Is this even legal? It doesn't sound legal.

Correct. HIPAA only applies to organizations that work with personal health information. In fact, there's nothing stopping someone who legally receives another person's health information (such as a family member's) from a covered organization from subsequently spreading it around.

It's nerdy information, it's astronomy related, and the opportunity to tell people who believe in astrology that their whole system is wrong, even by their own rules, is something that would appeal to a fairly large number of Slashdot readers.

It's not the "if you have nothing to hide" argument, it's the fact that entrusting data that can incriminate you to a random company or third party just isn't the smartest thing to do.

Basically, for most people, regular reality is good enough. Want to play games? There are tons of great games out that you can play. Want to watch media? Same answer. Why spend a chunk of money and go through the effort of setting up a VR system, possibly clearing space to use it, and putting it on each time when you can have a great time by simply ... not?

It's actually a system that runs a script when the cable is removed. What that script does is up to you.

The idea is to connect the BusKill cable to your Linux laptop on one end, and to your belt, on the other end. When someone yanks your laptop from your lap or table, the USB cable disconnects from the laptop and triggers a udev script [1, 2, 3] that executes a series of preset operations.

These can be something as simple as activating your screensaver or shutting down your device (forcing the thief to bypass your laptop's authentication mechanism before accessing any data), but the script can also be configured to wipe the device or delete certain folders (to prevent thieves from retrieving any sensitive data or accessing secure business backends).

Back when Opera was an innovative browser developed by many of the people now at Vivaldi, it had the ability to identify as one of the bigger browsers on a site by site basis. When it didn't, far too many sites either blocked it or disabled 'advanced features'. At one point, Opera even released a Bork edition that displayed MSN as if it were written by the Swedish Chef to highlight the fact that the site intentionally rendered improperly in the standard Opera browser.

I guess the more things change...

Are you sure? Right in the summary it says this subscription is an option if you want to skip the waiting list:

WT:Social went live last month and is currently nearing 50,000 users. The company is rolling out access slowly; when I signed up, I was approximately number 28,000 on the waitlist. Alternatively, you can pay 13 bucks a month or 100 a year to get access right away.

I am frankly amused "Educating women" is the dodge they used.

Elephant? What elephant?

I don't really see what the problem is. Research shows that more education for women correlates with fewer children. The article mentions this as an example of a good approach to dealing with overpopulation to make it clear they're not suggesting methods like death squads or a policy of one child per family. Other than that, they're not offering detailed plans on how to achieve the various goals listed. Will there be obstacles and some cultures that resist such changes? Of course, but discussing that level of detail is outside the scope of the article.

But once they go on the other side of parked cars, they get filled with pedestrians, delivery hand trucks, Citibikers, and just about every other form of nuisance.

How dare people bike in the biking lane!

Both!

I wonder if part of the reason for fewer bites is that some flies don't recognize zebra striped cows as valid targets. They should test how flies behave toward cows that are strange colors, like orange and green. They should also see whether flies in areas where zebras are native are less affected by the zebra pattern cow painting, though that could be the result of a number of factors.

Whether factory farming is a kindness or a cruelty is dependent on the quality of life the animals have. Can they roam relatively free in good health, safe from predators, with sufficient good food? If so, it sounds like a very nice life for them. Are they confined to small overcrowded areas in questionable health with festering wounds untreated while they're fed poor quality food in horrible conditions? If that's the case, and what I've read about factory farming suggest that it's usually closer to the truth, it sounds like a life of prolonged torture.

Compared to living in the wild, the first case sounds like a pretty good deal. The second one, not so much.

I prefer to purchase the Masochist Bundle which also includes Fran Drescher's voice.

I see lots of angry comments about how vaping as a whole is being blamed for bad cartridges from some bad actors, but isn't this primarily a measure to try to deal with the epidemic of underage vaping? This is the same reason flavored cigarettes (aside from menthol) were banned. Yes, it comes at a time a lot of attention has been focused on vaping due to the lung illnesses, but it's not a call to ban all vaping.