Right, except that all the old people who are dependent on Social Security would starve (whether that dependency is a good thing in the first place or not isn't the point - I think it's dumb, but once it was put in place it removed the incentive for working class people to save enough for retirement). And the poor people would have no health care because Medicare would be gone.

And with no military left, what's left of our hegemony would be gone. Which means no deterrence against other nations doing naughty things like making nuclear and biological weapons, no deterrence against backing terrorist entities in inter-state disputes. And the Arabs can gouge us as much as they want for oil, and the Saudi and Pakistani governments will collapse without support, resulting in takeovers by radical Islamists and a spike in oil prices to 200 dollars a barrel overnight.

So yeah, your idea is fucking stupid. Take it back to the drawing board. What the Federal government *should* be doing is directing funds toward research of critical national security importance, like breaking the shackles of oil dependence so we can afford to downsize our military to a more reasonable scale necessary for self-defense and occasional force projection rather than large scale occupation. As for the rest of it, there's too much pork barrel and make-work crap even in the good parts (like NASA) and that stuff definitely needs to be gutted. But a $100M Federal government will never work.

You forgot about "don't ask, don't tell". He did push the repeal of that policy through. Otherwise though, I think your post is pretty accurate and describes my position and political inclinations as well. Although I'd like to think I'm more of a thinking man's moderate/Northeastern Republican, and would gladly vote Republican if they could muster some literate, socially liberal candidates like we used to have in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, the Republican party at the national level was first co-opted by neoconservative warmongers, then co-opted by Tea Party nutcases who think the federal government should be essentially nonexistant, to the extent that the world "think" can be used to apply to these people at all.

I think everybody had Obama wrong during his campaign in '08. He was neither the closet socialist that Republicans feared, nor the savior of our nation that Democrats hoped. In fact, he was a charismatic speaker but under-experienced leader without the executive experience to get things done. He's basically continued Bush's policies with respect to domestic fiscal and economic matters, brought almost nothing new to the table with respect to banking regulation or re-creating some semblance of a manufacturing economy in our country outside of the military-industrial complex, the two most important domestic economic matters to stimulate healthy, controlled growth. And his healthcare plan was gutted by design to get everybody to agree to it.

We haven't had a good president since Clinton. And even he made a huge mistake with NAFTA and failing to put some effective trade barriers with China in place. Not to mention sticking little Willie in everything that moved.

In fact, he used to post regularly. I think once he started trolling Android for dollars, he became so deeply hated here that he stopped showing up very often. The perception now is that he's a paid anti-Android/pro-Microsoft(?) shill. Not sure if that's true, but the guy is clearly a bit of a dick.

It isn't afflicted with the awful fake user spam that Facebook has. I get assaulted with at least 5-10 fraudulent friend requests on Facebook every day.

I just hope it stays that way - the asymmetric model of G+ doesn't seem to reward fake user spam as strongly, but it remains to be seen how that's handled.

You fools are only benchmarking Firefox 8!! Well I benchmarked Firefox 14 and it's plus 10 faster than Firefox 4.

I appreciate the benefits of rapid versioning and release cycles, but really, this is ridiculous.

Yes, and Google+ has the same feature. :) You can view your public profile, your profile as visible to a given other Google+ member, or your profile as visible to a member of a particular circle of yours. It's pretty trivial to figure out if you are accidentally oversharing in your public profile.

A) As was already pointed out, he sells the binary engine, so he did redistribute it.

B) The rules of the competition require disclosure of any used third party libraries or components. Since he didn't disclose this usage, he violated the competition rules regardless of whether he was complying with the license conditions or not.

I suspect that most of Facebook's current growth, at least within the US, consists of fake/spam accounts... so yeah, definitely peaked out. Not sure how they'll do in other parts of the world though, there might be more opportunity there for them, though other parts of the world seem to have their own popular social networking sites already.

Let's just say I wouldn't be too quick to give Facebook a 10, or 70 or whatever billion dollar valuation.

The bitcoin effort needs the involvement of some economists with experience studying and understanding currencies, not just techies. It could also use some PR and marketing people, with all the bad press they've been getting lately for their poorly crafted currency system.

It sounds like they have the technology stuff reasonably well figured out, but they have utterly failed on the economics and marketing side of things.

I suspect that bitcoin needs to be replaced with a new system that has the advantages of the current without the raging disadvantages, re-branded without the negative associations of bitcoin, and work to make sure they don't fuck up again.

Like Friendster and MySpace before it, the club is only cool when it's too cool for other people. Once every yutz is a member, including your parents and grandparents and kids, it's so unbounded and open that you can basically only put things there that you'd share publicly. Which isn't much. Which makes it lose much of its appeal. It would still be a decent, easy place to share photos and stuff, but the creepy marketing aspects kind of kill that use for me.

Frankly, you are posting as AC which likely means you don't understand or are just full of shit.

I'm not old, I do understand, and I think Murdock is full of shit. My decade-long posting history on Slashdot should back that up. Just because I acknowledge the reality that newspapers have a tough go at it doesn't mean I think that erecting massive paywalls and trying to "block" people from "stealing" content is the answer (the Murdock response).

You and I are in agreement about what has happened. We just disagree about the cause and effect. I'd posit that by and large, local reporting has always had the gunk you describe, and simply became more saturated with AP repeats because of the budgetary issues I described.

I don't think anybody got lazy. The local beat reporters got laid off because the local newspapers were hemorrhaging money. If they got a job covering the celebrity beat, they would consider themselves lucky to be able to put food on the table.

This story has nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with market forces. Craiglist and eBay killed the market for local classifieds, Monster et. al. killed the local job postings, and Google ate up the advertising dollars that used to go to print.

The only newspapers left solvent are large national papers, and even those are barely so for the most part.

I pay for a dead tree New York Times subscription because we need journalism to continue as an institution and a public good. The problem is in an era of free-on-the-margin information, it's mighty hard to get people to pay to cover the fixed costs of reporting, and the number of people willing to pay shrinks massively when you are talking about a local rather than national scale.

I discussed this in my post from May 19th:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2167958&cid=36176946

Still applies. That chart isn't the chart of a proper currency pair (USD/Bitcoin), it's the chart of the price of a speculative asset in a bubble.

The people who set up Bitcoin had some good ideas, but they didn't think things through properly and they need to start over. The way they set up the allocation of a fixed amount of bitcoin per day was bound to create huge value distortions as more people started trying to create bitcoins and entered the market for buying and selling bitcoins.

The value of a bitcoin is therefore actually not a direct function of calculation work performed, but rather a function of the number of users/number of total computing cycles used to compute bitcoins (because the number of bitcoins issued per day is nearly constant as workload to find them increases - it's not actually constant, but rather a gradually decreasing series over time, but the amount of computing power dedicated to it has grown much faster than this function).

This is completely nonsensical. It is making the asset more and more scarce and driving up prices, but also making it less and less likely that anybody real would ever want to accept the asset as a currency replacement.

Good computer science, bad economics. Bitcoin has already failed because of this. Nobody looking at these charts would ever want to accept this stuff as currency.

Inflation at a modest rate (2-3%) is actually a good thing for the economy. It encourages present consumption, lending, or investment over currency hoarding. Noticeable changes in currency's purchasing power over a time scale of minutes, days, or weeks, however, is a bad thing because it causes major economic distortions and lots of wasted activity trying to avoid the negative consequences of these changes in value.

but the designers still make plenty of money ...

This is generally nonsense. Most high end fashion companies make very little money. Their labor costs are very, very high, and their sales volumes are very, very small because their price points are so high. In fact, these businesses would generally not even be viable if there weren't lots of well-to-do young women in New York and Paris willingly to work for free or nearly-free to "break in" to this industry. Same thing with the magazine world. Subsidized by nearly free labor, not much money to really go around, headquartered in very high rent, high cost-of-living areas, high production costs, etc.

The head designers at more mainstream fashion houses (the ones that guys posting on Slashdot would have heard of) may make many millions of dollars a year, but that's selling stuff that's carried in Bloomingdale's and Neiman Marcus, not the haute couture runway innovators.

And still I wouldn't really want to be a shareholder in any of these companies, compared to the many other investment opportunities out there.