Your account will get blacklisted and you'll never get mod points ever again :)

I used to think that the slashdot mod system was pretty robust, but with enough pressure applied, everything can be corrupted. And it is.

I suppose some of that may be down to the difference in the value of the change. It was worth about 2.5X what it is today back when I was working convenience store night shifts, so people might have cared more about getting it correct.

Even more, people at Starbucks are paying $7 for a cup of coffee, so they're clearly not very price-sensitive. If the customer doesn't bother to look to see whether they got the correct change, should the cashier waste everyone's time getting it right? I think yes, but I could see where people might disagree.

I know people at the convenience store got pissed when they got shortchanged, which is why cashiers who couldn't count change out got fired pretty quickly. They might last longer at Starbucks today. Especially since most customers don't pay with cash.

Ultimately, freedom will come when you've got symmetric 1gig up and down, and you can run your own synapse server for matrix on your own. Get a few friends willing to do HA with you, and you've got something fairly robust.

Running on someone else's infra is always a risk - you get get cancelled from AWS, or azure, or google cloud, and then even your federated system is nuked.

I still remember my HP LaserJet 4P - lasted for decades, but finally just had too many problems with OOM errors (even after upgrading ram).

Gave up my HP last year, and went for Brother. They don't make me feel like I'm a young girl on Epstein island.

That's not new. I saw the same problem when I was working at a convenience store in the late 80s.

The fact that they can get a job in another country easily doesn't mean they don't fear being required to leave this one. Most immigrants like the US and don't want to leave it, and even if they didn't care about the US in particular they've often built lives here that they don't want to uproot. I've seen several really smart, talented people get booted out of the country over bizarre rules or immigration snafus, even with help from expensive immigration attorneys. It's stupid.

And, of course, many more are willing to be abused by their employers in order to stay. I don't see that problem so much, because although I work with a lot of people on H1Bs, my employer (Google) treats them well, pays them the same as citizens, etc. But it make sense that there is a lot of abuse in the broader industry.

That doesn't happen much, not unless the worker is forced to go back because of crappy H1B policies. The fact is that nearly all foreign workers would love to stay permanently.

Fair point. It's like Yoda's cave test - whatever you bring with you is what you find :)

Some minds are definitely more...erotically oriented than others :)

Well, the NIV definitely gets more graphic, but KJV:

NIV: There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
KJV: For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.

Neither of those are particularly graphic...although I can see the argument against NIV.

As for graphic violence, certainly crucifixion is pretty terrible, but that's definitely different than say, "The Boys", or any number of popular manga. As for genocide, one death is a murder, 1 million deaths is just a statistic.

Probably the most graphic is the garden of gethsemane, bleeding through pores.

Erotic doesn't have to be graphic...in fact, often times, being graphic limits how erotic something can be.

What's nice about, let's call it "subtle" erotica, is that it is cryptic enough to be age appropriate across a much larger swath than graphic erotica.

"Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved, truly delightful.
Our couch is green;
the beams of our house are cedar;
our rafters are pine."

A 6 year old can read that, and not notice the double and triple entendre.

I found the whole Lot and his daughters especially icky. That and the whole incest thing with all of adam's and eve's children. Blech.

That being said, I don't think they have graphic sex and violence, like say, a cartoon rendition of underage fellatio, in any edition of the bible I've read.

The problem is actually upstream - the problem isn't about banning sexually explicit books in children's libraries, it's about having a process that allows community input on acquisitions in the first place.

But, how much press would you get from "local school library committee decided not to stock hustler, playboy, and Attack on Titan manga on Tuesday night" - avoiding the controversy isn't what anyone is looking for.

Yeah, but acacia trees aren't suddenly going to decide they're going a different route and a species of ant goes extinct in a season.

Actually, it's more the other way around, but is that your criteria? If a human had to make a decision for it, that's the critical difference?

Again, this seems like an aesthetic opinion, lacking humility.

I'll grant you that viruses and bacteria can evolve quickly via natural selection. But that's hardly something that extends to large multicellular life.

So, one of the basic premises of abiogenic origins of life is that with enough random chance and time, specific, important changes will occur on a path towards life and more complex life.

But nothing about that math means that extremely "lucky" things can't happen in quick succession. The "rate of change" argument is only really "rate of change over some arbitrary timescale". Just because the first step in self-replicating proteins took, say, 3 billions years worth of die rolls, doesn't mean that the next step won't happen in the next second.

So to think that large, multicellular life cannot undergo incredibly fast changes (as fast as any genetic engineering done by humans), is an issue of perspective. Now, I'll grant you, we might, as organisms with significant amounts of control over our environment, create a rate of sustained change that is incredibly rare - but I don't see how the rarity really makes us qualitatively different.

Perhaps, for some perspective, watch this: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/natur.... It's a humbling thing to imagine plants actually are able to manipulate animals - including humans.

It seems far more prudent to recognize that we're having drastic effects on an extremely complex system, and we should really try to minimize those impacts when possible.

If you believe that we can effectively minimize our impacts to complex systems, I think you're overestimating our ability to understand complex systems. That's not to say that there aren't some easy, marginal, things we can do to avoid acute problems, but the amount of time you should spend on minimizing your impacts, versus surviving inevitable change that happens in complex systems for practically unknowable reasons, should be a very low ratio.

In the case of "invasive" species, it's silly to imagine there is any way for us to control them. You might be able to "slow the spread", as it were, but it's *always* going to be a losing battle. Adapting to the newcomer species is the only battle you can effectively win.

Well, there is a non-zero probability that the Earth could enter a runaway warming cycle and become another Venus, with surface temperatures exceeding 400C. The planet wouldn't be destroyed, but life would probably be wiped out. AFAIK we haven't found any life form that can survive above about 120C.

That seems unlikely, though, given that Earth's hottest phases so far (after the crust cooled, anyway) have been considerably cooler than that.

So... remain in Mexico is the only one? Mexico has said they won't agree to reinstate it, and without their cooperation it would put the US in violation of our treaties. The president can't legally break treaties; Congress needs to act for that.