Well originally, the US was set up to be closer to this. The difference was, instead of being "picked from a lottery", they were elected in small elections all over the country. It was (is) called the Electoral College. Senators for each state also used to be elected by the state's legislature, rather than by popular vote.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, depending on your viewpoint), we changed all that to move closer to a direct democracy. People get angry about the Electoral College every once in a while and propose getting rid of it and moving to a direct popular vote, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.

I think this is tied somewhat to the issue of the issue of self-driving cars. Part of the problem with flying cars is the question of, who do we trust to fly them? What's the process of licensing people to drive/pilot these things? Do we trust people not to fly over protected airspace? Do we trust people not to fly into buildings? Along with everything else, driving/piloting a vehicle designed both for driving and flying might very well be more complicated than learning to drive and learning to fly combined.

However, if you can have self-driving cars, and you can make a self-flying driving car (including take-off and landing), then you could have the whole thing controlled by a computer guided system, adhering to restrictions to traffic and air traffic. Along with everything else, you could have restrictions that say, "When you're in NYC, the car knows that it needs to drive because airspace is restricted. Once you drive X miles outside the city, you can take to the air along certain restricted routes, following certain procedures." All of that could be controlled with computers, disallowing various kinds of abuses.

Of course, that assumes that we have sufficient systems for safe autonomous driving/flight. It also assumes that everything is coded well enough to prevent people from hacking the car to allow them to break the rules. It also assumed that people will be ok with being restricted and tracked. Finally, it assumes that, when you've put all these restrictions in place, you haven't made the idea so un-fun that people don't want a flying car anymore.

Some people assume that totalitarian/hierarchical organizations are simply inherently bad, and "democracy" is inherently good. Really, it's more about the situation and context.

For example, even in our modern "democracy", our military still uses a top-down hierarchy with a rigid chain of command. There are good reasons for this. When you're in dangerous situations, organization and timing can become vital to the survival of the group, and survival tends to trump social justice. If the military commander has a plan that requires a troop of soldiers move to a particular location in a short amount of time, you don't want people standing around debating, or wondering whether the plan is fair. You need people to follow orders immediately, or else a lot of people might die.

There have been situations in humanity's past when this would have been true of social/governmental organizations too. If the chief needs everyone to mobilize in order to avert disaster and keep the entire tribe from being wiped out, then you don't want a lot of debate. The whole setup worked pretty well for a while.

Of course now, things are different. Most of our lives (speaking at least of the people reading Slashdot) are relatively safe and comfortable. We don't need to follow orders immediately and unquestioningly in order to stay alive. Also, our society is larger, and the concentration of power is greater. The danger of taking time for debate is not greater than the danger of a bad ruler with absolute power over a society, so totalitarianism seems like it's not such a great idea.

A) You're saying the iPhone 6 looks like the HTC one, from the back, if you ignore all the details and focus purely on the rough shape of the device, which is roughly the same as the iPhone 4.
B) Apple didn't just put out those pictures touting their "new design approach" and "sophisticated look".
C) I don't have a problem with companies copying each other. I think it's generally a good strategy to copy the best thing out there, and then improve on it. It's just kind of silly to copy and then brag about how your copied product is revolutionary.
D) The Sony Clies didn't have as strong a similarity, so you're not getting any points there.
E) People who complain about fanboys are usually just fanboys for the competitor.

This person probably lives downwind of the great lakes, which froze last winter because the polar vortex moved off the poles (which were above freezing at times) and landed on Minnesota. We had a great winter in Vermont. OTOH, they are experiencing unseasonable high temperatures in California this summer, and Europe has had some really hot summers recently. Unfortunately people confuse their local climate with the global climate.

Warming hasn't flatlined. Atmospheric warming hasn't even flatlined. But sea warming has been consistent and substantial. Google clathrates if you're curious why you should care about that.

If that's your best argument, it sounds like you've come to the debate unarmed. Congress is notoriously hostile to climate science.

Yes, and really, really huge (many orders of magnitude bigger) amounts of profit would be lost by oil companies' shareholders if we decided to believe the absolutely overwhelming evidence that carbon dioxide causes global warming. Being a global warming scientist is a lot less lucrative than using those same skills to do just about anything else, so it's really hard to believe that job security is the motivational basis for roughly 99% of scientists who study climate change saying that we have a problem. Chances are that they just want to try to prevent their children seeing the last days of civilization and then dying painfully.

The double irony is that a lot of climate change deniers are the same people who stockpile weapons in case of the collapse of civilization. It's almost as if you bloody well want to spend your last days futilely defending the dwindling supplies in your bunker.

I like how the "new design approach" and "sophisticated look" boil down to "making it look more like an iPhone 4."

Why? Is it your contention that the work of sysadmins and support personnel has just been trouble-free for decades, and all the problems were caused by a sysadmin "not knowing what they were doing"?

And now is when we have a long and stupid debate as to whether the term "IT" signifies a grouping of all computer-related work including development, or whether it's limited to workstation/server/network design, deployment, and support. And we go on with this debate for a long time, becoming increasingly irate, arguing about whether developers or sysadmins do more of the 'real' work, and...

Let's just skip to the end and agree that, regardless of whether IT 'really' includes software development, it's pretty clear that the author didn't have software development in mind when he wrote the article.

And then other hiring managers would get annoyed and toss your resume because you did something you weren't supposed to. Maybe I'm just cynical, but that seems to be the way it goes with job applications: for anything that one person says, "I would be impressed and that resume would go to the top of my list!" there's at least a few others that say, "I find that unappealing and I would ignore a resume that came in with that."

There's a bit of a problem there, given the automated scans and everything.

For example, HR people will do things like filtering out resumes that don't include "Cisco". They might not actually have Cisco equipment, or even if they do, it might not be a vital part of the job. Regardless, Their system is just set up to filter out anything that doesn't include "Cisco". Now, you're a network tech that isn't very experienced with Cisco, but you've done a little work on Cisco equipment here and there, and you understand routers in general. Do you slip "Cisco" into your resume just to get past the scans?

I don't on my resume, but it's a tough issue, and I understand why someone would do that kind of thing. The problem is, by having the automated filtering process, employers/recruiters are providing an incentive for people to throw in buzzwords just to get their resume to be seen by human eyes. I've actually heard recruiters suggest that people put a bunch of small-type white-on-white invisible text at the bottom of their resumes, filled with buzzwords without context, just to get past automated filters.

What I find sad and disturbing is not that people will throw buzzwords in their resume, but that employers have created a system where that's a smart strategy. You'd think someone would come up with a better method.

And yet... OP has a point! Dunno why someone modded that flamebait.

Well if the message is literally saying, "This call may be recorded for quality assurance," then couldn't you take that as permission. It doesn't specify who should do the recording, it just says it "may be recorded". Like, "Yes, you may go to the bathroom. This phone call also may be recorded."