It already exists:

http://www.amazon.com/Hank-Greens-2D-Glasses-Headaches-Discomfort/dp/B004X4L1UC/

A friend who gets headaches loves these.

I love this. They charge a premium for 3D that half of everybody hates. Now they'd like to charge another premium for 3D that will suck a bit less.

I look forward to the next article bleating about the mysterious decline in box office attendance. What could it possibly be?

I agree that it can't be done right, but I think it's not just about screen size. On my mobile device I'm much more task-focused. When I'm up to something specific, I almost always ignore ads.

On a desktop I'm much more likely to be poking around or under less time pressure, so I'm much more willing to explore the tangent an ad generally represents.

Because business school also trains them to minimize costs and maximize quarterly profits. And their managers and stockholders reward them for that as well. Which inevitably leads to that behavior and a bunch of other idiotic ones. Because as you demonstrate with the bit about fixed costs, a lot of these numbers are fictions. Sometimes convenient fictions, but always fictions.

This is in contrast to the Lean approach where one minimizes waste and maximizes value delivered to the end user. In Lean thinking, staff aren't a cost to be shed ASAP, they're an asset, one you invest in.

That doesn't strike me as particularly paradoxical. Hate-crimes laws recognize existing substantial bias against particular minority groups with an eye toward reducing the bias. Most laws recoginize an existing problem and have the aim of reducing it.

As far as I can see, what I wrote is true.

But we happen to have hate-crime laws protecting specific groups because of the history of violence directed against them. If this is more common, I'm sure a law banning that will eventually appear.

I'm saying your question is nonsensical. The crime is "inciting racial hatred". It's a crime because there's a longstanding problem with racial hatred which people would like to stop.

Similarly, inciting a riot is a crime because that was a significant problem at some point. Imagine you find somebody convicted of inciting a riot and then ask me "well, what if he didn't incite?" or "what if it wasn't a riot he was inciting?" I'd have the same response to your question above: a) then it wouldn't be a crime, and b) you're missing the point.

It seems very weird. One rents something when one can't afford to buy it. Domain names cost very little, so they should just own the domain outright, especially as it's the one whose name matches the legal entity. As far as I'm concerned, any web site developer that doesn't insist that the client own the domain name in a case like this is at best negligent.

But it's also the kind of thing a shady operator would do to take advantage of naive clients.

Sure, but it makes it an understandable mistake on the part of Rackspace. And if the company gave Rackspace some documentation that the poster was buying the name on behalf of Learning Together, then the transfer may have been proper.

More importantly, though, it puts the poster in a different light. He concealed material facts in his summary, and on the face of it trying to hold on to a client's domain is shady. It makes me wonder what else he's hidden.

Whoa. That puts a different light on things. The poster, who does web development, bought a domain name learning-together.ca which was used by his client Learning Together Inc. Rackspace transferred control of the domain name from the poster to Learning Together, Inc. It seems very weird indeed that the poster is trying to keep control of that domain.

Yes, exactly. On a couple of occasions a sternly worded letter from a lawyer has worked wonders for me.

My favorite was when a company who owed me for months of contract work suddenly got a case of we-can't-afford-to-pay. My lawyer wrote a letter explaining that under California law, wages had to be paid before anything else, and encouraged them to contact the very energetic state agency in charge of enforcing that if they were unclear. It was a masterpiece of subtle menace, and I got a wire transfer for the whole amount two days later. Total cost to me: a few hundred bucks. A decade later, he's still my lawyer.

You're saying that if we take the "racial" out of inciting racial hatred then it would no longer be the crime of inciting racial hatred? Sure, ok.

Inciting racial hatred in the UK is something they've had a problem with, something that causes harm to the fabric of society. So they made it illegal. Seems reasonable to me.

That's a) ignoring the main point, which is that why someone does something matters, and b) wrong.

It's wrong because you could intend to beat somebody up because they're black but accidentally kill them. That would be voluntary manslaughter. And also a hate crime.

Inciting violence against a minority group can do a lot more than make them sad. It can intimidate people. It can force them to leave town or prevent them from voting. Oh, and it can trigger physical violence, which... gets people trampled and killed.

You haven't really thought this through. Even for non-hate crimes, consider:

• first-degree murder - premeditated intentional killing
• second-degree murder - unplanned intentional killing
• felony murder - accidental killing in the course of a felony,
• voluntary manslaughter - accidentally killing somebody while trying to harm them or intentionally killing them when provoked, and
• involuntary manslaughter - accidentally killing somebody without intent to harm (e.g., negligent homicide)

The difference for all of these is exactly "the reason you did it". The legal term is mens rea .

Hate crimes get an additional penalty because there's additional harm. It's an action against not just the person physically injured, but all the people of the sort of person hated. Slashdot-specific analogy: If a jock beats up another jock, it's just a fight. But if a jock beats up a nerd because he's a nerd then that will tend to intimidate not just the person he beat up, but all nerds.