you forgot 3. If it goes crazy and starts trying to kill everyone, it looses power after a few feet.

If I had mod points, +1 funny for "Cinderblock throwing have never really been any industry metric..."

Existing laws seem not to be very effective. I don't know if that's a problem with the laws or with enforcement. Given that dozens of malware attacks arrive in my inbox every day, I'm surmising that our current legal framework isn't up to the task.

In general, the innovators will always be ahead of the regulators. In this case, the innovators happen to be criminals.

As I read the wikipedia article and the linked FAS paper, the CFAA seems to only protect government and bank computers. Is that true? What law does someone spamming malware as e-mail attachments break?

...the Global Malware Authors Guild announced the formation of a new super-PAC...

Strengthening your point, I think labor is a distant third. The #2 cost is the airplane itself. A new 747 costs $352 million. A major airline should be able to borrow money at 5-6%, so the mortgage on the plane will cost about $20 million/year. The aircraft is probably good for 30 years, so that's about $12 million/year in depreciation. It's costing the airline something like $32 million a year just to own the airplane.

They should get around 3000 flight hours out of it per year (10-12 hrs/day x 6 days/week x 48 weeks/year), so add $10k or so per flight hour to your estimates. This also makes it obvious why fast turnaround is so important--Southwest pretty much revolutionized the industry by being able to flip a plane in 15-30 minutes. That extra hour of flight time each day is huge when you're looking at tens of thousands of dollars in fixed costs.

Next time you board an aircraft, take a look to the left. If the cockpit door is open, there's probably a small plaque there telling you who the bank is that actually owns the plane.

According to this, 16.7EBq of Xenon was released by Fukushima, and plugging that into the forumla wikipedia gives to convert Bequerels to grams says that about 2.4kg of Xe-133 was released. Haven't seen anything that says Xe-136 was released, but I didn't look that hard.

That's why I provided sources. These are far from uncontrolled statistics. Both articles go into great length on how they avoid the so-called "confounding variables." To the "people that are about to commit suicide go out and buy a gun":

The suicide rate wasn't lower for people with multiple guns or for people who kept their guns locked, so I don't think the data supports the hypothesis that the suicide weapon was purchased for the purpose of suicide.

To the "people who live in bad neighborhoods get guns" most of the second article is about that point and how to disentangle all the different predictive factors behind getting shot. I'm sure there's some truth to "people who are planning on entering a dangerous situation carry", but there's also some truth to "if you try and draw while you're getting mugged, you're gonna get shot." In support of that, note that having a gun increases your risk of geting shot even more for "assaults where the victim had at least some chance to resist"

Sad truth is that if you try to resist a crime, you generally place yourself in more danger than if you passively submit. I'm not saying that recommends any particular course of action. Personally, I hope to act bravely, even if it puts me in danger, though my soon-to-arrive child might change that opinion. We shouldn't let the ethical question of how to respond to violence obscure the fact that going for your gun does not make you safer. Escalating a robbery to a gunfight is a risky move--why does stating that fairly obvious fact upset people?

Actually, they do. People with guns in the home are around twice as likely to be murdered and 10 times as likely do die of suicide as people without guns (source). People carrying guns are about 5 times as likely to get shot as people who aren't carying guns (source). This is not even considering accidental shootings. You say you're "not the sort of idiot who is likely enough to shoot myself by accident," and I hope you're right, but I doubt many accidental shooters thought they were either.

I work in this industry, and think you're misunderstanding a lot of things about deregulation. Electricity deregulation affected power plants, power purchases, and to some extent, the high-voltage transmission system. The local distribution system, which is what this storm seems to have hit, is still very much traditionally regulated in nearly all areas. The "EDC" (electricity delivery company, what most people think of as their utility) owns the wires. EDCs still operate under rates that are generally set by state government, and trust me, they are always under scrutiny. Also, an EDC doesn't really have much of a profit motive here: anything they spend on extra maintenance will be passed on to ratepayers, and anything they save by shirking maintenance will end up going back to ratepayers.

Coops and Municipal utilities are nearly entirely exempted from deregulation, and run much the same as they did in the 1930s.

In any event, this storm is a good natural test of your hypothesis: some of the affected states (Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey) are entirely deregulated, and some (West Virginia, Tennessee, the Carolina) are traditionally regulated. Virginia is somewhere in the middle.

Sea level rise has been directly measured by satellite since 1992. The data's pretty solid. I'm tempted to add something sarcastic, but I guess the right thing to do is de-escalate. Measurements are measurements, throwing around unwarranted accusations of bias IMHO does nothing but help our society's decay into superstitious tribalism. I kind of like the scientific era and would like it to last.

No, I think 'sea level' is actually different around the world (relative to what, I'm not sure maybe the geoid). Odd bit of trivia is that the Pacific end of the Panama canal is about 20cm higher than the Atlantic end. (http://www.psmsl.org/train_and_info/faqs/

Yeah, misogynist probably would have been the better word, remembered it right after I hit submit. Gynophobic strikes me as less judgmental than misogynist, and I suppose I do believe a lot of mis-X flows from X-phobia, but that's a different story. At least I'm not alone, Websters had this note in their definition of gynophobia:

No, not trolling, just kind of depressed at the reaction.

Note that the first quote you provide is in the reporter's voice, not any of the models. To some extent, this reads like the kind of story where the reporter started with an angle and wrote it regardless of what the actual subjects say. The direct quotes are all pretty down to earth: "But the work is pretty relaxed and you don't have to do a lot in order to get paid," "It's not a great feeling to see that, but there's nothing that can really be done. We work to promote products," "I'm used to it" and so on. Of the four women quoted, three don't say much more than that a job's a job, and standing and smiling all day is harder than it looks. Ellen Lee, the only woman who's quoted complaining about the job, is pointed out as looking for other work.

These all seem within the usual spectrum of responses when people are asked about their jobs. I guess the formula "You knew that [X] existed when you took the job, so you have no right to complain about it." just doesn't ring true for me. If X = {'carpal tunnel syndrome', 'stupid management', 'TPS reports'}, I suspect there'd be a supportive reaction from slashdoters. So why when X = 'sexisim' is there such a huge angry response?

OK people, let's not be quite the gynophobic nerds we're made out to be.

First, RTFA. There was essentially no complaining at all in the article, besides a little "it's tiring to stand in heels for eight hours" Really really sad the number of slashdotters who without reading the article just assumed that it was a bunch of women whining. Not to mention the number of posts here responding to accusations of sexism that were never made. Defensive much?

Second, to the parent post, you know what the one who didn't like it did? She quit and got a different job.

Given that like every third slashdot post is someone complaining about their job, you'd think people here would maybe cut these women a little slack. Or is it really that offensive to hear a women who's job is to be professionally pretty talk about it just like it's any other job?

Ah yes, that must be why NYC housing is getting so affordable.

Kind of ironic that the nation's most desirable places to live (as measured by how much people are willing to pay to live there) and the engines of the economy (as measured by average income) are the places that seem to be furthest from Libertarian wonderland.