and tweaked the punctuation a bit, from "Don't Be Evil" to "Don't, Be Evil!"

BTW, am I the first one to notice that Uber is an anagram of "Rube"?

It still astonishes me that people do personal stuff in the internet using their real name. I still can't get my head around that.

It's not like anyone's successfully hiding their identity from the NSA these days, sure, but from a casual search of your name by your boss? I don't even show up, except for my LinkedIn account.

That's the "employer discovered the Twitter account the employee thought was anonymous" bucket!

FLAC is for idiots who think they have superhuman hearing.

Archiving in a compressed format is for idiots who don't understand coding quantization noise. Have fun re-ripping again in a few years.

So the top 1% can afford to have a political voice individually, without forming corporations, while the rest of us need some way to pool the money of thousands in order to accomplish that. Explain again how restricting corporate speech hurts that 1%? Would you have the government regulate the political speech of newspapers and cable news channels?

Hey, welcome back to civilization, how did your 2 years without the internet go? While you were away, you missed some news (it was everywhere): turns out the US government was actually recording every voice call in a datacenter somewhere, and a lot more too! I know; crazy, huh? The truth was actually more extreme than the conspiracy theorists feared.

Almost everything that's been useful from my college studies, 20 years back, came from about 3 courses: the first year in-major courses (which taught recursion, functional programming, and pointers), and the data structures and algorithms course.

There was a lot of crap that seemed interesting at the time, but was from other specialties (and no classes even offered related to my specialty). Those basics: recursion, functional programming, pointers, data structures and algorithms are quite important long term, and won't age out, but that's just a few classes.

Beyond that: people need jobs more than they need to keep professors busy, and practical skills with tool that will get you hired upon graduation need to be a priority, The future won't hold any unskilled labor - that will be all taken over by automation before much longer - and that means far more people will need to prepare for highly skilled jobs.

Surprised you haven't gotten any "but animals eat meat!" comments.

Animals also commit petty murder and mass rape. I like to think that we have the intelligence to choose to not have to imitate the behavior of other animals and decide our own path. And fortunately, we have a digestive system which allows us to make that choice when it comes to our diet.

Swans can literally kill people - a guy died just a couple years ago when swans attacked his boat and then kept attacking him while he tried to swim to shore, until he drowned. More common though are things like bruises (up to and including black eyes), scratches, and skin-puncturing bites. A google image search for swan attack shows how they don't mess around when they feel threatene (there's even pictures of one attacking a full-grown horse)

It's not all that distant of a relative of chickens, actually - it's in the same family (but a different subfamily). It's kind of wierd that one family (Phasianidae) has almost all of the commonly consumed poultry - chicken, turkey, grouse, quail, pheasant, peafowl, guineafowl, etc. Go up to the order level and you find more (mostly regionally popular) game fowl, like ptarmigan. And once you hit the superorder level, you get the water fowl like ducks, geese, and swans. I can't even think of any other poultry species. There's lots of Aves clades, subclasses, and infraclasses, but apparently the species that people find make good eating are rather clustered together.

The only mechanism they have for that is one they've long abandoned: raising the "fractional" in "fractional reserve currency" above 0. And they weren't aggressive about that during the Carter years, no reason to assume they'd do it here. A return to 5-10 years of 10-15% inflation is possible - heck it may even be the goal of the Fed (we'll certainly never pay down the current debt without something like that).

The Fed created a couple trillion in new money to feed to the government for spending. That might have been enough to cause a currency collapse except for 2 things: other currencies were mostly worse, and the Fed paid banks billions (I'll wait while you recover from the surprise) to store a couple trillion in reserves with the Fed - so the net money in circulation didn't actually change much.

But as the economy recovers, the banks will likely withdraw that money from the Fed and invest it more profitably, putting those trillions into circulation that the Fed minted over the past decade or so. What happens then is anyone's guess - no nation has ever done this trick before, and there's no way to know what will happen to the currency.

No one should be cocky about this. It's nothing but intellectual arrogance to claim you know how this will play out over the coming decade.

A lot of companies are involved in a lot of renewables tech research. That doesn't mean that any particular one is going to be profitable. The vast majority are going to be big failures.

Wave power's track record so far has been subpar to say the least. And looking at their diagrams, I can't imagine that they're not headed straight for the same fate. Even if we assume that their numbers aren't overly optimistic, their design looks like it would involve several times more steel per nameplate capacity than a wind turbine tower. And they're operating in a much harsher environment. No rotors, but they're dealing with major hydraulic pumping instead. It just doesn't look like a winner to me.

If it was my job to have a go at wave power, I can't imagine going for anything involving large amounts of structural steel or hydraulic pumping; I'd keep it simple and just go for a grid of cables (potentially a high tensile strength UV-resistant plastic), anchored at the edges to keep tension up across the whole grid, with the only slack available involving the grid pulling on regularly spaced springloaded reels (the rotation thereof generating electricity), with any combination of floats, drag chutes and weighs/anchors to cause the needed tug from the movement of water. No pumps, no hydraulic fluid, no large compressive-loaded structures, just a tensile structure that would be (proportionally) lightweight and easy to deploy.

But hey, it's not my industry ;)

Feels like I've said this 100 times now:

Electronic voting: bad.
Computer-assisted voting: good.

Sure, fine, have a touch-screen and pretty pictures and good usability in general, all of that is great. Then have the voting machine print a paper ballot, which is then cast normally. You can check the paper, or just use the paper yourself, if you don't trust the computer, or if it breaks, or has been hacked. And since almost all ballots will be printed cleanly, there will be little room for 2000-style "dimpled chad" and "interpreting the voter's intentions".

While I appreciate your greed and approve, if you're a software developer, or have some other highly skilled job as most /.ers do, it's not like you're at risk here. The jobs that have been scarce here because of outsourcing are in general low-skill jobs, from manufacturing to call centers, that are swiftly being replaced by robots anyhow.