From TFA:

To my understanding a mutually agreed business deal is not stealing, even if one party does a shoddy job. If I pay you to write me a piece of software and when deadline flies past, the software isn't complete, you have not fulfilled your side of the contract and I might be able to sue you, but I don't think that the term stealing is usually used in that context.

I might be flat out wrong there, as this isn't my first language, but my understanding of the term is that you take something from me without me agreeing to give it to you. If you simply fool me into paying you much more than what your service is worth, it sounds more like false advertising, contract breaking, fraud or something.

I lean left on local standards (those of European social democracy) so I'd probably be something like "extreme left" on American standards (if we consider Democrats a left-wing party). I have no love for either Goldman Sachs or the whole sector they operate in... that said, you can hardly call what they did "stealing".

Are they unethical? Sure. Have they broken some laws by deceiving regulators? Probably. Misleading advertising? Might be. Fraud? Depends on the contracts they've used... but stealing? No. They've simply not cared about the fate of their clients - or the society - except where they had the economic incentive to do so. That kind of stuff happens when you have free markets.

For any given amount of freedom in the markets, you get some good and some bad sides. You thus choose a level where the good sides outweigh the bad ones... and acknowledge that the decision also leads to some undesired results. What doesn't work is choosing one level, at first ignoring undesired results and then, when they become too apparent, call them stealing, etc. without making an argument for choosing another level of freedom in general.

According to quick Google, average depth of oceans is about 4km, surface area of earth is about 510'072'000 km2 and water covers about 70% of earths surface.

5.1E8 km2 * 4km * 0.7 = 1.428 billion km3. Sphere of that volume is about 1396 km across.

The GP's graph says "1390 kilometres across and has a volume of 1.4 billion cubic kilometres", which is very close to that quick approximation.

My approximation is very quick and dirty (I didn't take into account that surface of earth is less 4km below the surface than on the surface, which would reduce the sphere... but I also didn't take into account glaciers, etc. which would increase the sphere... Obviously the surface of sea isn't exactly 70% and the depth isn't exactly 4km...) but I feel very confident that the scale of the number is about right and it happens to perfectly match the graph.

I would say that everyone has - by default - a reasonable expectation of privacy whenever nobody else is around. Sure, if you are in a park, you can't do certain things that you could in the privacy of your home even if you don't see anyone, because you might not just have noticed someone and so on. However, in a half-public place, such as a store with no customers inside, you should be able to call your family/doctor/etc. or whatever without having to wonder whether someone is monitoring you in secret. (You may say "You shouldn't do that at work anyways" but that's to be settled between the employee and employer)

That all said, yeah... Involving the local cops? Sure. FBI? Maybe. Secret service? It does sound like an overkill.

It is true that you often see arguments from both sides modded up but I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from that. There are many topics that aren't debated essentially at all because the consensus / group think has already been reached. That isn't bad thing in itself (Not every topic should be debated. We should have consensus not to support genocides, for example...) but the point is that for any hot topic we debate there is a consensus about a dozen more that we don't debate and thus us having some debated issues doesn't prove much about variation.

Honestly though, I think that the biggest problem with /. moderation system is that mods use "-1 Redundant" and "-1 Offtopic" mods far too little. The most heated topics, like the one about constitutionality of Obamacare, have something like 2.5k messages. There is absolutely no way that most of those messages added to the discussion but most were just repeating the same arguments that others had already made... but weren't modded redundant. Part of the problem is that the same exact things were debated in many places, which is due to mods not being willing to use the offtopic mod when one thread of posts strays away from the topic of that thread. You can look at nearly any /. story and in the first thread there are many people who "reply" to the first poster or two just to get their comment higher even though they in no way relate to what the parent had said. This all forces people to spend a lot more time reading the same arguments over and over again and potentially missing some good ones due to the whole discussion about the subtopic not being in the same place.

While I mostly agree with you, I wouldn't dismiss relative terms completely in this short of cases. For example, if outbreaks have been in very steady decline for several decades and then we suddenly get worst outbreak in twenty years, it might tell us something very important (Is the trend turning? Has someone/-thing just made a very serious fuckup that caused it? How likely is it that it's just a statistical anomaly?) even if it doesn't tell us how worried we should feel about acute problems.

I'm a software developer with nearly finished degree (I expect that I'll graduate within a year despite doing more work than studying). They pay me 18 euros (=22 dollars) an hour, so assuming 22 days * 7.5 hours, that's 2970 euros or 3645 dollars a month (44k dollars a year), which I find pretty good for a 22-year old who hasn't yet graduated in this economic situation.

When I graduate, I expect to be able to negotiate about 10% immediate raise, so 10% isn't enough to get me change jobs for money. I'm treated decently (My boss isn't an idiot, I am not micromanaged, I can work from home part of the time as long as the job gets done, I have very flexible hours, etc.) and while some other job might have even more benefits, I'm not interested in taking the risk, so 20% wouldn't be enough. Actually, 30% wouldn't be enough if the new job wouldn't be flexible enough for me to finish my degree but assuming it'd be... I don't think I could ignore that significant jump in wage this early in my life. It'd probably open up a whole new range of career paths.

First of all, it's closer to 17%. With the current rate of decrease we'll hit 15% in something like four months if nothing happens before that. More importantly...

Audience of W3Schools is people who are trying to learn the basics of certain web-related technologies and don't yet know that W3Schools is hardly the best place for that. Whether you like W3Schools or not, it's hardly representative of general population.

Marriage is both social and legal construct. In most areas gay marriage can be legalized by simply changing the words man, husband, wife and woman to person and that's more or less it. However, changing the marriage to a construct between 2...n people, we need to totally rethink many concepts such as divorce (does it break the whole group or can just one person leave? Also, can a new person later on just "join" existing marriage?) and widowhood. If a man and two women are married and the man dies, are the two women now considered widows and are they now gay married to each other? What if one of the women died instead, are the man and other woman now considered widows? Issues like this matter because many laws are built on them.

It makes sense to fix gay marriage first, because that's so quick and easy, compared to legalizing polygamy in marriages.

I think that what the cop in your video did is just great - it didn't cost anything but reminded a couple of people on the scene (and 600k more on Youtube) that gods are just people like us and lowered the threshold to be in contact with them. However, if I were a cop, I wouldn't want to do that in front of a camera: I'd be scared shitless that it might cause a storm of "What?! A cop playing around? While in duty? On taxpayer money?!"

Three things are pretty well established (among both psychologists and economists):
a) Perceived happiness equals actual happiness (If we look at the brain activity near pleasure centers, we notice that how happy people say they are has very strong correlation with active those areas are. So if Antti from Finland rates his happiness at 60 and Ted from USA rates his happiness at 70, it's likely that Ted is actually happier and it's not just that they would have different scale due to culture, language, social class, etc...)
b) Absolute wealth increases perceived happiness only up to about 2000 dollars a month (If we look at countries below that threshold, average income correlates strongly with perceived happiness. Above that limit, very little)
c) Relative wealth to your peers increases happiness constantly (Look at essentially any country and you can bet that the wealthiest quarter is happier that the poorest quarter, even if the poorest quarter about reaches the threshold mentioned in b)
I don't have the time to write all evidence/arguments behind the above claims but if you're interested, I do recommend either the British economist Richard Layard's book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (note: despite the name, it isn't any new age / self-help book) or getting up to date on the basics of modern psychology.

That being the case, it's a bit silly to make comparisons to medieval times and look at absolute wealth. Sure, we can say "Most of the poor no longer need to worry about starving to death in western countries" and that is a huge, happiness-increasing thing over the middle ages. But comparing their absolute wealth to aristocrats is more or less useless, because they are likely to be a lot less happy than the aristocrats (due to having low wealth and status relative to others instead of being considered the privileged elite of the society).

Also, you're pretty comfortably middle class so when people talk about the poor, they don't talk about people like you... but that's getting a bit offtopic.

Nokia is the name of the city where the company was incorporated in 1871.

As for the story... I've been waiting for this to happen. I'd love to see them succeed but I have very hard time imagining that it'll actually happen. I guess their best bet is staying afloat a while and hoping that Nokia decides to buy them back.

It's true that you need to download and install them yourself... But they are offered by Microsoft for free in their poweruser tools, are very lightweight and work well. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545027

A couple of years ago I was quick to promote Linux over Windows due to higher reliability. Now I don't remember when was the last time that my Windows crashed but I've had numerous problems with Linux (On Ubuntu, last two times I allowed the package manager to make a major version update have broken the whole system. I then tried to install Mint, it crashed half a dozen times before I was finally able to get the whole installation through and then enabling two monitors broke X. I've had little interest to go back and find out what's the problem). I used to run Linux and just use Wine and VM when I had to use some windows app, now I run Linux inside a VM on Windows when I need to do programming.

Meanwhile, ever since Windows 7 came out, I've felt that Windows has better usability than the Linux desktops I've tried and massively better usability than the Mac I have to use at work.

I know that I've only given some anecdotes and opinions but while I understand that they aren't statistically significant, I use Linux, Mac and Windows nearly daily (iOS development, web-development and entertainment use) and I'm pretty sure that my recent lack-of-hate towards Windows is indicating that something has changed for the better.

Meanwhile MS is still in charge of the second most popular game console (Wii is the most popular but for somewhat different target audience), have gained some increase in market share on smartphones, are launching tablets and I don't think that the current year of Linux on Desktop is going to threaten MS any more than the previous ones.

So.. yeah. I'm not usually this "pro-MS", I hate Metro as much as the next geek, I have had to develop for WP7 and don't have much nice things to say about it, don't remember when was the last time I had any interest to try out Internet explorer and so on... but I still think that everything after the flop that was Vista, MS has been improving its act.

They might be sending message to the wider public: "Oh, you saw documents that state we are up to something really evil? Well... you can't know whether they're accurate or planted by us. If you were certain they were accurate, you might be willing to risk it all to do the right thing but now that you aren't certain... Do you feel lucky?"

The point of censorship is never to prevent access to information by a few dedicated people. It is to allow the masses - who want to feel like good people - a way to shield themselves from everything evil the government does so they have a way to rationalize to themselves why they don't do what they know to be the right thing. This is exactly that.