Licenses matter, especially for businesses. You have to know that this piece of software you want to build things around, to rely on, isn't going to be taken from you. And, you shouldn't have to be a "judge of character" for a business in order to have that security. FUD is a heavy characterization that seems to devalue the perspective of those who do feel they need to operate under license security.

Ancillary effects of poor health are economic losses due to less reliability of getting work, working, etc. Bad health fuels poverty. Poverty eats at labor markets which drive up costs of goods for everyone. What is interesting is that the cost of projected health care increase alone is sufficient to get close to being equal to the money saved. Want to start projecting the costs of extra prisons, lawyers, cops, and judges to deal with the extra crime? How about we bring in some ethics: we're quibbling over 5 billion which represents 0.03% of our GDP for the purposes of starving some more poor people. Frankly, I'd take the less crime, even if I were completely heartless.

BTW, love reading your posts in general!

It seems to me that we have plenty of money and food and could easily create a policy situation that would feed and clothe most Americans reasonably well. I think even housing could be "reasonable" or at least much improved. But, for the political will.... How dare we suggest that the upper middle class or the upper upper upper classes didn't completely earn everything?

Also, it isn't a zero sum game. Doubling the minimum wage and fixing it to inflation may be an economic engine that improves everyone's lives. I think you probably agree, but I wouldn't cede points to the idea that we couldn't do it.

I do love your epic, hilarious rebuttals of people's bullshit motivations arguments!

Citation needed. I feel like this statement requires more than just the phrase "study after study".

From Wikipedia

Here is the link to the study, if you would like to question its methodology. http://www.unicri.eu/documentation_centre/publications/series/understanding/19_GUN_OWNERSHIP.pdf

I saw a pamphlet once that asserted that first world countries with tough gun laws had just as much violent crimes as the US does, but what they forgot to mention was that much less of the violence was committed with a gun and there was less gun-related murder. There are also statistical regressions that show that murders per capita drop when guns are tightly controlled.

These countries also score as highly as the US on the Index of Economic Freedom and higher on other freedom indices like personal freedom. So, do countries really need to be afraid of their citizens' guns? Guns do not seem to be a keystone to a modern free democracy.

You can find countries that score low on all indices and yet have really strong gun laws, but my point is that guns do not seem to be necessary for scaring the government. I doubt very much that guns scare our government all that much. I think Aaron Swartz scared the hell out of our government with a laptop computer. Maybe we should have a laptop amendment.

Gun laws and the discussions of them require more nuance and appreciation of methodology than we are generally capable of in day to day discourse, because there is emotional investment and, consequently, bias, even in academic circles in the US.

Since there are cross-cutting concerns between the platforms, the answer is yes. People know that this runs Linux, more people will spend time developing for Linux, some of those developments might have a positive impact on the desktop or people maybe more likely to install it as their desktop.

Uhh, I used QWES because I was a tank in WoW. I imagine many other tanks in WoW learned the same style. WoW had Q and E be the strafing keys and A and D were nonsense keys for turning. You were a BAD tank if you turned... Of course many bad tanks are going to respond to this justifying the ability to turn with the keyboard, but there was never ever a reason to do anything but strafe. To me, this de-emphasizes back peddling and makes it more likely that you want to move forward, a trait I've found positive in FPS's where I now use the style exclusively as well.

Due to inertia, the stars would continue to travel at their current speeds if nothing were pushing and pulling on them. As it is, whatever gravitational forces are acting upon them at the moment might be comparatively insignificant to their current inertia.

So how did they get their current inertia? They might have gotten it from the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's core without setting their vector towards the core. They could do so possibly using a gravity slingshot effect. So it is surprising they're not coming from the core, as the article states. So what is interesting about these stars is they don't seem to be explained by the slingshot effect.

Further, gravity is a force of attraction and so does no pushing.

Also, I did a knapkin calculation of the speeds involved and it would be 1/700th the speed of light except the article says that this speed is relative to the movement of the galaxy and not an absolute speed like the slashdot summary intimates.

If the promise of self-driving cars includes the idea that the self-driving car will rarely ever be in error and will at least be far less likely to be in error than a human driver, then it seems probable to me that a human being being alert enough and able to correct the self-driving car may make things worse by trying to intercede both legally and in terms of actual outcome.

Also, market forces might cause insurance companies to offer lower rates for cars that are self-driving, and eventually much lower rates, because they know they will almost never have to fork over the money and they want that market. At some point, courts and the general public will figure out that it was almost certainly the fault of a human-driven car and as such, liability may end up being nearly always on the human driven car, driving up insurance for cars built for or intended to be used by humans drivers.

Human drivers might end up being priced out by the rising costs of gas (self-driving cars are probably going to be more economical), liability, and so forth. Once a car can really be self-driving, we can have probably pretty damn cheap self-driving taxis and "minivans" which use algorithms to pickup multiple people in a small area who want to go to a similar place, further driving down the costs of transportation, gas, liability, etc.

It might also have an impact on health care costs, as accidents cost the state, insurance, and patients, lots of money in hospital care for accidents. Certainly avoiding the negative economic impact of losing valuable people (aren't we all valuable?) to car crashes will also probably fuel legislation that makes it ever harder/costlier/illegal for a human to drive a car on a public road.

This seems too facile a statement. We don't know their cash flow or projected cash flow, whether the PR hit would quantitatively affect the bottom line worse than eating the bad press and recovering the funds, etc. For proof of a company having terrible PR but making windfall profits, look at Walmart. PR is, and always should be, just one consideration.

Interesting, however I would expect that certain individuals had a much broader platform, like Oprah. These days, I'm going to guess that people who regularly use yelp and write reviews, or people who have a lot of twitter followers, might have much broader power to affect consumer decision. There are people on the internet who are not famous whose output I have found and now regard as more trustworthy and interesting than a randomly selected newspaper article. Microbloggers with significant followers come to mind.

Except that the exposure of this error is much more contained in a brick and mortar. Websites can scale up rapidly before the error is noticed. If a store suddenly started selling the same thing at a tremendous discount and the store exploded to several hundred times its normal conversion or volume, probably the most dense cashier would notice that something was off quite quickly. Stores also often have a floor manager who would certainly notice this change in volume and probably react by figuring our there was a deal too good to be true.

Also, it is unclear whether Brick's business model took a greater hit, has less of a safety margin, or a greater method for making markups. Delta still may end up charging a fair bit and come close to recouping its costs on "value-added" things like luggage costs. Moreover, is the Brick's business model as driven by repeat business and reputation? We've seen plenty of businesses get negative attention and ultimately drive more traffic as a result. Some people love a good backlash. The only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about.

Finally, there is the moral and legal justification. Why should a business be held to such a mistake? IANAL, but I remember a contract being considered invalid if there was insufficient consideration for one party. This seems appropriate, at least in spirit. The business made a flagrant, possibly very easy mistake, and I'm going to guess most customers reasonably assumed that it was a mistake and took advantage, anyway. If the argument is that the business should have installed safeguards against such eventualities, like algorithms to detect egregious discounts from the subtotal, then they are already well motivated by the PR issues that can result, as well as the loss in time it takes to recover or correct the problem for each second the discount is erroneously available.

I'm going to guess if these businesses were sole proprietors in a neighborhood climate that the people would have been less likely to take advantage, more likely to tell the proprietor, and less likely to grouse if asked to return the product or pay the difference. Hundreds of people make their livelihoods in these respective businesses and millions are affected by the cost offsets the businesses would have to do to recover from the errors. There is more to this story than the solitary consumer's point of view.

I suppose you believe Hoover didn't blackmail either Kennedy. https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty/prospect-blackmail-nsa

You would be so right, if you weren't so very wrong. From this wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_of_theistic_probability or from his own mouth if you want to watch video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fUYUvvJiW0

Dawkins argues that while there appear to be plenty of individuals that would place themselves as "1" due to the strictness of religious doctrine against doubt, most atheists do not consider themselves "7" because atheism arises from a lack of evidence and evidence can always change a thinking person's mind. In print, Dawkins self-identified as a '6', though when interviewed by Bill Maher[3] and later by Anthony Kenny,[4] he suggested '6.9' to be more accurate.

I did say Dawkins was obnoxious, but I still give him more personal integrity than you seem to imply.

No, it doesn't contradict my post. I didn't say I could prove my way was better. In fact, I think we may disagree about what the word "prove" means. To my lights, I can't prove my way is better because the only way I know how to prove things is with my way, and my way would call that circular reasoning. Some axiomatic thinking is required, I'll grant. It is unfortunate that you started to resort to ad hominems.

interesting