What about the share holders who sold out before the leak was discovered? What if the owner died and the money was passed on to heirs? What about the ones that moved to another country? Let's say the leaking pond contaminated your drinking water, and coincidentally two of your children have mental development disorders, which of course you can never prove came from that leak? How much cash is worth that?

So we think, now, 30 years after the fact, that the large amount of lead being released into the air from the automotive industry was responsible for the drastic increases in violent crime in the 1960s and 1970s.

Even supposing we hadn't banned leaded gasoline, how exactly do you think the oil and gas industry would take to new efforts to tax their products today? Do you think consumers would enjoy it? Can we ever prove 100% that this was the cause? How many years back would we need to try to retroactively collect these taxes? Can we even legally do so? Just exactly how much do value do you assign to damaging a baby or young child's brain so that you can appropriate tax gasoline for the effect?

Now take everything I just said and apply it to carbon dioxide and global climate change and see how well it's working.

When applied to the commons - primarily the environment - unregulated capitalism is an absolute failure. Attempting to apply more market forces to it only works if your goal is to hasten the revolution that swings things too far in some other direction.

The fashion industry would like to respectfully disagree with you.

In all seriousness, apparently some change does matter. I read about a study (on phone and too lazy to find link) where heterosexual women were asked to decide which of a group of photographs of men were more "striking" or somesuch. When the group was almost all people with beards, those without we're deemed more striking. And vice versa.

So, if everyone does something one way, being different stands out. Not everyone is creative enough to find their own own way, but they can jump on the coat tails of the actual creative innovators. Eventually the whole market moves and "change" has happened for "change's sake", but it's roots are justified in human desire to appreciate the unique and innovative.*

* a desire that is not shared by all, and often misguided, admittedly.

"Blinkers" are both turn signal and hazard indicators. Cars I have owned manufactured in the past 20 years have had at least three distinct control methods to turn on and off the hazard indicators. So no, "blinkers" haven't been standard for 35 years.

From the video, it looks like the Google car did leave some space in front of it. It should have realized that the person approaching from behind was not stopping fast enough and might rear end it, and, prior to impact, applied a quick burst of gas then brake to use up some of that buffer space. That would give the approaching driver additional space to stop.

Then again, when I do that, it's because I see the panic in the eyes of the driver approaching from behind, and I can also tell that he's trying to stop and just doesn't quite have enough space. It's been successful a few times. Were I to see that the approaching driver is way too fast and, for example, looking at his phone, I would assume he wasn't going to try to stop and me eating into my buffer space would just make it more likely my car would have front-end damage, too. I'd be better served trying to drive out of the way. Fortunately I've only been in this situation twice and the driver behind me both times decided to drive into the shoulder/ditch instead of rear end me.

As shown in the video, the Google car both stopped short (leaving space for it to move up a few feet and brake again when it realized the driver behind wouldn't stop in time, giving the driver behind more space to stop) AND wasn't the first car at the light, so even if it used up its buffer space and was still shoved, it would neither be driving nor likely get shoved into the intersection.

Mathematics isn't a science any more than fashion is a science. They are just off the scales at different ends.

Based on the nude male bicycle gang that passed us near Golden Gate Park when we were there on vacation a few weeks ago, I think the correct verb is "is".

AT&T has given me an IPV6 address and routes traffic to certain destinations using it. I can tell because those destinations time out if I haven't visited them recently, then after a minute or so of trying (no matter how many windows, refreshes, etc. while other sites work fine), they suddenly start working - until I don't visit them for 10 minutes or so and they reset. Facebook, Google properties fall into this category.

According to the internet it's a know problem in AT&T's IPV6 implementation and I need to turn it off at the router. I keep meaning to take care of it but then again I keep thinking Google Fiber will get here and I won't have to bother.

The thing is, the number of people who want to regularly visit a site that looks like it was made in 1998 and mostly comments on decade-old inside jokes and features an increasingly libertarian slant is not growing because the number of people who fall into that category is not growing. Slashdot has four options:

1) Figure out how to grow their customer base without eliminating their existing customers (difficult; existing customers oppose change and tend to either directly be, or through their opinions appear to be, hostile to newcomers),

2) They should give up growing their customer base and just be the best they can for their existing base, trying to win back the Soylent News crowd. (This might work, but wouldn't grow the base. They'd be like "classic rock" stations or "oldies" stations before that, who were playing popular music when they started, but rather than keep up with pop they decide to freeze in time and mostly ride the same fan base to their mutual deaths. Plus this assumes the existing base was homogenous; it wasn't, and as some groups have gotten more vocal they have permanently chased others away.)

3) They could say "fuck it" to their existing customer base, make all the radical changes they want to make, and start over rebuilding a new crowd. (This usually doesn't make corporate overlords happy unless it's their brainchild idea, e.g. Napster, etc., and even then it rarely works.)

4) Cowboy Neal could pull the plug and shut the whole thing down. (I needed to include a decade-old inside joke here somewhere.)

The law isn't so black and white. The government (and a judge, and a jury) would weigh the illegal uses of the service with the legal ones. They would also look to see how the service handled obvious and reported illegal uses. If, for example, eBay only sold stolen goods, and it was obvious (as in spelled out in the product descriptions) that they were stolen, and they did nothing when users reported the listings of stolen goods, then yeah, they would be breaking the law.

On the other hand, Craigslist has many legal users, and does block listings reported for selling drugs, etc. So even though you can buy drugs through Silk Road and Craigslist, one was shut down and the other one wasn't, with the same standards applied.

I'm not going to touch your Too Big To Fail corporate references as they have their own set of standards that do reflect actual problems with the legal and/or corporate governance system.

Obamacars

Sure you can, when they are done with it and you now need it more than they do. Same with police service, fire service, ambulance, etc. Or are those handouts in your opinion since you can't use them when they are actively serving someone else?

...and basics like the ability to receive a phone call with a job offer while also being out on the town distributing resumes is necessary to empower people to get the job that lets them earn that wealth. The idea that the best way to empower someone is to make them sit at home waiting for a phone call on their land line, while being unable to go out due to lack of cell, and unable to apply to any job at home thanks to lack of internet service, is frankly absurd. Government investing in people to empower them with the tools needed to get jobs and become productive members of society is something I want out of my government, and since enough other people agree with me including enough of the Supreme Court that it's constitutional, I get what I want.

The government is not a business and should not be a business, and business analogies do not apply.