But more than that, GOTO is how processors work at the lowest level. All of those fancy blocks in a modern language get turned into "jumps" and such at the lowest levels when compiled. The first computer languages - such as fortran - were a pretty thin veneer over assembly, anyway, so gotos made sense.

It depends. Many of us have argued for an official corporate "death penalty", and the government here (US) actually does shut down businesses sometimes and courts often order the people who set up scam businesses to never engage in that sort of business again. Ultimately action needs to be taken against individuals, though.

Which is why - in the case of governmental misconduct - *individuals* need to be held accountable, including hard time in prison. That way, next time a higher up at [spy agency] tells his minions to [break the law], the minions get to say "Hey, Jim did that shit last year and he and his boss are locked up in a maximum security prison for the next 10 years. I'll pass and I'll also be turning you over for prosecution."

Not to invoke Godwin, but following your logic we should have handed out a bunch of harsh rebukes at Nuremberg.

That's from Radley Balko, a pretty well-known libertarian journalist. He's at the Washington Post now.

I mean, in a sardonic way. They go to such great lengths to say "IT'S ILLEGAL!!!" and "THEY CAN'T DO THAT". They dance around, yell about all this, and they're doing that so that you won't notice something conspicuous in its absence: consequences.

Imagine if you robbed a liquor store and went to court and the judge yelled about how it's illegal to rob liquor stores, you should have known that, yes, you, liquor store robber! You law breaker! Scoundrel! You're terrible, I can't believe you robbed the liquor store. Okay, you can leave now, just don't rob any more liquor stores because it's illegal to do that!

It's ludicrous, really. We need to understand that these issues are far more serious than people knocking off liquor stores and it's time we started treating it as such. Real consequences for those who broke the law - and I don't mean the minimum security marriott.

Exactly. Note that when a plane crashes the NTSB goes nuts figuring out everything that they can about the crash and about the airplane right before the crash. They've been doing so for decades. This is why planes are so very safe and why they can pretty accurately determine the cause of the crash in almost all cases.

I doubt they took this lightly, especially since they're speaking ill of a dead man (at least it could be taken in that way).

I've had shingles twice before age 45 and finally got the vaccine (didn't know what it was the first time as there were no outward symptoms). But, yes, it's chicken pox. I had to stay away from babies for a month when I had it, which was pretty easy, anyway.

I agree with Christie's comments in this case. There are plenty of vaccines that should be mandated, with MMR being at the top of the list.

But read this:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/15/...

The point is that Perry tried to mandate that girls get the HPV vaccine made by Merck, with the implication being that Merck bought the support. HPV is a good vaccine to have but there's no comparison between HPV and measles.

We again have this issue where the soundbite media can't handle nuance and blind partisanship is going to reign. Let's face it, had Christie parroted Obama's exact words there would still be people here who would claim he's an idiot for saying that.

The anti-vax crowd is wrong - deadly wrong - but that doesn't mean that every vaccine out there should be mandated. I mean, how about the flu vaccine? Shingles?

Where's that line?

Why aren't these people so concerned about the overwhelming majority of teachers and nurses being female?

Isn't this as big of a problem?

Don't we need to do *something* to encourage more men to become nurses? I mean, isn't this so f'ing important that Google needs to get behind it?

Just another data point in Microsoft's slide into being the company of "ME TOO!" When was the last time they actually innovated?

As for running Windows on your IoT device, all I can say is LOL.

Yeah, but we're already storing it, anyway. I might be nuts but from what I've seen if we were to take 10 or 15 square miles of land - totally insignificant when you look at the size of our country - and decide that it was going to be a nasty radioactive place but that we would work to keep it contained and do whatever we need there - seems like we could do it. But nobody wants that "in their back yard".

When I read about this stuff my only conclusion is that we're wasting a bunch of energy and should be looking at ways to harvest it.

You apparently have no left-wing friends on facebook.

This reminds me of a lot of Christian friends who say how great it is that Chick-Fil-A is closed on Sunday and that's so Christian of them and all that. These same people usually point this out while eating in another restaurant on Sunday.

And, yet, some guy named Elon Musk - who never worked at Ford, GM, Honda, the guy's a nobody - is the one who's making all the money in electric cars right now. Why?

Now and then industries that have been around for 100 years get so stuck in doing things the same way and simply scaling it can't get over the hump where you have to say "we can't scale this way of doing it, we have to start from scratch". They also have a huge patent catalog related to their current way of doing things, a huge number of engineers who know this method inside out, etc. There's considerable inertia to overcome, and few companies overcome it.

That's why when things change it's often the newcomers who do it.

Here's another one - Vizio. Ever heard of them 15 years ago? They never made a CRT-based television. The founders came from a monitor manufacturer and decided to start making TVs based on LCD technology. They went straight to Sam's and Costco to sell them. They pretty much own that market now.

Meanwhile, where's Westinghouse? Or RCA? They turned out a ton of tubes back in the day, but they're gone. Nobody wants a freaking X-ray generator in their house now.

Honestly, I think a shakeup like this is long overdue in the elevator business. You say there are so many moving parts to your caterpillar drive - do you have any idea of how many moving parts are in a standard elevator. Your idea cuts the moving parts down to perhaps 1/10th of what there is now. Getting rid of counterweights is a huge deal. You can even keep the counterweight and change the traction to your idea and there are still far fewer moving parts.

Elevators were first made when a tall building was 10 stories. The idea that a radical overhaul in design isn't needed for buildings that are 20 times that tall is laughable.

So, yes, I think you're absolutely wrong. An outsider is almost certainly what is needed to scale elevators up like this.

No, austerity didn't bring it. If anything, trying to spend within your limited means will postpone making things worse. Do it long enough and things might even get better.

But borrowing and spending isn't going to make it better, even if they can find someone from whom to borrow.