I have a friend who was a medical entomologist and journal editor before he retired. I ran into him while I was browsing a book table at a conference, and mentioned that I'd like to buy one of the medical entomology textbooks but the $250 price tag was a bit steep.

"Just wait," he said. "I'm about to change that. I'm writing a new textbook that will be a lot cheaper. I want students and public health departments to be able to afford a solid medical entomology reference."

When his book came out the publisher set the priced at $500. It was twice as expensive any of its competitors. Now something like this is never going to sell like a basic calculus book, but it has a considerably larger market than you'd think. His idea was that it would find its way into the syllabus in medical, veterinary and public health schools; and that hospitals and public health agencies would buy copies for their libraries. But his strategy to make that happen by making the book affordable and sell in (relatively) high numbers; the publisher had other plans.

So don't blame authors for high textbook prices. It's publishers who set the price.

Roughly, not exactly. Pegging the price of a battery switch to the price of gas really wouldn't make any sense, although it might make sense to make it based on the cost of electricity in the area, assuming that that varies.

Shutting down air traffic after 9/11 had a measurable impact on weather over CONUS from the lack of contrails in the sky. It isn't unfathomable that ships can also have a measurable level of impact.

If you're going to commit to this exercise where you use extrapolation to arrive at a conclusion, then you're going to have to take things like 3d-printing into account and even just the general demand for machines that build machines that will lead to eventual technical advances.

Try to remember that when you cherry-pick what does and doesn't count when extrapolating stuff like this you're simply adding to the risk that earlier you implied was a bad thing.

If you apply that same extrapolation to what's happening here on Earth right now and you get right back to the super-robots being dominant. I'll give you a hint: robots are the dominant life-form on Mars right now.

And the scientific evidence of this conclusion is...? ;)

In other words, one group of "skeptics" has appointed themselves to be the gatekeepers of the definition of skepticism, and is now throwing a tantrum because there are other people using term that don't match the definition that this group came up with.

If this "Committee for Skeptical Inquiry" is worried that they'll be confused with the climate-change skeptics, then they need to come up with another term for themselves. Demanding that the English language change to suit their own preferences is stupid, and the only reason why it's getting any support here on Slashdot is because of the personal animosity that most of us have towards the climate-change skeptics.

And yes, I'm going to purposefully use the term "climate-change skeptics" from now on.

If you read the article, you'll find that writing shell scripts to handle filenames containing every possible character "properly" is so difficult that virtually everyone gets it wrong. When something's been around for close to 40 years and still nobody can get it right, maybe it's time to admit that it's the tool that's broken.

As do members of unions and members of activist groups. Using your logic these groups of individuals should also be silenced.

I agree. No additional rights because you have pooled your money.

As the court has said, a group of people have the same speech rights as individual persons. There are no additional rights, just the same right.

Except, corporations are allowed to participate in elections to an extent and in ways that private citizens cannot.

Using your logic employees may have even more rights than shareholders. In your logic shareholders may have two voices, individual and corporate; while employees may have three voices, individual, corporate and union. Again I am referring to a situation such as "a steel corporation wanting the government to maintain a tariff on steel imports". The steel workers union would probably want the government to maintain the tariff too.

Right. Everybody gets the same vote. Everybody gets the same campaign finance limit (and citizens only). That's simple. Corporations, unions, etc are not citizens. They cannot vote or run for office. Why should they be allowed to participate in politics financially?

And if it was all about "rights" why has Citizens United allowed corporate donors anonymity in political finance when individuals are not allowed to be anonymous in the same way?

You make the mistake of thinking that everyone who disagrees with you is a liberal. You have an image living in your head that is not real.

A group of people does not lose its free speech rights by forming the group. Full stop.

Nor do they gain additional rights, which is the current situation under Citizens United.

I understand that you weren't trying to make a serious point, but no, the government is not a person, either. The government has no constitutional rights.

Trapped in a walled garden, are we?

Yeah, you're probably right. I hadn't thought of it that way.

Those employees and shareholders already have their individual rights. Do you believe that the corporation should confer upon them additional rights? So that people who own stock have rights to certain speech that others do not? Because that's exactly the current situation.

Nossir. Corporate personhood was a legal shorthand that has gone out of control. It will be looked upon by history with embarrassment.

This article makes a pretty convincing case that we'd be better off with some restrictions on filenames. It's hard to argue the point that allowing certain characters in filenames causes more problems than it solves.