You didn't expect them to stand upright in the water like a buoy did you?

Why not? Engines at the bottom and empty fuel tanks above them. That sounds like a buoy to me.

I know this is an old thread ... but I really don't like Pulseaudio.

I never installed it on my Gentoo system. On my Mint systems, removing Pulseaudio is one of my first post-installation steps.

If I want to play sound over a network I export a read-only filesystem containing my media to the machines on my LAN (Samba does this nicely). Then I can play video and anything else over the network too, in a transparent way. I've never seen a single benefit of running Pulseaudio but I have seen lots of difficult-to-resolve problems. It's just useless bloat to me. I have a much better time using straight ALSA.

I wasn't talking about people who are committing suicide. I was referring to idiots that take drugs for fun, and take too much because their stoned from all the drugs they decided to take.

A person who overdosed either chose to do so deliberately, in which case it's suicide, or he did so accidentally, in which case he didn't choose to do so so any more than people who go out after dark choose to get mugged. Which one is it?

People randomly "decide" to overdose on tainted lettuce or dairy products? I was unaware of this trend.

So it's bad luck when people get bad consequences from actions you approve of, and deliberate choice when people get bad consequences from actions you disapprove of? Why do you have such double standard?

Wow, good projection there. It is almost subliminal, following as it does something that makes no sense at all. Givien that my argument is about allowing people to choose to put poison in their body, you want to equate it to walking around and eating food. And somehow that translates into me wanting to control them.

Nice evasion. Now answer my question: Do you have any reason why potential bad consequences from drug use shouldn't be mitigated, besides trying to discourage such use - in other words, control people?

Being top dog means you get to butt into their business, not the other way around.

Who lives their lives in the public eye, Joe Average or Joe President? Who has their affairs and birth certificates and stupid remarks and pastors discussed in (inter)national media?

The chains of power bind both ends. All the chains the Top Dog holds end up determining his moves; the necessities of maintaining all that power override any other concern. The US is a fine example: it's politics have worldwide consequences, thus they attract worldwide interest, and are in large part determined by the desire to keep that worldwide effect rather than the good of the citizens.

That's one of the reasons leaders tend to be so awful: what kind of person does it take to want the job?

Welcome to the Internet.

China in particular understands that progress comes not from the Invisible Hand, but from directing your resources to a primary goal of human development.

Which, presumably, is why China has done in 40 years what it took the US eight years...

Having said that, many recent aircraft failures have been caused by the crew and I think fully automatic airliners should be looked at. Or at least keep a hostie around to blow the thing up.

It used to be trawlers...

Also whether it landed at the planned location to within a metre or so, given that the plan is to land on a barge.

lol let me guess, plan a governrment overthrow? suicide?

I told you, because I don't trust the people who would be empowered to change the constitution. Fix that problem, and you don't need to change it.

So it's local outsourcing. They're still taking away your job so that they can give it to someone that isn't in as good of a bargaining position. It doesn't matter if it's some guy in a 3rd world country, or some guy that's visiting from a 3rd world country who gets to be treated like dirt.

Both "illegals" and H1-B's fall into this sort of 3rd world underclass.

As if we didn't already have enough pockets of 3rd world fester...

Cost of living also tends to be higher in those Blue states. So this is a nice double whammy from states that are supposed to have more intrusive and effective governance.

So much for that idea...

ok, you are really good at looking at problems, let's see if you're any good at finding solutions.

FitBit TOS states that they might use unanimous data aggregates but my individual data is private, unless I explicitly authorize sharing. I have no problem with that at all.