"Travelling can be stressful and our aim is to make the interaction between human (passenger) and computer (check-in) as natural and helpful as possible."

Remember those stickers on the registers at K-Mart, facing the cashier, with the letters, "TYFSOK"? It stands for, "Thank You For Shopping Our K-Mart." The sticker was to remind the beleagured minimum wage employee to recite the words. Did anyone, ever, feel that the person mechanically parroting that catch phrase actually cared? How about the greeters at Wal Mart? (I think they've pretty much gone away, like the TYFSOK stickers)

You can teach an automaton to mimick human emotion, but even when it is an actual human such mimickry is patronizing and irritating. If you want human warmth, hire warm humans (downside; warm humans who can keep their positive mental attitude while working at an airport are expensive and they need time to recover from their shifts).

If you are going to use computers, embrace their natural advantages. Computers are fast, predictable, and emotionless. Those can be good characteristics in a user interface -- particularly when the customer just wants to get the process finished and move on. Work with the entire industry to develop a standard interface and sequence so the user and bang through it without even engaging their brain -- everyone is better off with travellers on autopilot. Painting a computer in whore's makeup won't make it a lover for any but the most desperate.

And, for you air travellers, a quick question: Why are you still endorsing them? Why are you still agreeing to be subjected to the TSA and the awful customer service of the airlines? Have you really made all reasonable efforts to switch to alternatives? If you aren't making significant personal sacrifices to cut their cashflow, you are lending aid and comfort to the enemy. I've driven 6,000 miles in the past year avoiding air travel. What are you doing?

Two-fer-one from this scene: Escaping The Reavers

"Faster, Faster, Faster would be better!"

or, "Kaylee! Heat her up, we got reavers!"

While the EPA is thinking about raising limits on how much radioactive material nuclear power plants can release into the environment there are no limits on what coal plants can release.

"But Teacher! Billy is punching people, so why can't I punch people?!?"

If you have empirical data to present on the risk of the current levels of radiation exposure measured in QALYs, and an argument for adjusting the current regulated level, present it. But saying that we should ease our regulation on this form of harm, merely because you assert that another form of harm is insufficiently regulated, is manipulative and irrational.

But the philosophical core of the region and the tech industry remains fundamentally progressive.

Never underestimate the power of a god. And make no mistake about it; to many in The Valley, Zuck is a god. Even among those for whom he is not, most worship at the temple of Facebook with more dedication, trust, and fervor than the average Christian. If that temple begins to emit a message, it will have a significant distorting effect on perception, just like the church -- and traditional religion doesn't have the power of computer aided psychological operations.

Paul had one-on-one meetings with ... Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Well now there is a truy hideous beast to consider: What do you get when you cross Rand Paul's megalomaniacal motives with a sociopath who has the means, opportunity, and willingness to perform mass psychological experiments? Let's find out!

In most of Europe, the "economically conservative but socially liberal" parties have economic policies to he left of the Democrats,

Not in terms of tax progressivity. American has managed to export Reaganomics to the world. "Socialist" France, to take but one example, has a much lower top marginal tax and higher income concentration than America had in our golden era -- 1950s and 1960s. Details here.

foresee an increasingly automated future where most of humanity would become either jobless or underemployed by the middle of the century. While robots take over the production of consumer hardware, Big Data algorithms like the ones used by Google and IBM appear to be displacing even white collar tech workers. How long before the only ones left on the payroll are the few "rockstar" programmers and administrators needed to maintain the system? Besides politics and drug dealing, what jobs are really future-proof?

Think of the big picture. If the future you are describing really happens, with the vast majority of society scraping for an ever smaller piece of the pie, what would be the natural outcome? What skills would be in demand?

There would be a lot of big crime targetted at the very few, very rich and the corporations (giant concentrations of assets imply large scale criminal operations). There would be a lot of petty crime between the proletariate (mostly crimes of opportunity with a low profit margin, probably not much of a career there except maybe in racketeering). Maybe some shakedown operations not too far removed from mass copyright enforcement. There would be religious and ideological pontification, offering hope to hopeless people, whether substantive or illusory. There would be a lot of civil unrest, and a lot of mechanisms for suppressing that unrest (tough to say which side will have the upper hand at any moment, but both sides will have openings).

So: Information security, physical security, ideology / idolism / propaganda and counter-propaganda, sockpuppet armies and microtargetted mass messaging, law enforcement and thuggery, lickspittle to the wealthy, and influence management and peddling, off the top of my head.

Consider what postmodern feudalism might look like. That should be a reasonable picture, if what you suggest should come to pass.

Unrelated server crash. Try this one. I'll have the original URL back up as soon as I get this new box built.

Sorry, I only support candidates who can provide me with vector-based artwork.

Here you go: LibreOffice Draw format.

who is binney

But, maybe my previous response was too snarky...

Sometimes people say, of Snowden, "He should have gone through official channels."

In 2001, William Binney did exactly that. Ever since then, Binney had been harrassed and prosecuted by the government, and marginalized and ignored by the media -- until Snowden embarrassed the major media with the help of Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian. Binney (and Drake before him) is why Snowden was right not to go through official channels; that method had been tested and found to fail.

who is binney

That's a big part of the reason I went with Binney instead of Doctorow (my original choice); to make you, and others like you, wonder, "Who is Binney?" Hopefully most of the rest will realize they can type "binney" into a search engine. :)

Looks like ".Snowden" at first glance. Reduce the space between the i and the dot.

Thanks for the tip. Done. Same url.

Snowden / Binney 2016!

That image is my original artwork (with friendly tips from Slashdot user Indigo), copyright 2014 Robert Bushman, licensed under CC by-nc-sa. It is properly sized for a 2.75" by 5" sticker with .125" bleed at 300 dpi. I'm getting them printed at psprint.com (I recommend doing a search for "vinyl bumper stickers", since they often have a coupon running on Duck Duck Go). I haven't seen my physical proofs yet, but the on-screen color conversion looked good to me. Please feel free to print a stack and spread them far and wide.

I appreciate you taking the time to comment and give suggestions. I think I am going to go with Snowden/Binney, and that I will stop fiddling with the design. Thank you!

Far to many Americans these days don't care how much it hurts government funding as long as it hurts people better off than them.

And far too many remain emotionally attached to laissez-faire despite extensive empirical evidence that in the real world it does not match the theoretical ideal free market.

Naturally, GDP growth is all that matters long term. Heck, even in just 20 years, the difference between 2% and 4% growth makes more difference in our day-to-day lives than anything else the government can do. But so few people seem to care.

The hardest thing for me to do when I did a deep dive on the data was to give up the preconception that I was hoping to prove. I went into it believing that the shift in the level of the top tax bracket had caused the reduction in long-run GDP growth by increasing friction on the entrepreneurial class (roughly P90 - P99 income range). While the data did not support my belief, it gave me an extraordinarily detailed picture of what did happen. I am an economist and an empiricist; my only rational choice was to abandon my belief in favor of the truth.