People hilariously think that this can be mitigated by giving government (people who rely on guns) more power over business (people who rely on money). Nice, now we have two bosses.

It's cute that you have bothered to learn the talking points of the Glad Wrap party. Someone can now refute them with the talking points of the Saran Wrap party. In the meantime, their thugs will continue to wrap your face in their product and sell your corpse to the powdered-protein manufacturers.

Have you read your insurance policies lately? Car--homeowners--health--commercial liability? I haven't. It's all meaningless abstraction. There are no examples--they're taken for granted, all buried in mountains of case books known as "common law," which is, naturally, hidden behind a paywall. If you had just one concrete example for each paragraph, all that abstract language would immediately crystallize into a reality; and the document would become a series of tiny narratives that people might actually enjoy reading, and learning from.

Privacy agreements are the same, but in utero. It's not whether you can understand them in the abstract; of course, you can; but you can't say what your understanding actually means for a specific test case. Even lawyers can't, because the policy's actual meaning will, in the end, be decided by a court, when two contending parties have spend millions getting lawyers to render an elaborate exegesis of the text. In the case of those "agreements," the case law which will, eventually, also rest behind a paywall and beyond your reach in any case, has yet to be created. And until there is a clear public policy to shape the judgments in those cases, there will be chaos and its inevitable unrestrained exploitation by bad actors.

Yes, exactly. You and hundreds of thousands of other people who develop arrhythmias, atrial or otherwise, because of caffeine. "Heart health" does not equal only coronary arteries--that's the only area this study purports to study. The headline is criminally ignorant.

Well, at least one thing you wrote was true: we Americans do not live in a democracy. We never have, of course. But if you think that electing a single human being to direct the entire armed might of 350 million people, and to carry out the spending of 20-25% of their collective economic effort, in a single election, as a choice among two individuals selected by what are self-described private groups and in no way representative of the people, could somehow be turned into "democracy" by changing the electoral college as an institution, or even eliminating it, then you have been failed by your education as a citizen. That does not surprise me, because the number of people who actually understand anything about political institutions is, maybe, a few tens of thousands, at most. Democracy does not have to do with voting in an election every four years. It is a system of government where the people--all of the qualified citizens, usually qualified by property and education and armed service--meet in an assembly to make decisions, pass laws, and conduct trials as massed jurors. That is democracy. Nothing that is done in modern governments has anything--anything--to do with democracy.

Where is your good governance to be found? The governance of Bitcoin is conducted by organized crime, which, globally, is a more peaceable, united, and effective government than any of the ones with armies and flags (outside of Europe, at any rate). They are doing a bang-up job of making their mint, which is a blockchain, and its currency, which is Bitcoin, do everything they want. Somehow the Federal Reserve has done better? "Read a history book." That's rich. Let's start with one on the Federal Reserve--let's start with it when you can buy a stamp for $.01. How's that "good governance" working out for you, if you are not a banker?

Facebook says it's not using your microphone to inform ads or to change your News feed. It says nothing whatsoever about recording you. This is the classic non-denial denial.

Trigger warning: this comment contains a quotation drawn from an armed forces recruitment slogan of another era, and therefore may offend just about everybody.

How much time can be spent coding is determined entirely by how much true creativity is involved. Three hours is pretty much the limit for truly creative work (PhD experience). But if it's just work, well, I put in pretty productive 30-hour shifts as a medical resident (medical experience). See a terrific book called Daily Rituals by Mason Currey: almost all of those extraordinary creators were good for three-hour shifts, at most twice a day with a long break in between.

But let's face it, the message is not making a statement about coding in general. It's about the culture Google wants to create among their organization. Like the Marines, Google is "looking for a few good men." At least there's no doubt about what you would be signing up for.

The tragedy of the commons should be mandatory curriculum in school, along with the effects of compound interest on debt.

For those not up on the idea (which surely excepts everyone on /.), it almost completely invalidates traditional Kantian "What if everybody did that" moral imperatives, by imposing a pragmatic anti-Kantian imperative along these lines: "Somebody will do that anyway, and you will certainly lose by not having done it first; and then, when you have all done that, you will get to see what actually would happen if everybody did that."

I liked Jared Diamond's work for the way he addresses these situations in detail. I know many people find his work uncomfortable or insufficiently sensitive to, ahem, "diversity"--kind of an amusing criticism, considering Diamond's background in anthropology. It is uncommon to find work on calamity that is actually not sensationalized as much as it could be, and his work belongs in that category.

I, for one, would welcome hearing about other works you all have read that give insights into any practical way around or out of the Tragedy. It is the conundrum that, if not solved within a generation or two, will kill human life on the planet, and in the meantime, make it not worth living.

I know, great information, right? Good thing not all of us are idiots.

I wish someone would get a clue and retire this fuzzy-thinking line of nonsense. Trump has succeeded in the system as it was written, playing by rules that he did not make. What he wants now is to change roles; to acquire the power to change the rules, so that people do not have to play that way any more. Don't believe it? Well let's go with the first and best example: factory owners in Industrial Revolution England helped bring about the earliest factory reforms in the history of the world, introducing a shred of humanity into what was hell for everyone involved. They did that because they actually wanted the regulation, so that they could afford to be more humane: they knew that individually, no one of them, no matter how well intentioned, could afford to play by a different, and more costly, set of labor standards. It not only wouldn't be profitable--it would not be possible: because their business would rapidly disappear, losing out against the competition that was using 15-hour child labor, and undercutting their prices. See how that works? No? Well, that's why you are not rich, like Donald Trump. But just to prove it, run a business like a charity for a while, then get back to me on how noble you were for those six weeks--before you burned through your capital and went back to work for someone else.

So much this. Doctors are just juggling knives; the more diseases and treatment, the more knives; the better the doctor, the more knives. Eventually the best docs create a system where it's a medical error as likely as anything that terminates this recursive "complex system" catastrophically.

Yeah, not saying Jobs was a saint by any means. As an ubuntu/mint guy for seven years--a latecomer--I completely agree with you about Mac. My wife has a Macbook. I literally cannot make it work--I'm like a chimp with an abacus. Finally I decided that itunes just does not want me to have a library on a server or a removable hard drive. It's not part of their business model. So fuck them. One Mac in this household is plenty. And, I can't block ads on any of my idevices. So, I don't browse on idevices. Fuck them. So I'm a dinosaur with linux mint and Firefox and Thunderbird to download my gmail, and I am very happy about it. But I still think that Jobs truly did bring incredible dedication to "the product," and you just don't find that any more in business. Except maybe in the music field: Ernie Ball, Gibson, Gretsch, etc make pretty good products for not much money, and it really is about the product.

Toasters could be way better.

Shorter toasting times through more intense heat radiation (just a few extra grams of metal in the wires), burn prevention for the toast and the user, more ergonomic knobs; but what about the really good stuff: what about a color sensor so that you can set your toast to come out "looking like this"? Presets for different family members' toast-doneness preferences? Seriously--"bagel" is the best they can do?

Too bad that Steve Jobs died. He was pretty much our only hope for cool stuff like this. If you can name another guy who cares as much as he did about the product, and actually runs the company, I would love to hear it--really. And no, Dell does not count. Please.

Not that I want to go down this road, but I had the same experience, and finally settled on this one: Sharx Security, made in New Hampshire, my adoptive state. Nice people, at least so far. They actually answered my email within an hour. They sent me a custom firmware that does not even ping 8.8.8.8 to find out if it is "properly connected." And yes, it was deployed in its own VLAN--I just didn't want clutter in the pfSense logs.