That Amazon is involved as a middleman is itself a problem. There's no need for the author to sell to Amazon for them to then sell to me when there's no physical medium for e-books, and for traditional publishing, Amazon should just be another traditional retailer, not something special.

Physical and e-books are pretty much equivalent these days, at least in this regard. Modern printing presses allow printing on demand, so all that's left is the logistics of having a catalog somewhere handling orders and sending them to printers.

I repeat, do not treat a private service as a public square. That's a horrible idea.

In a society based on private ownership, it's not something you can avoid. When every space people gather in is owned by a private entity, you either treat them as public or accept that you can't put your soapbox anywhere - and that means destruction. Powers That Be want to preserve status quo because they are the status quo, so they will simply ignore any problems until they grow to the point of tearing society apart.

Democracies tend to be stabler than autocracies precisely because they give citizens a way to bring up issues and force the Powers to do something about them while they still can. Anonymity is essential to make this mechanism efficient, since it shields the complainer from revenge. And Facebook is far past the point where it can claim equivalency with a corner store; it's decisions - such as forbidding pseudonyms - have (a chilling) effect on the society as a whole, thus society should have a say in them.

With great power comes a great responsibility. Facebooks and Walmarts of this world want all that sweet power while avoiding any responsibility whatsoever. And so capitalism faces a crisis over this very same thing yet again. Too bad there's no communism anymore to provide a threat recognizable to monkey brains to serve as a wake-up call from ideological daydreams, so I guess this time we go all the way to the point of no return and disintegration.

It's positive infinity when descending on the positive numbers, but negative infinity when ascending from the negatives. No one value can represent both!

Of course it can. A humble vector is an example of just that. It simply means that any calculation involving said value will similarly return a value representing multiple values.

Mathematicians don't know which rule has precedence for 0/0, so there's no way a dumb machine can figure it out,

Because it has no context. But the programmer does. So how about letting the programmer denote blocks of code, such as functions, with how they want "x/0" to be handled for x=0 and x=/= 0?

Alternatively, expand the exception mechanism. Currently, exceptions are a pain because when an exception occurs, the original point of computation is lost. But if the exception handler got it, for example as a continuation, with the ability to provide the result for the failed instruction (that is, when an instruction fails it gets replaced by a call to the exception handler which can either throw the exception for "real" or simply return a result), it would allow for such scenarios to be painlessly handled, both for x/0 and all other scenarios.

It is always amusing to see those that chant the mantra "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" so loudly and frequently, do everything possible to avoid scrutiny of their own actions.

Boys will be boys and politicians will be politicians. And because this sort of behaviour is not only tolerated but actually expected, it will continue. After all, people don't choose most of their actions based on rational consideration but by expressing cultural archetypes - and our cultural archetype for anyone who wields any kind of power is "corrupt, abusive, hypocritical asshole".

That is the reason psychopaths gravitate towards leadership positions: our concept of leadership is such that only a psychopath can do the job without wanting to kill themselves.

So go ahead, do express your amusement at this story, just understand that your very message is helping keep it from being reported as what it actually is: a criminal conspiracy of treacherous high-level officials attempting to subvert British democracy. Treacherous? No... they're loyal to the real British spirit, which differs quite a bit from how the country wants itself to be seen.

Bluster and bullying works for some,

Or at least people put up with your personality flaws if you have something they want bad enough. However, top talent can almost certainly get theirs from someone else, so you'll left with the mediocre and below, or just the truly desperate if you're nasty enough.

Wasn't there a Slashdot article a few months ago about Linux not getting enough new volunteer developers since they don't want to deal with the associated drama?

Transformers detonate. They do it because the oil loses its dielectric property, or because an air space forms inside the transformer. The idea that linemen, who eventually would have seen an event like this take place as well as the injury/death that resulted (it's not all that rare, and used to be even more common, "back in the day") would cause such events just to get some overtime, sounds preposterous to me.

Not all psychopaths manage to make it to management. Some of them are going to be stuck at blue collar jobs. And I suppose not having underlings to torment would cause them more likely to act out their pathology in illegal ways.

Of course it's anyone's guess if grandparent's "friend's dad" actually was a psychopath (and dumb enough to let a couple of kids know what he was up to), or if it's yet another piece of propaganda for the ongoing War on Workers.

Breaking news: Organized crime runs the world.

If it did, it wouldn't be crime, now would it? A state openly run by the Mafia would simply be your run-of-the-mill military dictatorship or warlord-ridden anarchy, depending on whether a single faction was supreme or not.

No, what we're seeing here is the difference between official and real culture. That is what corruption is, at its core: a culture tries to pretend it's something else - something better - than it actually is, a kind of "werewolf state" which mauls people by night and damns wolfs by day. Everyone goes along with the lie because when someone points out the hypocrisy, the mask of decency slips and the beast comes out.

But when the beast is out, it can be seen by all. That is its weakness. People can no longer pretend everything is fine; they must either openly submit to the wolf - and accept they're going to be devoured - or fight to rid themselves of it. And this beast has no claws of its own, only those lent to it by its slaves. Knowing that, it too must choose whether to strike back and risk breaking its spell entirely, or give up some of its malevolence and become less like a wolf and more like a human.

How often does an entire neighborhood in some city just depopulate, overnight? Some suspect comes to the police' attention, and everyone who has had any contact with him just disappears. Today, the FEMA camps still stand empty. We are dangerously close to becoming a full fledged police state, but if you think we are there already, then you lack understanding and imagination.

"Police state is a term denoting government that exercises power arbitrarily through the police." Both the War on Drugs and War on Terror fit that to a t.

To put it bluntly, your government lets you speak because it has nothing to fear from anything you might say. Your fellow Americans aren't going to stop voting for DemoPublicans, no matter what horrible things might be revealed - so why would RepubliCrats bother silencing you? They simply record everything you say, and pick you up if it looks like you're about to resort to anything more.

US is a police state 2.0. And like with most things in human culture, here too the newer version lacks some of the murderous malevolence of the old.

Yes, as a white male you are automatically a racist sexist homophobe on the verge of a hate crime. Its in our DNA apparently ...

No, it's in your internalized cultural values. An outdated institution is using you and the AC as meat puppets in a desperate struggle to pass on its memetic material. Let it go.

The US will be fine. It is largely working as intended and if anything serious did happen, congress would band together in a heartbeat. That is actually where we should be worried. Imagine the world today if congress had serious debate and opposition to the Iraq war or the patriot act when initially passed.

How do you expect the Congress to have a serious debate about anything if everyone there has been conditioned to simply react as they're told? People who are used to treating politics as a game played for their personal profit or the advancement of their political tribe (party) aren't going to magically change and treat it as a serious responsibility just because there happens to be something at stake this time. If anything, stress is going to cause them to give in to the dysfunctional organizational culture even more fully.

The federal government is not the same type of government that the UK's parliament is. They are limited in scope and abilities by the US constitution because even from the start the founders knew we were too diverse and needed most of the governance from state and local levels. Each colony was a nation in itself when the union was formed.

Right, so why do the states stick to the union? The threat of the British Empire reclaiming its property has long since passed and is unlikely to ever return. So what stops, say, Texas from severing its ties to the Federal government, if all it wants or can reasonably expect is non-interference with its local affairs?

The issue isn't what powers or tasks the Federal government has, the issue is that no one seems to have any faith in its ability to actually succesfully perform any.

Bringing water to thirsty people is only good if you value people.

If those thirsty people valued water they would simply pay the $68,000,000,000 from their own pocket, you damn commie.

Remember the true currency of politics is votes not money. As long as its one person one vote the 99% actually have the power, they just fail to use it. Party loyalty is one of various examples of how the 99% fails itself.

The 99% always have the power. No dictator can rule without the approval - however grudgingly given - of his subjects. So why do they give that approval to someone like Saddam? Because in their mind there is an internalized image of the nation they happen to identify with, which is constantly telling them how to act, speak and think, and which gets constantly reinforced by and synchronized to other people's actions and reactions.

So why do people vote against their own interests? Because they're a member of a Group (democrats, republicans, evangelicals, greens, communists, whatever), and members of a Group vote in a certain way. Or, put another way, a person is a part of a community but the community is also a part of a person. So people are actually voting according to their interests, just not their personal interests.

I suspect the next big leap in human evolution is becoming fully aware of this mechanism and bringing it under conscious control. Currently it isn't, which is why strong identification with a group - such as a particular nation, ideology or religion - tends to lead to highly irrational behavior. Such groups don't have brains of their own, after all, so if the members just blindly obey, the end result is that it can't evaluate its own actions. We need more patriots who are willing to criticize their nation/church/party/shady backroom club/whatever, to treat it as a sports team that needs to be whipped into shape rather than an idol to be worshipped.

Many of the Asian countries hate China. And not just "they are spying on me!" hate, this is personal. They joined the TPP trade talks as protection against China, so there is little chance they will join with China any time soon.

Finland hated Soviet Union with the hate of hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded and their kin, but that didn't stop it from making deals with them. Countries who let hate dictate their political decisions tend to go the way of Captain Ahab.

So long as the power stays split up (mostly) evenly in 1/3s, we have gridlock to expect, which is preferable to what you get when the power is less evenly spread.

It might seem preferable as long as everything is business as usual, but such effective paralysis rises serious questions whether the US can continue as a single nation. Sooner or later there will be a serious crisis, and gridlock will prevent any kind of effective response.

But even if there isn't, a gridlock is a symptom of a rather serious defect. As I see it, the US is on the brink of completely abandoning democracy because compromise is seen as a sign of weakness rather than the very core of the institution. Only swing states matter, and even those only swing between two parties. And of course, seeing gridlock as a positive means the system has lost its credibility, and will - and already is - increasingly rely on blunt force to stay alive.

In short, the US is collapsing, in slow motion for now, and arresting the fall would require reforms the country and its citizens are unlikely to be capable of.