Right, there's no money in selling the ammonia.

But there's a profit to be made selling the thing that can run on free fuel as opposed to $5.00/gal oil.

And there's a fuckton of profit to be made inventing the technology that allows the car-makers to earn a profit over the heads of their competitors.

This would be a FANTASTIC business.

AAAAaaahhh, implied anti-competitive practices by the entrenched powers. That's a legitimate concern and if these guys wind up mysteriously murdered and/or promoted to the oil/gas industry, then you can bet your ass then people are watching and will chase after that golden opportunity, albeit quietly.

Holy SHIT!
You can go back up the stairs in Nethack!? Does the maker of Rogue know?

No, actually it didn't. The reason they had a procedurally generated map is that they COULDN'T save the game-state to disk. Disks were really small back then. Size constraints are a thing of the past, but they were a super-bitch back in the day. Their "fractal engine" created the world from an algorithm. And then I think they saved a couple flags if the player dinked with a planet or advanced plot. Saving the delta could really add up, so I don't know exactly how they persisted their map.

Back in my day, we had 800 planets that were procedurally generated, AND WE LIKED IT!

But really, the concept that you can procedurally generate an infinite universe is not that ground-breaking. I understand a lot of people are falling for the hype-train. And hey, it might be a really fun game. As long as there's something meaningful to do with all this PGC, and the game play holds water. But just because it's procedurally generated doesn't sell me on a game.

(Also, side-note, where the hell are the procedurally generated maps for the FPS genre? Why hasn't this happened yet?)

At all of Google?
Perhaps that'd be true if they were all trying to make the same pot of soup, but in this case it's more like all the cooks in the city with each group in their own kitchen sometimes serving entirely different ecosystems of consumer.

This. I'm inherently suspicious if it actually compiles the first time if I make any sort of significant change.

Is this some sort of cry for help? Are you ok? Do you need us to call someone?

News story: FCC proposes $48,000 fine
Followup story: FCC levies $48,000 fine
This just in!: Man recievers letter for $48,000 fine
You heard it here first: Man re-reads letter, yes the fine is for $48,000
Day 5 of ScrambleWatch: FCC confirms fine was for $48,000
Investigative journalism: Lawbooks confirm FCC can levie fines of $48,000
Sad tosser journalism: We called the FCC rather than mail them, against all conceivable actions, they said the fine was STILL $48,000

Has anything changed? Is there additional details? New facts? Stuff that's actually new? Is it news-worthy?

If not, then it's not a follow-up, it's just a very old duplicate.

Hey, sometimes I understand a journalist being fed up that X is STILL in jail, or that Y has not yet been prosecuted. It's a little news-worthy when a deadline or something passes or an anniversary of an event happens. People forget sometimes. Sometimes that's tragic.

Not this guy though. He's just kind of a passive-aggressive vigilante wannabe that ended up a bigger problem then what irritated him.

From an "enterprise-scale" company, which uses Oracle for their timesheet reporting, let me be the first to inform you that Oracle blows goats. The damn thing crashes if you try to type in text and enter number at the same time. We also have an Oracle database for parts which they've wanted to change for years. YEARS. But switching away is hard and costly and so we limp along with the system we have.

Oracle is where technology goes to die. And those rotting corpses are weighing down corporate America. Oracle has them locked into contracts and has chained those corpses to the corporations where they dangle like nooses, dragging us all down into the pit of obscurity and obsolesces.

But maybe I'm being too hard on them for making me fill out a timecard twice.

It's cool. Those stereotypes are easy pitfalls because they're quite often true. Just a little bit of introspection is often all that's needed. It's refreshing to see someone take a step back and actually reconsider their words.

But duuuuuuude, back Wednesday you called some climate-guy smug when he posted a lot of facts. He even said a contrary voice was a good thing, linked to a denier and said he didn't believe it but it was good food for thought. That's the opposite of smug.

And mexicans are "built" for picking fruit? Ralph May's a comedian, you know. It ruins their back just the same as it would yours. ...come on man, try to be a little bit nicer.

So ditch'em.

Move to soundcloud.

I'm a fan of a lot of artists that put their stuff up on either youtube or soundcloud. Might be time to switch off of youtube.

Hate to say it. I saw the rise of Google and a lot of money and effort went to really good things.
They offered their services for free using the knowledge gained to make a buck off better advertising. Things were good. They certainly had/have a shit-ton of power and people rallied against that. Claiming that they could abuse it and be a terrible blight upon the land. But they didn't. Until now. And I've seen similar sort of moves by Google of late. The sun sets eventually. Kinda sad, but perhaps it's time to move on.

Now, of course I'm still going to have a gmail account for a long time, and using google-docs is still crazy useful. Hell I still have the yahoo account where I throw spam. But rather than simply being happy with the bright future of the new young blood in the market, I'll be looking for some place to jump ship to. And I'll tell others as much.

Why do you have to be racist about it? Or ageist for that matter? Or sexist? The quip about him having an MBA is oh-so-tangentially on topic.
All things considered, it's probably a safe bet. That's how stereotypes work. But it doesn't make you any less of a racist dick.

That post he just made is quite useful to to the crowd of people that may not be familiar with you and your particular flavor of bias.
He knows you. And 5 slashot moderators know you and are willing to spend points to bump this up.

His post was, in short, insightful.

But hey, some people need more help than others,

CAN DO!

Your overall argument is that the rich aren't all that powerful and the poor have plenty of power. That the poor can get together and give their money to political organizations that run this town.
And that'd be nice, if it were true. But the fact of the matter is that the rich ARE powerful, very powerful, to the point that

Fact: The gini coefficient in the USA is rising. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the middle class is shrinking.

Not when they're homeless poor people. The crazy guy ranting on the corner WILL always be there and no, there's no real need to go guard against him. If anything we need to guard against the people trying to censor him.
The guy is harmless, at least on a political scale. He has zero hope of swaying the masses. If he somehow managed to gather a crowd and/or become a cult leader, and people started to listen to him, he'd probably no longer be a poor homeless person. He'd transform into a radio host, a televangelist, a full-blown-locked-in-a-compound cult leader, or worse, a CEO.

Since their inceptions? Only the rich could afford to step into those industries. They were serious money ordeals back in the day. But hey, now anyone with a phone can shoot video. Look at all of those mom&pop TV channels watched by millions! Oh, wait, no, that's Youtube and the Internet.
Well radio broadcasters are cheap! Look at all the... oh wait, the barrier to entry for commercial radio stations is really high just to keep competition out. Well there's always HAM... which is specifically barred from making money from it.

So this one is wrong. You're presuming there was a time that the rich didn't have a monopoly on it. And that isn't true.

And this might be the basis of why your worldview is so fucked.
YES. The rich and powerful run the corporations. Literally. The job is titled "CEO". Their boss is supposed to be the shareholders, but it's effectively the board, which is composed of a handful of rich people who are CEOs of their own corporations which have the original CEO on THEIR board.

And this here is some fantastic spin. Here let me point it out for you.
"catering to".
There is some rich individual, running a corporation that controls a chunk of spectrum that caters to rednecks. They pay lip-service to the cultural background of the redneck, play the right music, and run ads that hit the mark, but it is wholly controlled, steered, and profited by soulless corporate goons that don't know the difference between a banjo and a guitar. If you think that a corporation that SELLS to a group is the same thing as the group being politically empowered, then you are monstrously fucked up.

Bush. Rumsfeld. Cheney. They spent billions of (someone else's) dollars to destabilize the middle east. The sectarian violence in Iraq during the US occupation killed 100's of thousands.
Arguably (and it's a loose argument), the Iraq war helped push the Arab spring. People were reminded that the old-powers can be overthrown.

Vietnam was quite profitable for a specific subset of Americans.

But I think he was referencing Iraq.

Oh, for sure, but THEY ARE POWERLESS. The traditional fear was that the poor rabble-rousers would get everyone together with pitchforks and storm the castle. There doesn't seem to be much of a worry of that anymore.

The ACLU, EFF, Teamsters, Democrats and Republicans are largely run and funded by rich people that say that poor people have rights too. (and sometimes they act on it as well).

Damn shame that mentioning guns and healthcare completely derails a conversation about open source software.

Jesus motherfucking CHRIST! There's an arbitrary $200,000 investment required to be a cabbie in Europe? What the hell!?

Let me make this clear for you in case you don't understand the problem with this.
1) Most people don't just have $200,000 lying about. Not even for business expenses. So the phrase "you might pay $200,000 for it" is straight up bullshit. No. People go get a loan to buy this and pay the intrest on the loan. Which is a fancy-dancy way of making cabbies rent the privileged of being a cabbie.

2) For ANY sort of investment that ties up money, the phrase "you can sell it to somebody else, probably at a profit." is something you feed to suckers. It's something you say when you're trying to sell.

3) If you can just sell the thing to anybody, without any sort of certification, testing, vouching or anything, then it serves ZERO purpose other than simply being another bar to entry. And I think that was the original intent. To impose a limit on the number of taxis clogging the streets. This system does a really shitty job of keeping up with a growing populace and shifts in traffic needs.