By that time there were millions of slaves in the U.S. and as you pointed out, they reproduced and even resulted in a surplus for the larger plantations. There was a lively internal slave trade at that point.

Actually, the war on poverty was working until the GOP insisted on surrendering.

And yes, businesses that mooch on the taxpayer to supplement their inadequate payroll are evil. They know damned well they are mooching off of people with a lot less than they already have.

We don't claim the car thief is blameless if you leave your keys in your car, do we?

As timeOday said, they cost about 10 years wages for an equivalent free worker, so if the owner didn't keep them alive and well at least that long, it was a losing proposition.

So as despicable as the practice was, the modern practice is in some ways worse.

Ah, that's just because today's ultra-high-density platters require high-coercivity materials in order to adequately maintain the magnetization patterns that store the data. Low coercivity magnetic media just don't work at those densities.

That's the new innovation of forced labor. In the bad old days, slaves were quite expensive so you had to provide food, clothing, shelter, and at least minimal healthcare.

The new improved forced labor lets them pick up the slaves cheap, provide them minimal food and shelter and just let them die from overwork.

Very well might have been an L-1011, this was around 1994.

Both upsides were already easily solvable. Most distro's rc scripts already call a function to start a daemon. That could easily have called a helper program to set up the cgroup and register on dbus to act as a controller for the group.

Meanwhile, at least Debian's rc scripts already had dependencies listed in their headers that could be used to compute a start order. It could as easily be used to compute a makefile to start in parallel.

The problem is, now that the init process will be such a hairball of dependencies, it becomes harder to implement such solutions without seemingly unrelated bits breaking. For example, no reasonable person expects the GUI desktop to break if you switch out init. (and no reasonable person creates such a dependency)

Last DC-10 I flew on had a horrible vibration in the port side engine... not the plane's fault, I blame Delta, and thank my lucky stars that I made it from Miami to Atlanta without something serious happening on the left wing.

Inward opening doors just make sense to engineers.

Outward opening doors are the only rational answer when 35 people are pushing toward an exit in a panic.

No, it actually blows out an airplane - see: the Hawaii effect, metal fatigue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

It'll never quite stop being weird that Commander Keen, cartoony platformer, is what the guys behind Doom and Quake were working on in their early days....

Or, you go with signed routes. That is, you use a public key system to prove that you have the right to broadcast a route for a particular subnet.

In practice, it will probably mean some router upgrades. No more router cpus that were considered a bit underpowered for a calculator in the '90s. However, as an interim measure, it could be used to set some BGP filters to limit the potential damage.

The problem is, we're tipped over into corporatism where the net is controlled by a very few very large legal sictions tha tthe courts insist are somehow people.

You worry about the bad old government censoring the net but forget to worry about the ISPs censoring the net.

I can't imagine why you think the overmetered network protects us from the market cornering legislation and the pompous asses. Without proper net neutrality, we get all of the above and nowhere to turn.

It is a matter of taste; but the proliferation of 'widescreen' has really made multiple orientation setups more attractive. In particular, the ubiquitous 1920x1080 is cheap as dirt and nice and wide; but actually throws fewer vertical pixels than a nasty old 1280x1024 17' from about 2001. If you read or write a lot of text, or code with reasonably short lines, taking a cheapo 1920x1080 and rotating it gives you a 1080x1920: this is handy because it's still wider than 1024(so even old and horrible programs/layouts generally won't break, since anything that old and horrible probably expects 768 or 1024 pixel wide screens); but provides more vertical resolution than even substantially more expensive monitors in their native orientation.

I prefer my 'primary' monitor to be unrotated; but the amount of vertical resolution you can get for the money, without totally sacrificing width, from a rotated secondary monitor is pretty compelling.