Sounds an awful lot like that other "soft science", Economics.

The key difference between psychology and economics is that there's money in getting psychology correct (because it'll help you sell crap), while there's money in "proving" whatever economical hypothesis benefits the current elite.

Liars study psychology and practice economics.

Some researchers are finally getting away from the 'revealed wisdom' of Friedman and company, and hopefully Chicago School Economics will soon end up in the dust bin of history with phrenology and vital humors.

It doesn't really matter. Some other excuse for why the rich getting richer and the poor poorer is really in the best interests of those poor will take its place. And people will eat it right up, since it also excuses their dreams of getting rich themselves and lording it over the rest, who don't deserve it. And it doesn't help that Cold War mixed economics with nationalism to the point where people actually developed religious attachments to particular economical positions.

After all, phrenology might be in the dustbin of history, but the cause it served - dividing people into winners and losers so the former might be kept too busy oppressing the latter to start thinking for themselves rather than just doing what they're told - is still alive, as it has been for most of recorded history. It's like a memetic parasite living on noosphere and feeding on humanity generation after generation. Our future depends on killing it before advancing technology makes even losers able to destroy the world.

How many times would you have to get punched in the face before you started taking it out on them?

And if I did, I'd be taking out the predations of some punch-happy psycho on innocent people because I was too scared to confront the real culprit. That might make me a fine citizen for such bastions of greatness as North Korea or East Germany, but in the West, it just makes me a collaborator - a traitor to myself, my country, and humanity.

It's one thing to be a coward, it's another to internalize a lie and start actively serving it. At that point you've basically joined a cult, and all your perceptions get twisted by being filtered through its dogma; and because of such induced insanity, joining a cult sometimes ends very, very badly. As we have seen numerous times in the recent past.

A "lean" OS an OS where you easily add/enable just the pieces you want/need, not one that comes with everything and the kitchen sink preinstalled and enabled "just in case somebody needs it".

First implies the second. It can hardly get easier than installing drivers for everything under the Sun and letting unused ones lie waiting for their device to be connected.

The rest of the world is going faster, developing software for uses that you couldn't ever anticipate, on hardware that's not typical, and that's possbile only if your OS is a simple and reliable building block that scales well up and down and doesn't get in the way of doing unusual things.

Right, so how does software use this hardware? Either directly (we tried that; it was a bad idea), through proprietary interfaces (Glide, CUDA) or through standard interfaces (OpenGL, OpenCL). The last is best for end users but requires actively promoting these standard interfaces. So packaging their common bits into the OS makes perfect sense.

The basic failing of your argument is that you want an OS that doesn't make any tradeoffs at all, one that's perfectly tailorable to every possible use case. But in the real world, you make programs for specific use cases, and an OS is ultimately just a program. It too is designed with the needs of some small group of archetypical users in mind; the bigger and more varied this group, the less customized it is to anyone in particular.

TL;DR If every bit is precious to you, you'll just have to make your own custom OS with a hex editor.

I doubt it. It's too easy NOT to be.

But the thing is, an efficient department might not be in the manager's best interests. How do you show constant improvement if everything is already at 100%? Either push people beyond 100% - and accept that this will lead to everyone who can leaving and the rest spending all their time and effort looking busy and covering their ass - or make pointless changes to make yourself seem good.

It's easy to be a good manager, but almost impossible to be a good and ambitious one. First requires letting people do their jobs in peace, the second making changes. So if the boss cares about their career, whatever they're leading will usually be a complete mess, because they'll tinker with it to show off their skillz to their higher-ups, consequences be damned.

It's amazing your average corporation gets anything at all done, considering all the internal strife and associated disorganized chaos.

The first question that comes to my mind is, "What the fuck is the point of 2 Gbps service for residential customers?"

Not having to worry about my Steam downloads interfering my family's streaming video and still leaving enough room for comfortable web browsing and a torrent or two? All the while a computer is making a cloud backup?

Excess resources is what allows for growth, you know.

It would seem to me that society (both public and corporate) ought to be looking at the areas that are lucky to get T-1 speeds before it worries about upgrading cities that already have access to double and triple digit Mbps connections.

A city upgrading to Gbps service makes countryside seem backwards in comparison, increasing the chances that local public services win their legal battle against entrenched private interests and are allowed to increase speeds.

That about sums it up

Watching from the outside, it sure seems so. I wonder why, though? It couldn't possibly be because the country refused to give up racism when offered the carrot of a dream, so now it gets the stick of fire and brimstone, now could it?

Humanity seems utterly unable to learn tgat injustices are weaknesses that lead to destruction yet the universe seems just as unable to stop hammering the lesson home. Unmovable object of human stubborn evil meets the unstoppable force of obvious consequences. We haven't met any aliens because they're addicted to, mesmerized by and terrified of the epic farce that's human history. Assuming they're even alive anymore - not helping when able inserts them right back into the same pattern, after all, most likely by opening old scars.

We should really make ethics a branch of national defence, since most problems and threats originate from someone racking up bad karma in the name of short-term benefit.

But, unlike Greece, nobody is willing to give Argentina a bail out.

Nobody is willing to bail out Greece, either. What's being done in eurozone is transferring risk from private investors to taxpayers. Who, for some odd reason, seem to be turning against EU and its "socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor" economic ideology.

"Genius sells and idiot buys", like Helsingin Sanomat once said about modern art.

So if I go on vacation and someone moves into my house while I was gone, it's just "too bad, you weren't using it, just wait for them to leave and you can take it back?"

What ever made you think it's different? Not nature; leave a nest unguarded and some other critter claims it. "Property" is a social construct. If it becomes a tool for tyranny - if a few hoard everything and claim "property" as an excuse to enslave the rest - then it's on its way to the wastebasket of history.

Not that property is likely to last anyway. If 3D printers and other microproduction fulfils its promise, they'll finish what the industrial revolution started. Then what would be the point of hoarding, when you can instantiate any physical object you need, and let it be dissolved/recycled again when you no longer do?

Mind you, that was just frustration talking... because seriously, what is anyone going to do about this?

Stop believing in imaginary entities such as Disney, thus leaving all their "property" free for taking. For that matter, stop believing in imaginary chains of ownership altogether; if someone's not personally using some resource, it doesn't belong to him, no matter any paper says.

Capitalism is just a secularized religion. It's gods, and the divinely ordained order they live in, are no more immune to final sanction than any others that have guided civilizations in ages past. Invisible Hand either gets its shit together or smashes into the Ragnarock of reality, just like Historical Inevitability did in the USSR. Past accomplishments don't excuse continued lousy performance forever, for men or their gods.

You are confusing businesses with corporations. Not all businesses have shareholders and act in a sociopathic manner.

I'm not confusing anything, I'm simply focusing on corporations specifically.

Everyone seems to hate corporations, but bring up the idea of banning them in favor of a natural system (ie no government imposed "corporate veil" limiting the liability of the owners/shareholders) where the owners are actually responsible for the actions of their employees, and everyone goes crazy.

Without corporate veil you aren't going to get microprocessors, since those cost billions to develop and set up manufacturing for. You aren't going to get medicine either, for the same reason. Modern society can't function without Big Business, and Big Business can't exist without corporate veil. Problem isn't corporations in themselves, it's the social expectations and legal judgements guiding those corporations.

It's the "profit is all that matters" creed that has to go. But that's not going to be an easy battle, since Cold War left West with a religious attachment to an extreme form of capitalism. That secular religion needs to be either reformed or replaced. But of course the first hurdle is precisely that most people don't really consider it a religion - a social construct - but objective reality, thus effectively blinding them to any alternative.

I really do not understand the hate involved here. Let's assume that climate change is NOT happening. We still have the following facts:

1) Fossil fuels are a limited supply. Maybe enough for another 50 years. Maybe 100. But still limited.

2) We purchase large amounts of oil from countries that, in general, do not like us.

3) If it were not for oil, our interest in the middle east would decline greatly, which would be a good thing. If Muslims want to kill Muslims, that sounds like their problem. There is no "right" side in a conflict like that.

For all of these reasons, we should be decreasing our dependency on fossil fuels. More fuel efficiency and alternative fuels just simply make long term sense, even without considering climate change.

So, what is the problem?

The difference between driving and VR is that VR is supposed to simulate your being physically present inside a computer-generated environment.

Aren't most cars nowadays designed with the aid of computers?

Seriously - don't dig those things up...

Little chance of that: "200 miles underground". Unless the summary got meters and miles confused, but Slashdot editors wouldn't make such a mistake.

no, but there is no reason to regulate every business under the sun either. The governments role is not to tell people what they can and cant do with minor exceptions

The problem is, businesses are people but unlike humans are only expected to care about "shareholder value". If you're trying to keep a horde of rules-lawyering sociopathic demigods from murdering people and destroying the entire planet for profit and the only tool you have is regulation then of course you'll end up with an ever-thickening rulebook. You are, after all, trying to enumerate badness against professional lawyers.

If you want less regulation, then you have to change social values so that people and organizations will consider more than just their personal benefit when making decisions. But that would mean acknowledging raw capitalism isn't sufficient to be the sole guide for society or even economy. So I guess it'll have to wait until current collapse forces the issue. Until then, choke on your regulations.

Ban people with an opposing point of view? Google deciding intentionally what's "true" and "not true"? Only people with approved viewpoints get a chance to place ideas out there?

"I hate Jews" is a point of view. "There was no Holocaust" is a flat-out lie. You are entitled to your own opinions and interpretations, but not your own facts. The latter makes you wilfully insane.

And frankly, Turkey is being a moron here. They could simply ignore all this, it happened 100 years ago after all. Or they could issue an official apology. They could even frame the Armenians as nasty people who had it coming, evil as such approach might be. But instead they pick the one strategy that has no chance of success whatsoever: pretending nothing ever happened. It's enough to make one question whether someone in Turkey wishes to ride a national persecution complex to power.