Um...what now? If you believe that list reads from worst customer service to best, then you apparently believe that our highway departments and the post office have the best customer service in the entire service and infrastructure industries.

The fairness of price is certainly better as you move up the list, and the quality of service is much more consistent...but let's not delude ourselves into thinking the US postal service or the federal highway administration represent paragons of efficiency and politeness here.

This isn't even posted under Idle; it's posted under Apple.

We're really so obsessed with Apple that the after-life of it's CEO can make the front page?

News for Nerds, Stuff that Doesn't Fucking Matter At All

For the last time...that 'coffee on the crotch' thing people hold up as the prime example of frivolous lawsuits was probably the most justified lawsuit this country has ever seen.

The woman had fucking third-degree burns throughout her crotch and thighs. A surgeon had to literally rebuild her labia and vagina. Hundreds of people had received second and third degree burns from McDonald's coffee in the years leading up to the suit, including instances when employees spilled the coffee on patrons. McDonald's specifically acknowledged even before that particular incident that the coffee was dangerously hot and unfit for consumption at the time of sale, yet still made a firm and specific corporate policy of setting every coffee maker to that temperature.

It was categorical, institutional recklessness that severely injured hundreds of people over more than a decade, but when one woman actually sues and wins over this everyone dismisses her as a cash-grabbing crackpot. That's what lawsuits are for; when some entity is fucking people over and won't respond to any other pleading or incentive.

Half of the 'frivolous' lawsuits out there are completely reasonable and proper grievances that corporations have sneakily re-framed as whiny bullshit. Because how dare the peons think there's an even playing field for them somewhere?! Courts are for corporations to get things done, not the people! Just because some jerk sues Dairy Queen over melted ice cream - and every comedian or 'human interest' journalist in the nation takes a crack at that moron - doesn't mean you can snidely dismiss every individual vs. corporate lawsuit without a second glance.

Should we be surprised that the feedback is overwhelmingly positive? The owners of the site make money when the feedback is good; the site could die if the feedback was bad. They control the forum, including the ability to delete feedback. Connect the dots.

You wouldn't trust a company that self-reports; a company that controls the forum for user reports has the same underlying power to censor negative anecdotes as any other company that regulates from within.

That "kills up to 90% of infected people" comment is something of an exaggeration. From reading Richard Preston's "The Hot Zone", I recall that the dominant families of Ebola virus are the Sudan strain(s) and the Zaire strain(s). The Zaire strain will really fuck you up; that's the one which kills up to 90%. The Sudan strain is much less dangerous (statistically speaking), and kills something like 40-50%. There's even a new strain which broke out in a medical research facility in Reston, VA in 1998 which was contagious only to monkeys.

It sounds pedantic and insensitive to point out that some strains kill only 50% when even that number is horrific, and sounds totally incidental to mention a non-lethal strain, but actually the Reston and Sudan strains are more concerning in many ways than the extremely lethal Zaire varieties.

Extremely contagious, quick, and deadly diseases like Ebola Zaire often go too quickly for their own good. They can kill everyone so fast that even if the victims travel or meet an ignorant medical response, outbreaks wind up limiting themselves because the incubation isn't really that long and you certainly aren't moving around to spread the disease anymore once you're dead. Several times major outbreaks in African villages burnt themselves out with only the most rudimentary quarantine measures, and there were some major scares when people with Zaire strain took international plane rides that should have lead to global devastation if the disease were really that efficient in spreading. (It is astonishingly contagious in certain circumstances and certain phases of infection, but its contagiousness to people in the immediate area is only correlated to it's potential global virulence, not explicitly and solely causal to said potential.)

On the other hand, diseases like Sudan and Reston Ebola might become much worse health threats than the exceptionally deadly types of Ebola. Something like Ebola Sudan, which kills slower and kills relatively fewer people, could travel much farther and wider than the Zaire types. There could be longer periods in which people are shedding virus while they're still largely pre-symptomatic, longer periods of disease and recovery where they're extremely contagious but still require medical care and community to some degree, etc. I don't recall whether it applies to Hemorrhagic fevers, but there are also viruses people carry and periodically shed for life, as well, like herpes viruses. So a disease that kills a smaller percentage and presents less quickly/dramatically can be far more dangerous than the quicker, more brutal members of its pathogenic family

Along the same lines, the Reston variety of Ebola could be the freakiest of all, given some bad cosmic luck. Something very closely related to a lethal human illness can spread in birds, monkeys, pigs, etc. until it's downright common, and then suddenly re-develop the qualities to infect and kill humans. Now you have something which can be unpredictably spread by a population of carriers which can't be quarantined or predicted even half as well as you could manage human beings. That's why they follow the development of flu strains in birds, pigs, monkeys, and ruminants every year; you never know when something will show up that could make the Spanish flu look like a weekend with the sniffles.

So in summary, the headline makes Hemorrhagic fevers look worse than they really are (although even the 'nicest' ones are fucking terrifying), and it's actually the gentler varieties that are most likely to fuck up humanity one day.

Are they kidding here? Fourth edition is will turn 4 years old next month, and they're already actively developing the next set?

It takes at least four years just to fully develop a new edition of a major tabletop game, with all the adventures and campaign settings and stuff that come out. And forget how long it takes the publishing to catch up, what about the players? All the rule and supplement books are at least $20; the most basic set of stuff for running a campaign is $70+, and that doesn't include any "toys" like campaign manuals or power-gaming goofy shit like epic-level character rulebooks / setting-based weapons and spell guides, etc. That shit's expensive, and it takes time to get used to.

Releasing a new edition of D&D every five years is just as much a slutty cash grab as releasing a new Call of Duty annually. They're not even letting the new version settle in before they prepare to shove it out the door.

No, it doesn't. Every book is tracked. The second they accept a book, whether a new book from the loading dock or a used book from the buyback desk, it's in the system with its own sticker, and at least 3 employees saw the unpacking or purchasing happen. If I was stealing books, if there was any reason it could be "suspicious as hell", then where's the audit? If they can give me a list of which books I've sold them and claim this must be some criminal scheme, then why can't they simply count their copies of those titles and prove that I stole them? I'll give you a hint: because they did, and they know I didn't.

Not all coincidences are automatically "suspicious", and they had reams upon reams of camera footage and inventory data to catch me if I'd ever done anything legitimately wrong. I have no doubt they'd have charged me if they actually believed I stole anything or broke any law. They were the biggest assholes anyone there had ever worked for. They didn't charge me, because I never did anything wrong. I never stole anything or accessed any information that any other student couldn't have. It's as simple as that.

These are the same people who pay students $7.25/hour and external employees $10/hour, because "students get all their tax money back anyway, so you're practically ahead of the $10 people, anyway." Yeah, and I'm the fucking tooth fairy. I'm sure all of your half-time, temporary $10/hr employees were in a >27% tax bracket. They also had big, proud banners all over saying "our earnings go to scholorships". These banners failed to note that you can pay your management any number you damn well please and then call the rest of it "earnings", and also failed to mention that they were tens of millions in debt from mismanaging their remodel and so hadn't really *had* any earnings left for scholarships in years.

They also effectively threw out any book the school wasn't using anymore. They had people who would come in, scan all the books and compare them to the wholesalers and Amazon prices, and simply tell us how much money they were going to give us so they could cart it home and put it up online. We never turned down a single offer, ever, despite most offers being maybe 5% of the books' current value. I went to see the store manager and said "Why do you do this!? I'll buy the books from you if you just throw them away like that! I'll get a business license and go through the same moron channels these chislers went through to buy books from you, and I'll pay you *10 times* as much". She didn't have a good answer. She said there were always people after her to buy the books, and it was just a headache, and even if I was licensed she might not want to do business with me. "Do business with me?" She made it sound like contract negotiations; and yet she didn't provide a single specific reason why it would be complicated. It was just inconvenient, and less annoyance to pass the costs of those wasted books onto the students than to recover any real value. I was offering to pay her 10 times as much to literally dumpster dive as someone else was offering her. I'm not sure there's anything complicated about doing business there, or anything short of fucking idiocy to turn down that money. They were just lazy, corrupt fucks, and that's all there was to it. Every long term employee I ever spoke with immediately agreed when I brought up these bizarre situations that there was nothing else to it; corruption, greed, and incredible laziness.

They lied to everyone they could, manipulated anyone they could, and fired/censured anyone who got too close to the heart of their game. They were corrupt and lazy beyond belief, and that's all that was "suspicious as hell" about that store or anything I did there.

No, it's not against the spirit of the law. They're allowed to buy books from their students all they want; it was solely the bookstore's decision to buy only one copy per student, and solely their decision to enforce that policy on a broad scale from "not at all" to "fire people on the spot". Their only justification for buying just one copy is to make sure some asshole doesn't bring in crate upon crate of freshly purchased books off Amazon the first day of buyback, walk out with $30k, and fuck over every student from those classes who wanted to sell their books. Which is why I only gave them shit after buyback, when they still needed more but couldn't acquire them any other way.

And whether or not it would be against the spirit of the law, this particular law is flat out evil. Anyone should be proud to violate that law, and in more than spirit. The law states, more or less, that no public entity can provide services that a private company could reasonably do. Universities and sanitation services are pretty much the only exempt parties, and even then the bookstore was supposed to buy books only from established megacorps, if not from their students. The law in question exists solely because of ignorant fears of socialism. The corporations love it, because it fucks over small business and make sure that public power, internet, housing, etc are almost impossible to establish even in cases where it would be better and cheaper for everyone to do so; the public loves it because ZOMG BOLSHEVIKS.

Every level of the textbook business is about manipulation, lies, and control, from the publisher to the campus bookstore.

I researched the actual cost of textbooks once, and found industry websites with cost breakdowns which swore, up and down, that the profit margin on textbooks was 1%. I shit you not. You buy the 13th edition of your text for a retail price of $298, a book that's been out for 15 years and hundreds of printings, and they expect you to believe that even *now*, on the 13th edition, the publisher made well under $3 per copy.

On the retail side, I worked for a campus bookstore and my wife was their night manager. After they let me off for total lack of available work, I decided to just sell them books I found on ebay and bought from other students. After I sold them several dozen they fired my wife and banned me from the store based on their unwritten and inconsistently enforced policy that a student can sell only one copy of a particular title to them. Why do they care? I have no idea. The only time I sold them books was the two week period after spring semester buyback but before summer classes; I gave them more copies of these books, at prices and quantities they set, during a period when their used stock was already at it's yearly maximum but still not high enough for their liking. There were no other copies for them to acquire from students, and awful NC state laws forbid them from acquiring more used copies on Amazon, eBay, etc. For this they treated me like a criminal, fired my wife, and even made allusions to whether we'd stolen the books despite the fact that there are cameras, audits, and never less than 3 people at the registers.

It was all about control; what I did was good for their business, and they didn't give a shit. I was making money in a place they thought only they were allowed to make money. Even though it made them even more money than it made me, they hated me for it and considered it abusive.

Control, control, control.

Evil company is evil.

And as usual the people who most need to know won't find out, and the people who already hate Facebook or unabashedly love all news technological will be worrying/whining about it for a week or two.

Slow news day?

I understand your feelings, and I just posted about why this stuff should be deleted. However, when this thing blew up I became curious about the correlations between child porn and child predation.

I found these: http://www.news.com.au/study-finds-no-link-between-child-porn-and-sex-abuse/story-0-1225749645592
http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-legalizing-child-pornography-linked-sex.html

It appears that child porn may not lead people to child predation, and perhaps the availability of what is or resembles child pornography can even lower child predation. I don't know how you separate 'harmless' use of child porn from the coupled market-making that would encourage actual predators to make more for these mere users. Nevertheless, it appears that child porn may not cause behavior escalation any more than snuff films produce serial killers or marijuana produces crackheads. In my opinion, there's likely something wrong with predators, chronic addicts, and serial murderers that goes well beyond the content and availability of their "soft" content like pot or movies. It looks like child porn leading to child predation may be one more "gateway" theory in which the correlation is far weaker than we believed.

I obviously don't support watching or producing child porn, snuff films, or even necessarily pot - but newer data suggests the situation may be a lot more complicated than people think.

Being between jobs, I've spent a crap load of time on Reddit lately, so I'll try to give you some better context than you're getting from the other posts, which are almost all random speculation.

This isn't just about seeing sexuality in children or people fapping over misappropriated but otherwise innocuous pictures of other people's children.

The largest of the sub-reddits at issue, preteen_girls, featured a posting from a man attracted to his daughter (I would provide a link to this thread, but reading it once was enough; I ain't going back there). He received advice about how to get her drunk, how to gradually introduce her to some physical intimacy via backrubs and neck massage, and gradually escalate to fully sexual encounters. This is exactly how things unfolded when my wife was raped as a 12 year old. They're not just trading pictures, they're trading time-tested advice on seduction and child rape.

Oh, and the advice I described came from the moderator of the page.

That's the kind of stuff that's going on here. I don't give a flying fuck how you feel about free speech, or even child porn: giving advice on intoxicating, seducing, and fucking people is wrong. Setting aside the serious question of whether children can give consent in the first place, these people think it's fine to seduce and drug kids until consent is no longer an issue. This kind of stuff is wrong whether your target is 12 or 42. Knowing that people meet and give one another advice about such things in public on these sub-reddits, to say nothing of what goes in private between people who connect via these sub-reddits (because most people are still smart enough not to collude in raping a child or sharing true snuff on a public forum), gives Reddit both the moral authority and the legal imperative to shut those forums down.

Seriously, raping 12 year olds. Intoxicating and fucking your own daughter or niece. As I've already had to say once this month on slashdot, sometimes 'think of the children' is a valid concern.

It's really very wrong to say skepticism is "healthy", and yet I see people say this almost daily. It's no more 'healthy' to be systematically 'skeptical' than it is to be systematically credulous. It's 'healthy' to follow the data and not make any assumptions before you analyze it.

Disbelieving things by default isn't really much better, from a scientific perspective, than believing everything you hear.

Wonderful, a system that will save the company a metric fuckton of cash and they'll pass on some unspecified fraction to us. How noble. I'm not saying it's a useless or immoral thing (quite the contrary), but it's hardly cause for public celebration when a company does something to increase their profits and it coincidentally helps the rest of us.

Now how about using that system to charge someone like me, who drives maybe 1,500 miles a year, less than someone who drives at or above the American average of ~12,000 miles a year? No, see, that's crazy talk. That would be something that doesn't save Fair Pay any money!

The Nighthawk was still designed as much as possible like a true airplane; it's only unstable because they couldn't build a more aerodynamic stealthy shape using only flat surfaces (they used flat surfaces because the math for radar deflection depended on computer simulations, and computers couldn't do good enough calculations for curved surfaces in the late '70s).

Calling it a brick is really quite inaccurate. It had an amazingly narrow wingspan, but it's still a plane and it still produced sufficient lift to fly straight on a reasonable power budget. It wasn't stable without computer correction, but that doesn't mean it's a brick. It's not as if they simply strapped enough rockets onto a random shape to get it airborne.