Preposterous. Slightly less preposterous would be renaming "TL;DR" because that's essentially what it's for - taking something complex and reducing it to something simple for a wide audience to be able to grasp the key points of very quickly.

Put yourself in their position. Let's say as a software engineer, in order to ply your craft, you are legally required to obtain a certificate from the government that costs 100 grand, up front, before you can ever get a job. You can't get around it, you can't operate out of Belize, you can't just do it on the side on the downlow. You want that job at google? Pay the 100K. You want that freelance job developing your cousin's business website? Pay the 100K or get arrested when the IRS finds out you didn't get the 100K token. It's not your fault, you have to do it.

Now say some startup bullies their way into the market with offshore workers out of India and places them in the jobs you are competing for for free, without having to get the tokens for them, without having to pay malpractice insurance, without having to even file taxes.

You gonna be cool with that? I mean it's not your fault you had to jump through the hoops to ply your trade.

Solution? Either make this startup pay for tokens and get insurance for them and do everything YOU have to do, or have the token system abolished and make it so you don't have to have insurance to work AND make the startup compensate you by refunding your token for you as a requirement to enter the market and compete with you.

Just remember: if somebody is interested in finding out what you are doing, and they have unlimited resources to do so, then you WILL get caught no matter how good you think your tools are, no matter how careful you think you are.

The process that saw the rise of Senator Palpatine to Emperor cannot really be compared to anything you might have seen in any western democracy any time recently. It's more the sort of thing that you saw give rise to the Kim dynasty in North Korea but even that, I can't think of anything comparable.

1) Senator Palpatine becomes Chancellor by capitalizing on Trade Federation's aggression on his home planet

2) Chancellor Palpatine invokes extraordinary powers to take action against separatists, to fight a war. He commissions a grand army for the republic, a federal army so to speak, as opposed to each system (state) having its own security apparatus. The senate approves because it's war and everything. The twist though, is he is the one behind the separatist uprising. He's controlling both sides. So maybe if you buy in to the idea that 911 was an inside job, that would be comparable with Bush Cheney and Rumsfeld doing away with the niceties of civil rights and all.

3) The Jedi discover that Palpatine is a Sith Lord and attempt to assassinate him. After easily killing the 4 jedi who come for him, he rallies the senate to turn the army against the Jedi and eradicate them. That's a pretty rational response if you think about it, from the senate and the population's point of view, they don't know what a Sith Lord is. The Jedi are an eccentric cult that bullies and intimidates its opponents.

4) Senator Jar Jar Binks takes part in the vote to give Palpatine imperial powers and Palpatine eventually disbands the senate

EXTREME PROGRAMMING!!!

Ugh.

Yes but if you never offer the opportunity for people of those different groups to generate that code you'll never see it

Maybe so but what you describe is still illegal. Let's change some of your words: replace 'older' with 'black'. Now what?

Reminds me of the movie "The Wolf of Wall Street", the senior trader giving tips to the new guy advising him to use cocaine in order to "stay sharp between the ears." And "That's not a recommendation, it's a prescription". Pulls out a little tubular dispenser, uses some right there in front of everybody. I'm inclined to think that that part of the movie is not an exaggeration of what goes on on Wall Street and in those big law firms.

I'm sorry to hear you've struggled so much, seems that this drug has been very beneficial to you. Nobody is saying that there are not people who legitimately need it. The focus of the story & discussion is that people are abusing it to get ahead. Think of those douchebags who go to medical marijuana dispensaries because they want to get high. How does that make all of the people who legitimately need it look and feel? Like you, I imagine. Really terrible, and then politicians want to ban it. The worst part is these abusers don't care that legit users might lose it because of them. Likewise there is massive abuse of drugs like ambien. Most people who take it are not suffering from the kind of debilitating insomnia it's supposed to be used for.

It's the Prisoner's Dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

It only works out if we're all SURE that everybody else is going to abide by that promise. Yada yada yada, we all violate the agreement. Not me, I'm too old.

Yep, another deadly weapon to use for the AI system we eventually turn over everything to. We best begin to plot the Butlerian Jihad now.

Way back in the day when Microsoft was unleashing IE onto the world, everybody howled that they were introducing new IE specific things for websites to be able to provide, eg ActiveX. Now it seems that google is doing the same thing with Chrome. In both cases the idea is to take ownership of the web...