Insurance companies are not huge bureaucracies? Color me surprised.

being mostly spared from WW1 and WW2.

This is the big thing that a lot of people don't understand. Not only did we "win" WW2, ours was the only country involved that didn't suffer huge infrastructure or human losses and already had a large manufacturing industry. Once WW2 was over, most of the "first world" at the time needed to rebuild and America was able and ready to provide tools, materials, engineers, etc. We also lent a lot of money and supplied to our allies that had to be paid back over time, as well as reparations from the losing countries.

If other countries didn't have the crap bombed out of them, but everything else came out the same, we likely would have had a small boon but nothing like the surge in quality of life we did see.

Oh ho, didn't know about the whole series thing, thanks! That's nice, as I've bought base games on Steam while they were on sale and later wanted the DLC, and it was as cheap to buy the base+DLC/GoTY Edition as it was just the DLC. Always a small annoyance of mine.

While I don't have many games from GOG (I have no qualms with Steam and a huge backlog already), this could be worthwhile, especially if they beat out Origin and UPlay in the quality department. Doubly so if they can match Steam Sales. I put my name in for a beta invite and hope it goes well.

I can't find it in the announcement, but I read somewhere else that part of GOG Galaxy will be downloading the installers for games to your computer, so you can install them outside Galaxy or if the service ever terminates.

The major difference, and the problem with Nerval's Lobster, is that prior to being purchased by Dice all submissions for their prior owners and sister sub-properties (GeekNet/Andover/SourceForge) would have a disclaimer attached to it so long as I can recall. This is no longer the case; the only way to know that this is a bought-and-paid-for placement ('cause Dice bought Slashdot) is that they're always "submitted" by Nerval's Lobster. Newer visitors won't know about the potential conflict of interest because it's no longer acknowledged.

It would be nice if they just made Nerval's Lobster an editor account so the robot could post itself, but they won't because they know that thousands of regular /. users will just block that editor; rightfully so, IMO.

If he makes it to the last rounds of the DNC primaries, I can see his Dem opponents (with backing from the GOP if they see him as the strongest possible opponent) making a big ruckus about his "socialism".

I'd like to see him brand himself as a socialistic capitalist, or capitalistic socialist, to directly take on that eventual attack and also confuse the fuck out of a number of conservative voters. "How can he be a capitalist if he's a socialist?!"

There have been recent (good) rulings that saying "X, but on a computer" is not a valid patent. I hope that lower courts say that this is just "X, but on a mobile computer" so we don't have to have an explicit ruling also blocking "X, but on a phone".

On another note, I wonder if it would be worth having some crowd-funded anti-patent-troll fund. I know the EFF takes the fight when able, but that's usually after smaller companies/individuals have caved and paid the extortion fee. If there was a fund that would take the patent-holder to court and pay out any ruling against the defendant, should the patent be deemed baseless (any patent, not just electronics), that would hopefully halt the trolls far earlier in the process and dissuade others.

I've always wondered about something like this, but with a teleconference. Multiple locations around the globe would have a room with the exact same size/shape/furniture, but it's all rather mundane and painted green. The participants in each location wear VR goggles; cameras around the room take 3D visuals of the room's participants, and then combine all the rooms in VR along with giving nice decorum to the mundane room, customizable by group. (Want it to have giant windows so you can watch Godzilla destroy the city in the distance during your conference? Yeah, we can do that.)

This gives something more "intimate" than even the robot, able to project body language and hand gestures. The only issue would be eyes, like a raised eyebrow when a person thinks something is odd, or a furrowed brow for a concern; cameras inside of the goggles, pointing at the eyes, might be able to get this, but I don't know how feasible that is at the moment.

You could even have nifty holographic projections, which would be great for architecture firms (and make it useful for even local conferencing as well.)

Yes, the Photoshop contests have always been of the vein "first submission=99% chance to win". With rare exception you can take the votes per post only and reasonably guess the order in which they were posted. I think TotalFark was even advertised as a way to get a leg-up on Photoshop contests (one of which I won primarily because I was the first to post an entry thanks to my TotalFark membership at the time, and my entry didn't completely suck.)

There are ways to make them work much, much better if they would accept submissions, then open voting. But that would require improvements to the commenting system...

The complaints I saw were never about the share to modders, but that the mods cost anything. At least one guy was saying he would never pay for something that was previously free (talking about mods in general, not just specific mods), even if it meant that the modder got incentive to build a higher-quality mod or make more mods.

While Bethesda was rather greedy in their cut, I don't think that a system allowing for modders to sell their mods is an overall bad idea. However, Valve was rather hamfisted in their implementation, and there are a number of pitfalls they didn't take into account properly if at all (avoiding someone take a free mod and just sticking it in the store, mod dependencies on mods made by someone else, etc.)

After all, Valve already has systems in place for giving creators a cut of sales when their item is officially sold through Valve's stores, like cosmetics for Team Fortress 2 characters. Those cosmetics are nothing more than tiny mods for the game with implementation by the game developers.

Having different interests and preferences in men/women for a certain education or a certain job is not a problem.

It's actually the inverse of a problem: While everyone in a group at work has the same work-related goals, the more variety they have in their personal lives and interests can lead to better approaches by the group.

To use a car analogy, if everyone in working group (or company at large, for that matter), drove only a Trans Am, and people needed to drive somewhere for any reason, everyone's first thought would probably be "Okay, we'll take a Trans Am". But if there are some who drove Trans Ams, and some who drove trucks, and some who drove minivans, and some on motorcycles, you would get a lot more possibilities immediately depending on the needs of the drive, rather than have to figure it out further down the line.

For a tool analogy, if all you have in your toolbox are hammers then everything looks like a nail. But if you have a hammer, and screwdrivers, and pliers, etc., you will be far more capable in whatever task you have to accomplish.

This is a load of crap that's highly insulting to men, of course.

It's not limited to men. While they are a minority, there are women engineers already, and your line of thinking (which I agree with) implies that these women engineers also have no positive social impact.

It's like some form of the No True Scotsman fallacy. "No REAL female engineer would take corporate jobs for planning dams..."

I think that the heavy movement to "ban" guns and guns parts--whether such bans are useful or not--is in contradiction of the 2nd Amendment. That people have been doing this and trumpeting it has only gotten the American people used to the Bill of Rights applying in a more narrow fashion, leading to lack of outcry about the violation of every other Bill of Rights Amendment except the 3rd. (And, with the way more urban training missions are going in the military, I wouldn't be surprised to see that violated in the next few years, just so the government can cover all ten...)

I was a regular Fark user for some time, and hopped on TotalFark. However, over time I got annoyed with the "cafes" and other social cliques, and found 4chan much more to my liking because moderation was lax (at the time), focusing on spam and obvious trolls, with little censorship.

While I haven't used Fark regularly for years now, I do have some friends from my time there that are active participants, and my understanding from them and other sources is that the posting standards on Fark have gotten even stricter. How much of the moderation standards are due to your personal views (or views of your moderators), how much due to legal concerns, and how much due to member concerns (trolling/stalking/aggravation, keeping various wordfilters to make it more SFW, etc.).

As a followup question, have you ever considered a moderation system like of Slashdot?

(As an unrelated question, if you won your bid for governor but a candidate came along with a better name, would you resign and have them take your place?)

Kill us all off? No, that's too simple, I think. A scary thought I had the other day while considering all of this: If robots are able to do the vast majority of necessary work, the non-rich will fall into three main, employable categories:
1) Great artists/entertainers - musicians, painters, actors, prostitutes, and extending to occupations like chefs, who may even be completely attached to a single elite family to fulfill their desires
2) Highly intelligent - the engineers/scientists who maintain robots and do what little work there is that humans can't do, as well as research and medicine
3) Lab rats

The elite will, of course, want to extend their active lives for as long as possible. They'll have part of that second group working on various cures/vaccines/life extenders, which obviously need trials before the elite will use them. Sure, you could import a ton of monkeys... or you could use some of the 180 million unemployed people in the country at that time. We're already at the point where the oligarchy can write a lot of their own laws, so if such a dystopia were to pass it would be easy for them to do away with any laws against testing on humans.

If one of these participants is really lucky, they'll get the benefit of whatever is being tested with little-to-no downsides, plus pay. If they're only somewhat lucky, they'll die quickly in the trials and their family (if they have one) will get a moderate cash pay out (which is how the rich will ensure the desperate will volunteer). Otherwise they'll come out deformed, mentally and/or physically, but still be paid.