I *can* imagine the possibility that within 5 years, we'd have portable enough 3d imagers and powerful enough phones to both stick the hardware in a phone-sized device and have a phone-sized device run the required software. I have no real understanding of how the physics of that would really work, granted, but it doesn't seem totally outside the bounds of possibility.

But that's just the input. I *can't* really imagine the possibility that within 5 years, we'd have powerful enough *printers* to take the output of such a precise scanner, and recreate it anywhere near so precise, even if you're only talking about an object made entirely out of one or two kinds of plastic, which is unlikely to be the sort of object people would really want to "replicate". "Just about anything"? Yeah right.

Wake me up when we can replicate food, say, and have it taste the same as the original. Will we see that in my lifetime? Maybe, if I'm lucky. Will we see that in 3-5 years? I'd bet quite a lot of money on "no", and I'm not a betting sort of person.

> Are you pissed off enough to take the time to hand-write a letter to your congressional rep? Are you pissed off enough to get 20 people to sign it? These aren't monumental tasks, nor are they expensive.

They also aren't terribly *useful*. I'm pissed off too, but I'm not so pissed off that I'm going to hire a bunch of people to go door to door to get the signatures that would be required to get something on the ballot, which even if it passed, they'd probably just sneakily ignore it anyway.

Public opinion and people actually knowing it happens is way more important than your congressman knowing about it (anyway, he probably already does, probably thinks it sucks, but knows that if he ever tried to touch it, he'd be labeled as not "tough on crime" and his career would be over.)

A few years ago, I got served a lawsuit regarding a person entirely unrelated to me, but who happened to have the same name as me and live in the same city. When they couldn't track him down at his home, they found *me* listed as working at my work address, and gave it to me instead. I called him frantically, he said that's fine, mistakes happen, he was sure I wasn't the guy, he'd talk to his server and he was sure it was a mistake.

He called back the next day, said the server confirmed I was totally the guy he had a picture of (very unlikely, given I'm like 15 years younger...). I actually had to get a lawyer to get the guy to back off me. Luckily my mom knows a jillion people, and a friend of a friend of hers said he'd be happy to send the guy a nastygram on my behalf pro-bono. When the guy heard from an actual lawyer, he must have decided it wasn't worth it and went back to actually tracking down the guy that was supposed to get it, because I never heard back from him again.

So yeah. Not at all surprised there are a lot of awful lazy process servers out there who would rather just drop a lawsuit off randomly then actually make sure they gave it to the person who deserved it.

Come on, at least properly quote Tom Lehrer: "There are people out there who don't love their fellow man... and I hate people like that."

Give them nothing! But take from them... everything!

And if you do discover that you have inadvertently hired a douchebag, fire them already.

As a consultant, I have privs to do all kinds of damage in all sorts of places to not only my company, but any number of companies I'm doing work for or have done work for in the past.

First off, I'm not a dick; even if I were leaving because the company had shafted me horrifically, rather than, as it sounds like here, because I hypothetically just found some other opportunity that suited me more... even then, even if I felt like being vindictive (unlikely), I'd still restrict any harm I thought I could get away with causing, to those people who actually deserved it, not indiscriminately start screwing things up in a way that would harm all kinds of other people who had nothing to do with whatever hypothetical thing I'm imagining the company had done. Anyone who you imagine might start deleting crap out of random databases or whatever, you should can the guy right now, cause what's stopping him from doing that *now* over some slight, real or imagined?

But secondly and far more importantly, if I were that sort of person, and I was disgruntled, do you think I'd tell you and give you a chance to lock me out? That'd be pretty stupid. If I were disgruntled and wanted to cause harm and then quit, I would obviously do it *in that order*. cause I mean... duh?

Fixing that for you:
> If it turns out they can't provide service, they'll claim they refunded your deposit, but never actually send you a refund. When you call them later that month to ask about it, they'll insist that they did, redirect you a couple times to people who don't have your information, then eventually say they'll call you back tomorrow about it, which they also won't do.

When a headline says a road is proposed to connect "London to NYC", it's hard to imagine that could possibly mean anything else but the truly mind-bogglingly dumb idea of creating a road all the way across the Atlantic ocean. Which would be hilarious, but rather monumentally unlikely.

The actual proposal, which I've seen before, so it's not like it's a totally new idea, would connect Alaska with Russia, thus connecting the western US with Asia. Would still be stupidly expensive, but not *impossibly* so, and would be fantastic for shipping. But I can't imagine it would be the best way to ship something from NYC to London or reverse? They're both basically coastal on the Atlantic, and we're talking about connecting the *Pacific*. It would connect London to NYC in the same way that it would connect Denver to Zimbabwe.

I don't think it's a terrible idea, though.

> "Well the sentiment here definitely seems to lean toward "let me speed, limits are for dummies" camp."

I don't think that's quite the sentiment. I think the predominant sentiment is more like "let me speed - speed limits are artificially low as a revenue generator". Which, 99% of the time, they sure freaking are. There are *so* many places where if you drove even remotely close to the speed limit, everyone would be justifiably honking at you because you were going way slower than you had any safety-related reason to be going.

Vast majority of places, at least around here, speed limits exist as a guideline, and the guideline is actually "it's safe to go about 5-10 mph faster than whatever is posted". Vast majority of places, if you are driving the speed limit, you *are* going stupidly slow, and *are* kind of being a dick unless you know there are cops around. So let's, instead, make speed limits *actually* reflect safe driving speeds, and at *that* point I'm fine having automated systems like this and harsher penalties for ignoring it.

Ok, fine, you win. Oracle does technically work on Linux (for sufficiently gross values of "work"), so it does beat MSSQL in that regard. Still... while I certainly understand the existence of non-Microsoft ecosystems and that that could in some cases be the smart choice, I definitely can't understand going with a Linux setup and then choosing to use *Oracle*, for *anything*. Why would you possibly hate yourself that much?

More like for 100% of tasks. MSSQL is pretty good; a bit of a pain to install, and obviously crazy pricy unless you're just already paying for it for some other reason, but it's plenty powerful and pretty simple to use.

Oracle, on the other hand, is a steaming pile of turd.

Wow. Epic Slashdot it's-2015-and-still-no-unicode-support fail. :(

(Those were supposed to be small-caps, as per Death, pointing out that Death is a pretty nice guy, at least. Fail!)

SÊoeááoeÊYá...É'á Ê(TM)á ááá ÊoeáÊá...... DáááÊoe És á áÊáááÊ ÉÉáá ÉáoeÊ, áÒ"ááÊ áÊYÊY.

I disagree, people who want to ban depictions of Muhammad are pretty big boobs. (Though they're also still people, so it would offend exactly the same number of both, by definition.)

> "They'll kill people, animals, cause accidents, destroy property"
Yes, they probably will. But the question is, will they kill fewer people and animals, cause fewer accidents, and destroy less property than the absolutely enormous number of people and animals killed, accidents caused, and property destroyed by *humans* driving cars? I expect by the time self-driving cars go mainstream, the answer will be a monumental yes, in which case, that's still a win for humans and the planet.