No, but if there's a conversation going on about said "good thing" it is a little unreasonable for people to jump in the middle of it to shout "Yeah but he did this bad thing 15 years ago!". Yes, Gates did bad stuff. There are plenty of articles on Slashdot about the bad stuff that he's done (and that his legacy continues to contribute to). This isn't one of those articles. Couldn't we just take a minute to say "Mr Gates is doing something worthwhile with his money".

Because then you'd get charged with destruction or tampering of evidence.

I agree, why should Cogent need to supply all this throughput that Comcast's paying customers are asking for!? Waaaaaiit a minute....

Engineer - "Hey Boss, we need some cash to upgrade the connection to these networks."
Boss - "What?! We just upgraded those connections a couple years ago"
Engineer - *rolls eyes* "Well the link is saturated, looks like lots of people watching online video... Netflix comes in over this connection so it makes sense"
Boss - "First they take our subscribers now they're forcing us to upgrade our equipment... well fuck em!"
Engineer - "Waaah?"
Boss - "You heard me, fuck em!"
Engineer - "But... our customers will get terrible service when they try to watch Netflix, or do anything else on that network for that matter"
Boss - "Exactly!"

You can make crap like this illegal, in fact it arguably already is without net neutrality legislation.

Unfortunately lots of people. Some of them young gay people facing harassment, others are the ones doing the harassing. When it comes to certain sub-subjects (such as legally recognized marriage), only a very narrow majority "don't care" and we only crossed that threshold very recently.

So yes it's great that an anonymous "who cares" gets modded up on Slashdot, I think it says good things about our community. But at the same time it's a bit of patting ourselves on the back about how forward thinking and accepting we all are.

Arguably it's more affirmative than that, it's not just "I'm not ashamed" it's "I will not be ashamed".

Not to mention I think you're gonna have some lag issues controlling a probe orbiting Saturn. Heck, you'd probably have latency issues with a submersible a few thousand feet down, enough to make you nauseous anyway.

The "discussion" as you call it has been going on since Origin of the Species was written. One side of the "discussion" has brought 150 years of scientific research and refinement the other has brought... the bible... or at least some interpretation of it, an interpretation that would have horrified and/or confused most theologian from 2000 BC to 1800 AD.

The fact that it is a state funded university makes it doubly so.

They are borrowing the prestige of the University and it's faculty to lend credence to their anti-science agenda. I don't have a problem with them talking, but I certainly have problem with them appropriating other people's reputation to improve their ability to be heard.

$60 billion dollars are spent on truck driver salary's in the US. If automated vehicles achieve a 1% improvement in fuel economy (which is ludicrously conservative) you would save the economy another $45 billion in fuel costs. Not to mention the hundreds of millions of hours of wasted time, tens of thousands of deaths, and hundreds of thousands of injuries that could be possibly be prevented or at least reduced.

"Data" can also be used as an "uncountable" or "mass" noun, which is it's common usage.

From what I've seen, one side of the debate assumes they're in a vacuum, the other side assumes that they are spherical and exist in still water. Both sides are wrong, nearly equally so. Economies are chaotic, actors aren't rational, externalities drive changes in both directions. You talk in absolutes just as thoroughly as the people you are arguing against, and with about the same amount of evidence to back it up.

It's the difference between being at home with a fever and diarrhea and being at the hospital bleeding out every pore of your body with explosive diarrhea unable to get up and use the toilet. Someone's gotta clean it up, not to put too fine a point on it.