Seatbelts: "Consumers find them too restrictive!"

So, an aside here: There's absolutely no question that seat belts make drivers and their passengers safer -- none whatsoever.

Pedestrians, on the other hand, have a considerably higher death and injury rate in areas where seat belts are in use -- seat belts reduce risk for drivers, drivers behave more recklessly (because they can), and other road users who aren't protected by those seatbelts die.

I'm also reminded somewhat of guard rails on some of our major freeways (Austin area) being replaced with a trio of metal lines intended to redirect vehicles back onto the road rather than letting them cross the median into the other direction's traffic. It's not an entirely bad idea -- unless you're on a motorcycle, in which contact with those things at speed almost always means dismemberment.

Anyhow -- there's more than one kind of road user, and decisions made intended to protect one class can have unintended effects on the rest. A groundswell of support for something that makes drivers safer might well increase the risk of death for folks who are already in a marginalized class.

What in the world does any have to do with "the cloud"? The scenario is entirely relevant when you're putting servers you own in DC space that you lease.

If anything, using cloud services negates this impact on pricing somewhat, since the service themselves is such a large customer of their DC that they have considerably more negotiating leverage (and, commodity OpenStack instances being reasonably fungible, it can be considerably easier to switch cloud providers than to move physical hardware between datacenters... unless you did something silly like lock yourself in to a single cloud provider's extensions or API).

I mentioned this discussion to my fiancee, a fed. Although the situation referenced wouldn't come up there (expense reimbursement is actually efficient), their training explicitly indicated that refusal to accept a personal-liability card (or behavior in using that card resulting in revocation) would be a firing offense for any job with mandatory travel.

The federal government is pretty darned good about following employment law. I'm guessing, then, that it's the company's past history that made your refusal reasonable, and thus grounds for a wrongful termination suit.

Mind if I ask the jurisdiction where this happened? (I'm currently in a right-to-work state).

You seriously lack imagination. Make $250,000 grand and pay about 40% in direct Federal/State taxes. $150,000 is left (60%). Now, pay a shitload of real estate taxes for the property you rent, not actually own - $40,000 with $110,000 left. Buy lots of shit/$100k paying 10% sales tax (like crook county, illinois). $10,000 more in taxes.

If you're "buying lots of shit" on that scale, you're outside of the category of people who get to bitch about being able to pay for food.

As an aside, a note of follow-up: I was persuaded that the official response was not innately unreasonable in discussion with some IRL friends over last night.

I still hold that the original post I responded to (holding that debating the point at all would be hurtful to those seriously impacted by the event) was full of it.

I also didn't notice any strafing, jumping, or crouching going on, so yet again these gimmicky input devices prove that the keyboard+mouse/controller is still the superior input mechanism. You can see the red team running circles around this guy the entire time.

You'd certainly want to have servers/rooms set up only for folks using this setup to make it fair, yes. That doesn't strike me as infeasible.

This entire series of events in Boston transpired in less than 24 hours. A cop was murdered at MIT, a man was carjacked, and the police responding to the carjacking were shot at, and had bombs thrown at them as they chased the suspects through the city. They shot one and took him into custody, the other was cornered in hiding in the neighborhood where they conducted the searches during the day Friday. Would you really have preferred they just told people, "Hey guys, don't worry about it, this guy's wanted in connection to the murders of 4 people & the maiming of 200 or so, he's armed, desperate, and hiding in your neighborhood, but we're all going to just go home and get a good night's sleep, and we'll keep looking for him tomorrow night, or well, he's bound to turn up at some point, we'll get him then, I guess! Keep calm and carry on!"

Were this shutdown isolated to a single neighborhood, I would have no qualm.

That said -- you're putting a lot of words in my mouth. "Good old-fashioned policework" does not by any means imply that the level of police resources involved in a response not be proportionate to the level of risk of further criminal activity.

*In between* air raids, they were asked to "keep calm and carry on" - and that's a reasonable request. But in the middle of an emergency, they weren't being told "Pop over to the cafe for a spot of tea and crumpet while the bombs fall, don't let that Luftwaffe ruin your day!" They were being told, "take shelter, and turn out your lights.

You're seriously comparing two criminals running around (using, admittedly, significant ordinance) to having enemy bombers overhead?

Taking reasonable precautions is certainly appropriate during a known attack. Shutting down the city because there might be some further incident is an entirely dissimilar category.

It's the internet, you don't have to pretend to be a tough guy - we don't care. This was not a response to the bombing on Monday and your concern trolling is a bit overdone.

I'm no tough guy -- but I live my principals on this.

When I lived in San Jose, I walked the "bad" parts of town, at night, alone. I do the same today in East Austin (and, to distinguish this from random "Internet Tough Guy" talk -- I play Ingress, so if you go through the trouble to look me up, you can verify the portals I own, and that the resonator spacing is consistently better than is reasonably achievable from a car). I'll do the same in the next place I live. And as I said, I'm no tough guy -- my fiancee (a tiny disabled woman) has a long history of putting assailants in the hospital, but I don't.

The point I'm making is that I'm not spouting things I don't believe for the sake of trolling. I genuinely believe that the Right Thing to do to make urban spaces safer (to the extent that their safety isn't sorely underestimated already, which is my principal thesis) is to act as if they're safe and encourage others to do the same... and that the right way to deal with dangerous attention-seekers is through good old-fashioned police work... while the rest of the populace keeps calm, and carries on.

You've done the math on one side; how about we do it on the other?

Boston is 625,000 people. Asking all of them to stay home for a day is 1,736 person-years of productivity lost (more, actually, because this isn't scaled to workdays but to days in a year overall) -- before taking into account network effects (people who relied on or used services from Bostonians).

Over a thousand person-years of effort is not so trivial a thing as to be beyond questioning. To be sure, the individuals who were killed or maimed had it far, far worse... but the impact goes beyond them, and that is in no small part a result of official overreaction.

(What I haven't touched on, but others have, is that demonstrating that we, as a people, have a large knee-jerk reaction to these events encourages other suicidal attention-seekers to follow a similar course... but I'll leave that discussion to happen in other threads).

The lockdown was a minor inconvenience compared to those who lost their limbs.

Multiply an inconvenience by hundreds of thousands or millions, and you've got something substantially more. At risk of being accused of further trivialization, I'm going to recall a quote by Steve Jobs:

"Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"

Keeping a sense of scale is important in multiple directions. Amount of impact to a single individual is one axis; number of individuals involved is the other. Neither stands alone.

Civil panic being "Please stay indoors while we finish chasing down the other person who did this to your loved ones"?

That's an example, yes.

I -- and my better half as well -- love city life. High-density urban living is often much maligned, but the world is full of people, and people are interesting creatures, with interesting habits and habitats. Society is, on the whole, a resilient thing, and it works better when people get out, interact, and have a (cautious) modicum of trust for each other. So yes -- it would dishonor my memory, or hers, for a city to be brought to a standstill on either of our behalves.

Shutting down a city's public spaces destroys trust, not only in the essential decency and resiliency of the community, but also in the basic safety of those public spaces. Shutting down commerce harms everyone -- and it's not for you to say what's a small way and what's big; if someone who's paid by the hour misses their rent, it's no small matter to them. And to what end?

When you make these deaths worth going to any end for, you say that these people are better, more important than those whose deaths happen less spectacularly, even when similarly untimely or undeserved. I, for one, would rather know that however I go, my time was spent building a strong, resilient society and community -- one that trusts in the essential decency of others and is too strong and self-assured for needless fear.

I just cringe at the thought of someone who's life was affected reading some of the comments in this discussion.

Far more lives were affected by the lockdown than by the bombing itself. Who are these hypothetical "someone"s you speak of? The victims' families?

You can't predict an individual's reaction any more than I can -- I can only predict my own. I'll tell you this: Civil panic would be a horrible way to "honor" the death of one of my loved ones. Speaking only for myself -- the only person I can speak for -- I would find no offense, and perhaps even some small glimmer of comfort, in my community and country opting to follow the British war slogan: "Keep calm, and carry on".

Hmm. A publication date of 1999 predates some of Bagwell's work, but that does look like interesting reading.

My apologies for the pedantry.