I'm sure a class action suit would work great.

Earthquake hits LA, does major damage. Oil and gas companies are taken to court in a class action lawsuit. (There's a lot of oil production here, especially around Long Beach.)

The case drags on for years, but eventually the companies have to settle, let's say for $10 billion. That sounds like a lot of money right? Except half of it goes to the lawyers. Then half of the rest is made as a tax deductible donation to the Red Cross for disaster relief. The remaining 2.5 billion is split amongst the approximately 18.5 million residents of greater Los Angeles. Which would come out to a little under $150 per person. And it's delivered in the form of coupons for 50% off your next 100 gallons of gas. That 2.5 billion will of course go into a fund until those coupons are redeemed, and i would be surprised if the companies responsible don't get to keep the interest on those funds until they're spent to reimburse the gas stations that redeem the coupons. And of course a lot of people will forget that they have the coupons and never get around to using them. And a lot of the people won't actually own a gasoline powered car and will have to try and sell the coupons, probably for less than market value.

(And then most likely the price of gas in LA will go up for "unknown reasons" until most of the coupons have been redeemed.)

Whoops, it certainly wasn't consciously intentional :)

As a favorite author liked to say, "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch." Unfortunately we are very poor at evaluating externalized costs. The pollution put out by coal plants that are "far enough" away from cities, the fish that are killed by hydroelectric damns, the excess carbon produced by all fossil fuels, and now the potential for damaging earthquakes from large scale oil and gas operations.

Of course the first ones to ignore externalized costs are the business offloading those costs on everyone else. And if a magnitude 7 quake gets triggered and people get hurt or killed (potentially dozens or hundreds of people in the US and possibly many more in less developed areas) the corporations responsible ought to be liable for millions or billions of dollars. But if necessary they'll lawyer up for a fraction of the cost and drag the issue out in court for years until everyone forgets. After all, how do you prove that this particular quake wouldn't have happened without drilling? And how do you prove which company's actions triggered the quake?

A big boom, but not quite big enough to destroy the star? Perhaps the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator just got misdirected to the wrong location?

Agreed. Snowden's actions _may_ have been somewhat detrimental to our security, especially in the short term, but they did a lot to help shore up the values we _should_ be concerned about in the long run.

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." That Ben Franklin quote gets thrown around quite a lot, but that's just because it's so demonstrably true. It's always possible that the people in charge right now are good and honorable, but if you keep giving up liberties then sooner or later someone is going to come along who wants to abuse the system and there will be nothing left to stop them.

And just for the record, it should be noted that he said "essential liberty". We all have to give up some liberty to live in functioning society. Unfortunately everyone has different opinions about which are the "essential" liberties and when you've crossed the line between prudence and paranoia.

That's good to know, but sadly it looks like even in verbatim mode google still ignores punctuation. For years after i switched to google for most searches i still used AltaVista for a lot of coding related questions because it would recognize and honor punctuation in the query.

If there was a way to force it to expand all the article sections by default i'd be a lot more inclined to use the mobile site. As it is i often end up on wikipedia on my phone because i was searching for something specific about a subject and google suggested that wikipedia page contained relevant information. But then when i try to text search for the word/phrase that i did the google search on it fails because that section of the article is collapsed.

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.