about the value of stimulus, and how all jobs are sacred, even stupid fucked up ones like these at the DEA.

The "aimed at small businesses" part is almost certainly hooey, and is being done for political reasons.

"Him that doth not work, neither shall he eat" is a lot better than "we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us".

^^^THIS^^^

are remarkably puerile and shallow, which is surprising for someone who shows such a great comprehension of the pathologies that exist in heavily bureaucratic corporations.

It confuses technological means with good governance. As others have mentioned upthread, the major consideration of mob rule is no different than without technology. Read your Federalist Papers, then get back to me.

Can't take a hard drive built with LVM and migrate it to another machine with the same name -- i.e. a common operation after a hardware upgrade. I suppose it is possible to rename the logical volume, but this is fairly arcane, and why should I have to do this? ext4 offers no such impediment.

Your steam drill is calling on line one.

Seriously, this is the kind of discussion we get from the economically illiterate. There is a story, frequently attributed to Milton Friedman, regarding this sort of nonsense:

"At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: 'You don't understand. This is a jobs program.' To which Milton replied: 'Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it's jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.'"

Garmin allows you to pick from a number of different voices, with different regional accents and languages as well.

I can't find the exact image -- it's a Facebook photo of a friend-of-a-friend (possibly visible here) -- so this Tumblr image will have to suffice. Lately I saw a college professor complaining about how badly in debt his students are and how their lives will start with crippling burdens. Yet for all that, I heard no consideration for the part they played in this drama. Did they offer to take a pay cut? Find a more economical way to teach? The college-for-all movement has heightened costs (expanded the number of instructors required, added facilities and administrative staff) while not materially changing the overall worth of a degree.

Supposedly, the main reason for getting a college degree is the bump in lifetime earnings, but not all degrees are created equal. Engineering, math, and the hard sciences dramatically pull up the averages for everyone, while the humanities languish. It was this way when I was in college back in the 80's, and it's only gotten worse since. If you're slaving away to get that PhD in medieval literature and racking up $150,000 in debt, you might want to revisit that life plan.

The standard razor for any vaporware tech is,

"Five years away" = "we have the general physical principles down but there are a lot of implementation details unresolved".
"Ten years away" = "we're not really sure about the physics, and/or the economic feasibility has yet to be established".
"Twenty years away" = "some guy wrote about this in a journal and a few people in the field may believe it could work".
Now, "100 years away" = "Not. Happening. In Your Lifetime, or anyone else's".

Please all die.

KTHXBAI,
-- Mr. Science

instead of shooting your mouth off.

Bernie Madoff is sitting in jail right now for ripping off the rich, and they all got their money back.

The Wilpons allegedly lost as much as $700 million, so maybe you want to substantiate that claim with something.

Seriously, the unison call-and-repeat chanting is straight outta Mao, as is the refusal to allow videotaping of a public event.