I may be speaking from inexperience here, but the problem you're highlighting is a big circular clusterfuck.

Going back to ancient times, once a book is published the first time, it can be copied. When book-copying labor (scribes with pens) was scarce, books were scarce--but at the same time, anyone could be in the business of copying books, if they had the education and a steady hand; demand for more books was virtually infinite, as there were plenty of libraries or individuals that would pay for a copy of, say, philosophy, or math, or something else interesting. (Of course, it was dependent on local demand specifically, or any travelling traders you could sell to, and those are different...) When book copying first became industrial (printing press), book publication (both copying and first edition) became a centralized industry, with a large overhead that had to do with labor, machine costs, and transportation. But because you were doing it in bulk, you could absorb the overhead with margins on each book sold instead of sustaining yourself on a sell-by-sell basis.

The book industry now faces two problems: it's incredibly easy to print things (albeit in variable quality), and book copying is now digital: instantaneous and costing virtually nothing. We are back where we were at the beginning, where anyone could get into the business of copying books--and thanks to digital communications, books created anywhere can be printed and distributed anywhere. Book publication as a centralized industry can only exist with the digital equivalent of mercantilism, which means that book publication as an industry needs to use its money as a leverage to prevent the industry from collapsing.

Basically, if the entire book industry collapsed in a pile of dust tomorrow, and there never again was a centralized book publishing regime, we wouldn't lose access to many books. There would be lots of scanning and trading, and a lot of books published digitally and independently, either to be printed locally or used on some sort of reader. Maybe--maybe--certain authors that could only thrive on a centralized industry would fail, but a new decentralized industry would be born. Basically the only people who really, severely don't want that to happen are people who depend on the system as-is, and unfortunately, many of them have been filling out their wallets on those margins for a long time. It'd be nice for them to stop being selfish, but their worldview and their current jobs rely on this system, so I guess it's only to be expected that they think in those terms.

Agreed, I'd feel a lot better if part of this competition was zero (not "acceptably low") false positives. Some backwards places in the world (yes, I am speaking specifically of America) being accused of sex crimes is a Bad Thing and will ruin your entire life, even if the accusation is baseless. It is not acceptable to create an algorithm that will ruin innocent people's lives with some probability, if used for its intended purpose.

They make high precision scales, and they're going around the world saying, "Look how our scale gives a different mass measurement for the same object in different places." In the video on their site they talk about how they do in fact go out of their way to adjust the scales for local gravity (wherever they're being shipped to? Somehow?), but they could push that emphasis more.

What they're showing is that the mass reading (as opposed to weight reading, which is accurate) is not consistent when you move them around the world, and that their instruments in particular are sensitive enough to be affected. That's true and important, but they should be making more of a fuss about their calibration services if they're going to be showing off that sensitivity.

Million-dolar spacecraft have been lost for less. Units matter.

I don't know why a company that made scales would make that particular mistake, but then, if NASA can do it, who am I to judge.

I don't see the problem. All he has to do is roll doubles.

Occasionally, and I know this may surprise you, people use exaggerated language in order to complain about something which is, admittedly, a minor issue.

Like how your mom complains about your "microscopic" dick. I know it's very small, but it's biologically impossible for it to be so small you need a microscope.

I was discussing violent videogames elsewhere on the internet and brought this up:

Not to mention that the idea is that the entire tube holds a vacuum, which buoys it up, and it's held DOWN with tethers. How do you even construct that? There are no cranes to LEO. Even if you put them in place, and empty out the gas slowly so that it rises (without coming to a sudden stop at the end that breaks a tether), each segment is probably hundreds of pounds of metal. Imagine being miles in the air, wrestling with an enormous hunk of metal that's tied to the earth in what you can only hope is the right position, in order to get the end to line up with the last piece...

Well, okay, it sounds like a heck of an exciting job. But it also sounds like it could go wrong so terribly easily...

Jobs: If you're driving under the influence, you've showed you're either negligent, or actively willing to endanger yourself and others for a night's entertainment. I understand your argument about "a grown man, having two drinks with a meal"--but it's just a drink. Most restaurants have something else you can quench your thirst with that won't make you unable to drive. If you're so (pardon the term) drunk on the taste and sensation of a beer with your dinner that you're in danger of going over, maybe you can't be trusted to know the limit in the first place.

Go figure that people might not consider you a pristine employee. I mean sure, you might do a very good job at whatever it is they hire you for. You might also be a surly, insensitive jackass that ends up breaking property or assaulting people, which may in turn cost them more than you'll ever be worth.

Insurance: Drunk drivers kill a lot of people every year. In addition to it being a tragedy, for the insurance co.s, it's a business matter. How do YOU propose that they tell the difference between a person who drives drunk (or tipsy) but have been lucky so far, and people who might die, kill, create enormous medical bills, or wreck expensive property tomorrow?

Fines: These are laws about public safety. You're complaining about paying money because you were caught endangering others. I'm not sure I trust you behind the wheel in any event, knowing that. Let alone that you consulted a lawyer about how to act if (when eventually?) you get caught doing something that could kill people, and took the advice to heart.

It's not like there's no corruption and malevolence in the police, or that there's nowhere that police do a shitty job of keeping people safe. But if you want to make an argument like that, pick something other than harsh drunk driving laws.

I strongly hope this leads to criminal investigations and long jailtime.

I'd be rather offended if anyone didn't hope for the same.

I'd prefer not to be cynical about a group like Mozilla, but that's blatant deceit. The default is what happens before a choice is made, so there is one unless you are physically restrained from using the browser until you make a choice.

The actual answer is that nobody knows what would happen to advertising, which like it or not is the underpinning of the web, if DNT was enabled for everyone. But you can't say that for two reasons.
1) It makes Mozilla look like a total sellout
2) If normal people actually understood that the web as we know it wouldn't exist without tracking-enhanced adverts, the magic would go away. They'd be hesitant to go to random websites about strange things because they're being tracked. They'd hesitate to be as honest about searching the web. They'd cease to believe that you can find everything you want online, because someone is watching. In other words, they'd become afraid of the internet, afraid of browsing, afraid of speaking out online.

Which, maybe they should be afraid, maybe they shouldn't. That's a different argument altogether.

There are still satellites (the manmade kind), which are not shielded against high velocity shrapnel. Any orbiting ships or stations will also want to avoid shrapnel, if at all possible, down to sizes that are essentially impossible to detect.

Also consider this: Coming at the planet are 200 basketball-sized, high-metal rocks, and a nuclear bomb (EMP) with no EM signature (such as radio communications back home) that could burst in orbit, at the edge of the atmosphere, or on touchdown. Radar can't tell them apart. They have a tiny angular cross-section even assuming they're bunched up together, which they need not be. If they're spread out over several miles you'd barely know they're there. After a series of them turned out to just be metal asteroids, would stop caring and let them burn up, or keep destroying every last one? At what cost? Assuming the war has multiple fronts, how many people are you going to assign to this task rather than something more constructive?

Yeah, and I'm sure it wouldn't intimidate him at all to know that federal prosecutors were breathing down his neck, looking for ANYTHING illegal.

Because a guy like that has an otherwise clean record, yup yup.

Aside: The question I ask myself sometimes about corruption is, what is it like to be the first person to be corrupt. Not knowing for sure that paying off a cop is going to work, not having a whole citadel of corruption around you showing you that people get away with it. The first cop running crooked, not knowing if he'll be stopped; the first politico scared shitless that someone will figure out he's taking bribes.

Or maybe they're doing it because they're on drugs or alcohol and can't think straight for crap. I don't know.

We can make other things fly, just not cars. What we have here is clearly a failure of engineering.

For anyone not in on the joke, it's from way back near the beginning of the webcomic, Schlock Mercenary. (The art's a lot better now, and I recommend it to anyone interested in good, silly sci-fi.)