What your missing missing out is the societal destruction of the USA inherit in highly polarized wealth in a society. Crime increases with wealth inequality and it's because of companies exploiting visa's like the H1B.

You've seen this crime yourself why would you want to make America crap like the Phillipines?

I've heard the claim it's indespensible but that's not true from a chemical point of view. But possibly from an economic point of view.

You've hit the nail on the head with the exercise theories. Injuries can stop any program dead in its tracks. Avoiding injury is the key.

I find in some forums the issue is the group think enforced by moderators.

The StackOverflow forums suffer from this as they are community moderated and many questions get closed as Off Topic which basically are chats about something tangential to the area or opinion but are valuable none the less or I wouldn't have gone to the page to begin with. Effectively moderators promote group think.

Some bizarre things Ive seen in its computer science forum are questions being closed when about things like "what are the current areas of research in blah?". Somehow its gathered a bunch of crap mods and computer science doesn't really get discussed there.

If its truly out of forum then these forums need to allow some kind of "Open Discussion" tag or move to another forum ability.

Wow I wonder what has driven this? Anybody know?

Linux won the server market. RedHat is in the support business. C# developers that have server code want to deploy on Linux now that they can and with this they can even pay for support.

There's a large base of C# code, and there's a market to get it moved from Windows to Linux.

And a large base of C# developers who can now easily deploy to RHEL servers. Which will increase the need for support services for it all.

Why didn't the failsafe dam get built? It's a perfect big infrastructure project for IMF types to fund?

The work on the failsafe dam has actually started a few years ago but it got only 40% finished due to political tensions. It's not done and it wouldn't be able to hold anything as it currently is.

That's a good point you make about US reconstruction or lack thereof. I wonder if any of the Marines on here who were in Iraq could explain why this buffer dam didn't get built? It seems a perfect large scale infrastructure project and it doesn't even have to work much.

Solar is on a downward cost curve. Every doubling of installed cells leads to I think %20 cheaper costs.

I think Snowden showed that it is as easy as pressing a button which is why he went and blurted it out. The NSA were also working to make it easier to track people.

My take on it is privacy is dead or nearly and we have to have good legal protections of who can use what data and when. The privacy arms race will mostly be won by big government with lots of resources and enough willing/foolish patriots (Depending on your point of view).

I agree. And the logical next step is that there will be inevitably abuses, that some of the victims of these abuses will ultimately access power, and that we will have proper privacy protection after that, like we do for regular mail or like we do for your physical home.

It is just a shame that we have to go through the whole cycle given that we just know it should happen. But in a way, the more extensive the surveillance is, the quicker this cycle will happen. And right now we are in a pretty bad place already. So let's be optimistic!

But evil uses paper is probably going to do less harm than evil uses Tor or a gun or a nuke. Societal control must adapt to the medium on a regularly adjusting basis depending on the perceived level of evil.

Do not underestimate the power of paper. Because with the right amount of legal framework (on paper) I can evict people from their houses, sell these of for a nice profit and not have to care for the fate of said people.

I could rob whole countries of their future (say Greece) with paper treaties.

I can rob people of most of their democratic power (see lots of tries at treaties like TTIP or some things like this).

All on paper and in my eyes tending to the evil side.

The problem with evil though is, that it isn't an objective term, it is not empirically measurable and it has so many definitions and perspectives, that it has none.

Evil is a weasle-word, is propaganda, nothing more. So we really need a better word, a better definition. And breaking the law or something like that does not work either, as for example the laws in Germany, the US or Saudi Arabia or China tend to differ massively. They are ideologically tainted and do not provide an objective framework/reference either.

So we should work on a actionable and helpful definition first and not go partisan on the medium to be controlled.

The issue here is more or less. A kitchen knife is bound to cause less casualty than a machine gun in the hand of a psycho, hence we require licenses for gun. It's not to eliminate death through violence, it's to reduce and deter it. We don't want people to reach for the nearest machine gun whenever they have a domestic quarrel (obviously we don't want people to reach for a knife either, but I hope you get my point) or when their neighbor's dog poops in their yard.