You could say all of the above about contraction of STDs.

TIme for a national public STD registry?

So you're saying you disagree with the part of the ruling that said he could keep the clothed photos?

And that, my friends, is why CAFE[1] standards are a stupid way of reducing emissions.

Just figure out what the social cost of the emissions is, charge that much through a tax, and let everyone decide on their own whether that trip, or that vehicle, is still worth it.

Not equitable enough? Rebate everyone an equal share of the money raised this way, which protects from consumption losses at low income levels while preserving the incentive to cut back.

Going to complain about "lol wuts the point of collecting it all to refund it"? I guess you missed the fact that emissions are harmful.

[1] Corporate Average Fuel Economy i.e. cars you sell must on average be this fuel efficient.

Perhaps, but you don't get that defense when you start talking about "Our company ROCKS on [racial] diversity! ... but how much it rocks in that regard is a 'trade secret', yeah, that's it."

Maintain two separate vehicles in order to drive every day? Great, that's definitely better for the environment!

Yep -- kids are just *rarin'* to read the classics, and the they mostly fall in love with reading the moment you allow them to browse one.

That was sarcasm.

If Gates can improve school productivity as much as he improved software productivity, yes, that would be a great improvement.

I know that Window's is not the best operating system (to put it mildly). And English is not the best language.

I think the point is that, if you were to buy out the existing coal industry, there would be no more *financially invested* stakeholders in (US) coal, and thus no one who'd strongly want to fight a coincident ban.

That's not unique to cryptocurrencies with blockchains. Any private digital currency (including and especially those used in MMORPGs) has to deal with the same problem, of making sure that transactions are ordered correctly, that money is still available in an account, etc. In that sense, they all have the problem of the network having to know about both transactions.

It even affects the real-world clearing of bank transactions, which is why people always complain about the lag between when they get their money and when they can spend it, which exists (in part) because of the interdependence of all the accounts.

One solution, of course, is to perform the accounting via bearer notes, aka physical paper/coin money. The holding of the note validates the availability that unit of money, and that there is no "lock" on it.

But even then, you have to worry about someone spending money while they still have a lien from a third party.

Fine, as long as we don't make it a *general* policy to adopt Steve Ballmer's jargon.

Oy gevalt! This again? When minimizing risk, you have to invest where you get the best returns in lives saved. Obviously, in retrospect, after an accident, you'll wish you had spent infinity on having more safety, but that's the wrong way to think about it.

You should instead:

1) figure out how much you're willing to spend per statistical life saved

2) deploy safety measures up to that point

It's not always going to make sense to keep throwing on all kinds of safety equipment simply to handle every black swan event you can think of -- remember, they do log airplane location remotely and continuously; it's just that that still wasn't enough in this case.

You might as well advocate that planes start giving everyone a parachute, without realizing it makes flight so unaffordable as to push people to less safe modes of transportation.

Comments like these promote a worse understanding of the issues.

But it's *not* critical to the performance of the job they're *actually* trying to.

Think about it: can they still hobnob, cut backroom deals, wield enormous power, and keep that power? Yep, they're doing that just fine. Tech ignorance isn't holding them back from that at all!

So, like PayPal then?

The topic is "does relying on an IDE make you a bad programmer". And I say yes by analogy to the carpenter situation: *relying* on a powersaw -- being able to cut wood only that way -- makes you a bad carpenter.

If your understanding of cutting wood has atrophied to "uh, flick the switch and push the wood into the blade", then yeah, it has worsened your expertise as a carpenter -- because you've lost the understanding that would allow you to cut wood with a plain ol' handsaw and are forced to backlog until the real experts can replace it when it breaks.