Yes, the US sucks. It has always sucked. It will continue to suck long into the future, until it eventually just goes away.

Every thread on /. quickly devolves into how the US does worse than everywhere else.
We could have a discussion about starvation in North Korea, and how people are boiling grass and bark for 'soup', and some of you geniuses would proudly proclaim that the quality of bark from US trees has less nutritional value. And garner mod points for it.

This 'used' to be a place for semi-rational discussion. Oh well.
Dice is but one of the reasons.

First, it's astonishingly pedantic to lecture someone on being "obtuse", and then go into the 'there is no such thing as race' bullshit. We all know what we are talking about, and if you don't, then you're the one being obtuse.

Secondly, isn't it fairly racist to imply that mono ethnic cities aren't "interesting, creative and vigorous"? That's pretty superficial.

Finally, you may have a delightful postmodern hipster view of ports, but most of them across history have been dangerous places that decent people avoided, for good reason.

[The GOP] will not fund anything except military and espionage.

And Big Oil.

This is an awful long article for something that doesn't exist.

If it is your hometown, you have probably owned your house there for decades and rising rents don't affect you. In fact the rising housing prices (50% in 3 years for the author of the article) are very good. You can sell for a huge profit, pay your taxes to the government to fund mass transit infrastructure and move to somewhere less desirable (Detroit) where you can buy a depressed house in a largely minority owned neighborhood and pocket the difference to live off of. What is the problem again?

No - people that are artists and nurses just choose a more emotionally rewarding career than people that choose to be engineers and doctors that make more. Yes, it is easier to be a starving artist rather than have to struggle through calculus and get an engineering degree - but the engineer usually gets a significantly larger paycheck. Same for a nurse that can become a nurse with an associates degree, vs. having to struggle through organic chemistry and anatomy to become a doctor. It isn't fair to say that the primarily female dominated nursing profession is at fault here.

At a previous company the admin for our team was a male. He was the only male admin in a worker population of many thousands (with at least many dozens of admins in the organization). I was told by my previous groups admin to be nice to him, he didn't fit in with the engineers - as he was an outsider, and he didn't fit in with the admins - because he was a male. Last I heard from him he got his MBA and is now managing a rather large group. He move up and out - others can as well.

I think you're generally right about the subject, you've however completely confused "libertarians" with "liberals".

I always hated this particular hatred of "Math is hard"... Math is hard - I always tell my daughter that. Not telling girls that math is hard because we are afraid they won't like it isn't going to help them. They are going to struggle with it like all of the boys - not understand why it is hard for them and fear that it is because they are a girl. I always tell my daughter math is hard - she has to struggle with it like everyone else, but in the end that is what she will need to get the good jobs when she is older. And yes - she is actually very good in Math as an honor student in pre-calc as a sophomore.

Get off your high horse saying that is is Misogyny telling a girl that math is hard... If it isn't you aren't doing it right, take the next class up until it is.

Where do you find actual chemistry sets with actual chemicals in them that can actually make interesting things? I have been trying to find something like I had as a kid for 10 years - with no luck. 1/2 the time the "Chemistry" sets don't actually have any chemicals in them, the other 1/2 they are all salts, sugars, and simple things that you can't make turn colors and explode (What is the fun of chemistry without a few explosions and fire?)

This is one place I wish market purists would get on board--put a price on carbon, and solutions will come out of the woodwork and plummet in price.

Except market purists balk at this because "putting a price on carbon" is an artificial thing - it's screwing around with the markets. The markets have already spoken: the externalities of climate change (relocation costs, war, health costs) have a lower cost than trying to develop alternatives. These costs are already really accounted for, even though they aren't necessarily applied at the source of "carbon" emission.

I don't have the numbers to prove it but using the Amazon service to find video to watch is horrific. I can only imagine Amazon is paying them for inclusion, because otherwise the numbers cannot be worth recording...

While in the US there is a generally accepted right to self defense, the legal theory in the UK is that fighting crime is the police's job.

This brings up a question. It's well established in the US that the police have no responsibility to protect your life; if you call 911 when the Bad Guys show up and get killed before the police arrive, your next of kin don't get to sue the cops. (Look up Warren v. District of Columbia for an example.) It's not that much of a problem here as you have the right to defend yourself, with deadly force if necessary. In a legal environment where that right to self-defense isn't guaranteed, as it isn't in the UK, does that then imply a potential liability if their police don't do what has been decided is their job? (I suspect it doesn't, but I could be wrong.)

If an out-of-control rocket falls on my head, whether it was carrying a little plutonium or a solar panel isn't going to be high on my list of concerns.

This is Slashdot, so new we are rewarded with a litany of "look how stupid congress is" stories.

The fact is, the conversation is clearly brainstorming, more of a signal that lateral thinking was welcome, as the secret service clearly hasn't thought if anything effective.

Maybe Charlie Manson wants to consummate his marriage second hand since he's not allowed conjugal visits.,/i>

Go ahead. You stick your wang in that bit o crazy. I'll pass.