Larger and stronger at a younger age would seem to be a good survival trait, not a bad one.

Too inexperienced to make good decisions + too strong to be easily controlled = excellent chances of dying young.

I mean, can you IMAGINE the dam structure you'd need to create a pool of water deep enough to float a block of stone to the top of the pyramid? Hint, it'd dwarf the pyramid!

Not really. Remember, the pyramid gets less wide towards the top. So your dam walls only need to be higher than one layer of stones: after a layer of is finished, move the walls on top of its outer edge and refill. Sure, you need a system of levees to get the ships to the lake at the top of the growing pyramid, but that's okay: it can just rest against the pyramid wall. 45 degree rise is no problem if you can move weight one bucket at a time.

And if you use windmills to pump the water, you don't even need all that much human labour.

Sure they are. I assure you that the priest who is fully supported by his congregation is taxed on his "earnings". A housewife still has to file and is responsible for the taxes on the spouses income even if they had no role in actually earning it. All those people still pay sales, use, gasoline, excise, etc taxes. It's essentially impossible to not be a taxpayer on some level.

I run a company that makes wiring harnesses and I am an engineer (as well as an accountant) myself. I assure you that there are a LOT of idiots who would would design such a stupid system. I get to deal with some of them on a semi-regular basis.

We like to pretend here on slashdot that engineers are universally good at their job and always do quality work but I have several file cabinets full of evidence 10 feet from where I sit that proves that too many engineers are monumentally incompetent idiots. On a daily basis I see drawings that are incomplete, incorrect, badly designed, occasionally dangerous, specify incompatible or needlessly expensive parts, difficult or impossible to read, sloppy, cannot be manufactured and even just plain incoherent. I have seen precisely 7 product drawings (out of hundreds) in the last 5 years where I could build the product detailed on the print without asking even a single question or correcting some error. This is quite simply bad engineering by people who aren't very good at their jobs.

The fun part of engineering is figuring out a clever solution to a problem. The harder and less fun part of engineering (but probably the more important part) is documenting the solution in such a way that others can understand and replicate your solution and adjust/debug it if necessary. People who can write good quality work instructions are a shocking rarity even among very smart people. A lot of engineers will take easy shortcuts even when it results in a worse and more expensive product in the long run.

Not even remotely true. Governments are perfectly capable of earning money when they choose to. Governments can and do own things and can behave very much like private businesses if they want to. In China and Egypt and Russia (and many more) have huge swaths of the private economy are outright owned by the government. The fact that the US government generally refrains from trying to make a profit and behaving like a private enterprise doesn't mean they cannot or do not. For a time in the very recent past the US government literally owned GM and Chrysler which means the US government was for a time in the automobile manufacturing business.

Not to mention that a government can literally "print" money if they want to. The Federal Reserve technically makes a profit every year though that doesn't really mean much in reality.

Some do and some do not. People who stay home to raise children often do not earn any money. Religious leaders are often supported by tithes or donations earned by others. Elected officials and judges are typically supported by taxpayers.

making the init system a large complex system that does lots of things rather than the old school ideology of doing one thing and doing it well

Which init scripts didn't do. They approximated what's really dependency system (B and C need A to be up before starting, and D needs both) with a bunch of sequentyally-ran numbered scripts. The end result was both inefficient and fragile.

Launchd is the young whippersnapper on the block. Solaris has had daemon administration for years.

The old guard is a huge fan of PID1 doing it's thing then going away: it's up to everyone else to manage the world after PID1 kicks everything off. The new world- the people who like systemd- are enthusiastic beyond belief to have a PID1 which serves as a master control point where the system can continue to be managed. Every systemd subsystem has a DBUS API we can program and talk to, we can schedule coordinate and manage processes over systemd's core DBUs endpoint- this speaks of the new dawn where we might not be able to hack our shell scripts to do whatever, but we can write higher level code to effectively manage their operation. Which is something that royally sucked egg in the old guard's world.

Sure some of this could sort of be dealt with by continuing to add more shell scripts. But the init script world is mess. Individual daemons have radically different ideas of what kind of responsibility they need to handle in their init scripts and even though for the most part the skeleton is visible across all, it's a hack job that outsiders have to wrack their brain to understand. Conversely, systemd gives us uniform control over the system: the master control program PID1 that is systemd will let us start/stop things, AND will tell us the status of things (over either shell interfaces or DBus).

I look at this more like the innovation of steering- which permitted four wheel vehicles- than I do a particular engine configuration (different muscle, same end). Sure you could get there with the old two wheel drive cart, but as it turns out you have a lot more flexibility when the platform has consistent stability that permits being added to. Where the cam goes is an argument that affirms the lie that systemd is just a really complex initscript: it's not, it's a resident system control daemon.

Not necessarily and only after the fact. A hotel chain has a reputation to maintain and generally they are operating as ongoing concerns. AirBnB users (both guests and renters) are under no such long term pressures.

I think that is overly cynical. The government and its elected officials generally do care that the people under their care are safe and happy, even if their ultimate motivation is just to get re-elected rather than some deep level of humanity. And a government being concerned about attempts to circumvent their powers of taxation shouldn't be terribly surprising. Taxing travelers is a great way to bring money into the area from outside without having to tax the people that elect them. Shouldn't shock anyone that such an easy taxation target would be valued highly by government officials who want to get re-elected.

That is true but not really relevant. If someone is considering a long term stay, chances are they are going to look the place over in person before any money changes hands. Not so with a short term hotel-style stay where you will be in and out in a short amount of time. I'm not saying AirBnB is a bad thing but what you are saying is a false equivalency in most cases. There are some serious issues to think about here is all I'm saying.

No need to paint the male gender as a whole as being filled with sociopaths. It's just the law of large numbers at work. There's maybe 30 million American men in the age rage that are likely to pick up srange women; if just 1/10 % of them are sociopathic predators that's 30,000 predators; and since they *are* predators they'll be overrepresented in young women's encounters with men in pick-up scenarios. Small numbers can produce disproportionate problems. In this case it represents numbers the actions of such a small proportion of men that our ideas about how normal people act aren't a reliable guide.

Drink spiking is a very rare crime. Most studies that look for evidence of it find very little. The highest I found was a government study which found date rape drugs in 4.5% of the cases from four sexual assault clinics. Note this is 4.5% of the cases where the assault occurred, so we're not talking about 4.5% of encounters, we're talking 4.5% of rapes. 4.5% is certainly high enough to be a concern in certain situations, like residential parties at a college. In such a situation a date rape drug detector might actually have some utility, even though it addresses relatively rare actions by a tiny proportion of men.

A bigger concern than what we think of as a "date rape drug" is alcohol itself. The same study that found date rape drugs in 4.5% of sexual assault samples found alcohol in 55%. This result is consistently found across studies: alcohol is very frequently associated with sexual assault -- around half of the time. This is especially concerning because some people (men and women both) don't believe that surreptitiously incapacitating someone with alcohol in order to have sex is rape. They don't distinguish ethically between two people getting drunk and having sex and one of them slipping extra alcohol into a drink.

But the fact remains most men wouldn't do something like that. But that doesn't preclude the possibility that a woman might often encounter the few remaining men who would. A typical man has sex with a small number of women many times; a man who has sex with a large number of women only once is bound to be encountered by women disproportionately often.

So clearly we can extrapolate from your experience that no one ever has had or will have a problem... [/sarcasm]

Look, most people probably will never have a problem because most people are decent law abiding sorts. Those aren't who we are worried about. It's the few really bad ones that hurt, steal from or defraud or otherwise harm someone. If your experiences have been great, that is wonderful but that doesn't mean it isn't worth worrying about both for the visitor and the host. If you want to take the risks involved in using a service like AirBnB I have no problem with that but that doesn't mean there aren't some very important public health and safety considerations to address.

When we get to any actual science or engineering then I will pretend to care. Until then it really is not important in a forum like slashdot to anyone but a few overly pedantic people who don't know when to pick their battles. Just because people here generally care about science and engineering doesn't mean we can't deal with a little obvious imprecision in a description of a shape. No one will be negatively affected by the fact that it isn't truly a torus and most of us are well aware that it isn't actually a torus by the proper defintion. It's like pointing out that the Saint Louis Arch is actually a catenary instead of a parabola as is commonly assumed. Interesting but ultimately not genuinely important 99.999999999% of the time.

In some cases the answer will be yes. If I found my out my neighbor had turned his house into a de-facto hotel, I would likely be pretty upset and rightly so. That potentially affects me and my property so you better believe I'm going to want a say in the matter. Furthermore there are various important liability, safety and taxation concerns that need to be addressed before any sane person should give a blanket go-ahead.

The (probably few) customers who don't get scammed by shady "hosts". The neighbors who don't have to put up with living next to a de-facto hotel which the property is almost certainly not zoned for. The taxing authorities and by extension the local citizens who are probably not receiving the benefits of tax revenue they would otherwise receive. The normal hotels and their employees who lose revenue they likely otherwise would have received.

Just because something is new doesn't mean it is necessarily good. I don't have a problem with Air Bnb and I actually do wish them the best of luck but just because they think their product is "innovative" doesn't automatically mean it is a good idea. I can see potential problems with the service that are serious and need to be addressed in a more adult way than screaming "KILLING INNOVATION" to anyone who will listen.

Their well deserved reputation isn't relevant for once I think. Microsoft doesn't need to sell at a loss here to gain market share at Dropbox's expense because they almost certainly have a huge cost advantage. Like for Google, storage space for Microsoft is a by-product of their other product offerings such as search or Office in the cloud. I'm certainly no fan of Microsoft's (and have 20 years of postings to prove it) but I really don't think there is a credible case for predatory pricing to be made here. Dropbox has a flawed business model and as you point out they should have sold the company when they had the chance. Now they will get crushed by any large firm that has storage space to spare (specifically Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, etc) and a desire to slap a friendly interface on it because by-products are by definition cheap.

Probably not applicable here because storage space to Google is a by-product, not a loss leader. By-products by definition are generally very very cheap which means that Google's cost for the service is pretty close to zero - at least far closer to zero than it is for Dropbox. Otherwise the unused storage space would be a cost (waste) rather than a revenue stream. Google doesn't have to sell it for a loss because they have a huge cost advantage over Dropbox. They can sell it far below Dropbox's cost and still make money doing so because storage is not their primary business. Storage to Google is a by-product.

This is very similar to the problem Microsoft has in trying to compete with Linux. Companies that develop for linux have their primary line of business elsewhere -services, hardware, etc. For example IBM sells services so they don't actually have to make money on linux. Microsoft on the other hand currently has to make money selling the software so they can't just give it away. This puts certain constraints on Microsoft's business model.