$1 per initial message might seem like a deterrent but with a good result set from data mining various sources a company could establish a viable subset of facebook users likely to be swayed by subsequent promotional offers. Just takes a hook to gather a response from the first message so that additional messages can be sent free, like - respond to this so that your name is entered into a free draw to win Product X. If it's well targeted it'll pay for itself in the long term.

It can sound like common sense but as with many thing the devil is in the detail.

Consider cleaning parks for example. That's going to be a local council responsibility in the UK but in many cases the council probably contract it out to a private company. So within the current framework, if people on benefits are made to do the work then the private enterprise is getting the money for the contract but has lower labour costs. Who becomes the parasite then?

In principle I have no objection to people on benefits having to carry out some civic function but I am very opposed to any private enterprise profiting as a result. That's why I am opposed to the current UK Workfare scheme. It's not creating jobs; it's just allowing private enterprise to get free labour, in effect making them government subsidised. If they're getting taxpayer funded labour, then I as a taxpayer should get a vote at their AGM.

And this AC post excellently defines to our non-UK colleagues, exactly how a reader of the Daily Mail thinks. They think that things like the ECtHR do nothing but prevent us deporting scrounging asylum seekers without giving any thought to how it's absence could affect the government's treatment of each and every citizen of the country.

Well, maybe Chinese today and for the next couple of years.

But when labour costs start to rise in China where is the next place that the big multi-nationals will seek to keep their cost base as low as possible? If you can determine that and then learn the local language then you could reap big rewards when the off-shoring goes there.

Of course you can always just go for the long game. Eventually that low labour cost will be found in English speaking countries.

Given that significantly more than half that list is 20th century or later dates and the lead time to impending apocalypse seems to be getting shorter it is certain that it will rapidly grow. 2222 will eventually be on it. As will 2221 and 2223 and every year.

In replying to that sequence of posts you also forgot to add that slashdot is forever populated by anonymous cowards who *always* know that the current widely accepted theory for *any* scientific discipline is wrong and that whatever arbitrary replacement is eventually dreamed up (I don't think they ever understand what "evidence based" means) for it will also be wrong.

Fair point, but O'Neill cylinders have artificial gravity via centrifugal force on their inner surfaces. Research point for someone there to see how much that changes things, but even setting up a workable environment for, say mice, to investigate the effects will probably cost quite a bit.

While there might actually be respondents who believe themselves to be disciples of Jedi principles, the other 99.999% would have just seen a facebook friend post, "Hey! Wouldn't it be funny if we all put Jedi on the census form as our religion".

I found a more interesting blog post at the time about Lockheed Martin having a fixed price contract to collate the census data and if enough people answered honestly but took measures that would interfere with the automated form scanning, then the costs incurred in manually processing the forms would hit their projected profit a bit.

The meme is more widespread than that because certain media outlets supporting a conservative agenda will perpetuate the idea at every opportunity so that many taxpayers will believe that the single, most significant reason for a country's economic woes is down to people living it large on welfare.

So long as the ruling elite can keep the in-fighting going among the people who massively outnumber them then they don't have to worry about attention being focused on them.

I wonder if there is a study on the rate of definite infection by disease among those in an open-plan office space versus those in a personal office.

It might be that those promoting a "come in, or else" policy might be relatively unlikely to personally suffer any consequence of it.

No wonder. They managed to fit a formula to a single number sequence of 6 values.

I'm sure that with modern computation, a formula could be calculated for just about any arbitrary sequence of 6 values. If that is possible then that would be deserving of being titled "a law".

Which got me thinking... if you're going to deploy helicopters against civilian food rioters[1] then it's probably better to have them under machine control rather than a pilot who is likely to come from a civilian background.

[1] Sadly, I don't think that this is an impossibility, even in developed nations.

But if they don't have pilots who are they going to make contenders in an execution that's fronted as a TV game show?

Good luck then. If it ever does become a commonplace transportation then some lazy and unintelligent legislator is just gong to deem it the same as fixed wing aircraft because they both, like, go into the sky, and therefore subject to the same restrictions.