I'm glad things worked out for you, but how the fuck did you not learn your lesson about using birth control after the first unintended pregnancy?

"The FBI was successful taking down these two illegal darknet websites. Therefore, the FBI will be successful in taking down all illegal darknet websites." You fail Intro to Logic.

I'm sure there are some competent people in the FBI, but their track record with technology isn't great. And they know it, which is the reason behind "Operation Onymous", where they took down a small number of darknet markets on the same day using a different method for each one, and not relying on any fundamental flaws in the in the Tor protocol for any of them. Meanwhile, markets like Agora that were running on the day of "Operation Onymous" are still running, because they didn't make stupid mistakes. "Operation Onymous" was a pathetic attempt to FUD the drug-buying/selling public, and the FBI obviously chose this strategy since it was impotent at shutting down the competently run darknet marketplaces.

I'm not in favor of illegal darknet markets. Extreme libertarianism, like all extremism, has the potential to motivate and make possible atrocities. But the technology behind these markets is solid. Handwaving and saying that all criminals get caught is just wishful thinking on your part.

Without intending to start a general Libertarianism-is-good-no-it's-bad argument, I'll just say that I think employers that think it's okay to try to control their employees' private lives in that way are despicable. It is none of your business what I do outside of work, and if you think it is, then fuck you.

I'm not saying regulations against a direct supervisor dating a subordinate, or stuff like that, are offensive. But there is a very clear line, and that line is at preventing clear, work-related conflicts of interest that would be caused by the relationship. And even in that case it's more respectful to have a policy like "report it so we can deal with the conflict of interest through reassignment, etc." rather than "don't do it".

Oh and segregating a workplace by gender is so stupidly ridiculous that it would honestly shock me if anyone not in the cultural orbit of backwaters like Saudi Arabia proposed it seriously. So I'm going to assume this guy wasn't serious, because he'd have to be such a shithead to seriously suggest that that it's more likely he was joking.

I'm not sure what you're trying to get at. Either the product is defective, or it's not. If the car was defective, the company typically can't get out of it by saying, "we're not responsible for defects". Otherwise, there wouldn't be all the sturm und drang about, say, the supposedly defective accelerators in Toyota cars some years ago.

With auto insurance, if your rates are sky-high, it's typically because you made a choice to be a horrible driver. That's fair. With health insurance, if your rates are sky-high or companies simply won't offer to insure you for any amount of money (note the difference right there), it's often because you're unhealthy through no fault of your own -- bad genes, got cancer, whatever.

There is actually an exemption in Obamacare which says you can be charged higher premiums if you smoke, because you decided to be a dumbass that way. And the insurance companies do so.

Tort law typically forces companies to assume liabilities for things that are their fault. If you offer something for sale, and it doesn't work for the purpose you sold it for, you're typically on the hook even if you put "NO WARRANTY" on it. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know the details, but it's likely legislatures will look at this issue once self-driving vehicles become a thing and change the law to whatever they think is best anyway.

Why don't we just have the car's computer check for faults and not operate if any are detected? For non-critical situations, have the screen say, "service needed, car ceases operation in 200 miles" when a worn component is detected, and then count down the miles right up to the turn-off point if the owner doesn't take the car in. If you let that counter go to 0, you're a dimwit, and now you have to tow your car to the repair shop.

Government regulation is good for this kind of safety feature.

In a bathroom situation, you're dealing with other people's urine and fecal matter potentially against your bare skin. To contrast, people usually wear clothes when in a car, and usually are not urinating or pooping in the car.

A few conspicuously placed security cameras in the rental car, and signs saying that passengers are liable for damages to the car, would ensure that people would follow this typical model of car usage.

Do you never take taxis?

Then get uninsured motorist coverage. It's a very popular and usually very, very inexpensive add-on to liability.

Good salesmen get overpaid in every field. They also are under intense pressure to perform and get fired/laid off if their numbers go down, for any reason. High-stress, high-risk, high-reward.

High-powered salesmen will probably migrate to other fields after self-driving cars take over, because all the money will drop out of the market when rates go way down because there are such fewer accidents.

Look, as a society. you have a choice:
- Allow immigrants and foreigners some leeway in not knowing your native language.
- Don't allow immigrants and foreigners into your country.

Some linguists think it is the case that it is physically impossible to become natively proficient in a language after 12 or so. Even if this isn't the case, learning a new language is an arduous and time-intensive process for an adult who has other things to do with his time. Expecting every tourist to your country to learn your language fluently before going is simply stupid. Expecting an exchange student to learn your language fluently before going is also not reasonable: this person is a full-time student who has a million other things to learn besides a giant bidirectional map between his words and yours.

Expecting true immigrants to learn your language, after they've been there some time, is reasonable. Immigrants are planning to be in your country for the rest of their lives, or at least many years, and it's reasonable to expect they would make a time investment to, over the course of 5-10 years, become proficient in the language of the country they are in so that they're not in a social ghetto where they can only interact and befriend other immigrants. This usually happens; when it doesn't, it's troubling, because it fractures the country's culture.

BUT, the point is ... if you are in a country that anyone wants to visit, for any reason, you will occasionally run into people in your country who don't speak the native language. The most you might expect from these people is that they've made a token effort to memorize some key phrases to shift some of the burden of communication to them instead of you. And if you don't live in a country anyone wants to visit, well, that sucks for you.

Insightful comment. I'm sorry about what happened to you. However, it sounds like you may have made a few bad decisions, because if you lost "14 years of savings" in your retirement plan, well, you were doing it wrong. Some rules:

- Don't put value in pensions.
- Don't hold too much stock in your employer; if you can buy it below market value, then sell most of it at market value as soon as you can and diversify right away.

Finally, the job market has picked up now, and you probably shouldn't be working at a 25% salary cut anymore. I'd look into jumping ship or asking for a raise.

What a brilliant argument. "This works well for the easiest, most common case, so obviously it's awesome and there are no problems." I hope you're not working on anything important.

NAT constrains the web in ways that aren't immediately obvious. Applications haven't been built, ideas haven't been implemented, because of the way it chokes the client endpoints of the Internet.

Why did it take so long for us to have Skype-like services? Because, despite the best efforts of the best network engineers, we can't get two home computers behind NATs to reliably talk to each other. Skype can't always do it with its shitty proprietary protocol, either, but, when it fails, the Skype client falls back to routing the traffic through Skype's own servers. This doubles the traffic necessary for communication, so it's shitty, and it also means Skype has to have hugely deep pockets to pay for and run this otherwise completely unnecessary server infrastructure.

So, instead of peer-to-peer VoIP communication, which would make sense, we have to have a huge company proxying traffic for everyone because we can't make two endpoints talk to each other. This is hugely wasteful, a single point of failure, a single point for mass surveillance, and a single point for corporate asshattery. And this is just one example of the type of wart we have because of widespread NAT.

Do your hypothetical true Scotsmen like to use Skype in addition to watching cat videos? Then they're negatively affected by NAT. They probably don't realize it, but they are.

The sooner NAT dies, the better for everyone.

Wrong.

I often wonder what possesses people to make blatantly inaccurate statements, such as yours here, on Slashdot. So help me out. Did you just make that up and assume it's true because it made sense to you, are you deliberately misinforming people, or are you some sort of crank?

Yeah, man, totally.

And, relatedly, does anyone really think the dodo is extinct? Surely they must be somewhere, maybe being mistaken for pigeons or chickens or something.

Also dinosaurs. Maybe the abominable snowman's really a raptor or brontosaurus and just no one's gotten a good look.

Eventually someone's going to find one of these supposedly "extinct" animals and blow the sheeple's minds. Nothing can ever really go "extinct". It's just too big of a big world.