Most people, I'm sure. I actually don't. Thinking back through my life, there's really nothing that has ever happened that would bother me. Some of it might be mildly uncomfortable but only mildly. Some might be a little more uncomfortable without the context, for example when I was 19 I was arrested for theft, but I wasn't actually stealing anything. Oh... perhaps an even better example was about three years ago when I broke my daughter's collarbone. Without the context, that makes me sound like an abusive father. But even that doesn't bother me so much that I feel a need to provide the context here.

However, let's assume that everyone does. In that case, there's a good argument that lots of doxing would be a good thing, since it would demonstrate that (nearly) everyone has these sorts of minor issues at some point in their life, which means that we should all just stop getting worked up over them.

Sure it was a lot hotter. But we could deal with it. At my house this morning it's -23F. We can deal with that, we can deal with heat.

There's a false assumption behind this line of argument, which is that the climate today is hospitable to humans. It's really not. There are relatively few areas of the planet where humans could survive without some level of technology and effective adaptation of the environment (clothing, man-made shelters and fuel for heating, at least). Humans today live in large numbers everywhere except the most extreme of the climates... from equatorial jungles and deserts to frozen tundra, including places that have annual temperature swings of 150F or more.

Given that, it's silly to claim that altering temperatures by a few degrees will make the technologically adept humans of today (and decades and centuries hence) incapable of living comfortably in large numbers. Rising sea levels will cause mass displacements, and that will be expensive and difficult, consuming a large fraction of human productivity and likely causing many individual tragedies. Other changes in weather patterns will cause other displacements and changes. Droughts, floods, possibly-increased storms, etc. All of these are real issues, and worth worrying about. But the direct effects of a few degrees temperature change will merely make us adjust our clothing styles and turn down the heat/turn up the AC. Meh.

The rest of your post was good, but this bit is silly. The earth has seen much faster climate change, many times, and not only does life "cope", there's some reason to believe rapid climate change has been one of the biggest drivers of evolutionary diversity.

With that said, although climate change might be good for biodiversity and a good counter to the Holocene extinction, it's likely inconvenient for us, so we should learn how to engineer the planet's climate and stabilize it, not only against anthropogenic changes, but against "natural" changes as well (the climate isn't very stable, and both ends of the typical range of extremes would be pretty uncomfortable for us).

Long-term storage is the wrong solution, at least for spent fuel. The right solution is to burn the spent fuel in breeder reactors. The result is waste that only needs to be stored for a couple of centuries.

Obviously. Though it's configured with a rather different userspace than most Linuxen.

It's at the ideal end of the spectrum... because someone knowledgeable set it up to be that way.

Normal users don't install Windows. They do have to manage the steaming pile of crap, though, or find someone else who will.

Exactly.

Google Cloud Print (which works on Android devices and on any Windows/OS X/Linux machine with a Chrome browser) sends your print jobs to Google, which routes them to the cloud-connected printer you select. It's actually quite convenient in a lot of ways. It means you don't have to configure the machine you're printing from for the printer you're printing to. It also means you don't have to be in the same physical location as the printer to print... which seems less than useful if you're trying to print a piece of paper because you need it, but can be very useful if you're trying to print a piece of paper that someone else, who is located near the printer, needs.

ChromeOS doesn't include a native printing system (CUPS would be the obvious choice), and can only print via Cloud Print. IMO, ChromeOS should bundle CUPS with a reasonable set of printer configurations, for users who may not have a cloud-capable printer, or who may not have network connectivity, but the cloud solution actually works really well where it does work.

I agree that Chromebooks need to be able to print to a USB-connected printer, but I disagree that Cloud Print is crappy. It's non-functional where you don't have net connectivity, but everywhere else, it's awesome. In my experience it's so much more reliable than ordinary Wifi printer connections, and even some USB printer connections that I always use Cloud Print first, if it's available. haven't even bothered to configure my laptop with drivers for my home printer. That approach is fiddly, while the cloud solution works every time with no setup. And it works from my phone, my tablet, etc.

In addition, it is occasionally *very* convenient to be able to print to a printer somewhere else. There have been several times when I've been traveling that I've printed something for my wife, on our home printer. Yes, I could send her the doc and she could print it, but only if she has the relevant application... it's so much easier just to text her to say "The document you need to sign and run up to the county office is printing in the kitchen right now".

The point of a Chromebook isn't cost savings, it's that it's maintenance-free. There's no malware to worry about and nothing to mess up. The same is pretty true of an iPad or an Android tablet, but presumably he wants a laptop form factor.

My mom wanted to get something and I encouraged her to get either a Chromebook or a tablet, but my dad insisted that those were crap and she should get a real computer, and he found a deeply-discounted laptop with Windows 8.1 on it, which was cheaper than most Chromebooks.

And two days later I was over at her house, cleaning off malware, installing AV, trying to fix configuration changes she'd accidentally made while trying to fix the problems she'd caused. I should have made my dad fix it, frankly. Windows is too much hassle. OS X isn't too bad, but Apple's premium prices are. Linux can be anywhere from impossible to ideal for a less-clueful user, but it may require some knowledge to set it up, and the notion is intimidating to many. ChromeOS is... safe, reliable and easy.

Except it can't print except via the cloud. That, incidentally, was the argument my dad used to insist on Windows for her. Google needs to add CUPS to ChromeOS, IMO. It's pretty much plug and play with most printers.

So what?

Answer this: Would the knowledge that no movie studio would pay you millions to license your novels have stopped you from writing them? You can argue that that possibility factored into your thinking, but that's not the point. The point is: If that possibility, and that alone, were completely removed, would you have chosen not to write?

You have to keep in mind that the purpose of copyright -- as envisioned by the framers of the Constitution, who provided the legal framework for it -- is to benefit society, not authors. It's to promote creation and publication. So, society should set the terms of the temporary copyright monopoly at the minimum level required to motivate authors to write and publish, and no higher.

Personally, I'm a fan of geometrically-growing copyright registration fees. Make it free for the first decade (from publication), $100 for the second, $10K for the third, $1M for the fourth, $100M for the fifth, $10B for the sixth, and so on. Each decade costs 100X what the previous decade did. Oh, and adjust the fees for inflation, too. The idea is to ensure that all works have 20-30 years in which the owner can attempt to sell it, and to hold out the promise of even longer for blockbusters with long-term financial viability, but to ensure that everything eventually falls into the public domain. The offer of longer terms for blockbusters, note, isn't to benefit copyright holders financially so much as it is to dangle a carrot, because hardly any work will justify $100M, and it's likely that nothing would justify $10B.

Your notion of basing it on gross revenue is interesting, but I think it would be too easy for big studios to game.

How does this work when there are hundreds of people working on a project, like a film? Does the copyright expire ten years after the first death, or the last? If the former, then pretty much any movie more than ten years old will be in the public domain. If the latter, I guess we're going to start seeing a few dozen babies somehow contributing to every new project, all of them selected from families who seem to live unusually long.

Also, what constitutes "death"? What happens if a member of the crew is cryogenically preserved and later brought back to life? Does copyright get reinstated? And what happens if people stop dying? It doesn't seem at all unlikely that within the next few decades we acquire the ability to keep a human body alive indefinitely (though I'm not sure if the brain is up to remaining useful for much longer)?

I think tying copyright to human lifespans is a bad idea. I prefer ever-increasing copyright maintenance fees. If Disney is willing to pay a billion dollars a year to keep Mickey, fine. But for most works, the copyright owners will eventually decide that it's better to release it into the public domain.

Yeah, nothing says "in bed" like a 2.5 year court battle, followed by immediately notifying the target.