You're right, you're right... my mistake! "Facebook could probably lose a few gas stations and remain a perfectly stable network..."

So facebook could probably lose a few servers is probably the more apt analogy, yes?

So two PhD students, realizing they're wasting their time on Facebook, decide to fix their problem by... wasting their time inventing a gizmo to keep them from wasting their time on facebook.

As a fellow PhD student, seems legit!

Hopefully they consulted the handy infographic "Is It Worth the Time?" by Randall Munroe before undertaking the project: http://xkcd.com/1205/

Winner: Insult of the day!

Does anybody who has ever seen this video have trouble reading the summary without hearing the Shirrelles croon "momma said, momma said!" ?

by Upton Sinclair applies here:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Why is everyone dancing around naming some leader and going on about something called Godwin's law without going into specifics? You'd think the way people are tiptoeing around here that Hitler's Stasi was watching us all.

(They see me trollin... They hatin... patrollin then tryin to catch me ridin dirty...)

Did reading it differently change the meaning in any way?

I really meant my question rhetorically. One view of the world holds that all the burdens put on taxis are to the benefit of consumers. Another view is that taxi-services receive economic rents from the government by receiving a monopoly on their business through licensure. These "burdens" of service requirements are simply the state extracting some portion of the rents from the taxi companies. Do not doubt, however, that the net rents remain positive for the taxi companies, even after these burdens are accounted for -- else they wouldn't be in the taxi business.

The latter viewpoint is that the consumer is robbed through this artificial monopoly regime receiving the positive net rents, and these competitors represent weeds growing through the cracks in the government's collusive regime with taxi companies. Yes, they may be plucked, but fairness is very subjective. In this case, I find "unfair to the real taxis" to mean "reducing the monopoly rents to real taxis." And as a consumer I say Bra...vo.

I fear that side-talking page has now received more attention than $DEITY ever intended.

What does it mean to be "unfair to the real taxis?"

...and a Hindu ceremony, and a Buddhist ceremony, and a Jewish ceremony, and a... oh, maybe in fact it's a human institution that's been blessed by various faiths around the globe then? Something humans seek to do regardless of their creed?

Seen in that context, marriage is whatever people want it to be, and it's been that way for a LONG time. Legislating it to conform to Christian ideals is theocratic.

Also his series involves some of the most twisted and intricate alien reproduction methods ever described. I can see the campaign speech now: "Sex should be between one man and one woman... or one tree and one piggy... or some grass and insects..." I guess it's consistent with the view that sex is for reproducing, regardless of your species' method.

Yes, I did read his "about me" page when trying to figure out what happened to let this submission pass. Sorry if my question was unclear -- I know who Lauren says he is (and I believe he is telling the truth). My question is more rhetorical -- submitting your own writing to slashdot has always seemed in bad form to me, regardless of who you are. If Al Gore submitted a story he wrote himself, we'd go "wow, Al Gore... why does he have to submit his own stuff to slashdot?" Self-submission reduces your credibility somewhat. It doesn't help when the thing you submit is rambling and incoherent.

Indeed he was on this earth doing grown-up things when I was in diapers (I am 32). (I can't help the time continuum, don't hold it against me.) That fact doesn't make his argument more cogent. Nor do I care that your slashdot ID has fewer digits than mine in case you were wondering.

Is this astroturf? Who is Lauren Weinstein and why does he get to submit his own blog post to the front page of slashdot? The post reads like a mediocre comment to be found in a slashdot forum -- i wouldn't expect it to be modded more than +1.