it's a question of professional ethics.

That's what makes this tricky. From the point of view of professional ethics, avoiding harm to the users is paramount. But some of the things that are justified by professional ethics can be bad for your career, like going around your boss's back to your boss's boss. Depending on the corporate culture and how old you are, it could be a career ending move. If you're under 30 and obviously have marketable skills, go for it. If you're over 40 and have a family to support, you want to bring your spouse in on the decision. In fact you probably want a lawyer too.

From a pure CYA standpoint, documenting everything but not rocking the boat might well be the safest position to take *for you personally*. It may be very bad for your company and your product's users.

Well, that's begging the question. We don't *know* that Senator Markey or anyone on his staff are illiterate; we only know that they aren't as careful with proofreading as they could be.

That said, I'll attempt to answer your question: because he (or his staff) is raising a serious, important point. That's not enough for you to listen to him? It's not enough that he served thirty years on the House Committee on Communications and Technology either? He (and his staff and the secretarial pool in his office) have to be *infallible* in matters of proofreading before you'll listen?

Ah yes, the culture of "zing". It's much more important to catch a politician (or more likely, one of his staff) in a typo than to pay attention to the substance of what he's written.

My hat's off to you. You, sir, are obviously a genius.

Seriously, if an electrical load at a friggin' school poses any measurable risk of fire before tripping the breaker, there's a much bigger moral crime being committed here than the theft of $0.05.

Agreed. I think the wrong part is treating the cost to secure the site as *damage*. That seems to be just as sloppy reasoning as "I only did it for a minute." At most I would consider the marginal cost of fixing the site right away as damage, and even that's questionable.

Well, that is the current dream of many.. find ways to have all the benefits of operating in the US without paying for it. Taxes are something that it is in one's best interest to have other people paying.

I don't mind paying taxes, and wouldn't mind paying a standard VAT to sell anywhere in the US. But the local US sales tax laws are a complete clusterfuck. When I'm selling books in various locations, I have to dig up the tax rate for that location It's a hassle, but doable, but some states are really fucked up.

New York is one of them.

Sales tax varies depending on which county, in some cases which city or which part of the city you're in. Tax rates coded to zip codes don't work...some zipcodes span localities with wildly varying sales tax rates. I'lliinois is better, but still, rates vary depending on whether you're in Chicago proper, one of the suburbs, or one of the localities downstate.

Multiply this complexity by 50 states and you begin to realize what a complete clusterfuck it is for any small online buisiness to try and cope with. Shipping a package to Bumblefuck, Nebraska? What's the sales tax? How about Buttfuck, New York? Good luck.

Impose a national VAT of x percent, and kick back some or all of it to the states, and ban local sales taxes of any kind. This needs to be vastly simplified. Even if it were 50 states and 50 different sales tax rates that would be doable, but with many dozens of different sales tax venues with varying rates in New York alone, and plenty of states like Illiinois with a few cities that impose their own surtax to the state rate, figuring this crap out is a nightmare on the best of days. If every state is allowed to impose its taxes on all online folks, only the big players like Amazon will be able to cope. The rest of us, and most new startups, will crumble under the burden.

Sure. That Methane Clathrate is at the bottom of the sea, so it can't possibly do any harm.

Those scientists should stop messing about with things like the bottom of the ocean. If God wanted us to know about stuff on the bottom of the ocean he'd have put that bit on top.

I think you've got the wrong end of the stick. I think anything sounds homogeneous to someone who doesn't listen carefully, e.g., someone who doesn't care for the genre.

When Charlie Parker went out for chicken and waffles after a gig, he used to listen to country music on the juke box. This was Charlie Parker arguably the greatest god in the serious jazz fanatic's pantheon. When the other musicians would complain that country music was corny, Bird would simply say, "Listen."

The problem with the recording industry is that it is not in the business of producing music. It is in the business of producing and exploiting hits. I had this epiphany when struggling with the iTunes Store one day. "Why is the interface so bad? Why do they make me fight my way to what I want to buy?" Then it hit me: the iTunes Store was trying to steer me to what everyone else was buying. It's part of the hit industry.

It's no wonder that kids listen to music on YouTube these days. True, it's *free*, but to me there's an even bigger advantage. It finds me what I want, even if its a bit odd and even (gasp) non-commercial. The other day I was reading an old murder mystery got a hankering to listen to some old English music hall songs. That's practically a major project on iTunes but on YouTube you just pop "British Music Hall Songs" in the search box and Bob's your uncle.

This is an example of "begging the question". "Randomness" is not a property of a number, it is a property of a sequence.

This sounds like splitting hairs, but it actually makes a lot of confusing things clearer if instead of asking "Is this number random?" you ask "Was this number produced by a process that generates a random sequence?"

Lets take the example of a combination. "0000000" is just as random as "3115435", but "0000000" was generated by a process which spits out easily keyed-in, easy-for-humans-to-remember numbers. In other words it's generated by a process that is biased towards spitting out numbers like "0000000" and "1234567".

Well, measured by what they spend, they get a whole lot less healthcare. Measured by outcomes, they've got measurably better health

They've got slightly higher longevity figures (82 vs 79), expected years of healthy life (70 vs 67) and significantly lower infant mortality rates (4.27 per 1000 vs. 5.9), while at the same time spending LOTS less money (as of 2010, US: $8233 vs. Canada:$4,445). The per capita cost discrepancy is even more dramatic when you consider that at the time 17% of Americans had no insurance at all, and an unknown number more were under-insured with junk plans.

So what the figures show is that Americans get more health care, Canadians get better health outcomes.

This is basically a strawman argument. Nobody is discussing getting rid of cell phone service and and replacing it with POTS. The question with respect to disasters is whether POTS adds anything * vs. plowing the resources that would be used to maintain POTS into something else*.

That last bit is important. It's obvious that having both POTS and cell coverage provides you with some level of redundancy that you don't get if you only have one or the other. POTS also provides enough power to run a basic analog phone, which is a big advantage. But it's not clear to me that some kind of digital service couldn't run over the same wires while providing enough juice for something like a digital analog to emergency POTS voice service. Somebody would have to come up with specific proposals.

Sure, but under your proposal they can't *stop* printing money, even in an inflationary economy.

In effect you might as well tax people; sure *money* isn't changing hands, but your ability to buy things is reduced by inflation, which has the same practical effect as taxation: you can't buy as many widgets with your savings. In fact inflation skews the market away from savings and investment and more toward immediate consumption.

In any case the Fed doesn't literally *print money*. The Treasury does that, but it has ZERO effect on the supply of money to the economy. Under our system you can't get money into the economy just by printing it, because you can't just give it away. What the Fed does primarily is *lend* money, which is different than just handing out freshly minted dollar bills because the money has to be paid back. It can also buy Treasury securities in "open market operations", which is not unlike your solution of the Fed handing over currency to the US government, only (a) it involves a middle-man and (b) the federal government has to pay the Fed when the securities mature.

So the way the Fed gets money into the economy is quite a bit different than just printing currency and handing it over to anyone, even the government, because money created by lending or open market operations is automatically un-created at a later date. Money that the Fed creates will eventually have to return to the place it was created. Simply printing money and handing it over to someone, even the government, is irreversible.

We need somebody famous but with no pretensions (someone like
a Letterman or a Foxworthy) to speak out in a voice that will be
heard and tell everyone the obvious: the emperor is butt nekkid.

Updike did just that in A Month of Sundays. Hilariously written, exposes the hypocracy and doublethink that is so rampant in American society, and in particular the right-wing clergy of this country, and very well written. People either love it or hate it ... the latter generally fall into the religious category, as the story deals with a pastor who sleeps with just about everyone's wife, and justifies his actions through selective quotation of the bible ("amen!").

There are American works that deserve that level of praise (Updike's work being one of them imho), but good luck getting it past the numerous gatekeepers who decide what is 'great' and what itsn't (and I'm not just talking about the dinasaur publishers or withering literary agents, I'm also including the left and particularly right-wing pressure groups, and worst of all, the religious pressure groups).

so..... you're saying they need to spend a bit more on PR?

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And if you do demonstrate that you're a complete fuckup and destroy multiple companies, and a coke problem and a drunk driver, you may instead be handed a Texas governorship and a mere six-figure salary position as president of the United States. Only the not-total-fuckups get the more valuable seven- to eight-figure salary positions.

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