"That's excellent! Now that they're a legitimate public entity, they can be sued! That gets them out of criminal court, and into profit court err I mean civil court."

I can hear the excited clicking of Mont Blanc pens now...

In the time it took me to type this message, Google earned $1.54 million.

How much do you fine them before it's a rounding error that they fail to notice?

I think you're right, despite the waves of vast cynicism in that post.

Another way to put this is that the audience defines the product. Our inattentive public wants news-drama, not news-factuality, so any news service run as a business will quickly start with the Justin Bieber and Jodi Arias stories...

Why dont you help by killing yourself?

I don't think that would help.

If you have thoughts of suicide, try one of these hotlines. Talk to someone before depression wins.

The old ways are best:

This finding is relevant because it suggests the existence of a limited number of ephemeral particles per unit volume in a vacuum.

In other words, there is no nothingness; everything is something. Thus we're looking at vacuums being a variation of type of substrate of matter, not an absence of matter. Mind-blowing. Be sure to drop acid before reading this.

At first, I was excited by this. A new way of looking at the world! Crowd-sourcing! etc.

Now I'm cynical. Crowd sourcing translates to witch-hunts. The ideas that Anon have adopted are the same old ones that got us in this mess in the first place.

You want news? Go to Slashdot or Hacker News.

Stoned basement-dwelling teenage life dropouts should not be determining what we think is "news"

This is a trick question.

The users drive the software; their use defines it and their input is the most important.

However, the users are their own worst enemy. They have trouble translating the effects they want into the designs that are required in the software.

Thus I think the users need the most input, but that needs to be filtered through developers, the smart managers (1-2% on any job), and the user experience folks.

That is, if you want functional software. Users are their own worst enemy and are self-defeating; if you just want to make some bucks quickly, the marketers are the most important as they'll go flatter the users and come back with a list of buzz-words and then make sure the software has those features, even if in barely functional form. But you'll sell more product in the first cycle.

VIM editing Perl code in one window, another for an execution trace, and a third to run the program. Ugly and basic but it gets the job done.

Ultimately, within a hundred years, this world is going to be absolutely miserable to live on and some really pissed off person is going to create a biological weapon and bring it all down... all because people are desperate for power over others but refuse to live by the rules they themselves create. I guess it is good that I will be dead before then. I wonder how much suffering I will see before I die. The suffering from World War 2 was apparently not enough.

I hope you elaborate.

It seems to me that despite our technology, society is directionless, people are miserable under the surface, we're not really achieving anything and discontent is spreading.

Stop all immigration.

Stop all food aid.

Stop the sharing of baby photos on Facebook.

Don't show sexy late night TV in winter.

Let's focus on raising the quality of the humans we do have, not making more.

Our technologies and laws allow us to do lots of things.

We should perhaps ask instead, what kind of society we are making?

If we're making a miserable place that focuses on details of law-breaking more than the big factor, which is how safe/smart of a driver someone is, we're penalizing good behavior and encouraging people to live in a nit-picky miserable world.

We can make a horrible world, if we want; however, we might prefer not to.

I like the positive way of looking at this that you've chosen. However, I also mourn the loss of what college should have been, could have been, etc.