People care about people. Governments do not. Any one who thinks the government is his friend is either a crony or a fool, possibly both. Governments' mission is to compel or prohibit; their core competence is coercion in the name of the status quo.

Before government made black self-defense illegal and enforced bigotry with government guns, blacks at least had a chance. Society was at least slowly intergrating even in the face of government sanctioned lynching, before government stepped in officially and made it illegal, backed by government guns and jails. The US Post office and military were more integrated than most people realize, until Woodrow Wilson came along and enforced segregation. That Louisian railroad was just one of many companies who integrated in pursuit of the amlighty dollar, until governments came along and stopped them with government guns and jail.

Progressives are an ignorant whiny lot, like all statists. All power to the government! The people, not so much.

BULLSHIT. Slavery and Jim Crow were both the RESULT of government laws. Neither can exist in the absence of government. Jim Crow in particular owes its existence to a Louiana law requiring a railroad to segregate its railroad cars against its own wishes, said law being approved by the US Supreme Court.

You need to learn a lot of history before opening your yap next time.

What a blissful world you live in!

Corporate taxes are bullshit in the first place. They are passed on in their product prices. If your response to that is that businesses are evil for doing so, then you are doubly a fool -- if an expense like taxes makes no difference in product prices, then why do other expenses matter? Expense is expense, money is fungible, and if you can't see that, you are far too ignorant to survive.

And that theoretical speed is with minimal fuel, no weapons, no armor, no maneuverability, no military radios. In short,

Then there's that crap about being a jet fighter.

which is only half the horsepower available in real fighter airplanes 5 years later which could only manage 450 mph.

This is one of the more idiotic articles to come down the pike in quite a while.

"Hard to follow" is itself hard to follow. The shades and colors and hard lines made it difficult for German stereo rangefinders to lock on, it made it difficult for submarines to determine the shape and length which were necessary for proper range, speed, and angle estimates, and in general it made target identification slower and more uncertain.

It wasn't zebra striping either. It was bizarre blocky shapes, always with straight edges, and there was a lot of color. The reason so many people think it black and white is because color film was very expensive and rare, and newspapers didn't print color pictures.

... if government just stepped out of the picture altogether. Yes, I hate bloatware. Why do you hate it so much, though, that you think you need to get government fo back up your hatred with the threat of jail and corporate death?

Government exists only to compel or prohibit, ultimately at the point of a gun. Its core competency is corrupt cronyism. To want that on your side is to admit your desires can not be achieved by moral persuasion or logical argument.

I wrote a file deduplicator. Build a table of file size ---> name. If two files have the same size, run md5sum on them or just use cmp -s. It's a trivial program.

But if you have photos which you consider duplicates but which have different sizes or checksums, then it's a visual gig and lots of boring tedious work,

Try this refutation.

tl;dr -- they counted the entire budget of any organization which spent even a dime on anything remotely anti-climate crisis. The true amount spent is probably (my guess) well under $100M.

It was intellectually dishonest to even release that study, and intellectually dishonest to tout it.

Exactly my thoughts. What need does this serve? Will it only be targeted at remote equipment (satellites, undersea rovers) which don't really need a phone or SIM card in the first place? Will accessible equipment still come with the write-once-read-mostly kind?

Anytime coercion enters the picture, along come its sibling corruption in every sense of the word.

If your scheme is not popular enough to stand on its own two legs -- if your arguments are not enough to win the day -- propping it up with compulsion is the only recourse left, and it reaps what it's worth.

Yes, let's set a standard, AND NEVER CHANGE IT.

Technology makes one leap into the future, and never changes again, so new standards are just capitalist hokum meant to deceive a gullible public and corrupt crony governments.

Why anyone ever let the government move away from the horsefull carriage standard, I do not know. Oh wait, that was after they'd already let the government approve the carriage, as if horses alone weren't good enough. Oh wait, that was after they'd already approved the walking standard. Oh wait, someone approved shoes and boots. And socks. And shoelaces, don't forget them, or velcro tabs, or slip-ons.

Yes, by all means, let's freeze standards to what YOU want, bub.

"Ministers" pretty much rules out .... only a few countries. Subby might want to include the country next time.

1. That's the first time anyone has ever tried a reverse ad hominem attack on me. Yay!

2. A one-sided conversation is not a conversation. Once commenced, a conversation is not under control of any single party to it. This is not a panel discussion and you are not the moderator of one. if you don't like the path the conversation taken -- if you now wish you had not made that first post -- too bad. Drop out if you want.

You have argued nothing except that you are butt hurt over being called out on your attempts to artificially limit the definition of corruption and cronyism. Your subsequent attempts to pretend you didn't start the topic and switch horses in mid-stream is interesting. I can only guess your first post embarrasses you so much you want to disown it.

If, instead, all you want to do now is argue about what degree of butt hurt you are, find a mirror. But if you want to argue about what crony corruption is, feel free to respond again. I'm sure slashdot's servers can withstand your efforts.

Your only limit on a conversation is refusal to take part. If you bring up corruption in a half-assed manner and I call you out and show how the problem is far wider than you are willing to admit, you don't get to call a foul on me for expanding the conversation. That's 3 year old behavior.

You especially don't get to try to limit the conversation to your original post on the one hand, and then widen it on the other hand by telling me to go read other comments of yours. That's admission that you wish to withdraw your original comment because it wasn't reflective of your rhoughts.

My opinions of you are necessarily as fact-free as your opinions of me. My facts showing the depth and breadth of crony corruption are sitting there waiting for you to answer with something other than "I was only talking about insurance since 2010" or more opinions on me, which apparently is ok for thee but not for me.