Could have sworn I read about a place that made it illegal to follow every traffic law (because the only people who would do that are people carrying drugs and they don't want to be pulled over). But I can't find it again.

You forgot the most important measure of performance: income generated for the Patent Office. The fake attempt at reigning in employees is just to distract from what the real problem is: the more patents, the more profit for the USPTO.

I predict idiots putting their phones in the passenger seat, and leaning over in addition to their previous phone use. Unless this is a device that can be unplugged, in which case they'll unplug it and then use their phone.

The technological solution to this problem is self-driving cars.

Anyone who thinks Vulcans are logical is an idiot.

Oh, and anyone who's studied Game Theory knows that emotional responses are extremely logical in many circumstances. For example, if you can prove you are committed to self-sacrifice for nothing more than to damage your opponent who has angered you, you limit what is logical for an opponent to do to you. Thus, people cannot safely screw you whenever you would earn no material profit in harming them, because you will "illogically" get angry and punch them in the face.

Orwellian society has come to us not because of technology, but because of people. Everyone from the President, NSA, Congress, Courts, Law Enforcement, and General Public is guilty of encouraging or simply allowing the erosion of our liberties. Because we need it to fight the terrorists, druggies, and especially child molesters. Think of the children!

Even if we manage to get government espionage under control, what technology is allowing is for private companies to collect massive amounts of data on us. And every idiot who installs apps on their phone that require "spy on you" permissions is guilty of helping them do so and even financing them. I can't see this stopping until someone makes a sufficiently shocking news story about violations of people's privacy. Maybe someone will make an app that forwards a copy of your browsing history to your mother and significant other, and a message to you saying "this is a small fraction of what every company knows about you".

Sure, there's differences with the MOOC community. The biggest three in my opinion are that

1) The courses are free with no obligation. Because of this, people can and will sign up for trivial things like looking at part of a single lecture.

2) The environment is different. Because the dedicated school environment is replaced with the same environment where most people play their computer games, and there is no one to crack the whip, and there is no dedicated timeslot in people's schedules, people who intended to take a full course may have trouble motivating themselves to complete it.

3) The completion certificate is worthless. No one gives a crap if you completed a MOOC course or not, and if they did it would be too easy to fake/cheat. And the person taking the course has a pretty good idea of what they know, so to them it's just a pat on the back. Besides this being mildly discouraging in general, it means there is very little reason to do the often boring assignments that would be required to complete the course.

Basically, all the worst problems of a MOOC could be fixed by having a "school" where you went in on a schedule and had someone watching over you. This would provide the motivation and environment some people need to succeed, and because it wouldn't be free it would weed out the people who didn't intend to carry through and provide the motivation of a sunk cost to continue. It would also help the certificate to be worth something, because there is someone to verify that you didn't cheat and that it was, in fact, you who took the class. At this point you're probably ready to complain that doing it this way exactly eliminates every advantage a MOOC was supposed to have. However, this sort of thing would be cheaper than a regular school and would also help legitimize MOOC even for people who do it on their own.

Robots are up in ARMs about the new controllers for their arms.

If lip reading software reaches the courts, suddenly all video recording becomes wiretapping. The courts might resolve that by allowing audio recording wherever they allow video recording. Or by forbidding video recording wherever they forbid audio recording. Or maybe they will finally do something about that ancient "wiretapping" deal they've been twisting into the modern world.

Nope, the answer is specialization and marketing.

Tesla's customers are largely environmentalists, who will be that much more eager to buy due to the factory being greener. For comparison, someone buying a can of pasta sauce won't care about the specifics of the canning factory, so price is the only factor.

The other reason is specialization: most factories do one thing and do it well, and trade for whatever else. While it's entirely possibly for a company to generate its own power, grow the food its employees will eat, make its own tools, etc. that all adds unnecessary complexity and gets in the way of specialization. Instead, do the thing you're good at and buy the rest. In the case of power, I could see more and more companies adding solar panels, since so much of their cost is installation. But for now going full renewable is only for marketing purposes.

Except the one the Slashdot editors have almost always leaves out context too.

Which raises the question, did anyone notice?

Lots of pirates are too lazy to scan their own books, but how long until every book a library has scanned ends up on the internet? And the more so because people in other countries have more trouble getting to a EU library so this will be the only way they can access the scanned books. And I'm sorry but scanned, searchable, non-DRMed books accessible to everyone are more valuable than the status quo, so once again pirates produce the higher quality goods at a cheaper price and greater convenience. It's long overdue to update our IP laws to the modern world.

People are routinely genuinely sorry for things they've spent decades doing (or more often than not, not doing). Do you think it's ever a good idea to waste a *decade* of your life plotting stupid revenge? There's so many better things you could do in 10 years, even if he didn't get caught it was a stupid waste of time.

I've got great news for you... you're already a big dick.

I'm sure the editors are shocked and amazed that "Google chose the test route; that it set limits on the road and weather conditions that the vehicle could encounter; and that its engineers had to take control of the car twice during the drive."