Comment Re:Buzzfeed's not nearly the worst (Score 1) 61
I wish I knew who it was so I could thank them personally.
The person who runs that Twitter account is a guy named Jake Beckman.
I guess I saved you a Google search.
I wish I knew who it was so I could thank them personally.
The person who runs that Twitter account is a guy named Jake Beckman.
I guess I saved you a Google search.
what they are doing makes little sense
Clue tip: If something appears to make little sense, you probably missed something. Your immediate response to that should be, "what am I missing?", not "okay, these professional scientists must be idiots who don't understand the topic they have Ph.D.s in as well as I do". Appeal to authority is bad, of course, but if you find yourself at odds with an expert, it should at least prompt a bit of self-critical examination to double-check where you might have missed something that, if you hadn't, would have made it all make sense. Like here, where the point of what they're doing is to determine a heck of a lot more than simply what the foreground process is, but rather, what the foreground process is doing.
Don't you just love how the Facebook login page will volunteer the name and linked account for an email address, if someone's registered it?
In either case, it makes it more difficult for private citizens to do what they want with their money by either increasing the cost of borrowing or directly taking it from them.
For some specific individuals, yes. For "private citizens" in general, no. The citizens as a whole have the exact same amount of money either way. The government doesn't take the money from taxes and bury it in a hole somewhere, it spends it, usually on employees that are predominantly citizens, or companies that are usually located within the same country. Indeed, money spent by the government is more likely to be spent on in-country companies that money spent by non-governmental organizations. The idea that the people have less money when taxes are higher is absurd. They money is redistributed, not eliminated. The people as a whole have the same amount of money regardless of whether taxes go up or down.
The argument is that the government doesn't create wealth.
Yes. The argument is that if you call a large organization a government, it doesn't create wealth, whereas if you call it a corporation, it magically does... by acquiring money from some parties and redistributing it to further parties. Those first parties will have had their money stimulate other business, instead of having had it been taxed, where the government would have then spent it, usually by giving it to businesses to do whatever job that needs to be done. In the end, the same amount of money is in the economy, and the same amount is in the hands of other businesses, all that's changed is which specific businesses have it, what work is actually done, and who benefits from the work done.
Well, if you're going to go that route, the contractors don't build anything either, they just arrange/rearrange the materials they're given. By that standard, nothing's ever been built on Earth, we're just assembling stuff left over from the last local supernova.
By any reasonable definition, NASA builds a lot of stuff.
Unless there is some killer feature, or the distribution is tailored well to a specific niche, I am quite bored with the "yet another Linux distro" articles
If you weren't interested in the article, why did you click on it? You know you're not required to read the ones that don't interest you?
Even better, you commented on it. Comments count even more than clicks to the bean-counters who determine which articles are generating the most interest and thus should be focused on more by the site. Comments are more content for the site, creating even more for people to read, and ultimately, more ad-revenue for the bean-counters. Even if your comment is negative, it's presence and the debate that it engenders encourages sites to post more of exactly what you commented on.
If you want to see less of something, actually prove it by not looking at it in the first place. That is what sends the site a loud and clear message about what you'd like to see more or less of.
What really irked me was the human characters betraying their oath to Earth and going native after they had kicked Clark out of office.
They didn't betray their oath. Arguably they upheld their oath better than others. They did what was in Earth's best interest, even when Earth's government (and probably most of its people) would consider them traitors for it. Their oath was to Earth, not its government, and they chose the path of true loyalty rather than blind obedience. You seem to be confusing loyalty to your country with loyalty to your government. Sometimes the former requires defying the latter.
That is dead to this crowd. 1/2 of them were probably in diapers in 2002!
Really? My impression is that Slashdot is mostly geezers.
Being geezers and wearing diapers are not mutually exclusive.
who would vote this as flamebait?
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.
