There was a time, long ago, when usury was punishable by death.

In layman's terms usury = making profit by charging interest on a loan of property, including land, tools, money, etc. while the owner sits on their Fat Ass.

Sometime in the 13th or 14th century, European 'business men' convinced a Pope to remove that punishment from the religious 'judicial system' so they could 'legitimately' start the banking system we have today.

And here we are, 21st century, with the 1% owning or restricting practically every aspect of the 99%'s lives through interest and patents.

As I just asserted in another post here on /. today, we are and have been living in a police state for some time now. This is one of the many signs we've had in the past decade.

I guess 'the people' are just slow at recognizing the signs.

Umm, we DO live in a police state as evidenced by this and thousands of other civil rights violations that happen daily in this country.

No one seems to want to acknowledge this, though.

LOL, and the fact his comment title and first paragraph say 'strike a zero' from coin values but in the last half of his comment reverses it to ADDing a zero to their value. LOL again. and then ROFL to points 2) (what previous AC said) and 3) umm, no you would have to change the face value to mean the literal value of the coin. the minting process would most definitely need to change to represent actual face value for future runs, so that's a new engraving for each side of each coin. There's probably some law or code that states the face value must be the actual value. Even if not, people are dumb; face value will need to be changed or updated at some point for all coins.

But then I get thinking (dangerous, I know) and the fact that 'get rid of dollar/cent' debate has arisen several times in recent decades and the current dangerous state of, not just the US but, worldwide economies has me guessing that we're headed for some sort of drastic market REvaluation, to what purpose is hard to say, but istartedi's wish might come true sooner than anyone's psychologically prepared for.

The only problem with those headlines is the repeated use of the usually derogatory terms 'nerd' and 'geek'. Believe me, the media is not helping in this case.

Why did they not use terms like 'whiz' or 'genius' I wonder? Oh, because they're the jackhats that make most of their money from thuggish american sports and their C average constituents.

Despite all that has been said on this particular topic, I wonder why this is news is classified with a skull and crossbones, not under YRO, and tagged as piracy.

What? You can always quit if the job sucks THAT bad. Believe me, I wouldn't have lasted a day at my current Level before happily walking out the door, flipping birds.
But as an idealistic fresh-outta-college twenty-something? Well...

A better question might be: What the hell was the official Google 'handler' saying to these contractors to compel them to keep on as long as they did? What kind of "You are protecting children and people all over the world", etc. BS were they spewing? You better believe there was at least some of it. But as an another astute poster mentioned, their job is also to hear NONE of it, natch - Hear No Evil.

Dear, Sweet, 'Do No Evil' Google: Please stop plugging your eyes, ears and mouth and get a psych support staff on board for these operatives and Start Speaking Out about this horrific garbage. The only way human society will ever cure this problem is with honest discussion so we can ALL get 'onboard' and start snitching on the creeps doing this horrific BS and posting the crap online.

I assert this News is Provenance!

He'd written about two dozen novels before his untimely death in 1996, but an amazing writer with both a gifted imagination and gift for words. I was never bored reading any of his books.

My favorites are:

Han Solo Trilogy: The best Star Wars novels, hands down.

Adventures of Alacrity Fitzhugh and Hobart Floyt: Fun space opera trilogy with lots of heart, amazing back story and plenty of action. Sadly, out of print but easy enough to obtain 99cent copies online.

GammaLAW: Epic science fiction series about a group of super soldiers sent to a distant world that has fallen out of communication with the rest of the settled worlds hoping to solve the mystery of an alien race threatening mass invasion. He once likened GammaLAW to 'War and Peace in space, with a cast of characters in the hundreds', he was working on the manuscript at the time of his passing, and his longtime friend and pseudonym sharing author, James Luceno, pulled the final script together which was released in 4 paperbacks in the late 1990's. Sadly, also out of print.

Other fun things he worked on were the novelizations of (and serious improvements on) the Harmony Gold Robotech animated television series, where apparently he and Jim Luceno took turns writing 3 books each of the initial 12 book series and alternating on the 5-book Sentinels novels and writing each section of the final 'wrap-up' novel.

The tongue-in-cheek Black Hole Travel Agency quartet of novels show how far out he and Jim could go in their world building and plot scenarios, which is pretty far out.

I've never found a comparable author that I have enjoyed to read so much, and I sure have tried. Iain Banks is as close as I've gotten, but he still falls short in the storytelling, humor and wit departments.

I agree, this comment's OP is clearly insane or possibly not an every-day, front-end web developer.

Kidding aside, this whole debate is definitely a case of one person's awesome is another persons craptastic. I for one can't STAND the new whiz-bang built in Firefox element inspector, which was pretty buggy the first release of FF they shoehorned it into. And now to add insult to injury they've managed to bork the about:config parameters to disable this horrible new feature from right-click menu. Talk about a wholly 'unhandy' feature, First Prize!

Firebug has consistently been the best javascript, DOM and CSS debugging tool I've ever used in an open source browser, hands down. Drosera, Web Inspector, whatever the fuck is in Safari / Chrome doesn't compare, and certainly doesn't save me time in my daily development tasks.

Chrome = daily email, reading browser; rarely shut it down because I rarely need to
Firefox = development browser set to clear cache, history, etc upon restart; restarted several times a day and shut down at the end of every workday. It used to consume memory like nuts, but it's gotten markedly better at releasing memory since R12
Safari, IE, etc = rarely used for compatibility testing only

Add 'tornado zone' to that list.

If you host all your cloud services at Rackspace in Texas and a tornado happens to rip apart their datacenter, well expect a few hours/days downtime. And you better have offsite backups of mission critical data or that's a long bet that is getting shorter every day.

Slightly off-topic from the TFA, but Howard Hughes' Genius was associated with having contracted syphilis when he was younger. Not sure how, but he was known to be a lusty fella with the ladies.

Hughes and many famously smart people were covered in the book Pox: Genius, Madness, And The Mysteries Of Syphilis where their genius was correlated with having the disease.

I too was reading here back in the 90's and can't say I can recall non-tech articles of Fear and Loathing with any frequency.

This comment is of course a better answer to my comment above which has already been labeled as troll, which I suppose is deserved given it's brevity and offtopic closure. So, in light of that I will attempt to give a better answer why this article has no place on /. :

This is not tech news, and does not 'matter' at all to the tech community, period. I can read this immediately on any other mainstream news source in minutes, including non-news sources like Facebook, Twitter, etc. so posting it here is not adding to my daily news experience. I assert this is obvious, so what use does this article have here?

Simple. Articles of Fear and Loathing are like a train wreck that is impossible to not watch. It serves the purpose to engage and distract you from what you should / could be doing positively with your life. This is the primary objective of any mainstream media outlet, which /. has obviously become. Of course the Media says their motive is to generate discussion on how we might possibly 'solve' problems like this in the future, but in actuality all it does is anger or sadden most people and distract them from the positive things in their lives.

I used to read /. regularly because they generally avoided nonsense like this in favor of genuine geek news topics. I have learned to get my informative reading from other sources, especially using a news reader of my own selection of curated bloggers who share my sentiments of mainstream media.

absolutely nothing.

Proof that the original /. is dead and gone and all we are left with is this crap-pile of AJAX and bad design.

What if I am just trying to get laid? Seriously, how does one determine from chat text whether a person is a 'sexual predator' vs. someone who is just looking for a casual hookup? Wouldn't the approach be similar if not identical? I smell a FAIL.

Of course, the results of this 'competition' will likely get support from conservative, big brother regimes as a way to ring up innocent and horny people - particularly targeting young men - online.

Gender based stereotyping, convictions and punishment coming soon to the interwebs and country you live in. That's just wonderful!

Would much rather have seen a sequel to Starflight!

And with none of this 2D grassroots bs, either. But I would settle for Oolite grade 3D space travel as long as it has decent storyline and atmospheric reentry sequences with super-fine planetary exploration missions.

I lost way more than 40hrs to both Starflight and the sequel each.