This is exactly what the world should do.
When I schedule a meeting, I just pick the time and date and everyone knows instantly when that is, it doesn't matter what time of year it is, and when [Country X] has arbitrarily decided to change times this year.

I moved from Saskatchewan (who doesn't change times) to BC and I'm not looking forward to it. Sure I'll get an extra hours of sleep this weekend, but I lose it a few months later.

The sad thing is, the number of people in SK who want to change times, or worse yet, think that province should switch to MST. For those who don't know, Saskatchewan falls completely within CST. It generally becomes an argument about this time every year.

Which you can read about here. And his letter didn't come from a PAC, it came from the Democratic Party.

I've never gotten anything remotely like this letter from the Republican Party or a conservative PAC (and I probably get well over 200 begging direct-mail solicitations a year).

I don't see such intimidation tactics as paying off for them...

1. "In 1991, Andrew Rapport declared Microsoft the winner in the PC contest because Microsoft and Intel had harnessed the Asian supply chain and dramatically undercut the cost of the eccentric Steve Jobs’s Apple Mac." No, by 1991, it was John Scully's Mac, as Jobs was ousted in 1985.
2. "When Apple’s first notebook, the Macintosh 100, wasn’t embraced by consumers because it was two big, too heavy, and too expensive" No, that would have been the original Mac Portable (1989), which was all of those things. The Powerbook (not Macintosh) 100 was actually a very light ultra-portable.

Since author Steven Max Patterson and his editors couldn't be bothered to perform basic fact-checking, I stopped reading at that point...

I shouldn't have to remind you of the things in the modern world that depends on real-time instructions from software.

You are not one of those things! You GIVE orders to computers, not take! The computer is supposed to be your bitch. Thirty years ago people worried about Terminators, and now I find out that all Skynet has to do, is nicely tell people to jump off cliffs. I can't wait until Google Surgeon, when everyone thinks they should just blindly do what they're told, preferably with impatience and in real time.

Google Surgeon [speaking slowly]: "Snip the art--"

Doctor: [snip] "Yeahyeah doesanyoneknowhow tospeedupthisthing'sspeech?"

Google Surgeon: "--ery, but first, clamp off the blood supply so the patient doesn't bleed to death."

It is positively dangerous when you have to go round a roundabout twice for it to catch up! (In a 40 ton rig).

WTF? How can a mapping program possibly be dangerous or time-sensitive?

(Please don't tell me you are one of those MORONS who relies on software for real-time instructions, instead of having your own plan that was possibly originally aided by software. If you're a moron, then it's not the software that's dangerous; it's that some even bigger, stupider moron allowed you to drive a 40 ton vehicle (or even a 1 ton vehicle) on roads that might have other people within a quarter mile.)

All I can think of, is that the slowness is somehow keeping you from being able to review your route before you it's time for you to leave, so that you end up driving faster to catch up.

Just troll people with the question mark.

1) Destroy instutionalized education and rebuild it with features like Oh, I don't know...how about not penalizing people who think differently and degrees based on contribution to society and not paper exams?

2) How about not destroying our economic base by giving bankers hundreds of trillions in benefits for raping society and well, maybe using that money to build something we need...like a new propulsion tech not based on Newtonian Physics?

I would be willing to bet with 17 trillion dollars that the Bankers go we could probably do something interesting....like open the entire resource base of the solar system to a growing humanity with lots of problems.

...funnel money to donors who then go bankrupt shortly after...

*sigh* You can lead a horse to an optimized process, but you can't make him apply it. Enjoy wasting your time diving for cover whenever any nuke goes off, while the rest of of snort, "Heh, he thought that was an H-bomb? What a dimwit!"

You say it dismissively, but the big thing lately is that Microsoft can play catch-up and is really trying to do it. Did you ever think you'd see the day? Starting around MSIE 9 they made huge strides toward becoming fairly normal, rather remaining forever obsolete, as a weird, special, anachronistic case. You never would have heard anyone say this in 2009 or 2004 but it now looks like a fresh Windows install might be able to surf the web, right out-of-the-box.

It used to be that if someone had problems and you found out their browser was .. well, they didn't know, but they said they just "clicked the internet" .. you'd tell 'em they need to get a browser, any reasonably modern browser. But I rebooted to do some testing just yesterday, and MSIE 11 does not suck. Seriously, I found more problems with Safari on Windows, than I did with MSIE.

Today's web browsers, in general, are pretty damn good. Even Microsoft can do this now.

From a certain point of view, they are huge.

I once read (*) that the full gamma burst from a thermonuclear explosion takes several seconds. (Whereas from a fission bomb, it's mostly over in a fraction of a second; the bigger-yield fusion bombs create a lot of temporary unstable shit that gives off more gamma rays as it decays over several seconds.) This led to me developing a nuclear war survival trick, which I will now share with everyone on Slashdot, even though I haven't tested (**) it yet:

If there's a sudden blinding flash in the sky, quickly try to estimate: does it look like a big one? If so, then dive for cover, preferably behind something big and solid, like a boulder or something like that. HTH.

(*) Wish I could cite a reference, but I'm lazy.

(**) If my trick is no good or based on misunderstood physics, you can make fun of me after the next nuclear war.

Without a top-down bureaucracy calling the shops, states can try 50 different methods to control the pandemic, and compare results to see who has the best one. They're not stuck mindlessly doing what Washington has dictated, even if it's wrong.

The CDC is swearing up and down Ebola can be transmitted by airborne infection, but what if they're wrong about this strain?

The federal government is much more likely than the states to continue a wrong course of action long after it's been proven a bad idea than the states. See also: Welfare, agribusiness subsidies, the food pyramid...

...because it might put favored liberal policies or politicians in a bad light. That's why Sharyl Attkisson resigned.