Then let's all agree not to take it. As we really only care about the relative performance when compared against your peers. If all your peers did it, you'd be in the same place you are now.

Might be better is if we all worked less, got paid less and hired a few more people. I realize some people want to work 50 hours a week (or more), but I don't and it's been hard to not do that and stay in my industry.

It's tough to arrest someone carrying a firearm when no one else is allowed to carry one.

It's time we repeal the Fourth Amendment. Police need to be able to find all the criminals using any means necessary. Won't someone please think of the children!!

(And if you post arguments against this proposal, I'll push to repeal the First Amendment as well)

So when googlebot visits, I'll send it some bullshit to satisfy it. Then continue to operate my website without really having to commit to mobile content.

There should be no estate for Goebbels, precisely because of the person he was and the things he has done. It's that the copyright isn't valid, it's that the estate should not exist!

When I read the article it didn't seem like the normal excepts you find in a biography. The excerpts have been described as "extensive", and I think Random House could have went beyond Fair Use and into copyright violation.

Orthogonal to the copyright issue is that I don't understand why Goebbels has an estate to make a claim against Random House. It should never have been permitted to allow a convicted war criminal to pass property onto heirs or relatives and all of his property ought to have reverted to the state and have been sold at auction. So what the heck happened?

You should write it instead of cut and paste?

There is fair use, and there is lifting the work of another person. If this were an academic paper, I would be far more lenient. but this is a book written to sell a lot of books. The purpose is to make money here, and not letting publishers get a free ride is precisely why there are copyright laws.

Then you run into the predictions of the Technocracy movement, where the price system collapses and most people have no job and zero income. Without job there are no consumers, without consumers there are no jobs. It's inevitable as the amount of work an individual can do increases with technology.

...we all give up.

Even if we have to invest exponentially more resources into shrinking transistors, the industry is very likely to continue to invest. They will give up when the R&D costs are high enough that there is no longer any profit. But marketing has really pushed people to upgrade to new devices that they don't need, if marketing continues to do their job then we'll see Moore's Law working for quite some time to come.

If there was an apocalypse, I assume there would be fewer people alive than there are now.

There is plenty of places to grow things if we all live like homesteaders on 2 or 3 acres of land. Takes about an acre per person to feed someone on today's diet. Less if you're a bit smarter about what you do. A bit more needed if you want to not die if you have a bad season.

Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley is 1290 sq mi. That's 825600 acres, if every man, woman and child had 5 acres to raise crops and livestock that would support 165,120 people, or about 41280 small families. (I don't think anyone would want to farm more than about 15 acres alone anyways, not without a tractor)

So that means a thriving suburban community of 1,894,605 today would be reduced to no more than 165,120. So an apocalypse where only 1 in 11 people survives is sustainable. Any more and conflict is likely as people fight for resources to avoid starving, that would most likely result in far more deaths and bring the population far below what is needed.

I used silicon valley as an example, as I am familiar with the area and I felt that it has a pretty representative population density. For people on the east coast, places like Long Island would have to be abandoned entirely for a large population to survive. It could support some people, but I doubt anyone could come to an agreement on who could stay and who would have to move further inland. My rough guess is people would have to spread out as far as all of Pennsylvania to handle that 9% of survivors from NY and NJ. That kind of population pressure is likely to create a ripple of conflict in many regions.

blacktop roads exist because we didn't know what to do with all that sludge from the refineries.

if money and labor was no object we would make roads out of roman concrete, and would probably pave far fewer roads than we have.

That blacktop is crap anyways, it falls apart in northern climates after a few seasons and patches are less stable than the original leading to a cycle of deterioration. (drive in Michigan to see what the post-apocalyptic highway system will look like)

I wonder if chewing bubble gum would also impact a below average student's exam scores. Seems like minimize the distractions from sex, alcohol, and cannabis would tend to help most below average students.

Also, if you can only smoke in these Dutch coffee shops, and spend all your time there instead of in your apartment or dorm, then less studying might explain away some of the exam scores.

But despite the above concerned, I think most of us all assumed that there is some cognitive impact while someone is using cannabis. The debate has always been if this is temporary or is the impact long term. I tend to find a lot of holes in research that shows the negative impact to be long term. I have a hunch that there could be some neutral impact that is long term (changes but not detrimental), but that has been rather tough to measure.

(researching comfortably from my armchair)

Being able to vote what gets lit next would solve a lot of debate in my circle.

entire internet -> cafe wifi -> trigger is not 20 meters and not easy to trace unless you know to look for cafe's polling HTTP or IRC or XMPP on a frequent basis.

But who says you can't tie the trigger to a facebook update? I change my profile picture and suddenly a bucket of pigs blood dumps on Carrie's head.

Well you can share it on the same system or over a network filesystem that is designed to do file locking in a unix friendly way (like NFS).

And I totally agree with other posters that RCS for /etc is a great way to go. I use it myself. (but I keep my DNS zone files in git)