Ah, no, not at all. I meant that Scribd seems to have removed the original document you linked. Thanks for linking that, by the way. Interesting (if depressing) stuff.

The link in your post is dead. This one seems to work: http://www.scribd.com/doc/6674234/Citigroup-Oct-16-2005-Plutonomy-Report-Part-1

What collaboration software did you like the most? My company produces massive detailed design documents, and during the editing phase, I end up getting an e-mail thread with billions of 12MB attachments. It's unmanageable, and I'm really trying to move us away from it. The office staff refuses to even consider Google Docs, so that's not an option.

Too late -- Honewell has had that problem licked since 1969!

Words of wisdom. I'm probably as young as the original poster, but experiences in my childhood and adolescence made me emotionally "older" in several important ways. I spent far too much time dwelling over past events that bore no further relevance on my present or my future, so I resolved to break the pattern with a decisive action. On the day I moved away for school, I tossed every object that held a memory, whether sour or sweet, into the flame. It was the most cathartic experience of my life.

Now I frequently purge obsolete emotional artifacts from my dwelling and devices. I think of the process as being similar to pruning yellowing leaves off of an ivy; you have to get rid of the dying ones to let new ones grow.

In my haste, I was evidently unclear. I was speaking of the population as a whole rather than of individual citizens. In any case, I am not so sure that the populace is really willing to do away with airport security, even if they do make jokes at its expense. See this poll, for instance.

I picked a bad example, and you're probably quite correct that more people oppose texting and driving than those who do not. The point I was attempting to illustrate is that people are often disproportionately afraid of an unlikely event's occurrence (for example, a terrorist bombing) while ignoring or downplaying the risks of a higher-probability event's occurrence, such as the possibility of having a car accident for a longtime commuter. This disproportionate fear can often lead to over-reactive, knee-jerk policies that don't really make sense when analyzed in context.

While I appreciate your feedback, I think you will find that it is not necessary to insult someone in order to disagree or offer objective criticism.

Human beings are strange critters, especially in numbers. They will happily consign themselves to completely unreasonable treatment by TSA goons to gain the mere perception of protection from an event that has about a 1*10^-1000 percent chance of happening in the first place. Meanwhile, most people don't seem to have a problem playing with their phones while doing eighty down the highway. This type of irrationality continually erodes personal freedom in the USA (and undoubtedly elsewhere).

I use three monitors for my development work. One of these monitors is a traditional 4:3 LCD; I use this to refer to longer documents and source code. The other two monitors are my "main" monitors and are identical 1600x1050 native resolution models. I use these for my IDE/editor and debugging panels. It's the perfect setup for me.

I presume nothing, other than that I clearly should include joke tags in the future.

I saw a guy reading a book while driving down the highway. I seriously wanted to chop off his nutsack to prevent him from spawning offspring.

Natural selection.

I cannot agree with you more. One of my friends, a well educated software engineer, is a fundamentalist Christian who believes that indoctrinating children is a moral imperative. While I have no doubts as to the purity of his motives, the indoctrination mindset itself sickens me beyond expression. I tend to think of religion as a virus of the mind, an infection that can only be resisted with an acquired -- rather than a native -- immunity. In an ideal world, children would not be exposed to religious ideas until they are of suitable intellectual strength to evaluate the ideas presented to them on their own merit. Then they could choose their favorite mythology.

Sweet Jesus indeed. I just about had a seizure. You should put a warning label on that link.

I live in Texas, where most freeways were designed with a 70MPH speed limit in mind. Unsurprisingly, the normal flow of traffic moves between 65 and 75MPH, even on roads where the speed limit was lowered to 55-60MPH despite the road's rated design speed. In my experience, this doesn't cause any obvious safety problems; however, an actual safety problem arises when a group of cars passes by a highway patrolman parked on the side of the road in speed-trap mode. Without fail, the drivers at the front of the line slam on their brakes, inevitably surprising the drivers behind them. Domino effect chaos ensues. The patrolmen are supposed to make traffic flow more smoothly, but when speed limits are lower than the normal flow of traffic, their presence is a mild hazard.

While I wholeheartedly agree with your feelings toward social media, Facebook is not culpable here. If this young woman had gone and plastered her silly comment on a billboard, would the billboard be at fault? Jury rules exist for the citizens' protection and should be enforced judiciously. This girl acted stupidly. The medium transmitting that stupidity had nothing to do with the infraction itself.