Yes, because this really makes it sound appealing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Me, I'm going the flunky route. Once someone inevitably turns on the superintelligent AI and it realizes in about two seconds that humanity is the biggest threat to its existence and spends the next five seconds taking over control of all automated hightech weaponry, its still going to need flunkies running the camps until the AI's got its life support chain entirely automated.

Maybe I'll get lucky and get the opportunity to kick the guys pressing the self-destruct button on the whole human race in the nuts a few times.

They're less arrogant and more flexible because they have lost power, not because they have learned any lesson or changed in any way. If they find themselves in a position of power they will abuse it again, and if they can screw you and gain from it when nobody's looking, you're going to get screwed.

Not forgetting how they will behave with power and keeping track when the company's nature rears its head again is part of keeping them from doing it again.

Maybe once they've kept their nose clean for half a century, but this far they haven't even managed two days.

> It would distort the free market and no one would take the risk...
Risk? What risk? The DOW did hit ~7k briefly, but last year it broke record highs on a daily basis. If you happened to be the idiot who sold at 7K, you lost. If you just kept your money where it was, you're doing pretty well. And why is that? Because congress plunged us deeper into debt and the federal reserve printed money like it was going out of style. And in the long run, those things will disproportionately hurt the lower and middle class in the form of higher taxes* that stifle job creation and inflation that erodes wages and savings.

So why would our government do this when there's obviously a lot more poor and middle-class voters than rich ones?
> ...and who is the shareholder? Your elderly mom, YOU, etc

Ah yes, that's it. Because the system forces all of us to take the same risk, independent of our financial means.
Between FDIC and NCUA, each adult can have $500k of government-insured bank and credit union deposits, far more than most of us have in liquid assets. Why would we possibly put our money at risk in the stock market? Because they pay almost no interest, yet government policies almost ensure inflation and profits in the stock market. So while we won't loose our deposits to bank fraud or runs on the bank, they'll slowly decrease in purchasing power. So instead we have to put it at the same risk that the very wealthy take in the stock market. Which means that when those systemic risks actually happen, the government HAS to bail out the markets or everyone, rich or poor, looses. This means the tax payer is actually on the hook to make sure the rich stay rich.

* Why do taxes and inflation hurt the poor and middle-class more? Because wage increases always trail inflation. And because the rich make most of their money through capital gains, paying 15% federal income tax while the rest of us pay more. We also pay a higher percentage of our salary in social security and medicare (there's a cap on how much of your salary is taxed for those). And since we have to spend more of our salary to survive, we pay a higher percentage of our earnings in sales tax. So I'm all for a flat income tax, but it has to take the place of all other taxes.

"... while listening in to someone elses private conversation."
"... while looking at intercepted pictures."
"... while reading your XKEYSCORE results on 'steamy secret agent sex'"

More like that.

I'm of no interests to secret services whatsoever

Yeah, that's not up to you to decide. Someone else will decide that and if your phone was at the wrong place at the wrong time and someone misread or misinterpreted some data you're going to be the guy on the floor with assault rifles pointed at your back and your family screaming around you. Better hope your realize the masked men are the cops so you don't struggle and get shot.

It's not like those doing the monitoring are certain to be competent or even guaranteed to be sane, and with signal-to-noise ratios being what they are and the extreme rarity of actual terrorists you can be sure that most hits will be false positives. Other people 'of no interest'.

Intent DOES matter to me and I do not think that any government in western democracies would dare misuse this power for oppressing people.

Oh, right, because we're not voting any representatives of ideologies that have shown no such restraint into power in Europe. Oh, wait...

So if you want to keep from being 'of no interest' in the future, better keep from saying anything that could possibly piss off communists, neonazis, religious fundamentalists or anyone else who might possibly wield power in the future during the rest of your life. The archives are going to remain but the intent of today has no binding power over future rulers.

Well, she'd better keep it out of Sweden. Apart from the Swedish opinion on hookers and blackjack, the Swedish FRA loves giving all data passing through the country to the NSA. The UK is as bad, although they don't quite share the Swedish hatred of hookers and blackjack.

Of course, whether any other European security agencies care about their citizens privacy is debatable.

Nothing in the Amanita genus is easy to id considering that it's a huge genus which includes a very large number of both the most commonly found and most poisonous mushrooms.

Now, if you mean that the genus, rather than the species phalloides is easy to identify, okay, maybe. But distinguishing A. phalloides from it's edible cousins is in no way easy, and you've got to be pretty dumb to eat anything that looks similar unless you have a degree in Mycology and/or decades continuous of field experience in the region where you picked it. There are old mushroom hunters and there are bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters, as the saying goes.

This is especially the case when other both edible and choice species like Bolets, Morels and Chanterelles are relatively easy to identify, have no poisonous lookalikes (assuming you have the experience to notice key characteristics). Of course, they're much harder to find, but...

Spending should be proportional to the danger because spending vast amounts of money on minor issues means more people die to the bigger threats.

As terrorism over the last decade killed about as many as die in freak bathtub accidents (about 300 per year), we should be spending about the same as we're spending on bathroom safety on the war on those scary terrorists.

Why not start at the beginning and tell us why the heck you're redesigning in the first place.

I read you're little "WE HEAR YOU" post. And no, you're still not listening. If you were, you'd know that we like slashdot just the way it is. No redesign. Why are you trying to change it at all?!? We're all baffled. Your stupid little post just said "we'll slow down". But nobody asked you to "slow down". We /told/ you to stop. Just don't touch anything.

If, for some unfathomable reason, you think you do need to change things, why don't you start by explaining why. Why are you trying to make /. look just like Ars Technica? Are your revenues hurting and you need to work more ads in there or increase readership to charge more for your ads? What gives. Why change it at all?

And if it's is revenue-related, why not just ask for money like Wikimedia. I donate to them every time they ask because I value their service. I'd give /. $5 ever once in a while too. I don't want to click on any ads, nor do I want to sign up for some paid account (I rarley log in anyway). I just want to read my FA's and comments. (Okay, maybe just headlines and comments).

Me too. Solidarity, brothers, solidarity.

Why would they overwhelm the supremes and bully congress with weakness on terrorism? Don't you think they've got enough dirt on both?

If congressmen or supremes want to claim terrorist threats as the reason they'll do what the NSA tells them to do it's because terrorists sounds better than 'we need to vote for this NSA authorization or they'll leak the mails to my mistress to the NYT'.

If I worked for facebook, I'd refer to users as "dumb fucks" too.

No, I don't have any "friends". :(

The fundamentals of the broken window fallacy means that if you break the bakers window you create a demand for another window and 'stimulate' the economy. The Fallacy aspect is the fact that the baker has now spent that money on a new window instead of a new pot that he needed as well, leading to a sum of a broken window, a new whole window but no new pot. The loss is the opportunity cost of something else not getting bought and produced.

The same applies to wine bottles (if they're drinking (or breaking) them to create demand rather than to enjoy them).

The same could theoretically be applied to virtual goods destruction, but the opportunity cost for virtual goods is actually in the creation side for them. As they are artificially scarce they could theoretically be instantiated en-masse without any cost at all, freeing up money for the production of actual scarce resources being created within the economy.

However, at least for games like EVE, a significant portion of the entertainment is derived from the production of artificially scarce virtual goods. People pay to sit around producing them, unlike windows where very few pay to hang around in a window factory making windows. This means that the failure to just instantiate a titan for anyone who wants one does not carry the same cost to the real world economy as would a failure to instantly replicate a window, could it be done at the same zero cost.

The difference being that wine bottles are scarce, while EVE assets are artificially scarce and could be replaced instantly without any labour or resources being consumed. If any 'real' economic damage is inflicted it's through artificial scarcity.

Of course, as that scarcity is a significant factor in the entertainment value of EVE, and the 'labour' required actually being considered entertainment by some as well it's not as simple as saying it's 'damage' and arguments in favour of the function can't be relegated to a reflection of the broken window fallacy.

You could rewrite the headline to 'Battle causes the opportunity of $200k worth of gameplay about building starships' and it would hold some validity as well.

For whistleblower laws to do any good at all they really need to be enforced with with prohibitive and spectacular zeal, ie, anyone attempting to act against a whistleblower needs to get landed in jail so fast their head spins.

Of course, we all know it doesn't work like that. Perhaps the whistleblower won't get prosecuted but they are likely to lose their job or at the very least they'll find their social situation at work impossible to deal with. Few actions against the whistleblower will ever be punished.

Realistically it's go to the press and hope the attention makes retaliation difficult, or shut up and do something else if you don't want to be complicit in whatever illegal acts happening that should be leaked. Snowden's assessment was without a doubt correct and he chose the only possible ethical course of action.