As a society, we've gotten to the point where we tolerate zero risk in our daily lives. So much so that society wants government to decide what is good for us.

This is a terrible way to live. I want options in my life and I want the free market to create them. I don't want government restricting options available to me, or restricting those that would provide those options to me.

Your premise is that society wants this and you do not. Fine. Your options are (1) live with it and attempt to convince society to make a different choice or (2) leave society.

Your options do not include (3) do you want within society because society should be different and you'll live as if it were whether the rest of society likes it or not. That is not living with the courage of your convictions, it's dodging the sacrifices of living with the existing social contract or going to/building a free market utopia somewhere else.

I want a pony. That doesn't mean that I'm going to board it in my reserved parking spot in my downtown condominium because MINE.

But you'd think that regulators would at least ask a few questions, llike "what happened" and "what can we do to make sure the same thing doesn't happen again".

You write as if they didn't do that several years ago.

The solution to oil spills is not: "another regulation that requires the regulated to follow the existing regulation." You develop new regulations when new processes or technology begin to fall outside existing regulations. Otherwise you enforce existing regulations, rebalance penalties, and recognize that no matter how many regulations you have, something will happen again. If you can't regulate theft and murder our of existence you sure can't regulate technological shortcutting out of existence.

Hint: when regulators determine that someone violated existing regulations and charge them billions of dollars in fines, "what can we do to make sure the same thing doesn't happen again" becomes a matter of weighing whether the fines are truly punitive versus something which might be written off as a cost of doing business. $4300/barrel of oil is still pretty punitive.

Or, Prince style: The dwarf planet formerly known as the ninth planet from the Sun.

If there are dwarves on that planet, it makes sense that they'd have a prince

A dwarf prince formerly known as the prince of the ninth planet from the Sun.

Come to think of it, the sun is a yellow dwarf star... *KAPOW*

We now return you to your formerly uncontroversial life, upon one of nine planets circling a sun, soundtracked by an artist toiling in rebellion against their record label.

let's go crazy... let's get nuts...

I'd be more concerned with your judgments if your contribution history to Slashdot didn't consist solely of throwaway comments of three sentences or less.

Not my peer, not genuinely interesting, not my problem...

If I ship something, it is up to me to pay insurance if I wish to do so. Otherwise, I take my chances on something happening to the cargo or it getting completely lost.

Utterly true. However, your shipper is not trying to develop safer delivery trucks or airplanes so as to reduce the frequency of accidents. Those are other entities (GMC, Boeing, etc.). Your shipping may be trying to reduce driver/pilot negligence or otherwise abate other people's negligence, but those are strategies that are either well-known and probably already in use or under-development and of low marginal utility. Most importantly, what you're shipping 99 times out of 100 isn't valuable enough to justify a lawsuit.

These guys are building rockets. It is literally rocket science. While they obviously have incentives to avoid putting on impromptu fireworks shows, the government in this case is shipping items with limited immediate replacement capability (equipment, experiments, spacesuits) in addition to food, water, and the like. The government doesn't really care how much replacement would cost since it will pay for the risk one way or another -- the insurance simply becomes wrapped into the cost. It would really prefer that it not blow up. After all, ehen you have a large enough pile of cash, the smartest way to insure your risk is to self-insure.

By putting the risk of loss on the launch company, NASA would be giving them an extra incentive to become more reliable. The launch company can reduce their cost and increase profits (since they're usually bidding fixed cost to provide a package of launches, savings on insurance costs would go to the launch company). The reason for requiring insurance is that otherwise you either audit the hell out of the company, require a bond which ties up capital, or hope that they remain solvent after something goes *blam* without racking up an uncollectable debt. It'd be the Solyndra controversy in a somewhat different form.

Electronic devices with lights shaped in the likeness of characters from an obscure television show that nobody born before 1990 had ever heard of, posed in a gesture that is universally understood to convey "fuck you".

I was born in the 1970s you presumptuous twit.

n!m (-_-) m!n

I hope you can see that because I'm doing it as hard as I can - literally. Damn lack of unicode support.

Honestly, how much trust do you put in what Microsoft publicly says?

It's not binding, they repeatedly change their mind, and they're a huge multinational who doesn't give crap what their consumers want.

However the license agreement will be legally binding and unless it mentions a expiration date for the license, a subscription fee, or the like, will pretty much settle the matter as of July 29th.

So you'll pardon us for having ZERO faith in the fact that Microsoft has said anything. Because it doesn't mean a damned thing.

They will do whatever maximizes profits, and what their lawyers say they can get away with.

Your blindly saying you believe them makes you either naive, or clueless.

Here's the thing: Announcing that Windows Seven and 8/8.1 may be upgraded to Windows 10 (for perpetuity) during the first year of release and then changing that policy upon launch day would create a tidal wave of bad publicity. You can count on large corporations doing all they can to avoid bad publicity -- if only because it significantly affects profits.

So forgive us for thinking that a corporation which has made this announcement and had months to consider how it was being interpreted, without correcting that interpretation as launch draws ever closer, is going to change their position so close to launch.

It's not going to happen. And in three weeks and two days, I just might hound you with a few I-told-you-so-s.

You know that content gets voted by the community and only appears on the front page if enough people care, right?

And everyone votes. And everyone takes their day-off July 3rd holiday to go to reddit. And everyone... Show me a votes to daily-visits ratio before you declare what is a minority and what is not.

I am hearing that several subreddits that went private were forcibly reopened by the admins, and the mods were unable to do anything about it after. I don't have sources, but if it's discovered that it true, that would be the final nail in the coffin for me.

I hear you. It sucks when someone decides to take their ball and go home only to be reminded that it's not their ball. It sucks even more when you support that someone only to be reminded that it's not your ball or your home, and that both of you are very replaceable.

The users don't care about this. You're a tiny minority that wants to see a catfight because you've decided someone is irreplaceable without any actual knowledge as to why they were let go.

...but if you do so maliciously and mendaciously...

That has nothing to do with the case IF what is said is true...

Mendaciously means falsely, e.g., "lying, untruthful, dishonest, deceitful, false, dissembling, insincere, disingenuous, hypocritical, fraudulent, double-dealing, two-faced, Janus-faced, two-timing, duplicitous, perjured;"

He already had lack of truth as a condition, therefore it has everything to do with the case.

Yes, an object with zero acceleration could technically be moving anywhere between not and the speed of light, but that's pedantic.

Simply, no. It's not pedantic. Because you ignore that your accelerometers are not perfect, that your constant is a variable due to accumulated error in your accelerometers, that you need not glide around on an ice rink in order for your generally-increasing (magnitude) accumulated error to make that constant an unknown variable, and that GPS solves that problem quite nicely.

All you need to monitor is translational vibration (evidence of non-rotational movement) which will be present regardless if you are walking or driving.

Thus proving that you're being pedantic and an idiot, as anyone who has ever worked with inertial guidance systems versus GPS guidance systems will repeat to you. Over... and over... and over. But since you're quite willing to dish out criticism without accepting any, I doubt that you'll bother to ask anyone working in the real world with real equipment how it all actually performs.

Do the authors not know what accelerometers are? That makes me question their expertise for writing about this subject.

Do you not know the laws of motion and calculus? Because those make me question your expertise as a critic.

Even assuming that your accelerometers are perfect (which they most assuredly are not), tracking accelleration over time gives you an assumed speed plus an unknown constant, which you are assuming is zero.

But you know the old saying about assumptions...

I'm capable of covering all but the most unlikely of situations

And when a not-quite most unlikely situation occurs, you'll be sure to to make good down to your last cent, rather than party like it's 1999 or take a sudden vacation to Central America.

Hint: in the states around me, you are free to self-insure provided that you deposit a rather large sum (mid-five-figures) in cash or bonds with the government. Because sudden parties and vacations tend to happen when one's life savings are about to be handed over to another. Are you fine with that?

And if they happen, I throw up my hands and declare bankruptcy and re-roll the dice. I'm fine with that.

EXACTLY. You're fine with that. The person you creamed doesn't get to discharge their injuries in bankruptcy, and doesn't get to re-roll the dice, but we really don't care about them. It's about you.

One could argue HFCS is worse than transfat and it is used everywhere. Come on, get on a roll, FDA!

One could, if they could prove that HFCS should no longer be generally recognized as safe, as was done with trans-fats.

Your minor problem is going to be that natural foods do not contain substantial quantities of trans-fats. It's a quirk of the abiotic hydrogenation process that is used to modify naturally occurring unsaturated oils. Thus the substance is essentially artificial.

That's not the case with HFCS. The process that produces HFCS is artificial, but the very same sugars are in corn, sugarcane, fruits, berries, and various vegetables. You don't object to what the substance is -- you merely object to the form it is being provided in and how much is used.

A little thought experiment: would you have the FDA ban honey as well? It has virtually the same glucose to fructose ratio as HFCS 55 (glucose and fructose are the major sugars present at about 32 and 38% respectively), about 17% water, about 10% other sugars (especially maltose, which is a dimer of glucose), and about 3% other.

If not, then tell me the key difference between the two substances that makes one ban worthy and the other not.

Banning HFCS is simply a poor proxy for regulating that amount of sugars that are incorporated into foods. Yet we don't (currently) permit the FDA to regulate on that basis. If you want to have the argument, make the argument. Don't construct a make believe boogeyman and expect a community of nerds to buy into the myth without question.

Weird that he was there???

Yes, weird that he was there. Weird that a man in a Stormtrooper costume was in front of an elementary school with no apparent reason to be associated with the school.

As I indicated in the GP post, the loitering charge is the really odd one. I'm not going to invest the time necessary to investigate where he lives, where the school is, where he was going (assuming it to be true), where he was actually located, the time of the 911 response, etc., etc. simply in order to to qualify the weirdness. A guy in a Stormtrooper is automatically weird. Your decision to read weirdness as meaning creepy or nefarious instead of simply unusual and out-of-the-box is your own deal.