We don't need protecting from ourselves. We do not need a hotel tax. In fact, we don't need any taxes except sales tax. But as soon as it is allowed to collect taxes, government invents new reasons to tax. That's because government is in business for itself. We're just the suckers who pay for it

Dear Media,

We've heard this, or variants of it, too many times and are now desensitized to it.

Until you show us a pile of bodies, we're inert.

Sincerely,

The People

The web worked when it had a simple standard that worked in every situation.

We've put layers on top of that, and now it's chaos. A bloated, irregular, often incomprehensible chaos designed to allow people to make custom interfaces out of the web.

The whole point of the web, versus having an application for every specific task (like we did on desktops before the 1990s, and like we now do on smartphones), was to have a standard and simplified interface.

The web grew and thrived under that goal. It's become more corporate, nuanced, isolated, sealed-off, etc. under our "new" way.

A good lawyer doesn't slay it; she keeps it alive and milks it for hourly payments.

"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.