We don't have a culture that encourages that behavior. Imagine.....what would have happened if the FBI admitted it fucked up and checked the wrong box?

I'll tell you what would happen if they said that: all hell would break loose. We'd have claims of racism, we'd have claims of misogyny, we'd have everyone and their cousin claiming to be a similar victim regardless of the merits of the claims.

The reason people don't say "sorry, I fucked up" is because "sorry" is not an acceptable answer in our society. All it seems to do is admit guilt which is inevitably followed by lawsuits. Why bother with an apology when the end result will be the same? Better to just ignore it until it becomes unignorable and only then will they respond.

Whether it's govt or "big business" the result is the same. They don't say "sorry, we fucked up" because they damn well know that won't be the last word. They also know, legally, that giving an apology is the equivalent of admitting guilt.

If society accepted apologies, we'd see a lot more of them. Unfortunately, that's not how our over-litigious world works.

I suspect many who rail against this kind of graft and corruption are fine with giving the government and it's agencies more power to regulate and 'insure a fair marketplace'. However, the more rules and laws that are passed, the more they can be (ab)used to advantage or disadvantage someone else or some other company. I am constantly surprised at how many people here on /. do not make this connection.

We beg and beg for more regulation about X. Once it's in place, you complain because companies try to influence the process? Well, surprise surprise.....when you regulate people or companies, they usually want to participate in the process. If, during that process, they can disadvantage the other guy......why not do that? That's common sense, completely expected, and has been going on as long as the world has been going around.

That Slashdot finds this surprising says more about slashdot than it does the companies.

Maybe this will work better:
1. Establish law(s) affecting companies
2. Act surprised when companies want to participate in the lawmaking
3. ????
4. Profit

1/3 of the country is not on food stamps because they are hungry. Hunger has nothing to do with it. Ask yourself: how can a country have 1/3 of it's population hungry and still have an obesity epidemic within that very population?

Something's rotten in Gotham....

Point in case, the people surfing the web using telnet to port 80 are going to be very pissed.

I bet all 8 of those people could learn a workaround.
C'mon....are we really worried about a use case for telnet websurfing?

It has raised the standard of living for far more people in a much shorter time than any other system ever developed in the history of humankind.

Would you like to know more?

You are right that the pendulum swings both ways. You're also right that a lot of people in history looked towards communism to solve society's ills, especially during the depression. But that's the point: we have a LOT of evidence on the results of communism because many countries around the world went on to implement and practice communism. After seeing how those countries turned out, America rightfully rejected that philosophy over the coming decades and our long history of success proves that we made a good choice.

So now we want to re-litigate the merits of communistic ideals? And it gets front page play in a (fairly) major publication?

As my original post hypothesized, lots of people who aren't usually interested in politics are being forced to get interested because of crap like this. I chose this article as one example but we all know there are thousands of these examples out there. What used to be common American values aren't so common anymore and nobody seems to be saying anything.

I'm well below normal about how much I care about cars and TVs.

.....but I suspect even your rudimentary understanding of cars and TVs outstrips the best of the "normals" we are talking about. Anyone on /. will be completely bored with this approach. The first thing I thought of was "great, more USA Today Tech articles with sidenotes from Kim Kommando". Sure, there is an audience for that.....but it's tech section will cater to Mary Jane Mathteacher and Tips for Excel.

What if I told you that the reason they talk about it so much is because they are genuinely concerned about the direction the country is going.

As one example of many: Not so long ago, we didn't have much discussion about whether communism was better than capitalism at raising the human living standard. Anyone with intellectual honesty already knew that answer so there wasn't much to talk about after a cursory review of the evidence. People who espoused that view were rightfully challenged almost immediately. Nowadays that is not the case. Here we are again debating the "merits" of a system that collapsed entirely less than 25 years ago. (For those that don't know what I am referring to, see the recent Rolling Stone article about what every millennial should be fighting for)

I want to be clear that we need to provide a forum for new ideas so I don't want to stifle discussion. It just gets tiring trying to explain that we already know some of these answers if you will just fucking look and read. But nope.....thoroughly discredited ideas keep rising to the top without challenge and old lesson will assuredly get relearned (at great human cost!)

That is why so many people take every conversation to politics. People can no longer assume that common core American values are being represented in politics anymore so it is forcing them to engage and set things straight. They don't want to be political anymore than you want them to be political. It's just that they have no choice.

Quick clarification: The heart/lungs are always the best shot because they have the highest probability of a lethality. Shooting at the head is a bad idea because skulls are hard and tend to deflect arrows and sometimes bullets.

The choice of where to shoot a deer has nothing to do with "bagging that awesome trophy".

No, all this does is prevent PETA from harassing hunters via nefarious means. I assure you, the hunters are all for this as PETA has shown itself to be consistently irrational (to put it mildly). Do you not think they will use this "monitoring" for harassment? Of course they will.

Hunters have hunted for longer than this country has been around and now, all of a sudden, we need an adversarial group like PETA "monitoring" for compliance? Give me a break.

If PETA were a bit more rational (not counting on it), they might be welcomed to the table for constructive solutions to the problems they see.

Energy.

That, here in the USA, is cheap and plentiful

A thousand time this. Price discovery is almost unheard of in the medical industry. If patients were told prices and actually paid for service themselves (to be later reimbursed by insurance) you would see an immediate change in behavior as people shop the marketplace and prices rationalize. These are basic Free Market principles.

Do this experiment: next time you go to the Doctor, ask them the cost as if you were going to write them a check. Seems simple, right? What is the cost of "x", where x is my medical service? In many/most cases they will not be able to tell you a number. If they do, many times it will be the net cost (after insurance, discount, etc) instead of the total cost as if you were writing a check then and there.

Where do you think your information is going?
Let's check back in about 18 months.....

I am a very happy customer of the credit reporting agencies. The information I receive from them is well worth the price I pay and helps me make better credit decisions.

I don't really care if you don't think a late payment from March 2007 is relevant to my credit decision. What really matters is whether I (the lender) do and by my actions and words - I do care. You are coming to me wanting to borrow money, not the other way around. I want to know as much about your payback and credit history as possible. Sorry, that's how it is.

(P.S. This is +5 insightful now?.....)

Got it. That makes perfect sense now. Yes, that is certainly what got you blacklisted. Thanks for the clarification. I have run a relay but never an exit node for precisely this reason. I can't believe you ran it for 2 weeks without hearing from Verizon before that time.

Did you know you can run tor and be a relay without being an exit node? That still helps the Tor network tremendously so you might consider that if you aren't able to be an exit node anymore.