> This is the first time that I can think of that a population directly voted in the affirmative to collapse their economy.

In fact, that happens so often, political scientists have a term for it: "populism". It's very popular in some parts of the world.

Mostly not in the /first/ world, admittedly.

Hehe, bad choice of examples. Yes, Sputnik was launched during an IGY year of "cooperation"... but that doesn't mean it wasn't a cold war space race from the beginning. The USSR announced their intention to launch an artificial satellite nine days after the US announced the same intention. Then the USSR went forward with designing the satellite, only to discover that their original planned machine was going to take too long. Afraid that the US might beat them to it, they stepped back and focused on a simpler design so they could get it into space faster, and beat the US. As soon as their launch vehicle was good to go, they launched, pushing back some planned military test launches to do it.

Makes perfect sense to me. There are lots of people whose lifestyles don't permit a regular job, but could use a flexible income supplement.

That's a rather violent, not to mention criminal, response. I think not.

First, my comment was not a "defense" of anything.

Second, you seem to have missed the sentence "It's not quite as good if the smartphone is also providing the fingerprint scanner and camera, because in the event of an attempted fraudulent transaction that means the attacker is in control of those components."

Also, you seem to have missed the last paragraph. In fairness, I suppose I wasn't quite clear enough. When I said that the security is in the same ballpark as a four-digit PIN, I was comparing to a system using phone-mounted sensors. With sensors provided by the retailer, in a staffed checkout lane, it's unambiguously stronger.

zerofoo said nothing of the sort. He said that killing or fully disabling the shooter isn't necessary, not that it's not possible, or even unlikely.

The history of mass shooting violence in the US bears out both zerofoo's point that killing or disabling the shooter often isn't necessary, since mass shooters tend to suicide as soon as they meet armed resistance, and even those who don't are clearly going to have to shift their focus from mass murder to self-defense or be an easy target. There are plenty of cases in which shooters have been killed, disabled or otherwise stopped by citizens, though they tend to get less press for the simple reason that fewer people die.

Interestingly, the US has conducted this experiment over the last 40 years or so, as the number of concealed carry permit holders went from basically zero to up to 15% in some areas of the country. What happened? Not much. Violence declined, and there is some weak statistical evidence that it declined faster in areas where more people began carrying guns on a daily basis. There is no evidence that violence increased.

I suspect it won't change at all. What would reduce the number of shootings is removing all of the guns, but that is impossible.

This is something of an unrelated point, but I think it's worth noting that police did not respond quickly at Columbine High School, and that the experience dramatically changed police doctrine for responding to active shooters, across the nation. After-action analyses showed that as soon as the shooters faced aggressive armed response, they killed themselves, but that happened many minutes, and several deaths, later than it could have. At the time standard procedure was to cordon the area, isolate the shooters and wait for enough backup to arrive -- preferably SWAT -- that the police could enter in overwhelming force. But Columbine changed that, and most police departments now train their officers that if they have good reason to believe it's a lone shooter then the very first officers on the scene should enter immediately.

Immediate entry, without overwhelming force or special weapons, seems like it significantly increases the risk to the officers, but in practice it doesn't, much. And, of course, waiting tends to give shooters time and space to rack up massive body counts.

"no hardware or software fault occurred *on the spacecraft*"

There may have been a hardware or software fault on the ground, that resulted in an invalid command sequence. The desired behaviour in this case may be to enter a safe mode, so that you have a known means to recover (rather than bricking).

Or just change positions several times per day. I stand until I'm tired of it then sit for 30 minutes, repeat. I set a timer for the sitting periods, otherwise I find that when I'm focused on something I forget to stand up again. I've thought about hacking and arduino into the controls on my desk and automating that, so that after 30 minutes my desk automatically returns to the standing position, but haven't gotten around to it.

I have a motorized desk from VersaTables. Nice desk and the company was great to work with. Not cheap, though, not at all.

I can't teach a full econ class here. But the TL;DR version is that every country that tried austerity has recovered more slowly than every country that didn't.

Ok, perhaps not full econ class needed here, but would you mind explaining briefly how avoiding austerity measures such as reducing high pensions helps recovery? I can see that reducing number of teachers to one third (to get to the same teacher/pupil ratio as is elsewhere) would be a benefit but causes inflow of unemployed people which is drawback. I can also see that postponing building of roads or industrial parks damages recovery. But certainly there are areas where austerity does makes sense. Or not?

"Systemd is causing massive bloat in Linux."

One of the main objectives of systemd is to take advantage of linux-specific features (such as cgroups) that existed before systemd did.

The servers I am building at present have a minimum of 256GB ram, I couldn't care about a few MB of "bloat", what I *do* care about is resource limits at various levels, which cgroups gives me and systemd makes useable but default.

if you were trolling, you're the worst systemd troll I've seen this year.

Unfortunately, by your definition I don't believe that there *are* any civilized nations. It's not that I disagree with you, exactly. But I believe that your idealized definition of civilized doesn't map to any country in the world either at the present time or at any previous time.

Plenty of excuses, but sorry, if we're using English "kill the messenger" essentially means to act in such a way as to discourage others with the same (or sufficiently similar) message.

You may use the excuses to claim that the intent was other than "killing the messenger", but not to argue that that isn't what they did. To argue that that isn't what they did you would (probably) need to show that their action did not serve to discourage others with similar communications.

OTOH, perhaps in Spanish the phrase would be taken literally, as it once was in English. But in modern English "kill" has many figurative uses, such as "kill the spotlight" (though I think that's now more commonly "strike the spot", which also doesn't involve hitting the light).

You do realize that you can purchase open source software commercially, right? Then you get the same level of support that you get with proprietary software, and you get the source code as well.

Bitcoin is cash. What you call a "bitcoin bank" is really just a "bitcoin wallet" in somebody else's possession, and it is about as safe as trusting somebody with a wallet full of cash.

The closest thing to a bitcoin wallet involving a bank is putting cash in a safe deposit box. If you do that in the US it isn't protected by the FDIC. If you want to be protected by banking regulations you have to deposit your money.

Bitcoin was never designed around letting others hold your money. The design was really for individuals to hold their own money.

Not if you lease. If you lease, it's the lessor that gets the rebate, so when they calculate the financing they just take it off the top. The federal credit, anyway. This is one of several reasons why more EVs are leased than purchased.

This is incorrect. Charging on 120V doesn't do any damage to the batteries, in fact it's probably a little bit better for them. The problem with level 1 charging is that it's slow. Assuming the LEAF's battery is empty it takes about 21 hours to charge it to full on the 120V adapter included with the car.

I actually charged my car regularly on 120V and it wasn't as bad as you might think -- as long as I only needed to make one trip into town per day (from my house to the city is about a 40-mile round trip). The car was almost always fully-charged by morning, but if I went somewhere in the morning and came back home, there was no possibility of making a second trip in the afternoon or evening. Not without stopping off at the level 3 charger in town, anyway. Which I did from time to time -- it's free, and recharges the car from empty in about an hour, but it means having to kill an hour, and there isn't much of interest within walking distance of the charger.

So, I installed a 220V "level 2" charger. With it, the car recharges from empty in a little under four hours. In practice, that means that when I pull into the garage and plug in, it's generally full again in a couple of hours. Most of the time the flexibility that provides doesn't matter, but sometimes it's very handy. The level 2 charger cost me about $400. Was it worth it? Maybe, maybe not.