A written guarantee that my uniform would be either gold or blue, and that I'd not have to accompany the captain on landing parties until my own rank is at least Lieutenant Commander; and I'm in.

Unfortunately, that wouldn't work; at least not for reasonable people. Remember, Burning Man takes place in an otherwise uninhabitable desert. You're required to bring everything, including water, you need to live in that desert in with you; and cart it out, along with your trash, at the end of the week. That's not too difficult if you have a car. With a bus? Your 60-person bus just became a 12-person bus when you add in peoples' supplies and gear. It's not much of an improvement.

Of course, there's the option of NOT going prepared and being a parasite on those who happened to bring extra. And, yes, there are already bus services that cater to those people. But I, for one, would never, ever, join their ranks.

The Burning Man organization just doesn't want to solve certain problems with the event. Entry and exodus are big ones.

Entry has even more obvious solutions to the problems. But they are absolutely uninterested in solving it because it would involve making changes, and the entry procedure is "traditional'. Also, speeding things up would involve taking away certain peoples' ego trips; like the pointless and milquetoast "searching" of incoming vehicles that's not really a search and never uncovers contraband, but lets the "searcher" assert his au-thor-a-TAH over the "searched". Seriously... a friend of mine once entered with a crate full of illegal, and against BM rules, fireworks sitting openly in his van in full view of the people "searching" it, and they just waved him through! They could also cut out the, once again, "traditional" routine of making everyone get out of their cars AGAIN to ring the bell, get hugged by a hippie, and make the first-timers roll around in the dirt. But those people, too, have made their niche for themselves in the BMorg, and damned if they'll give it up, and to hell with the attendees who've just spent 14 hours stuck in their cars and would just like to get to camp and take a break.

I've never really payed attention and gotten all riled up at exodus; mainly because I've at atypical hours the years I went and didn't get stuck in major hold-ups. But I expect that there are similar improvements that could be made.

Hell, all they'd have to do is send the managers of entry and exodus down to Anaheim for a weekend and tell them to watch how Disneyland gets a Burning-Man-sized crowd in and out EVERY DAY, with hardly ever a delay, then bring back the knowledge and re-implement it. But there's no interest across the organization in fixing the problem.

You have your math wrong.

In most cases, it's actually disadvantageous, from a taxation perspective, for a couple to get married. There are other legal benefits which, obviously, many people decide are compelling enough to go ahead and take the tax penalty. But as a single taxpayer, you are not subsidizing married couples. The opposite is, in fact, true.

Yes, but that unofficial page really does have almost everything on it :)

Cute. But 3 miles isn't going to be good enough if all you've got is a 22 kiloton airburst. The White House, the President, and even all of Congress would be just fine. All you'd do is kill a bunch of civilians in the suburbs.

http://www.nuclearsecrecy.com/...

Also, 777s don't have much in the way of visibility except directly ahead. The pilot wouldn't know that a Sidewinder had been fired to set off the flares. Also, an F16 carries an internal 20mm cannon that can't be distracted by flares or ECM. And a 777 is a fairly big and poorly-maneouvering target.

I agree pretty much wholeheartedly that the coal companies need to die. But a 50-billion dollar payoff to an industry that is proud to poison the skies, destroy the landscape, and ruin the drinking water? Give free money to the people who want the USâ(TM)s environment to become more like Chinaâ(TM)s? Oh, HELL no. Put them out of business by any other means necessary. But letâ(TM)s not give those bastards a single red cent. Seriously. Screw those guys.

A better idea would be to impose (and enforce) strict carbon and particulate caps, deny permits for strip, open-pit, and mountaintop-removal mining, and crippling penalties for release of mining and processing chemical waste into the water supply. And you know what? If the coal companies are willing to reform themselves to operate within those constraint as good corporate citizens, fine. I will reform my opinion of them if and when they do. But otherwise? Screw âem.

And if weâ(TM)re going to spend 50-billion dollars on getting the US off of coal, letâ(TM)s do it the right way and use it to fund R&D on alternate, cleaner, energy sources: efficient photovoltaics, energy-positive fusion, thorium or fast-breeder fission, and so on.

Sorry, but you need better admins if they can't keep a BES up and running. That was the one good thing about the whole company, IMO (I always hated their phones.). When I was responsible for one, the only reason I ever logged into that box was to deal with user issues and the occasional scheduled software upgrade. Otherwise, I was pretty much able to just forget it was there. It was absolutely rock-solid; which, admittedly, shocked the hell out of me, considering the thing ran on windows server.

It's a crying shame that no one bought up BES and turned it into a device-agnostic activesync competitor.

Tech startups don't create the kinds of jobs that the 99% actually need. Oh, sure, many of them will eventually hire one secretary, and will pay into their building's contract for one part-time janitor.

That is demonstrably untrue. Both the US Census and the IRS publish income data; so it's not too hard to find where the 1% actually starts. Granted, the data is subject to interpretation. But even with the lower estimates, the bulk of workers fall soundly into the 99%.

According to whatsmypercent.com, the 1% starts at an annual income of $506,553. The New York Times shows the 1% starting at "just" $383,001. (The latter is nationwide aggregate. The NY Times tool actually lets you select via state, or even metro area. The the Bay Area, for example, you'd have to clear $558,046 before leaving the bottom 99%.)

The handful who win the IPO jackpot notwithstanding; I'm pretty sure your average tech worker is not cleating half a million a year, even in the Bay Area.

To elaborate a bit, since you mentioned the Golden Gate Bridge:

As far as I can find on Google, it's thought that 46 people committed suicide via the Golden Gate in 2013. That number is probably low, because the combination of the fog and swift outgoing currents make it quite possible to do so unseen. That's ONE method of suicide in a city with a population of about 800,000.

What a lot of people don't get is the sheer scale of Foxconn's factories. According to Cnet, their Shenzhen factory alone employs 500,000 workers. Obviously, that's more than half of San Francisco's population. But to add a little more perspective: Take your pick of Atlanta, Miami, Oakland, Cleveland, or Pittsburgh. That ONE factory employs more people than *live* in any of those (considered fairly major) cities. And that is just one of Foxconn's factories.

Sure, they have other issues. But by the standards of any city... and let's not kid ourselves, Foxconn operates entire cities... their suicide rate is fantastically low.

One good "Internet Tough Guy" deserves another. Or have you not seen any of the threats to assault Google Glass wearers that have been posted on various forums?

Personally, I'm going to take a fair bit of delight once Glass or it's successor is built into prescription frames & lenses, some Luddite ogre of a bar manager kicks someone wearing them out, and the patron's vision turns out to have been bad enough to bring the ADA into play.

Maybe after that happens a few times, the anti-technology brigade will get the clue that "nerds get out" just doesn't fly anymore.

So what?

You are confusing (probably deliberately) the difference between the baker (a person) and the bakery (a business). Even if the baker is the owner or operator of the bakery, they are two different legal entities, and for good reason. As a society, we routinely hold businesses to different, sometimes higher and sometimes lower, standards than we do individuals.

The bakery, as a business, is for example almost certainly required to hold to standards of cleanliness and sanitation, and subject to inspections to verify same, that the baker is free to ignore at home. Do health codes and inspections infringe on the baker's personal right to be a slob if he wants? Of course not. They regulate a separate entity: the bakery... the business.

I've been told by a lawyer (not getting legal advice, just chatting with a friend a couple of weeks before a Super Bowl one year) that if those sorts of shenanigans ever went through a trial all the way to a judgement that they wouldn't hold up. And according to the actual letter of the law, Joe Schmoe grocer could legally go ahead and sell beer and chips to you for your Super Bowl party instead of echoing the "big game day party" nonsense.

The problem is that there are very few companies that have the resources to see a conflict with the NFL, NBA, IOC, or whoever, all the way through a trial to judgement. Joe Schmoe is not one of those and would just be crushed under the sheer weight of the lawyers that would be brought to bear against him.

Rotting for a year or two in jail before being packed off to be tortured and murdered by the CIA is still a year or two when he's not being tortured and murdered by the CIA.

A lot can happen in a year or two. Administrations can change on either side of the pond. Rendition could be ended for reasons of scandal or people in general finding their moral compass. Public opinion could swing in his favor after more government malfeasance is exposed. He could die peacefully and painlessly of natural causes. The horse, as the story goes, may even learn to sing.