Wait a second -- this program has only been running for one quarter of a year?

76 jobs doesn't sound that bad, on such a short time frame.

Sounds like a pre-mature judgement.

You read a post on Slashdot and you didn't understand it.

The proposal is not that if a person commits a crime and pays X amount for it then if a company commits the same crime they should pay X multiplied by the difference in their income, which is what you're arguing against in your example of speeding tickets.

This is in relation to the kinds of crimes that (generally) companies commit, and is arguing that if a large company commits that crime then it should pay a larger fine than if a smaller company commits the same crime.

It is possible that the scale of the crime has been included in the size of the fee, but if so it's a pretty ridiculous standard to begin with. "Hundreds of thousands of customer records" is pretty vague, but let's assume records for 250,000 people. That means a fine of $100 a person. That's not nothing, but it doesn't really cover the potential damage they may have caused. And furthermore in this case, although we are presuming the employees did not sell the data as part of a corporate directive, the fact that they were able to do so indicates some pretty serious lack of oversight and security, and some portion of the fee ought to be related to that. And _that_ part of the fee ought to reflect the size of the company involved.

$25 million could easily bankrupt a small company, but AT&T will hardly notice it amidst the yearly revenue of $132 billion and net income of over $6 billion. So the fine works out to about 0.4% of their yearly profit. In 2011 the average American household had $12,800 of discretionary income available, about the best equivalent to corporate profit i can think of. In which case if an average American committed the same crime the "expected" fee would be $51.20. That's not even a speeding ticket, that's about a parking ticket level of fine.

You can't compare a civil offense like a speeding ticket to a criminal trial. The standards of proof are completely different.

In the case of a civil offense, the standard is preponderance of evidence. A cops word is pretty much good enough for that.
In a criminal trial the standard is beyond a reasonable doubt. That means no reasonable person can have a reasonable doubt that you did it. HUGE difference.

I have taught myself limited Esperanto, and can tell you: It actually DOES have a lot of unnecessary exceptions.

So I would take the basic ideas of :

Keep:
* the correlatives -- in fact, make it COMPLETE (i tiam for "now", rather than "nun")
* the agglutination system -- in fact, use it MORE, and think through, carefully, the ontology of each word region -- make it as plane and ordinary as possible: this may take several decades from a team of collaborating resesarchers, but might result in a dramatically easier learning curve
* NO irregular verbs

Toss:
* the future tense (-os)
* the conditional tense (-us)
* basically, anything that comes from Latin
* EXCEPTIONS
* , or anything else that doesn't appear on a querty keyboard
* irregular nouns
* the Esperanto dictionary -- some overlap would be fine, but don't just import it (because we want a clean model of agglutinated nouns)

Add:
* limited vowel sounds -- constrain vowel sounds to Japanese's "a", "i", "u", "e", and "o" -- and NO syllable emphasis

Irrelevant:
* European vs. Asian basis -- I really don't think this is the obstacle people think it is.

The Union of Concerned Scientists says that increasing wildfires comes from climate change.

I'm going to go with the science, rather than Random Internet Guy.

That's the long way of putting it, but yes. If the rainfall patterns stay the same as they are now vegetation will continue to grow in those same areas and the carbon will (on average) remain out of circulation. If the rainfall patterns continue to change the new vegetation in the affected areas won't get enough water and will die/not regrow in the new season and the carbon will quickly return to the environment. Like i said, the not so good side of things.

China Helps Reverse Global Forest Loss, With a Little Bit of Luck

According to a recent study the total amount of vegetation in the world has gone up over the last decade. This is mainly due to tree planting efforts in China, changing rainfall patterns allowing more growth in new areas and (probably) the increased amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

The not so good side of things is that the plants aren't taking up all the extra CO2, it's still going up just at a somewhat slower rate, and if rainfall patterns continue to change a lot of that new growth could end up dying off.

Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" is a much more recent SF book (2006) that examines some of the possible implications of driverless cars, drones, and wearable computers.

Hacker News has a fairly good track record causing something resembling the Slashdot effect at least on lower capacity servers. Its pretty rare you hear anyone comment that they got a traffic surge when their blog appeared on the front page of Slashdot any more, though it is quite common to hear comments about traffic surges from Hacker News.

Iraq used chemical weapons to pretty good effect to stave off Iranian human wave attacks during the Iran Iraq war. If they hadnâ(TM)t it would have somewhat increased the likelihood that Iran would have won the war. With the help of chemical weapons Iraq fought a much larger country to a stalemate.

The Reagan administration and numerous western companies were fine with Iraq using chemical weapons against Iran during that era. They didnt want Iran to win that war.

Deep Neural Nets will use it, at least the very big, wide, deep ones will.

I just had this extraordinary vision of Barbie teaching a computer science curriculum to girls everywhere.

Agreed, i'm usually ready to extol the virtues of Heinlein, but fix-up novels are not a thing he did.

As stated, the key elements of "fix-up novel" is that you fix-up something that wasn't a novel, and at the end of it you have a novel. If you just put a bunch of separate short stories together into a book without editing them at all then you've neither done any fixing-up nor ended up with a novel, regardless of whether the stories are all set in the same universe or not.

The _real_ grey area is serials. Some (eventual) novels were written with the intent to be a single story but were serialized in magazines as chapters/short stories. In some cases it's probably hard to tell the difference without knowing what the author was thinking at the time.

I'm confused, because it's really too bad that she never wrote a sequel to Beggars in Spain. And it's _really_ too bad that she never wrote a sequel to that theoretical sequel. I'm sure they would have worked out all their differences and everyone and everything would be happy and wonderful at the end of it!