> Really, all you have to do is kick the X11 and all the craziness from the window managers

SteamOS is doing nothing of the sort. It's little moe more than a bespoke version of Debian. It is essentially SteamBuntu.

He might be talking about the screw-up happening because the person provided bad info in a hallway conversation. The people who like to leave long voicemails also like to talk a lot in the hallways rather than send emails.

Also, his company's voicemail system might automatically delete them after a certain (short) amount of time. If the person tells him something wrong and the SHTF two months later, the voicemail's probably already gone.

Hey. It's "Gamification" of the comment hierarchy.

There are over six million people in US prisons, only a small minority of which are in there for violent crimes. You're 8.5x more likely to go to prison for a non-violent drug offense such as possessing a trivial amount of drugs or even living in the same home as a drug dealer and being charged as an accessory. Your are 6x more likely to be in prison for a public order or "victimless" crime such as prostitution than a violent crime. You are 2.5x more likely to be in prison for a "weapons violation" in which nobody was hurt than you are for a violent crime.

So why is it OK to be happy about the prospect of people in prison being killed in a fire?

One solution to many of the technical, administrative and financial problems of running prisons would be to imprison fewer people. Canada imprisons less than 1/6 the fraction of its population than the US, and it's not a crime-ridden hell hole; Germany 1/9th and Denmark 1/10th the US incarceration rate. We could half our prison spending and spend the money on education (or give people a tax break if you prefer), and still have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world.

Why do we have so many people in prisons? Well, putting people behind bars is good for a prosecutor's career, especially if he has political ambitions. Also in states with privatized prisons the taxpayers are financially penalized for having occupancy rates less than 95 or even 100%. Think about that. Your prisons are overcrowded, so you hire a politically contractor and build a virtual guarantee into the contract that prisons will remain overcrowded.

Anyhow, a coarse net wouldn't rain fire down on prisoners. Stretch a piece nylon (very flammable) rope and try to ignite it by throwing burning stuff onto it. Even if it does catch it will only smolder. So net would be cheap and practical, which is precisely why it would never be used in the US: not enough profits to prison operators.

Unified time would unify the date, though only if the entire world made the change.

Depending on the location and time of day, determining the date is an issue with the current system too, though.

Bah, that should have been <=. Forgot to use HTML entity notation for the angle bracket. >.<

People would only be confused until those used to the current system (and unable/unwilling to learn a new one) died off.

All we need is a 24-hour clock, and anyone giving a time to anyone else would simply note their zone (0-23). Determine the difference in the two zones, and the larger zone subtracts that many hours to figure out the relative time of day at the other location (and vice versa). There are other ways to calculate the relative difference in daylight/working time between locations too. Some are easier for certain people than others, and some are easier depending on whether or not the difference is =12.

Both systems obviously have pros and cons. The current one means people don't have to calculate anything to know whether it's day or night when already talking to someone. Coordinating action, especially if more than two locations are involved, can take significant calculation though. Changing to a unified time system makes coordination a snap, at the expense of immediately being able to tell the relative daylight/working time in another location.

We'd advance faster by removing them.

New use for the term "chip real estate".
Think of the foreclosures!

Unfortunately, that means they have to be several kilometers in width...

Tech startups don't create the kinds of jobs that the 99% actually need. Oh, sure, many of them will eventually hire one secretary, and will pay into their building's contract for one part-time janitor.

That is demonstrably untrue. Both the US Census and the IRS publish income data; so it's not too hard to find where the 1% actually starts. Granted, the data is subject to interpretation. But even with the lower estimates, the bulk of workers fall soundly into the 99%.

According to whatsmypercent.com, the 1% starts at an annual income of $506,553. The New York Times shows the 1% starting at "just" $383,001. (The latter is nationwide aggregate. The NY Times tool actually lets you select via state, or even metro area. The the Bay Area, for example, you'd have to clear $558,046 before leaving the bottom 99%.)

The handful who win the IPO jackpot notwithstanding; I'm pretty sure your average tech worker is not cleating half a million a year, even in the Bay Area.

Save us both some time, and just send it to me...

It's not that it can't do useful things for everyone; it's that you have to balance that against things like time wasted. For the head of a major agency with private secretaries and aids at her call, checking and sending emails might not be the best use of her time.

Robin Hood. Dick Turpin. Butch Cassidy. Bonnie and Clyde. Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán.

People who break the law have always been the subject of fascination, and for a certain subset of the fascinated, glorification. We still enjoy caper movies about criminals pulling off complicated heists, movies which gloss over the innocent victims of crime or even depict the criminal as an instrument of poetic justice. For the vast majority of people fascination with criminals is harmless. Living in a civilized society requires restraint that makes fantasies of anarchic behavior attractive. In moderation, some measure of admiration of rule breakers probably helps keep the people who run things in check (e.g. the Edward Snowden case).

The problem is that some people have difficulty separating fantasy from reality, keeping to moderation, or understanding how complex or ambiguous people can be. Julian Assange is neither an angel nor a devil, but a flawed, complicated person who did something that needed doing. George Washington wasn't the childhood paragon of the cherry tree legend, but an ambitious, rash, somewhat dishonest social climber who achieved greatness under the pressure of circumstance.

I haven't lived there, but I've been there several times. Thin gloves are perfectly adequate in Vancouver even during the winter. Not all of Canada is like Yellowknife.