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Comment Re:Ummmm ... duh? (Score 4, Insightful) 385

It appears this German guy knew that, and was hiding his problems from his employer and the regulatory agencies that license his operation of giant passenger aircraft.

So what happens when you remove doctor patient confidentiality? The other depressed people will not see them and will still fly, only without having received psychiatric help or medication. That makes the risk larger, not smaller.

Comment Re:Bummer (Score 1) 326

"Esp. of a woman: sexually promiscuous or provocative, esp. in a manner regarded as vulgar or distasteful.". So you're injecting your subjective views into what looks mean and attaching a value judgement into that.

That description is what whoever picked the booth babe "uniform" probably went for. It's catering to a specific fantasy: "You're a pimp and these are your bitches, if only you buy our product." You know, the exact one a cynical - though not necessarily very smart - marketer would use to sell to a stereotypical nerd.

Comment Re:You are missing the obvious point! (Score 2) 349

No it doesn't. It means more demand. Read up on Jevon's Paradox. As a resource (including labor) is used more efficiently, demand for it goes up, not down, because of greater opportunities. It would only go down if the Lump of Labor Fallacy wasn't a fallacy.

The problem is, people aren't coal. A coal seam can sit unused for a hundred million year with no ill effects. An unemployed laborer can't. He either gets a job fast or falls into poverty. Supply of labour cannot go down in response to market situation; the only thing that can go down is the price. And as price of labour falls, demand for products falls, because people who get paid less can't afford as much. As demand for products falls, more people get unemployed, and you have a nice little vicious circle going.

It's what's happening now. Cheap credit kept a fundamentally broken system going for a while, but now that well has ran dry and it's collapsing. Keeping it going forever would require citizen pay, or credit without expectation of repayment. But I doubt the rich and powerful will accept the economic independence this would bring to lower classes, but will continue fighting tooth and nail to retain their power all the way to another bloody revolution.

As a side note, economy is full of "fallacies" that only apply with certain preconditions, for example that the resource can go unused with no ill effects. Ignoring those preconditions makes them a fine way to explain away any need to change. The problem is, reality won't go away just because you ignore it, and reality is that lots of people are unemployed, those still employed are living under constant pressure and fear, national and personal debts are sky-high, and nobody seriously expects any of this to get better in the foreseeable future, at least outside official speeches.

Comment Parent Post Semantic Content: Null (Score 5, Insightful) 269

It's only those damn Russians are doing this, all other countries are saint.

Yeah, because that makes it all OK then.

Your comment is designed to distract from the issue at hand, shut down intelligent conversation on the topic, and imply the wrongdoer is just fine because, by implication, "everybody else does it, too" (no evidence to said implication provided, certainly not proven, and probably not true), all without contributing a single creative or new thought to the discussion at all.

Nice job, (Russian?) troll.

Comment Re:You are missing the obvious point! (Score 1) 349

Then explain why an American worker today can be more productive than his or her predecessors, yet paid a substantially smaller fraction of the proceeds from his or her labors?

Greater productivity per worker means less demand for workers. Less demand means lower price. Thus, more productive workforce means worse-paid workforce.

Yay capitalism.

Comment Re: Linux? OS X? Chrome OS? Nope. OpenBSD! (Score 1) 167

Until systemd is removed from a major Linux distro, I would consider that distro to be less secure than even a Windows system.

Some Poettering apologist will probably mark you as a troll, but for completeness there are a number of distros that default to non-systemd init architectures, including but not limited to

Calculate, Gentoo, Funtoo, Source Mage, Dyson, indeed all kinds of distros either default or support running a systemd-free system.

Comment Re:Not concerned (Score 1) 177

I think it's more likely we'll ban human drivers. Just this morning I counted over 16 silver/grey/blue-grey vehicles driving in pouring rain and light fog without headlights on. On average a computer driver today is probably better than a human, and they'll just get better as time moves on whereas human improvements are a bit slower to happen.

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