IBM was pretty public about laying off all the non-Sales positions and moving anything to do with technology and engineering overseas or giving it to Visa applicants. It was a cornerstone of the strategy. They're a 'consulting' firm now. They sell commodity services using cheap foreign labor paid at subsistence wages.

I suppose if you mean that the sales people are the only ones that add value you're right, in your own fashion. But if you feel that way what the heck are you doing on /.? Astroturfing?

if you've got kids, particularly girls, you're stuck. They all want to watch the same shows and the same night. I'm too broke for cable right now (When it hit $170/mo for Internet+tv I had to bail) and it drives my kid nuts. Sure, the shows might show up on Netflix, but it takes months. I can get them on iTunes, but it's so expensive I might as well buy cable (and I'm sure that's by design).

I know a lot of people will rant about Television being brain rot and all that, but for most normal people (hint: Not the /. crowd) TV is a social thing. It genuinely puts my kid at a social disadvantage that she doesn't have it.

...

...

Your former employer is undoubtedly very grateful you left on your own.

It's not the calories total so much as where the calories are coming from in terms of whole plant foods. The richest Egyptians thousands of years ago probably ate more like most US Americans today as far as refined grains and lots of meat, so they probably had similar "diseases of affluence" such as heart disease, gout, arthritis, diabetes, cancer, dementia, etc..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_affluence

http://www.heartattackproof.com/
"A groundbreaking program backed by the irrefutable results from Dr. Esselstyn's 20-year study proving changes in diet and nutrition can actually cure heart disease ... The proof is in the results. The patients in Dr. Esselstyn's initial study came to him with advanced coronary artery disease. Despite the aggressive treatment they received, among them bypasses and angioplasties, 5 of the original group were told by their cardiologists they had less than a year to live. Within months on Dr. Esselstynâ(TM)s program, their cholesterol levels, angina symptoms, and blood flow improved dramatically. Twelve years later 17 compliant patients had no further cardiac events. Adherent patients survived beyond twenty years free of symptoms."

And:
http://www.heartattackproof.com/huffpost.htm
"Beginning in 1985 I initiated a study of seriously ill coronary artery disease patients. Their nutrition became plant based without oil. Their cholesterol levels plummeted. Their angina disappeared. Their weight dropped. I have reported this study at 5 years, 12 years, and 16 years, in the peer reviewed scientific literature and again beyond 20 years in my book Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. In some of the patients we had follow up angiograms (x-rays) of previously blocked arteries demonstrating striking disease reversal, which is a testament to my often quoted statement âoeThe truth be known coronary artery disease is a toothless paper tiger that need never exist and if it does exist It need never progress.""

So, it's actually those who won't pay attention who are "killing people" in the sense you mentioned. Those people who don't want to look at the evidence, or don't want to work to gather more.

But, it is indeed very profitable to kill people via misleading them that heart surgery will help much (as two of my family members suffered through and then died shortly afterwards for a personal anecdote). As Dr. Fuhrman points out, cardiac interventions are a major hospital profit center. Doctors made $100K or more (in insurance) from my family, but did not have to attend the funerals caused by their bad advice, and neither did they have to experience first-hand the physical or mental suffering their interventions caused.

Note that Fuhrman's, Orish's, Esselstyn's and McDougal's approaches are all better than the "Mediterranean diet" as much as that does indeed help:
http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/103/13/1823.full
"Diet is a cornerstone of cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention and treatment efforts. Step I and Step II diets are widely recommended as the first line of CVD intervention.1 At the core of this dietary guidance are the recommendations to decrease saturated fat and cholesterol and to consume more fruits, vegetables, and whole grain products. Information from an extensive database, especially regarding saturated fat, indicates that these diets significantly lower blood cholesterol levels, a major risk factor for CVD. Consequently, it is beyond debate that these diets reduce CVD risk. ..."

But what these MDs I mention go beyond is showing how you can not just prevent but *reverse* clogged arteries in the heart with diet.

So, if you had heart disease right now (which you probably do if you are like most older US Americans an eat a Standard American Diet), which would you rather have:
* a painful operation, months of recovery, and then six years of generally crappy quality of life eating the same old junk doing various restricted activities, or:
* making a major change to what you eat, which in six weeks tastes as good overall as what you ate before, and then, quite possibly, living twenty years in great health doing lots of physical activity?

See also:
"How to escape The Pleasure Trap!"
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Or, for a different disease, but with similar possibilities:
http://www.johnrobbins.info/being-fat-in-america/
"When Natala developed an infection in her right calf, doctors told her that part of her lower right leg might need to be amputated. But then a friend, who Natala described to me as "a vegan and into yoga," suggested that she consider a natural approach to her diabetes, and that she start to think of food as medicine. ... The physicians she was seeing for her diabetes took a look at her numbers, were amazed, and wanted to know how she did it. "I told them I had adopted a completely plant-based diet. They didn't seem surprised at all, and told me that plant-based diets were helping to reverse diabetes. When I asked why they had not suggested it, they told me because it isn't practical."
    Aghast, she asked her doctor, "Do you think it's practical to be 30 years old and lose a leg?""

So, is it practical to have a painful $10K-$100K heart operation and die a few years later as opposed to change your diet?

At the very least, would it not be putting your head in the sand to just get a bypass operation before trying this Google search?
https://www.google.com/search?q=reversing+heart+disease

Of course, even President Bush just got suckered into an angioplasty:
"Was George W. Bushâ(TM)s stent necessary?"
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/angioplasty-stents.aspx
"President Bush needed aggressive nutritional counseling and potentially life-saving nutritional information. It sounds like he was not properly informed of these studies documenting the ineffectiveness of PCI and the value of the proper dietary intervention. If not, I consider that malpractice. "

See also:
http://yourlife.usatoday.com/fitness-food/diet-nutrition/story/2011-08-23/Bill-Clinton-declares-vegan-victory/50111212/1
"[President] Clinton says he was inspired to follow a low-fat, plant-based diet by several doctors, including Dean Ornish, author of Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease. Ornish has been working with Clinton as one of his consulting physicians since 1993.
    After Clinton's angioplasty and stents in 2010, Ornish says he contacted the former president "and I indicated that the moderate diet and lifestyle changes he'd made didn't go far enough to prevent his heart disease from progressing, but our research proved that more intensive changes could actually reverse it," he says.
    "Heart disease is a food-borne illness," says Caldwell Esselstyn, Jr., author of Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. He's in a documentary about the benefits of a plant-based diet, Forks Over Knives, out next week on DVD. He advocates going "cold turkey from the typical fatty, meat-laden, dairy-rich Western diet" to this kind of plan."

That said, as long as your animal product consumption is less than about 10% of calories, most people without severe heart disease will probably be OK in that regard as far as not developing it. Reversing it may take more restricted diets for a time.

The advice mainstream cardiologists are promoting is equivalent to going to a garage mechanic when your oil light is on and first paying US$1K to have the oil light disconnected (being prescribed blood pressure medicine) and then, when the engine seizes up, being sold a new engine for $100K, all instead of fixing a leak and adding more oil (changing your diet) when the light came on in the first place. As Dr. Fuhrman says, all these things like prescriptions blood pressure medicine are "permissions slips" to avoid changing diet and lifestyle.

...so this research is misguided in that sense. See: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx

Great points. Because we can always make solar panels and windmills, I'm not too worried about space expansion being impossible from running out of fossil fuels from Peak Oil or whatever. And I agree that with enough energy, pretty much all resource issues become easy to solve.

On making it into space, see my comments here on self-replicating space habitats:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4080869&cid=44543237

On energy in general, as Amory Lovins an others have said, if fossil fuels and older nuclear had to pay their true costs up front (including health costs, environmental damage, centralization risks), renewables (like solar thermal) would have been cheaper since the 1970s. It's only because of tax preferences and unpaid externalities (e.g. politics) that fossil fuels have remained in widespread use. What is happening now is that wind and solar are becoming even cheaper than subsidized polluting risky fossil fuels etc..

In a capitalist society, prisons and war can be profitable, so we get lobbying for laws and politics such that they increase. Of course, in other societies, prisons and war can be sources of political power, so that growth is not unique to capitalism. In the theory of social decline, those cancers will grow until the society collapses because it can't afford them. And then the whole thing would start over, The difference this time is we have nukes and bioengineered plagues and soon autonomous killer robots, so its not clear humans will survive if our global society collapses in some likely ways. But, perhaps some isolated habitats might survive (ocean, subterranean, antarctic, space).
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

So, in that one sense, perhaps people like William Catton are right that the Earth has surpassed its "carrying capacity" -- but only in the narrow sense of carrying capacity including the ability to absorb humanities follies from greed and war. Otherwise we could probably support trillions of people on Earth with advanced technologies using lots of nuclear energy as you outline. A related story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Inside

Not that we'd probably want to do that compared to living in space and making the Earth into a nature park and religious shrine?

I've certainly read enough dystopian sci-fi (the Beserker series to begin with) that I understand where you are coming from. Having said that, humans deal in self-replicating technologies all the time (dogs, cat, horses, cattle, wheat, corn, potatoes, trees, and so on) that I don't think self-replicating space habitats greening the universe is necessarily an unmanageable issue. For example we manage the fertility of dogs and cats by spaying or neutering them to deal with overpopulation issues (although there is still a lot of sadness and troubles there, to be sure). Another poster pointed out the "greenfly" which I have not read about, which supposedly ends up harming humanity instead of helping it. Certainly there are always risks to anything we do -- and one of the biggest is just having all our eggs in one basket with all of humanity on just one planet that could get hit by an asteroid or plague or such.

What is more of a risk is, in general, AI getting out of hand (especially military AI), but that does is a risk whether AI is embodied in space habitats or embodied in spacecraft or robots or nanobots or whatever.

Respect: It goes both ways.

Considering most companies:

a) have "Human Resources" (as if people are some resource to be exploited) instead of "Human Assets" where employees are viewed as an _investment_,
b) can fire your ass at a moment's notice (i.e. At-Will-Employment)
c) yet still expect the "common courtesy" of two weeks

Maybe companies should get over themselves and learn to treat their employees with equal respect instead of treating them like slaves and be dicks about not giving a reference.

It's not the charging that is the issue, it's heat from the laptop. If you removed the battery and just stuck it in an oven at say 40C it would degrade. Batteries are chemical devices, they react to temperature.

there's a bunch of sales reps and H1-B contractors gathered round an old name nobody remembers....

NFC isn't supposed to have any security, any more than ethernet is. It's a transport protocol, low level. Security is on the layers above, typically at the application level.

The fact that the researchers don't understand this doesn't inspire confidence. The biggest application for NFC is secure payments, and the security isn't in the NFC part.

Strange, when I disconnect from my VPN I get blocking message from Virgin Media, so it's not like they are hiding anything when the censor a website. Do you have any examples of websites silently blocked by court order?

The script probably just queries the current battery level and logs it. If you are actively using the laptop it will add almost nothing to the load. There is no disk, it's an SSD as you go on to point out, and they don't idle at "full power" because that would be dumb and piss away energy. I don't think you understand how flash memory actually works.

So if you run Folding@Home or mine Bitcoins eventually your battery will go flat and your laptop will slow down to sub 1GHz speeds... Doesn't sound like a very good laptop.