"Excellent rant! Personally I don't care to have those sort of images in my head, kinda like - once you've seen one uncensored holocaust documentary you've seen them all."

Sure, but the same thing could be said for an Uwe Boll movie and nonetheless they have an audience.

"The design devotes a whole room to 3D printing, but I agree underground would be better than depleted uranium. Thick layer of martian ground is much easier to get than 2cm thick walls of DU."

No to mention that it's a toxic metal that weights 19.1 g/cm3 , 68.4% denser than lead, to transport that to another planet with rockets is going to be expensive if not impossible.

A single sheet of that 2cm thick shield, 1 meter by 1 meter would weigh 382kg, one third of a ton.

Also it still has 60% of the radioactivity of normal uranium, so you'd need lead to shield the uranium as well to avoid golf war syndrome on the astronauts.

Where could that come from? I would understand it if the rockets or shuttles docking up there would start near the ocean, let's say Florida, but hey, I'm no marine biologist, that's a job for George Costanza.

"~3 birds each day seems like a lot of KFC for a power plant...."

Indeed, it's about what my cat does damage in 4-5 hours.

"I'm not sure in what parallel universe you live, but in my part of europe there sure is overtime, and we are surely not getting paid for it. It's even explicit in the contracts that we do not get paid for overtime."

That clause means there is no overtime, go home instead of trying to make the manager have a good opinion about you.
There is no other possible interpretation, since all those have been declared illegal by the European Court.

Unpaid labor is called 'slavery'.

"Many slashdotters do pay to be on a web site that is mostly free of trolls."

But not free of MyCleanPC 'ads'.

"You don't have to check it while you are on vacation. You can actually ignore it."

You don't _have_ to, but you can.

This is Europe.
There _is_ no unpaid overtime!
If people check their mail during vacation, they are working, and they have to be paid and their vacation is still due an they can sue the company when they leave (or not) to get payment for the missed holidays or weekends.
Same thing if you get sick or injured during a holiday, the days don't count as holiday but as sick days, even if you stay there at the beach bar with a cast for 4 or 5 weeks. (although you can't drink alcohol, since this can hinder a speedy recovery)
The vacation days are still due.

Also, people with a security/dangerous job have to be alert and cannot have worked _anything_ 8 hours before the shift, if case of an accident or other misfortune, the company would be liable.

"So why delete what could be important communication? Just deal with it when you are back in the office."

If it's really important, the vacation guy is replaced during his absence and the replacement handles the email.
If that's not the case, it's not an important job, even if the tenant thinks it is.

Dear Daimler-Benz

I know it's after hours, but I would like to order 500 cars of the Model S as quickly as possible, color unimportant.
I'll pay double for speedy delivery.

Now all we need is some invasive species of chips.

"Wasn't there enough information posted and published everywhere in the mass media in Liberia to inform even the dumbest people not to do that at all? I mean, after 1000 people die in a quite horrid way, a bunch of RFSP (Really F****** Stupid People) storms an Ebola Quarantine Center, lets the infected patients flee, steals the medical supplies and probably believes they just fulfilled the will of their ancestors."

Think of it as evolution in action.

People who don't believe in Ebola are removed from the gene pool.

Just add 'washingtonpost.com##.buyitnow' to your adblocker and never see it again.

I don't care who does it for what reason, if it's the owner, his son or his dog, I just block it as soon as I see it.

Damn, now i see it's just domains, i tought they killed all my german and french spammers.

"doesn't that mean my entire face would be 1 pixel large?"

Americans have much larger faces, even their centimeters are 2,54 larger.

'Australia banned guns: Sure, there are no school massacres but the murder rate hasn't decreased.'

You're reading the wrong newspaper, the Washington Post says otherwise.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

"So what have the Australian laws actually done for homicide and suicide rates? Howard cites a study (pdf) by Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University finding that the firearm homicide rate fell by 59 percent, and the firearm suicide rate fell by 65 percent, in the decade after the law was introduced, without a parallel increase in non-firearm homicides and suicides. That provides strong circumstantial evidence for the law's effectiveness."

Apparently birds still fell to their deaths at that time.