When was it based just on user numbers?

I have a low 5 digit user number and I'm pretty sure I signed up for Slashdot at some point in the 1990s and I don't remember it being user number based unless that was a very short period before I signed up.

I think Slashdot's moderation scheme is part of what helps it and the inline threading of comments, which is very USENET-like.

My guess is everybody assumes flying cars will be VTOL craft and not fixed wing and will rely on rotary surfaces for lift and thrust. You would think that in order to be "wide spread" they would need to be VTOL to avoid the need for runways, etc.

I would guess the gimmicks will be super short ranges, small payloads (2 adults), based on some kind of electric fan propulsion with swappable battery packs. Like everything else, the big wait is probably less the aeronautics than the means to power it.

I think the states are handcuffed by Congress' ability to regulate interstate commerce. States can't charge tariffs on imports from other states.

I honestly don't know how California was ever able to get away with its own emissions standards in the 1970s when up against the Big 3 automakers other than the obvious smog problems in LA making it clear something had to be done.

States have pretty good options for regulating pollution outputs but they're also often up against the economic realities of the cost of energy as a major factor in their local business economics, and the fact that a lot of power plants are owned by national companies. Force closed a big coal plant without anything to replace its baseload? Sure, but now you've tripled the cost of electricity and it won't be long before local businesses close or relocate because they aren't profitable at the new rates.

I never know how much of the "solar/wind is growing!!!11" hype to actually believe, but it's probably likely that the economics of it really are starting to make sense and the only way change will really happen is when the economics of it work.

Maybe that's what Android needs, a hypervisor, and what we know now as Android the operating system could just run as a VM. All the physical device drivers could be abstracted as virtual devices and supported in the OS with open source virtual device drivers.

This would at least make the OS itself easier to update. The hypervisor would probably need updating as well, but I'd wager less often than the actual OS and without the burden of physical device drivers to worry about it could happen more often.

I don't think that the "believe women" idea means "conduct a proper investigation along the lines of general due process". I think it actually means women's accusations should be taken as incontrovertible fact and sufficient to obtain convictions. Too much of the rhetoric surrounding this idea is filled with supporting arguments that "false accusations are very few" and "reporting is traumatic" and other arguments which attempt to bolster the idea that a woman wouldn't bring an accusation if it wasn't true, so they should be treated as true and not require corroboration.

I think the police have done a poor job handling rape cases, but how much of this is fatigue from poor quality accusations (those made days/weeks later where there is no rape kit evidence to collect, etc)? How much is having enough legal exposure to know that an accusation isn't enough to actually obtain a court conviction?

I think police departments could make their sexual assault units more friendly to women making accusations -- I think a lot of the time it's not the lack of prosecutable charges, but the coarse and cynical treatment women get that's a big part of the problem. But it won't change the reality that accusing someone of sexual assault and obtaining a conviction requires more than just an accusation.

I'd like to see the #MeToo version of "To Kill a Mockingbird".

In the #MeToo version, Mayella Ewell's allegations of rape against Tom Robinson are taken at face value not because she's white and he's black, but because women never lie about rape.

Atticus Finch still attempts a valiant defense, but the jury believes Mayella Ewell because a woman is always to be believed, and Jim Thompson is convicted and hanged.

Atticus Finch is run out of town not for crossing the race line for justice, but because he attempted to discredit a woman's own sense of trauma.

And the entire story is written as a memoir by Scout, who denounced her father after the trial and went away to Smith College where she became a leading feminist literature professor.

Some of this is consumer driven -- people have little patience, and even less of it for expensive items they find confusing but necessary to own.

But I wonder how much of their unrealistic expectation is driven by unrealistic burdens placed on them? Eg, my widget is broken and I need my widget (which of course I am required to provide to do my job) to work. When my widget is broken, I can't work and my boss and my customers get pissed I am not helping them.

I think people generally are super-stressed anymore by the 24x7x365 world and the margin for error/downtime is so close to zero that any problem resolution that isn't instant is seen as insufficient.

That's an unrealistic expectation, but it's not driven by their own personal needs, it's the nature of the environment that pushes it. And it turns into a huge feedback loop that just results in everyone thinking everything needs to work 100% of the time and that any fixes will be immediate.

Trump's public confrontation with China may be stupid, but my assumption is he lacks the mental horsepower to actually decide what specific sanctions/tariffs should be imposed in this little dustup.

My guess is the actual technical details are the brainchild of people who have a deeper understanding of the Chinese economy and its vulnerabilities and they are more measured and strategic than simply slapping tariffs on stuff because it says "made in China". The people coming with specific tariffs have likely done their homework and min-maxed the tariffs to minimize harm to US interests and maximize the pain China feels.

It's also possible that even with good analytical insight and strategy it may be compromised by political considerations -- corporate supporters Trump doesn't want to alienate getting an exception, for example, but this is different than simply overall bad punitive strategy.

We've been hearing for years (decades?) now about how the Chinese economy has a bunch of systemic vulnerabilities and that lots of their positive economic data is flat-out fake or pumped up so bad it might as well be fiction. My guess would be the tariffs are designed to aggravate these systemic problems in addition to trying to hobble specific industries that might be too competitive.

The parent poster is literally arguing for his right to be exploited.

All manner of our economy is built around someone figuring something out and getting paid for it regularly without supplying any additional goods, services or labor.

Patents are granted, rents are paid, royalties are paid, licenses are extended, etc. Most technologies generally that produce greater results are priced based on extracting some percentage of the efficiency savings from the buyer.

If I sell a new machine that can dig 10 holes in a day and it replaces a machine that can only dig 2 holes a day, I expect that hole-diggers will make more money because they can dig more holes. I will price my machine -- regardless of what it costs to make the machine -- partly based on the fact that hole-diggers are now making more profits.

The first guy who figured out how to put a male and female animal into a pen and get more animals without running around through the forest hunting more food must have REALLY pissed off the rest of the tribe. I mean, why does this guy get to eat regularly without EVER spending days on the hunt?

Bwahaha. So nobody ever gets fired for bad results?

This just sounds like the company wanting it both ways, wanting the results *and* the employee to somehow be toiling for them, as if his labor misery was a product unto itself.

As a thought experiment, imagine a company hires an employee to fill a job. By some kind of magic, the employee can do their job without any actual effort exerted -- the mere presence of the employee causes the work to get done even though the employee seems to perform no actual labor, they just need to be present. Does the company fire the employee because they don't "work"?

I can't escape the idea that SO MANY respondents in this thread have some weird, Calvinistic idea about jobs needing to require some labor misery associated with them in order for the employee's "work" status to be justified.

If some super genius takes a job and can do the job they are assigned with far less effort than the typical employee for that job, why punish them? I mean, maybe promote them or try to give them a bigger job to gain more benefit from their genius, anything else just seems to be punishing them for not being as slow and ineffective as the average employee.

That's all well and good when you have the ability to do something about them. The problem usually is that you don't have unlimited rights/authority to just fix random stuff. It also supposes you know enough about the (tech, business process, etc) to do something constructive about them.

I wish I had a dollar for every time I saw some obviously broken technology/process and said "shit, just do it this way" and then once I dove in realized there was way more going on and that the broken way was some kind of best compromise given a bunch of impossible to change elements. There's a lot of conceit involved in thinking you can improve everything that appears to need improvement.

I once had the pleasure(?) of a job where I could knock back some problem to a fairly well solved level, and then move on to other stuff that required some honing/tuning, ad nauseum. Often improving A implied improving B and then improving C suggested further improvements to A, it kind of never ended. At times it got frustrating, like you just never will have the bandwidth to get it all done.

But I've also been in places where B and C needed obvious improvement but they were controlled by other people who were unwilling or uninterested in changing, and trying to force the issue was just more political hassle than it was ever worth.

For what it's worth, I'll bet Louis Farrakhan or David Duke would be fascinating (say it in Spock's voice) to talk to.

You don't have to actually believe whatever bullshit they spout, but listening to them might actually be at least entertaining.

I'm less bothered by the lack of a default paper manual, but I am bothered by things that don't really appear to have any kind of documentation at all, paper or electronic. Or if they have documentation, it's like paper thin (that's a pun) and doesn't cover most of the product or only a subset of features.

You're expected to just grok the design and figure it out, or google it somehow and find someone else who did figure it out and felt like sharing.

I feel like the world gets more and more technical but the actual documentation for it gets less and less. More complexity and less information.

Why not just a dual boot mode? Enter in passcode 1 and you get boot region 1 which can be a generic install with a few downloaded apps for cosmetics.

Passcode 2 gets you the other boot region.

Bonus points for some cheesy option that prevents boot region 2 from loading at all for some time window or number of reboots.