Fraud when used to overconsume a public good is a manifestation (and a very common one at that) of tragedy of the commons.

Sure, we'll just make more rules and increase our surveillance of everyone. And sometimes we won't actually do anything to diminish the fraud, because the point of creating the public good was to enable the fraud. One ends up with a lot of theater and a diminishment of human freedom as a result.

For example, I believe that's what US defense procurement is about these days. They make a great show of accounting for screws and a remarkably poor one of accounting for the effectiveness of the resulting military systems. Using substandard screws is abhorrent while building a few hundred planes for a good part of a trillion dollars that are terrible for the roles they are used in is just fine.

Ahh... the good ol' Slashdot rationalization - "Facebook is dead, really, it'll die any day now, seriously!". Which would be funny if it weren't so pathetic - since Slashdot has been predicting the imminent demise of FB since 2007.

My brother and his friend found themselves without any matches recently, but needing to start a fire to roast hot dogs and marsh mellows over. Using a paperclip and jumper cables they got the fire going quite quickly so they didn't have to eat raw hot dogs. They did have to carefully lay the fire though with lots of tinder as the paperclip only lasted a few seconds. But it was enough.

Sweet, thanks. I added this to my userContent.css file in my Pale Moon profile. Works great. Now if we could just come up with a grease monkey script to add the read more link back in.

A pair of ubiquiti NanoStationMs work well enough you may never have needed to implement the cable, though the NanoStationM is limited to 100 Mbit/s. I use it to get a solid network connection between two houses 400 feet apart and it works great. I actually get the full 100 Mbit/s out of it which is pretty impressive. The low-end units can work up to a kilometer away. I had been planning to trench in fiber optic, but this works so well for me that I've abandoned the idea of running the fiber for now. At least until I really need Gigabit across the link (or more).

Sure but SpaceX's goal to land the first stage has little to do with its cargo launch capabilities and its recent launch failure, or its march to man-rated rockets and the heavy lift booster. So I argue SpaceX is still doing very well in this lap. They can lift about one metric tonne more than the Progress freighter, and they are the only ones with return cargo capabilities. Return capabilities we haven't had since the Space Shuttle. I'm glad to see the Japanese cargo vehicle getting good use, and I'm happy to see all the different companies enter this space (literally). SpaceX happens to be the American company the closest to providing independence for western astronauts.

Slashcode hasn't been open source in some time. Soylent built their site based on an older version of slashcode that was available and has modified it and improved it from there. Slashdot is built on the closed, and now completely proprietary, slashcode base.

Please Dice, drop the silly share button and return the read more link, and the read comments link. And provide a way to turn off the video stories that get stuck inline. This is an appropriate story to remind you of this. Your money is made because of content provided for free by us.

The Reddit administration is interested in one thing, and one thing only right now: Milking the site for as much money as possible, as quickly as possible, and fuck the users.

How do you differentiate between that and a site that wants to remain open for it's users despite the actions of few?

That means Reddit as a whole is popular (and fairly large) but popularity != influence.

Especially when you consider that even the largest subreddit is but a fraction of that traffic - much of the traffic is spread across thousands of subreddits (many of them quite small, even though they're popular among their habitues). It's essentially a collection of independent websites (though bound by a common interface and portal) ranging from fairly small (in terms of the overall web) to infinitesimally tiny.

Looking at this list of subreddits that have gone dark is instructive. Relatively few break the 100k subscribers mark, most are under 10k. And unless Reddit is very unusual in it's counting, the number of subscribers is a significant multiple of the number of active users.

Not to mention that each piece of hardware is built with the assumption of there being extant suppliers for its component parts. For Apollo hardware, this is rarely true, so you'd have to retool and test for each part. The sad thing is it'd actually be cheaper to build a brand new Saturn-V equivalent than to make an exact duplicate.

This is actually one of the sorts of cases where 3d printing (no, generally not things like plastic filament extruders... meaningful printing, like laser sintering, laser spraying, etc, as well as CNC milling, hybrid manufacture techniques and lost wax casting on a 3d-printed moulds) has the potential to really come into its own: all of these sort of parts that you only ever need half a dozen of them made but might some day suddenly want some more a couple decades down the road. Another interesting advantage on this front is also that of incremental testing - I know of one small rocketry startup that has set themselves up to sinter out aerospikes in an evolutionary fashion - they print one out, connect it straight to test, measure its performance, scrap it and feed that performance data back into the generation of the next printout, in a constant model-refining process. Combustion simulations can be tricky to get right, but real-world testing data doesn't lie ;)

Reddit has unbelievable traffic and reach, so stuff that earns popularity there gets spread to virtually everywhere and everyone.

[Remainder of tinfoil hat rant snipped]

That's what the Reddit hivemind thinks... In reality, not so much. Reddit only makes the news when it's on fire, again.

I actually lost IQ points reading that mess...

I should have stopped at the third paragraph,

Charcoal, in this case, is not the briquettes you use on your grill, which often contain no actual charcoal, but is the carbon residue left behind by organic matter (like wood) once it has been charred (or pyrolyzed)

Um, who is this moron? Yes, charcoal briquettes contain actual charcoal. They most certainly do contain (among other things) "the carbon residue left behind [etc...]". The rest of the article, breathless clickbait written at the kindergarten level, just goes downhill from there.

Looking at his submission history, he has a record of submitting equally moronic content all from the same site. (And one comment, over a year ago.) Pure slashvertisement.

Whoops, I was wrong - it's nearly 2 kilograms per person here, not 1. But you've still got us beat :) (Also, it looks like America is up to 207 million pounds of fireworks per year, a big increase... so 285 grams per capita per year).

I just think it's really weird how Americans see themselves as a major-fireworks nation when they set off so few.

Oh come on, what's New Years without an ER visit? ;) But yeah, I know some of your places have fireworks bans due to drought and the like.

In case you're curious, here's what New Years looks like here. It goes on at that intensity for at least half an hour, half intensity for maybe an additional hour or so, quarter intensity for another hour, etc. All this comes after the "brennur", which is about a dozen house-sized bonfires scattered all over town.

Basically, if one can make it burn or explode and there's nobody who objects, we'll set it on fire. Often while drinking heavily ;)

New York City for example usually sets off 20-25 tonnes of fireworks on the 4th of July. Meanwhile, little Reykjavík sets off about 300 tonnes on New Years' Eve. Americans average shooting off about 200 grams of Fireworks each over the course of the entire year, combining fireworks shows, personal usage, etc. Icelanders average about a kilogram per person just on New Years'.

And I know it's not just Iceland. I had a friend from Peru who moved to America and was terribly disappointed by what passed for a fireworks display there versus in her home country. Seriously, aren't you guys supposed to be the ones who enjoy blowing everything up? ;) Or do you get it out of your systems in the Middle East? ;)

(Note: not meant as an insult :) )