That reminds me of the safety showers that we have in every lab. You know what's going to happen when you pull that loop and you know that there's no drain on the floor and it's going to make a big mess, but damn if it's not tempting...

(I have to admit that I pulled one for the fun of it and it did make a big mess as expected. Totally worth it. I don't imagine pressing the halon button would go over quite as well.)

It's like when you ask a girl if she wants to go out with you, and she says no, and so you hire a team of psychologists to help you manipulate her into saying yes.

It's not really any less creepy when ad companies do it to get you to part with your money.

That sounds like something a manager would say. My advice would be that if you ever become a manager, realize that your job is to facilitate the work of your team.

You, the manager, are not a source of revenue or productivity in your company. Your job is to help the workers who are actually doing the work be as effective as they can. If you let your ego or high salary make you think that the workers are working for your benefit, then you're not doing your job.

Making management a "step up" in the career path has probably contributed the most to ineffective management. It's an important job, but it isn't worth more to the company than the actual workers that they "manage".

It may work if you actually have another offer already lined up. Sometimes it doesn't work, so you need to be ready to take that other offer.

Threatening to leave for another job that you have lined up can get you a raise, but threatening to go start interviewing for jobs doesn't get you shit (except maybe replaced). The one exception is if you are a superstar and "start interviewing" means "gone in a week". Know your cards before you start betting!

In his house at R'lyeh, dead Bennet Hasselton waits dreaming.

Did you even read my post? I was contesting the idea that paying for service from Google gets you any different treatment than using their "free" service.

The post to which I was responding, which I explicitly quoted said:

[citation needed]

From the Terms of Service:

When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.

Neither that, nor their Privacy Policy mention any exceptions for Photos if you pay for them. Where did you get this idea?

I agree that the story itself is not comparable to our lives, but the same can be said for most of the sci-fi or fantasy stories that try to address immortality. I've yet to read a book that's sole topic was discussing the philosophical dilemmas of extended life. Usually, the topic is just an aside to the main storyline (which is thankfully not as often saturated with drama as the vampire genre is).

Fiction is one of our more powerful tools for exploring philosophical concepts. For it to work, you have to create engaging worlds and characters with which to do the exploring. I'm certainly not one for the Byronic hero, but Rice's stories (which were fairly well written and I have to admit that I found them entertaining as a kid) were attempting to humanize an immortal creature so that the readers could attempt to experience a different perspective. She was exploring more than just immortality, so it makes sense that her characters aren't a perfect fit for that topic alone.

Her vampire world certainly isn't any more ridiculous than the world (or characters) of Lazarus Long or Louis Wu. Deep philosophical investigation is hard to do without contrived or ridiculous scenarios. If there's something to be learned from a work (and there isn't always one), then we shouldn't get hung up on the silly details of the story.

Anyway, it sounds like you have in mind a book that better addresses the topic. Can you share? I'm genuinely curious and I've never read enough!

They're probably logging the telemetry so that it can be retransmitted if they miss a beacon. The transmitter on this thing is pretty low power and the telemetry is presumably the valuable information that the sat is determining. That said, there are a number of ways that they could better handle the logs than to just let them grow and grow.

It may be more important for stability of the system to have constant churn in the serf population, though. Churn prevents the individuals from accumulating any appreciable amount of knowledge or money, which helps to maintain their desperation and dependence.

The constant cycle of growing up in hardship, only to be broken by unavoidable work, and then death is important for cementing the permanence of their position.

That you're fixated on the devices (the vampires) used to explore some philosophical concept only shows a limitation in your capability or interest. The vampire is just an established fictional method of achieving immortality, just like the (also fictional) medical treatments used by Heinlein and Niven and the like. Since immortality is currently a fictional concept to begin with, the choice of fiction used to explore it is just a matter of taste.

If the genre actually invalidates the philosophical point for you, then you're not a very competent thinker. (Spoken as someone who doesn't care for the vampire genre at all but was able to appreciate the exploration of immortality in her books nonetheless.)