Shocking: building owners are supposed to pay others to maintain their buildings. What's the current world coming to? Wealthy owners should be able to have their work done for free, so that they can keep more of their hard-earned money.

The reason that the discussion isn't framed more to be about the safety of citizens is because it's assumed that people understand to have buildings not collapse in an earthquake is a generally good thing for everyone. Do you really have to have a discussion about how not having buildings collapse onto people inside them is a good thing or a bad thing? We even have some pretty good numbers of the costs associated with earthquakes, as they happen frequently enough in plenty of developed and undeveloped areas.

Ah yes, the magic of the free market. There's absolutely no cost associated with moving, and there is a ready supply of housing that offers everything that the unsafe housing does, minus the lack of earthquake readiness.

Yes, because enforcing building codes constitutes a "taking". I'm sure you absolutely wouldn't do something like blame the government if buildings collapse in an earthquake due to lax building codes or lax enforcement.

The really sad part isn't that you actually believe this, it's that you're not the only one.

The Methane Clathrate gun is a pretty well known and understood situation. Methane Clathrates exist, the temperature at which they're released is understood, and the impact of all that methane on the atmosphere is also well understood. The only question that's still open is when exactly ocean temperatures will reach the range in which the gun will be triggered. Just hope you aren't around for it.

I think you might want to revisit what a corporation is. It's a legal construct designed to shield individuals from losing everything if their business goes belly-up.

As for your idea that a corporation is exactly the same thing as a political party... well, it certainly explains the cluster fuck in this country. Congratulations, you ARE the root problem.

I'm wondering: is your car a 1960 VW Beetle or 2CV? Because those are the only cars I can think of where the seats can sag enough to make this a worthwhile proposition.

Or, much more likely, you actually don't do any of this.

A little hint: "GottMitUns" is German and translates to "GodWithUs". Which just so happens to be the motto of the German military army (and a few other groups) until the end of WW2. Generally, it's fairly safe to assume that someone still sporting that motto has some serious hang-ups with German military and groups from 1900s to 1945.

Congratulations, CaptainLard gets it. Sycodon doesn't. I'll make another sweeping generalization: "conservatives can't read". This is fun! I can do this all day.

Do I also get to make sweeping generalizations about conservatives because you don't like government interference except to:
- control what I do in my bedroom
- control my social life
- control what I talk about
- control who I do business with
- control where I go
- control what I believe
- control what business I'm allowed to engage in

Just asking whether the "idiots are everywhere" and "generalizations are fun" rules can be abused in the other direction as well.

Spot on. Every single failure I've seen of an internal communications tool that wasn't Email or IM failed because of a lack of one of the three things you mentioned. They are tools, but they need to much more help to grow than something that everyone has to use, like a case system or a CRM.

I worked in the past at a company that did something similar to a "Facebook at work". The number one rule to get people to use it: never, EVER call it "Facebook for work". Call it "Shining Communications Turd", "Chainsaw through productivity", "Free Crack", just don't call it "Facebook for work".

I think Facebook might have a bigger uphill battle here than it thinks.

Where did you work, the NSA?

Erm, what? I know how PageRank works because I read about it as a technical paper in a Computing Journal in 1998, before Google was started as a company. That said, I don't know what came first - the paper or the patent. Pretty sure though that the paper came first, or was at least simultaneous to the patent filing. Finally, most of the stuff in the Google ranking mechanism is as much an algorithm as a kernel is an algorithm. It's a host of ranking modules, tweaks, weights, heuristics, clean-up jobs, maintenance jobs, spider jobs, and a whole crap-load of IT work to make it hum like it does.

Please do enlighten us how it could easily apply algorithms to categorize data to distinguish between personal, protected data, and data of public records that belong to someone else. Just for shits and grins, please create an algorithm that would distinguish between the Washington Post article and the original bankruptcy article.

Wow. So that means that now laws that cannot be followed every time are a good idea? In the case of Google, it means a perpetual fine that cannot be escaped, is completely arbitrary, and applies only to Google.

Everything you posted so far is a damning indictment of exactly why this law is terrible: it's not possible to fully comply, it's arbitrary, it's open to abuse from all sides, and its target is also completely arbitrary.

Technically, you are accurate in your description of why Google needs to follow the law as it is written. However, the discussion we're having is about whether the law should exist in the first law. On that, you're digging your own hole.

Considering the over-reaction we're getting from a lot of people around Ebola - and that includes people who laugh about bureaucrats' overreaction to blinking lights in Chicago and WiFi network names - I'm going to guess that most people are just scared shitless of stuff they don't understand and willing to sacrifice everything to feel safe again.

That doesn't make it any better, but it gives us a better shot at fixing the issue (educate people) than the conspiracy theory approach.

His duty is to the president, not the public. I have a lot of respect for him that he gave the president his opinion, the president disagreed with him, and he kept his mouth shut in public. I also have a lot of respect for him that he isn't just bashing Obama, but merely strongly disagreeing with him on some decisions the president made. On others, he is actually openly agreeing with him (see his position on "Enhanced Interrogation") - or at least, showing far more agreement than a standard republican would.

Yeah, Panetta was a republican, through and through. He was a security hawk, and never made any bones about it. At the same time, he fully supported the president while he was in office. Just for that, he deserves respect.

Big infrastructure projects lead themselves to being natural monopolies, with or without government interference. So removing government regulation unfortunately does not solve the problem.