Abandon the gas lines and generate electricity from it instead.

The basic problem with Facebook, Google+ etc. is that you actually don't know the real price - your privacy, and you don't have control over what information that you own anymore when you have dropped it to another site.

In the early days of the internet people experimented by setting up their own homepages, then came Geocities and now everything is essentially collected in either Facebook or LinkedIn.

I would think that a project as mature a Google+ wouldn't cost too much to mantain, specially for company the size of Google. So I'm surprised that the amount of data they're able to gather from Google+'s posts isn't worth the trouble to keep it alive.

If they're shut down immediately, yes. They're trial balloons. If you caution them immediately that they stepped over a line, then yes, they'll back down and say they weren't really serious. But if they get support, even under the guise of joking, it can develop.

Ever heard of swatting?

Oh, you have heard of swatting. You just chose to blame the victim instead.

I don't think you should be apologizing for slashdot's inability to handle a 20+ year old standard.

Or young educated professionals overestimate their understanding of the world and build a utopian vision based on a naive and overly simplistic worldview and are too stubborn to see its flaws until they get older and, hopefully, wiser?

Anyway, grandparent is completely correct. Ultimately the voters decide everything. Blaming people spending money to manipulate voters with propaganda is missing the point. There will always be propaganda. There will always be attempts at manipulation and misinformation. And they do this because people fall for it. Your best bet would be to make the voters better informed and better critical thinkers, but good luck with that. We've had decades of campaigns telling people it's their civic duty to vote even when they don't understand the issues. Originally the US only allowed landowners to vote. That's not practical today, but it did provide a filter on the voting pool to favor people more invested in the country and generally more educated.

That's a *very* specific and strange beef to be had, and in any case, a matter of industrial safety and plant management, not of some intrinsic environmental costs.

Bernie is an idiot, or maybe he just knows idiots like you will take his word on things. Those countries are capitalist with a few more socialist programs than the US. This is also why their tax rate is approaching 80%. They are quickly turning into the same shithole as Venezuela, and every other country that has ever embraced socialism before them. Fuck socialism.

Didn't they use to have a motto of "don't be evil? I think a lot of values got tossed aside in the pursuit of greater and greater profits (one of the hazards of publicly traded companies.) That whole story about James Damore and the over the top SJW's and the search tracking privacy violations turned a lot of techies away from it. (and towards using another search engine like DuckDuckGo instead) So basically you take the two main techie values, the freedom to speak your mind, and the privacy to not be tracked, and then you add on top of that things like the insane expense of silly con valley, well, it just isn't surprising that people want to leave.

So we've won on the Star Wars front, but will we be able to slow down those awful things known commonly as "Superhero Movies"? Only time will tell.

PG&E was a customer of ours, so of course we were talking about them at work. Everyone seemed to agree that even a couple of years ago it would have seemed absurd to think that PG&E was not a good reliable investment, much less that it would file for bankruptcy with a possibility of going out of business. With an existing utility it's almost like printing money as long as you manage it well. There's a cap on rates from the PUC but there's always enough leeway there to provide for a reasonable profit.

One factor in the bankruptcy is that the PUC and the courts have said that they can't pass along costs of lawsuits to their customers by raising rates.

Couldn't you just...you know, rake it? Like the Finns do.