Yup. Mass was the place that brought us the Salem witch trials, The Scarlet Letter, and plenty of similar themes. They made the Westboro Baptist Church look like a gay pride parade, though perhaps only because all that stuff had the full force of law.

Agreed. If I want to comparison shop just about anything other than a car I can just do an online search by model number, see all the asking prices, and purchase one in 5 minutes. A car turns into a high-pressure negotiation on my day off. With anything else if it turns out to be defective I just return it and get my money back - not so with the car.

I can understand that it has to work this way with houses since they aren't mass-produced. The car sales model is a dinosaur, and half the tactics that are used should be illegal.

Yup. The last time I walked into a car dealership I brought a TVM calculator with me. I didn't care what they told me about the price, interest, whatever. I punched in the terms into my calculator along with what I determined to be a fair price, calculated the effective interest rate, and decided if it was good enough. For my lease they ended up making it work by bumping up the residual value considerably. Whatever - just means I pay less now and we can play lets make a deal in 3 years when I've paid them way less than the loss they've taken from depreciation.

Lasers are monochromatic. You can design goggles that will effectively block a particular laser wavelength while not overly diminishing the rest of visible light.

The police know what wavelengths their lasers use in advance, and can come to the party prepared. Protesters would have to use the welding glasses and be blind anyway, or they would have to guess which laser wavelength to protect against.

Well, in theory anybody can choose to violate the laws of war, but if you do so chances are your enemies will do so as well.

So, you could go bombing enemy hospitals. The problem with doing that is that it doesn't really get you much (you're bombing people that are already out of action), and then you suddenly have to put all your own hospitals in bunkers lest they be bombed.

Likewise, if you start firing off gas weapons, then you get to watch cities full of thousands of people being killed with gas in retaliation. Or if you get too liberal with the laser blinders you get to watch your enemy come up with weapons designed to cause blindness and deploy them against battlefields such that huge numbers of your troops end up being blinded. The weapons being talked about here are more about dealing with individuals, but if you set out with the goal of blinding people I'm sure you could come up with more effective area-based weapons. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if there were super-intense flares you could fire into the night sky that would cause permanent eye damage to anybody looking in their direction.

The Geneva Conventions are just that - conventions. Nobody can force anybody to obey them, but countries choose to do so in the hope that their enemies will do the same.

No argument, but the thing is that there is one definitive checksum of what should be on-disk when you're dealing with zfs/btrfs. When you're dealing with Ceph each storage server keeps its own checksum at the filesystem level (if you're running it on zfs/btrfs - otherwise no protection at all).

On the other hand, it does sound like the network traffic is checksummed, so the only real risk is to bugs, memory/cpu errors, or manipulation of the on-disk files.

People go on about ECC, but as far as I can tell neither btrfs nor zfs are any more vulnerable to memory errors than anything else. It is just a matter of RAM being the next largest source of risk once you've eliminated the disks, so it is the next logical thing to fix. Using ECC with these filesystems probably provides no more or less protection than using ECC with any other filesystem. Of course, if you can add it economically to your system, you probably should consider it.

This is cancer spending, not antibiotic spending. Cancer gets a lot more attention, probably because most people know people who have died from cancer, many of them relatives, and fear dying from it themselves some day the way they don't fear dying from MRSA.

For comcast the lines are shared all the way up, so it definitely costs them money to transmit more data.

The thing about bandwidth is that the cost is a step function. You deploy so many lines, and you pay a fortune up-front for that. Then bandwidth is "free" up to a certain rate. After that you upgrade again for another small fortune.

The most sensible model for something like a last-mile ISP is a cost-plus model. Look at their total costs, divide by their total usage, add 3%, and make that the rate everybody pays. The rate gets adjusted as the figures change. Costs are regulated as well - the company can't just spend on anything it cares to and bill it to the customers with a 3% profit on top.

And I'm all for breaking up the vertical integration so that they're ONLY doing the last mile.

That's a nice document you have there...

Yup. At work they went through training to explain to employees that it was safe to point out problems to management. It basically accomplished nothing except for legal butt-covering, because everybody knows that if you have to tell somebody that it is safe to confide in you, it probably isn't.

In your view, the fact that people were given for free a piece of spam is something they should rightfully complain about? Without us making fun of them?

The answer is, "yes."

So what if an email were added to your inbox free of charge just like an email you actually wanted to read? You basically just described spam in a nutshell.

Sure, for one album one time only it is just a minor annoyance. However, if it happened with any regularity it would make a cloud-based music service useless. When I pull up my library, I want to view MY library, not the library some music promoter thinks I should have.

Makes sense. Google Play has had $0 album promotions on occassion. If you don't "buy" the album you might miss out on it, but nothing shows up in your library unless you go out and buy it. Nobody complains about this.

If the local store offered a free roll of toilet paper with every purchase before 10AM next Saturday nobody would be bothered by it. If the same store went around throwing rolls of toilet paper at everybody's houses at night people would complain, and rightly so.

Tor is configurable bandwidth wise. If I wanted to saturate my connection 24x7 using Tor, I probably could. It isn't interactive use, so I don't have a problem with prohibiting that.

I run a tor relay-only node and have it configured to use a very modest amount of bandwidth, and I've never gotten a complaint from my ISP about it. I'm sure if I ran it 24x7 at 90% of my capacity, I would hear about it.

I do think we need to move to a better pricing model for internet access. Paying for unlimited that isn't unlimited just leads to endless arguments. The contract should be based on usage with some kind of measurement attached, and then you get what you pay for. The rate should be regulated, since right now US ISPs are near-monopolies.

My electricity supplier doesn't care if I run a datacenter in my basement, as long as I pay my bills on time. That is because I don't pay for "unlimited" electricity. If electricity would be billed at a flat rate then you'd have the eco police doing random inspections for incandescent lightbulbs, insufficiently insulated windows, termostats set too high/low, and so on. Better to just let people pay for what they use and they then have incentive to buy bulbs that don't waste power.

I don't really see any evidence for substantial spending on antibiotic R&D. If you can point to some kind of citation for this I'm certainly curious.

Antibiotics aren't really a chemical class either, since there are many mechanisms of action. A chemical class would be something like beta-lactam antibiotics, etc. I suspect that particular class is mostly played-out, but there are potentially as many mechanisms for attacking bacteria as there are unique metabolic pathways in bacteria.

I don't mean to trivialize drug development - it seems to have slowed down across the board which probably reflects that most of the "low-hanging fruit" is gone. I think it is a far stretch to go from that to saying that there won't be any new drugs of any particular kind.

Looking at this, it seems like we have about 75k MRSA cases per year. If you want to make a decent profit of around $100M/yr off of that, then you need to charge about $1500 per case. That wouldn't be an amazing blockbuster, but it probably would be sustainable. If you could charge $15k/case then it would be a solidly profitable drug.

There are a few problems with those numbers. One is whether introducing an antibiotic would reduce the incidence rate. Obviously we would want it to, but that means fewer cases, and so you need to charge more per case. Also, what percentage of those cases are among people with insurance willing to pay those kinds of fees for treatment. If you end up treating people for a reduced charge or for free, then again there isn't much profit.

If some first world nation offered a bounty for a treatment that made up for these shortcomings I bet you'd see a determined effort to discover a new antibiotic.