I don't think you understood what was meant by "efficient". Greater mass (the ethanol plus the absorbent material) makes it a less efficient method of transporting ethanol. This product does not produce a drink nearly as strong as regular 80-proof, 40% liquor. It's not even close. I'd carry some 151 (75.5% alcohol) and be much better off. There are lightweight non-glass containers that would be more than suitable.

Did you ever consider that they already know that? These are people who jumped through so many hoops to get where they are that they just enjoy being in control, flexing their muscles, and feeling secure in their positions by using them to real effect. Frivolous shit like this is the low-hanging fruit for control freaks. The very fact that it doesn't involve anything important means that the degree of serious, committed opposition will be minimal.

The important part for this mentality: if it doesn't work, nothing is really lost and you can wait a bit then keep trying until it sticks; if or when it does work, it establishes a "useful" precedent, giving an appearance of legitimacy to the idea that yes, the state can regulate this thing, too.

This is how sociopaths think. It's about winning and winning is about strategy. Most of that comes from a good knowledge of history, what others have tried beore, which things worked and which backfired, and what one is willing to risk. The campaign promises and speeches are just part of playing the game. The problem, the disconnect, is that average people don't think this way. They keep misinterpreting the actions they're observing.

As long as that keeps happening, things are unlikely to change. It's really difficult to solve a problem you haven't even defined.

Have you ever tried to reason with a PHB? Especially when your argument, however correct and well-supported, doesn't come from someone who has that specific responsibility?

Actually when I read that comment, I thought: "it IS good to consider that this is not solely a Russian problem". I didn't necessarily see an appeal to the bandwagon approach to "morality". The person could have meant that, too, but since it was not specified, we don't actually know that.

But this is Slashdot, where assuming you know the poster's intent (through some sort of psychic powers, I guess) is somehow not considered arrogant.

White males are the one group that it's tacitly deemed "okay" to discriminate against. Especially if they happen to be Christian, and even more so if they're Protestant ("WASP").

You just can't have a civil, enlightened society if there's ANY grounp it's okay to fuck with. Even if you think they deserve it. Even if retaliation, based on group identity, against those who didn't personally decide historical events (with their enduring consequences) is somehow your idea of "justice", and simultaneously not your idea of "vengeance". Reversing the tide doesn't cause the state of "tide-free". And it isn't going to.

Otherwise, like if a single individual -- or single institution -- or small group of institutions -- made all these bad decisions, I would be perfectly fine with shunning and refusing to trust that person based on an observed track record. But what you have with the group-guilt scenario is this implicit idea that a large group of people, including those who had no input into the process, should bear some guilt for it. That's a total flat-out rejection of any sort of accountability or individuality.

If you want some kind of one-ness or collective, you don't get it this way. Dystopias are created by trying to find more efficient ways of doing it like that. No, you start by honoring the individual and letting those flourish, interact, and coalesce as they will.

I've yet to witness a Majority which was truly Moral in both word and deed.

I prefer red wine, myself. Like maybe a good, dry cabernet sauvignon. But to each their own! Enjoy that beer, my friend. Salud!

I wouldn't hire them anyway, based in sheer incompetence. The most readily observed incompetence: calling oneself an "editor" while remaining unable to spell-check or understand and apply the 5th-grade English grammar in which most news stories are deliberately written.

The problem is, the workaholics and institution types effectively have forced their ways on everyone else. Worker productivity has steadily risen since at least the 1950s, meanwhile wages (indexed against inflation) have remained relatively stagnant. That would be equitable if the number of hours worked per week had been reduced, but it hasn't (that, by the way, is what steadily improving technology could have brought us, but it's never enough, the owners want more, more more).

That means someone's getting screwed, and unless most of your revenue comes from investments or other unearned income, that includes you. If you don't work the overtime and place your corporation above your family, you're "not a team player". Because these are conflicting goals, they cannot all be simultaneously satisifed. One must be chosen at the expense of all others, meaning some group who want it one way are going to force this upon everyone else. Currently, in so many work environments, this favors those who want more work and less free time.

Rather than call it pure coincidence, which I deliberately and knowingly stopped short of saying, I was implying that it is not. I simply didn't care to get into the minutia of precisely how that happened and what the exact sequence of events were, since my point did not depend on the details, only on the truth that things happened in this manner.

I urge you to consider that Occam's Razor does not apply in the social realm, where motives are often hidden. This makes "paranoia" difficult to distinguish from "foresight".

In my personal unqualified opinion, it's like using alcohol. If there is no sign that it harms your well-being or reduces the quality of your life, then you do not have a problem. If there are such signs, then you do. In the absence of such signs, I would call it "caution".

I assume it will be the same sort of people who paid (i.e. their time and expertise) to create and make freely available other software like BitTorrent, the Linux kernel, the Apache server, etc.

There is ample reason to believe this is possible. There are numerous extant examples, far too many to enumerate here, in the form of just about every GPL'd project ever created. Perhaps you missed the part where I said it would need to be decentralized and peer-to-peer, so much like BitTorrent, the users themselves would bear the cost of the bandwidth and CPU cycles.

The question of how to host content that many users will want to share without ever-increasing costs of a centralized system to bear the load was, after all, the chief problem that BitTorrent was created to solve.

The BSD license very well could have worked, in the sense that I know of no law of physics or any other hard barrier making it impossible, yes. But generally to get something like what we've seen from the GPL Open Source movement, you need some kind of hedge against total selfishness. This is particularly true when dealing with corporations. That's the one thing the BSD license does not provide.

Perhaps in a more ideal world that does not still have such a pronounced scarcity mentality, the BSD license would have been sufficient. But in the world we know today, it's clear to me why one was more successful than the other (in terms of participation) long after a time when both were available.

I'll add, "paranoia" is one of those words that gets thrown around. Properly understood, it means an unreasonable fear of what is either impossible, or so astronomically unlikely as to be completely impractical. It doesn't take much study of history to see the repeating pattern that, again and again, any form of power or authority that can be abused, has been abused. Knowledge and technology are forms of power. It is inevitable that those who can wield them will abuse them. It's a scenario that is not only inevitable, but one that should be expected and prepared for.

To do otherwise is simply foolish and naive, an act of investing tremendous trust in institutions that have repeatedly proven themselves untrustworthy. I wonder sometimes if it's merely a problem of scale. If an individual lies, deceives, manipulates, or otherwise acts dishonestly towards another individual, confidence is quickly broken and trust withdrawn, often permanently. If a government or other large institution repeatedly acts dishonestly, you often see this faith-based (certainly not fact-based) defense that it meant well, will do better next time, and deserves our continued trust. This is usually never explicitly stated, but can be readily observed in the decisions many people make.

Perhaps this is a generational difference. In school, I was taught not to write "I think this is so" or "I believe this is true" in anything even slightly resembling formal composition. I was taught that, perhaps barring a rigorous scientific publication, anytime you read any written work of any sort in which the author takes a position, what you are reading is exactly that: one person's position. It should be understood as something like an opinion, something that may change at a later date, something with which others may have good reasons for disagreement. This is one part of thinking for yourself, by the way.

The more modern trend is to assume that anytime anyone speaks, they automatically presume to speak for everyone else in the most absolute terms possible unless this is otherwise disclaimed. Therefore much time is wasted bickering about things like "but I'm an exception!" and "that's just your opinion!" and many false judgments against someone's character are made, such as yours. While condemning someone for such a flimsy reason may be a reassuring outlet for the type of insecure people who contribute nothing but love to throw stones, if you are honest, you may have noticed it's not making any progress.

I wish most religions placed half that much value on justifying their doctrines.