Or neither. Sometimes it's fine to have a website crash and it's not worth the effort for the one time every 10 years that it gets pounded into oblivion. It would be like WalMart needing to redesign their entire store for black friday. It's probably not worth the effort to redesign the entire store for a single day.

The government has no right to a monopoly on any weapon.

However, my neighbor storing atomic weapons in his garage is a reasonable threat to my safety and so should be heavily regulated. If he can meet the same safety standards as the government (maybe some billionaire collector could do this), the state has no legitimate authority to have nukes of its own while denying him one. Or, ya know, maybe nukes are an inherent threat to people and no one, state or otherwise, U.S. or Iran, can have them. But "we can have them, you can't" is not a logically defensible argument.

My neighbor storing machine guns or a typical shooter's supply of ammo in his garage (again, subject to safe storage requirements, no storing a loaded machine gun pointed at my house) is no more a threat to my safety than him having the usual home hardware and chemicals in there. (

Even a tank is not threat -- and indeed, for just $1175 you can spend a day driving one around.)

I think this is good for everyone, not just IT. I had a job on the side for 3 years that was paying buko bucks. I socked every dollar into stocks and launching a side business. Now all of my profits from my side business are gravy since I invested in myself and others. And long after that job is a distant memory I'll still be making money from those paychecks.

I see a lot of people get a really sweet job and instead of treating it like a lottery winning, they treat it like a permanent source of income. Then that sweet deal disappears and they've raised their living expenses so that they have to find a replacement or go broke.

My little windfall has helped me fully fund my retirement account and it's given me a side job that I could parlay into a full time gig to fall back on if I ever was completely unemployed.

The long term trend as far as I'm concerned is near complete unemployment. If you don't own capital in one of the large corporations who own the robots and get a share of their profits you'll be broke looking for a job. You can already see that today. People always complain about how companies only care about their stock holders not their employees. It's true. They'll happily fire you and hire someone for 1/10th the price overseas if it increase their profits. But those profits don't just evaporate, they go said shareholders. So if your company is going to outsource your job, you might as well profit from their increased profit margin.

Where does the freedom to "say what I don't like" end and harassment begin?

In terms of content, you can say whatever the fuck you like about me. In terms of place and time and manner, you can't say whatever the fuck you like on my front lawn, because that's trespassing. You can't say whatever the fuck you like about me in my living room, because if you break into my house I will engage in legitimate self-defense and you will be quickly be unconscious or dead.

You can say whatever the fuck you like about me when we're in public, but if you continually follow me around at some point you are expressing a threat and committing assault. That has nothing to do with what you're saying, though, it applies even if you're silent -- it's the physical presence that's a threat.

You can say whatever the fuck you like about me on the internet or on TV or in a letter or on the phone or whatever. Unless you make a specific threat, and can be reasonably believed to have the means to carry it out, it's not assault. "I'm going to drop a nuclear bomb on Tom's house!" is not a threat, unless you command a nuclear arsenal. "Somebody ought to shoot Tom!" is offensive, but I don't have a right to not be offended, and unless someone is pointing a gun at me at that moment it's not assault or encouraging assault.

A nation with an interest in freedom could handle these cases without any new laws against trolling, using the same legal principles that have existed since the first idiot was prosecuted for mailing a threatening letter. But a moral panic about the 'net is fertile ground for authoritarians.

I have a GED, and I assure you I earn substantially more than most CS graduates

You'd think that'd help you deal with your insecurity.

In spite of the grumblings of many, Karjaluoto doesn't recall many such changes that we didn't later look upon as the right choice.

Or rather, the famous reality distortion field later convinced Apple customer's that Apple must have been right all along. Because otherwise they'd have to admit that they'd been had, and no one wants to do that.

People who have paid a high price to enter a group tend to value that group, and people who are part of a group tend to conform to that group's judgments. It's terrible tech and terrible design, but it's great marketing.

Would Apple be where it is if Jobs wasn't an asshole?

Do you think Linux would still be a success if Linus wasn't there to keep dumbasses from accumulating more political clout than technical competence and steering it toward ruin?

I bet we'd all be using Hurd now, we'd have a colony on Mars, and there'd be peace in the Middle East. Nothing promotes innovation faster than living in a hugbox that respects all opinions!

I agree. And I would wager that compiled languages with efficient compilers are on average more efficient than depending on people to write these systems in assembly and random mistakes being a drag on performance.

But, there is a big difference between the networking stack and some rapidly evolving "feature". For the most part TCP/IP handling is largely static so first-to-market is less important than bullet proof.

I apparently know more about PayPal than you. It wasn't setup to just make Ebay money. It had far grander designs.

"We're definitely onto something big. The need PayPal answers is monumental. Everyone in the world needs money â" to get paid, to trade, to live. Paper money is an ancient technology and an inconvenient means of payment. You can run out of it. It wears out. It can get lost or stolen. In the twenty-first century, people need a form of money that's more convenient and secure, something that can be accessed from anywhere with a PDA or an Internet connection. Of course, what we're calling 'convenient' for American users will be revolutionary for the developing world. Many of these countries' governments play fast and loose with their currencies," the former derivatives trader [referring to Thiel] noted, before continuing, "They use inflation and sometimes wholesale currency devaluations, like we saw in Russia and several Southeast Asian countries last year [referring to the 1998 Russian financial crisis and 1997 Asian financial crisis], to take wealth away from their citizens. Most of the ordinary people there never have an opportunity to open an offshore account or to get their hands on more than a few bills of a stable currency like U.S. dollars. Eventually PayPal will be able to change this. In the future, when we make our service available outside the U.S. and as Internet penetration continues to expand to all economic tiers of people, PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before. It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means because if they try the people will switch to dollars or Pounds or Yen, in effect dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure."

Or what other case of widespread corruption are you thinking of that was almost exclusively referred to as a -gate?

List of scandals with "-gate" suffix

How? What's the rate of geniuses among children who need public assistance?

I suspect you'd get a much bigger bang for your buck by focusing on the embryos.

Humanity is nothing but genes. Some tens of thousands of them, but yeah, compared to the scale of the universe, that is a few.

What you're actually sad about is that you can't comprehend how that figuratively infinite variability translates into the things your feeble brain finds comforting.

Gattaca was paranoid luddite whining that rationalizes lying and cheating when you can't adequately compete against people who are better at things than you.

What we should be against is any subsidization, special treatment, or monopolistic practices, always rooted in government.

Subsidies such as allowing Comcast access to public rights-of-way to string their wires? Monopolistic practices such as allowing Comcast to buy up rights-of-way and exclude others from using them?

Comcast is not making widgets out of parts distilled from thin air. It is stringing wires over land, and then using them to send data over which it claims to have a "copyright".

Land is turned into property only via government action. All "intellectual property" is created entirely by state fiat. "Get government out of managing property!" is a cry that can only arise from fundamental confusion about the nature of property.

In the US, capital is not a barrier to entry...

Perhaps some day you will join us in the reality based community.