This kind of trolling is pretty disgusting, but comes with freedom of speech, I guess.

this.

With, as the GP calls them, 'spectators' like these, we don't need enemies.

Lion tamer? Sounds like a realistic next goal for someone like this ticking bomb guy. Once someone clearly identifies with the goal of killing hundreds of people, it's more economical to test his intentions (which they did) and carve the rotten flesh out of society's body, versus resorting to asking him "enjoy the World, how do you feel about your mother, and hey here are some pills, if all fails, they'll change your mind - because you want this, right? - , pretty please never ever skip them" or following his every move for the rest of his life at a huge expense to society, which is never an airtight process anyway. We can moralise a lot from the vantage point of First World sophistication, but someone infected by medieval concepts will only exploit this as cracks in the society's self defense mechanism. If they go medieval on us, we need to take appropriate action, in pragmatic ways, to defend ourselves, rather than being immersed in navel gazing, rationalising murderous behavior etc. If he was ready to set off the bomb, of course let's remove him from society. I think most vegetarians would resort to eating meet if the alternative is starvation; most animal lovers don't have a problem squishing the odd moskito or wasp if they are bitten. The humanistic person like you also need to deal with forces whose very intention is to end humanistic society. Sure, learn about stuff, analyse, rationalise, give planet size benefits of the doubt, and contemplate how we should acquit criminals if it was proven they had a bad hair day or somebody looked at them with contempt. But in the meantime defend yourself from clearly demonstrated dangers, otherwise you might find yourself under Sharia law and you can forget about open discourse.

The FBI presented the guy with an 'opportunity' the same way some jihadist cell could have done, having identified him as a willing contributor. What's the difference? What if he were approached by a real terrorist cell, did the same thing, and, e.g. for some technical reason, the bomb didn't go off?

I insist that the FBI take such preventive measures, rather than just resorting to mopping up the blood, identifying bodies, and learning what happened and why, after the event - which are pretty clear to begin with, e.g. they were jihadists, or lone wolf criminals, period.

>If someone openly stated they want to become a martyr and hurt or kill a lot of people, they are mentally ill, whether they intend to carry it out or not. That's not open to debate.

No, you're only proving that you're incapable of properly reasoning in the real World. You hold some values and convictions and your spotty thought processes lead you to assume that all other people do, even those that grew up in radically different environments, maybe in a setting resembling the medieval ages, or maybe born to parents who themselves grew up in such an environment, and now they, and their children have difficulty adjusting to the First World. You are apparently incapable to understand that there are lots of religions and lots of calls to arm, especially in the Muslim world. Therefore you don't model a jihadist properly; you model yourself, or those who grew up near you, with the slight superficial change of having darker skin, calling God in a different name and maybe speaking an additional language.

Because naive (I was polite here) people like you represent danger to society through improperly resisting defense mechanisms of society, maybe society would benefit more from your visits to a psychologist than from the visits of a jihadist in the making:

You might learn not to project your current mind into the bodies of other people. You might learn that someone plotting something unreasonable _to you_ may not be mentally ill. However the jihadist won't say, "Yes, sure, after these 10 therapy sessions now I see the World is a beautiful place and I want to constructively contribute to society.".

What is it about the computational medium that make people perceive it as antisocial? I think it's because the screen size, and that it's a small rectangular window into another world. But nothing in computing is inherently antisocial; discounting 'social networks' and 'groupware', there is great potential in socially shared computing once the sharing can be done in a physical environment, rather than just through the little rectangular windows.

Imagine for example large surfaces, e.g. the interior or exterior walls of a building, or pavement surfaces, when they act as both displays and sensors (camera, pressure etc.). So many interesting and creative potential applications that are socially engaging and inclusive.

So what's the next step then? It's like the razor ads, with more and more blades.

So let's introduce the next stepping stone: Suxorz!

Suxorz has an even more incredibly large number of puzzle shapes, and even more colors! Of course they have to be smaller, so the text on them is unreadable and targeting it with the mouse teaches you some skill already! You get everything that you get in Scratch! and Snap! plus:

- Java-like interfaces!
- XML builder!
- an MVC framework that forces manual event handling with string based fake-namespace notifications for race conditions!
- you can convert the program to COBOL and ABAP/4!
- inheritance! - of course, just single inheritance, to force you to create 'visitor' patterns instead of just using multiple argument dispatch (CLOS)
- C++ style template programming!

As a side effect, it suppresses all other programming paradigms, so visit your local museum to experience stuffed specimens of Lisp, Logo, Forth, Scheme, Matlab, R, Haskell etc. and anything declarative!

Progress!

So frequent unwarranted recommendations for Scratch. It has a pretty crude UI, and it looks unappealing. It feels like adults' conception of what kid programming might be like. Kids are not stupid, they're kids, we should of course simplify and make it approachable, but 'for kids' doesn't mean it should be shit. There's all the deserved dismissal of GOTO, but Scratch and literally EVERYTHING except Logo teaches imperative programming. When people coded in Basic, they didn't think about the problems with a language that didn't encourage structured programming. Kids will look back to this period and will say apologetically, "imperative was the only thing available, the default choice, of course I got stuck in this incredibly mechanistic, low level mindset".

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to IMPERATIVE PROGRAMMING: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

not Edsger Dijkstra

With interesting data flow tooling for e.g. data analysis (RapidMiner, Knime) and even shader programming (http://bit.ly/1JwMJED), and Bret Victor's vision, not to mention his kid-friendly approach to functional programming (http://worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/) and visual editing prototypes, we should certainly do better than the n+1th rehash of some frigging 'while' loop into which some other imperative instructions can be snapped like puzzles. Everyone and their dog just rehashes this pattern over and over, mindlessly.

Not to mention that Scratch requires literacy, and literacy in English, for no good reason. Ah and its ergonomics is pretty bad, small fonts, incredibly small interacting surfaces that require a lot of accuracy. We have apparently just no idea how to use this novel interactive medium called 'computing' - the best we can suggest for kids is '59 vintage BASIC without GOTO wrapped in colored puzzle shapes to make it seem 'intuitive'.

The first person who invents a proper content creation tool for kids will have probably revolutionalised computing. There are so many people with artistic talent or creative inspiration who just don't get near the computing medium due to its incredibly arcane, fragmented and brittle hodge-podge of a pile of mess.

considering its options

Illegal for US companies, or for China? I suspect the former. Then wouldn't 'China' be able to shop in Canada or Germany or Russia? Buying it through the channel? Heck buy it from the million PC makers and OEMs who already buy PCs for probably 85% of the World's PCs and 75% of the World's servers.

Scratching my head, probably it takes an Einstein to figure this out

Could be because of different (or no) rebates here or something, but the Nissan Leaf and similar smaller EV cars are about twice as expensive as the comparable car of the same make. Glad to hear it's different in the US.

Btw. I agree it's just just a wording disagreement about 'the government pays you' part - I assume that the local pollution and higher oil import dependence are more than offset by European fuel taxes; so you can imagine that you as an electric car driver are asked to pay your due share for road maintenance, public education etc. that's funded with fuel tax, and then immediately the government ''pays you" the equal amount as a handout / incentive. That the net is zero doesn't invalidate either side of the transfer (principle of gross reporting).

I like separating the notions of cash transfer from notions of the underlying economics, because, in principle, funding roads and education is a responsibility that's fairly independent of whether you drive an EV or ICE car. Just because the government mixes money pools and justifies taxes through (sometimes real, sometimes just PR palatable) reasons for individual taxation types, does not the economic fundamentals change.

No need to think of economic transfers differently just because governments juggle with different labels for taxation; often a new tax element starts its life as a disincentivizing (e.g. tobacco), or temporary (e.g. bank taxes in Europe), or targeted funding for something noble (e.g. roads or education) in the public's eyes, but once the taxed population gets used to it, the initially specific targets get relaxed and it'll just be a source of money in the big coffer, the rates can even increase, the original justification is history and the economic landscape may shift over the years anyway.

So much so that if there's an effect that the government wanted to achieve in the first place, and that effect is getting realised, the government can start to worry about how to substitute the punitive taxes. E.g. start with high prevalence smoking; add a moderate tax to disincentivize and fund the pertaining healthcare costs; prevalence gets reduced; tax rates are raised, i.e. about the same tax still gets collected. However a further reduction of tobacco consumption might not be wanted by the government (agency problem), because now a much smaller portion of the population pays high taxes that may fund not just the healthcare costs of smoking, but also warfare, police, education etc. - not to mention employment (tobacco farming) and that smoking today has a cost impact spread over future decades, whereas the government likes to spend the money of taxpayers who haven't even been born rather than avoiding the healthcare burden caused by sick parents and grandparents who used to smoke, once they grow up.

It's a fair statement, however, the very high taxes on fuel sold in Europe aren't just there for punitive reasons. While tobacco tax maybe offsets (or more likely, just partially offsets) the negative externalities caused by smoking, such as healthcare costs (which are predominantly a public service in Europe), most of the negative externalities on car use are experienced globally, e.g. global warming. I suspect that taxes on fuel are as much a revenue stream for governments (spent on road infrastructure and all government services, doesn't matter here) as an incentive to use less fuel.

In other words, maybe (IMO: probably) if everyone switched to electric in a country, there would need to be a new tax on electricity, or higher road tolls, or something, to keep things in balance. If this were the case, we could conclude that indeed, the country hands out money for the small, wealthy minority that can afford electric cars - even if no money directly hits the electric buyer's account. Such implicit shifts in public money may occur, even if it's simply not paying 'fuel' tax which is more like just 'tax' which was created in a time when electric was not a policy consideration. Even if such government incentives favor the wealthy, it might be good statesmanship to keep this way, because the psychology of 'cheating' the tax system and evading fossil fuel costs and taxes, and benefitting from rebates, probably has a role in buyer enthusiasm and the establishment of a brand new, possibly local industry faster than without these incentives, and this may ultimately serve the country better than if we just wait out better economies. So it might be like a Kickstarter campaign.

A very accurate model would need to include a lot of uncertainty about technological progress and levels of competition across countries and companies, but the tl;dr is that new taxes are likely introduced once electric cars are widespread, meaning the current policy transfers economic benefits to buyers of electric cars now.

Don't forget the time value of the money, and more importantly, the cash aspect. Most people would not consider prepaying 5-10 years of fuel even if it gave them some 10-20% discount over the net present value of the future gas station stops.

But all things are not equal, and there's the additional savings of not buying junk food at the gas station.

My impeccably logical rational friend, loosen up a bit :-)

Don't forget: location, location, location :-) Speaking of pussiness: if you buy one of those addresses, and happen to look a bit like the guy who lived there, and have three small kids, "courage" is not in the context of your bravery, more like not exposing your children to avoidable risk. If you didn't know, US real estate prices in these - probably - nice areas are impacted by new neighbors who are not of the majority race.

Also, proper notification of these guys by government agencies, and other preparations may also amount to a few millions. US officials probably don't want the type of revenge terrorism that killed most of a journal's staff in France a couple of months ago.

Each of those 100 real estate addresses are worth many ten k less because living in an address where a jihadist can appear for shooting is less desirable. Loss of about 5-10 million USD before doing anything. Since media is their enabler, perhaps censorship doesn't appear avoidable.