Contrary to what many people think, the Commonwealth member nations are actually independent, or at the very least, self-governing. The UK cannot dictate to the rest of the Commonwealth to ban or otherwise sanction any individual. In other words, even that minor inconvenience isn't even on the table. (And, no, Elizabeth II cannot try throwing her weight as Queen around, even in nations where her power is more than ceremonial, without potentially triggering a wave of monachy abolition movements.)

Obviously, the Commonwealth nations could agree to take some action, but that is unlikely on anything but the least controversial issues. Everyone has a dozen mutually incompatible agendas of their own, never mind trying to figure out something they all agree on with others.

No. Their action of stepping off the curb in front of you dooms them, not your reaction time. We need to start holding pedestrians accountable for their own safety rather than automatically assuming that the automobile is at fault. The whole notion of "pedestrian has the right of way no matter what" is ludicrous when analyzed objectively. The idea that just because the pedestrian stepped onto the road in a crosswalk means that all traffic must stop instantly and in contravention of the laws of physics and/or reaction time of the operators is just bleeping stupid. (That's actually the rule in my neck of the woods. As though you're somehow supposed to read the mind of a pedestrian that you often cannot see due to obstructions (parked cars usually) is just dumb.) I'm not arguing that the pedestrian should always be considered at fault, either. Only that the pedestrian should have at least some responsibility for their own safety.

True, that. But maybe, just maybe, this can be the camel's nose.

There is a *lot* of code out there that does questionable stuff in PHP. Stuff that approximately works in PHP 5.6 but fails hard in PHP 7. A large amount of it is relying on things that were deprecated way before PHP 5.6 was even considered as a possibility. A lot of that code is non-trivial so it isn't a quick fix to update it, or worse, is orphaned and there is nobody to update it.

Even worse, a large fraction of it is on sites who don't have a programmer. It exists in unmaintained modules or add-ons to some framework or other that is, itself, often never upgraded. At $dayjob, I've lost count of the number of web sites that get defaced because someone bought a web site from $random_web_developer who used $framework and then never did any maintenance. I mean, people still expect a web site to be "fire and forget", especially if it's a simple brochure style site, and don't understand why they should have to put resources into maintaining it. And they're not wrong, either. These are the vast majority of the sites I can't force-upgrade to PHP 7 without having the customers simply cancel their accounts and not pay their outstanding bills. (Eventually I'll have to, but not today.)

On the other hand, I had almost no issues running PHP code I wrote on PHP 7. But that's probably because I don't overcomplicated the code with eleventy thousand classes, namespaces, autoloading classes, "Composer", or any other fancy gimmick that is all the rage today. The issues I did have tended to be due to code that really shouldn't have worked in the first place, or actually wasn't working properly even on PHP 5.6.

Basically, the overall resistance to replacing QWERTY is down to whether there is a tangible benefit to be had to compensate for the pain of transition. And transition to anything different *will* be painful because it necessarily requires everyone to retrain on the new layout. It's not clear that any previous alternative (including Dvorak) actually provides such a benefit. Even if there is a measurable improvement with a new layout or new input device, it would have to be such that it makes life noticeably easier for a large cross section of users. Nothing seems to have met that bar.

The original Dvorak study was flawed (no proper control and was not conducted by an impartial party) and further studies have suggested that additional training on QWERTY leads to (on average) similar gains to those shown in Dvorak's study (where the participants were trained on the Dvorak layout). Thus, it's not clear that there is any real benefit there so it's not surprising that it hasn't taken over the world.

Basically, since existing QWERTY keyboards generally do reasonably well for most people who do use some method of touch typing, it seems unlikely anything that isn't substantially better on multiple fronts will likey take over. Also, for the fair number of people who don't touch type, keyboard layout makes no real difference so that group of people won't benefit at all from a change.

I know that I, personally, find the QWERTY keyboard adequate for my needs. It's not clear to me that a different layout would necessarily be substantially better so I have no incentive to put the time into learning something else. Perhaps something will come along some day that is substantially better, but I'm skeptical.

Flying cars are not ever going to be mainstream. The problem isn't who operates them (humans or machines), even, though human drivers can't even handle two dimensional operations reliably so I would be terrified of the average driver today having to deal with three dimensions. No, the problem is the energy cost of getting a car in the air in the first place. I don't see a reasonable solution to that problem coming any time soon unless we discover some heretofore unknown magical method of doing antigravity or something like that. In general, it's far more economical to keep general transportation using traditional ground transport simply because you necessarily remove the cost of lifting and then lowering again the cargo and vehicle.

That's not to say that rich people won't have flying cars. I mean, they may be a bit more practical and helicpoters assuming they ever work. That's assuming they aren't already helicopters....

Or the police could actually respond with someone who actually, I don't know, investigates the report *before* sending in a paramilitary force? I mean, it seems like getting some Mark I eyeballs on a scene first would prevent pretty much every case of SWATing. That doesn't mean that the SWAT people don't go out to the location. Only that they do not deploy as the *first* option before there are any eyeballs on the scene.

School starting at 7:15 is ludicrous. Especially for older children for whom getting up early is counter-indicated by biology. (There are studies but I can't be bothered looking up references for a /. comment.) And wouldn't that mean school is then getting out for the day at 1:30 or so? Or do school days run longer in the US than I'm familiar with from when I went to school. Where and when I went to school, it ran from roughly 8:45 or 9:00 to about 3:15 or so, which meant I could get up at 7:00, do the necessary morning stuff, and *walk* to school and be there with a substantial margin before school started. Said schools provided zero bus service within towns. Maybe it's time we start allowing children to walk to school and stop bubble wrapping them? Especially the older ones, but even at age 6, I was walking to school and crossing a *highway* to do so.

The only people that *actually* benefit from credit bureaus are the banks and other lenders that use them. Consumers don't actually benefit at all. Contrary to the popular narrative, there is no need for credit bureaus in order for lenders to make decisions about extending credit. They did just fine making those decisions before the credit bureaus existed. It just meant they had to actually do the leg work to verify information on credit applications. You know, by making a few phone calls or checking their own records.

Since credit bureaus really only facilitate lenders' laziness, regularly have inaccurate information, and, as Equifax has so effectively demonstrated, are not secure repositories of information, the entire credit bureau system should be abolished and made illegal.

For anyone that argues that this will make borrowing harder, I say, "Good!" If borrowing money was harder, a lot fewer people would be massively over extended which would be an immense improvement for the future economic outlook.

This. A million times this. Though it does depend a bit on where you are in the time zone on the exact sunrise/set times (not counting shenanigans on the time zone boundaries, it varies by an hour, unsurprisingly). Still, it doesn't change the fact that if you're at a high enough latitude or close enough to the equator, the benefits of DST are, well, dubious at best.

On another note, the idea of using DST all year is really just a way to get people to shift their day by an hour without them realizing it. That may have some benefit outside of the typical DST effective dates depending on latitude, though probably not so much during the shortest days of the year.

(Also, the link between time changes and heart attacks is tenuous at best. Sure, the additional stress from changing one's sleep schedule might, maybe, serve to cause a heart attack to trigger earlier than it might have, but it's not at all clear that such attacks wouldn't happen anyway a few days or weeks later. Even if there is a real link, typical dumbass shift rotations would be a much larger problem since the time change is twice a year but most dumbass shift rotations are changing shifts every couple of weeks at best and multiple times per week at worst.)

It's not really surprising, but so many of these "profanity" and "spam" filters just compare a list of "words" against the input using a naïve substring match with no concern for even word boundaries. I mean, just because you might think "tart" is offensive, I highly doubt you would think "start" is. (If you do, then you are the one with the problem.)

As far as I can tell, this sort of thing is usually motivated by the "ZOMG!!!1111!!!!11!!!!11!!1 Think of the children!!!!!!111!!1!!!1!!" types in management or management caving to those types. And, of course, the developers are given three microseconds to implement an impossible filter that will Protect The Children. Sometimes management even comes along with a list of Bad Words. Even if that isn't the case, the developers are going to look at the request, realize how impossible it is, and do the simplest thing that they can that will convince management that their system can now Protect The Children.

This is, of course, a subset of a more general problem of incorrect validation of input. The number of times I've had my perfectly valid email address rejected because there is a hyphen in the domain name, or worse, because it doesn't end in ".com", ".org", or ".net" (yes, that happened a couple of times, though not recently) is astounding. I even had my perfectly valid postal address rejected by a validation tool run by the national post office once.

That's one of the problems with a UBI scheme. Figuring out what that benchmark should be is hard. The idea is that the UBI should give people the ability to subsist without having to move across an international border (because that's difficult or impossible for many people) as long as they're careful with their money. However, that doesn't mean they should be able to subsist anywhere they choose. Just that they can if the are sensible and don't insist on living somewhere too expensive or have luxuries they can't afford. Exactly what that benchmark should be depends on the country in question. (And it really should only apply to citizens (or equivalent) of that country and probably not be offered to citizens living abroad.)

That sort of problem is one of the reasons I don't necessarily support such a scheme (as I said in my original post). I just don't see any variant of today's world that is likely to occur in the foreseeable future where this type of system could work. (There are other issues than figuring out what the basic income should be that make it questionable, and not all of them are with the idea of UBI itself.)

I don't think Toronto or Vancouver have a nicer standard of living. I was using them as an example of expensive markets which should not be used as a factor in detemrining what level a UBI should be set at. I'll stick with the city I live in which is much more livable.

I didn't actually say Toronto or Vancouver is a "nicer standard of living" though I can see how you inferred that from what I wrote. I could have been clearer but we can't expect perfect prose from random commenters on /., now, can we?

Let me prefix this by saying that I don't necessarily support implementing a UBI system. However, I have yet to see anything called a "basic income" or "universal basic incomie" pilot program actually do things at all correctly. As other commenters have suggested, these pilot programs seem to be designed so that they must necessarily fail and be examples the politicians can point at and say, "See? We tried it and it failed." I'm not convinced UBI can actually work, but it definitely won't work if it isn't done right.

To do UBI correctly, it has to go to everybody. And it has to *replace* any income support programs. That is, it has to replace government programs such as (un)employment insurance, government pension plans not funded completely and directly by member contributions (because everyone would get UBI, the pension plan wouldn't be required, would it?). There also can't be any clawback because someone earned some money outside of the program. Doing that just adds administrative cost to the program and discourages recipients from working. Also, every person should get the same amount regardless of age, marital status, etc., though maybe with a minimum age before it kicks in. Otherwise, you recreate existing complex administration processes.

Now, here's the absolutely critical component. This UBI must not be set at a level where the recipient can afford a car, nice television, nice house, 127 cats, and the like. It should provide for *healthy* subsistence in a reasonable market and require careful management of money to do so (which encourages those who won't work to move out of the expensive cities like Vancouver or Toronto and those who want a nicer standard of living to work). It needs to be set such that if you want a nice living, you have to earn additional money, on which you pay taxes. (Also, under a proper UBI system, only the UBI itself would be income tax exempt. There would be no need for low end tax brackets under such a system.)

Limited pilot programs just aren't going to demonstrate anything because they're not going to work exclusive of existing income support programs and are going to potentially unbalance the labour force because the people getting free money can work for less. (That's probably why the clawback had to be there in this case.) To truly demonstrate whether such a system can work, it has to be tried at a fairly large scale and *existing* income support programs must be suspended for anyone participating in such a test.

Now I do understand that there is always going to be someone who isn't well served by such a program. But that's true of all the current options, too. If you're going to insist that it has to be perfect for everyone, then are you willing to give up all the existing social programs that you currently benefit from on that same principle? I thought not. So let's not create strawmen out of extreme edge cases since *every* system has those.

I left my previous job (about 2 decades ago) because my employer at the time was slowly going under. As soon as they even suggested that payroll would be late one month, I started looking. They even tried to stiff me on my final paycheck by saying "you didn't work those last two days of the month" (it was a weekend and not normal work days) so I think I got out just in time. They did hold on for another year or so but eventually tanked and their assets were bought out by another company that tanked a few years later itself. Within a few years, my take home had close to doubled (to within the industry average at the time once you exclude the unreasonable outliers that skewed the average substantially upward).

My current job probably won't last until I retire (because reasons that make sense), but the past couple decades have been far better than the 18 months at the previous job.