I'll buy that anti-discrimination laws create economic drag in a healthy society, but recall that the reason most of these laws were created is because there were widespread attempts to keep large portions of the society down. If you refuse to hire a talented black man, and I then hire him, it will only give me an economic edge if I don't suffer a social backlash because half of the society refuses to do business with me, 'because I hired a nigger'. This is exactly the conditions that required legal addressing with laws.

Now, while we aren't in the same place now, discrimination still exists, and nobody knows exactly where the tipping point lies, in terms of the laws changing from a social enabler to a net economic drag. Since the economic drag is relatively low (compared to say, 10% of the population being destitute and disenfranchised), it makes sense to keep the laws until such time that we can be sure that repealing them won't cause widespread social problems.

Armstrong risked his ass in countless ways flying to the goddamned MOON, he can keep all the extra cameras and junk he wants to. If ANYONE earned this stuff its the guys who put their lives on the line for science, the USA, and the general advancement of humanity.

I see zero problem with this.

What about drinking? Much more likely that your employees are going to be drinking than doing drugs, so what about mandatory breathalyzer tests? How about Every morning as they walk into the front door? Are you going to do background checks too? Ex-convicts are probably more likely to get re-arrested, don't hire those guys. You shouldn't hire minorities while you are at it, because they are more likely than white people to get pulled over and arrested by the police. That would really ruin your day, if your employees where being hassled by the police because they weren't born with the right skin color and they couldn't make their shift.

Or you could you know, just hire people that seem dependable and evaluate them on their performance, which seems a whole lot simpler and less judgmental.

Sarcasm, its a thing...

Wealthier? CAPITALIST RUNNING DOG, THIS! IS! COMMUNISM!!!

I thought that the whole point of Communism was that nobody was 'rich' or 'poor'....

"When I need important data, I just steal it from other people."

This is a meta-Turing test: Post something on /. about a computer doing something vaguely 'human' under the title of a machine passing a Turing test and see which posters believe it. Those people are just python scripts.

Bonus points for using a quasi 'AI' program to auto generate said stories...

I'm not a fan of foreign language requirements, but if you are a coder you should learn a foreign language. I've seen to many shitty coders that know nothing about encoding, localization, internationalization, times and dates formats, and other such things. If you are going to write apps in a increasingly global computer world, learn something about how other people communicate.

I didn't say that I wanted a non-anomalous Internet, I said what you are seeing is a result of mixing the two models. I didn't advocated for change in either direction. I suggest you read more carefully before posting.

Your second sentence is utter gibberish. You don't want something because you don't want it? I hope you speak more eloquently than you post, lets your audience end up covered with phlegm.

You suggested that I wish to track people down and punish them for saying things I don't like. I don't know where you got 'me' as the subject in that sentience. Isn't that what the law is for? Laws == things that people have collectively decided to prohibit. If you were to suggest that People who are breaking the law should be tracked down and punished, I would totally agree with you.

Finally you seem somewhat fuzzy headed about the difference between freedom of speach, and freedom of abuse. It is one thing to advocate of an unpopular idea, ('The Nazi party should voted into power','Women should be barefoot and pregnant') vs. various threats ('I am going to drive to your house at 1234 pine st and kill you, bmajik.', ' Here is all bmajik's personal information that could be used for identity theft and fraud'). I will advocate to allow the former but never the latter.

I actually very much like the idea of the internet being a place, or, at least having places, where there is no authority, no oversight, and no rule makers. Where if you say something that upsets people, you are mercilessly attacked -- with speech.

The problem with trolls on the internet isn't that they are attacking people with abuse and harassment, it is that they are doing it anomalously. If I tell you I think you are stupid and I am going to come to your house and kill you, you cannot really do anything about it; there are no repercussions to me for my aberrant behavior. I suspect a lot of problems with abuse and trolling would disappear very quickly if everyone was required to post with their full names and a photo of themselves as an avatar.

We are dealing with the fall out from having the Internet half anonymous.

TiggertheMad, a nobody from the Internet, said Tuesday that the he is "very concerned" by the most of the Internet's decision to not automatically encrypt all data. "We understand the value of legal discovery and the importance of enforcing laws," he said. "But we're very concerned they not lead to the creation of what I would call a 'zone of lawlessness,' where the government violates some of our most basic principles in some quixotic hunt to ferret out terrorists and other boogie men. They might actually have to do some actual police work, you know like they did for the last few centuries."

The station keeping and vibration might not be a problem - as long as you know what is happening I bet you could digitally correct for it. In fact, that might need to occur in any event, since for the levels of precision, you will probably need to be able to correct for the difference in gravitational forces acting on the ring between sea level and whatever orbit they put it in.

Perhaps the police should stop behaving in was that make non-criminals scared of them. The number of dangerous criminals in society is really very small. If this app is downloaded more than a few hundred times that would indicate that more people than just hardened criminals want to keep tabs on cops. Just the download counter for the app could be read as a social barometer of public trust.

Also, the watchmen don't like being watched? Tough shit. You want more power than the average person, you had better get used to extra scrutiny too.

Now they're just marketing doublespeak.

So true. When I saw the blurb about the 'charms bar' I immediately imagined an exclusive hipster cereal bar in San Francisco that exclusively served lucky charms cereal with organic unpasteurized milk. The flatware was reclaimed 1890s mining camp tin spoons, and the maitre'd was dressed like lucky the leprechaun.

I suppose we have that dumb fuck Balmer to thank for this....

This also looks a lot like a slightly unpopular kid going and beating up the most unpopular kid to make everyone else like them more.

Pedophiles are like Nazis: They are widely assumed to be completely and thoroughly evil and thus worthless human beings. If you are going to pick a group to engage in vigilante activity against this is just about the perfect one, because who is going to going to stand up and say 'that's not right'. Unlike other extremely unpopular groups like Human traffickers or actual no-Nazis, pedophiles are not generally gun toting violent lunatics, so the risk of being murdered in retaliation is pretty low.

If you want to break the law to try to uphold the law, this is a logical choice, I guess.