Every single slashdotter is an expert in infectious diseases. Guess I should edumicate myself with some more Tom Clancy novels to get up to speed.

Amazon is a company that realized if they just stuck with what they had ten years ago they wouldn't still exist today and they're not so stupid to think that doesn't hold true today.

This is a major point that a lot of developers don't take into account when designing for a new medium. Taking into I/O bandwidth from player to device plays a huge role in the success of the product. This is why twitter is so popular, the limitation of the character input makes it more suitable for phones because you'll never have to type a lot on a crappy phone keyboard and the screen is the ideal size to digest the same volume of content. Add in the ability to use the smartphone's strengths such as mobility and posting pictures directly from the phone's camera as additional bandwidth from the user and it's a match made in heaven. If as you can do with VR is reproduce a similar experience to a PC game no one will buy it. They'l just keep playing their PC games with their music on and reddit or youtube on their second monitor while enjoying a beverage. You have to offer a more immersive experience if you're going to limit multitasking and convenience. I think what's really going to have to improve for a lot of genres of games is a massive improvement in the quality of movement out of the NPC's, natural responses from them, the writing of the stories and the dialogue. I think if you're required to be totally immersed in the game you are experiencing and less detached than you can be to a computer monitor you're going to suffer cheese much less.

That's like comparing the postal service to penmanship. Utterly pointless.

I agree. It seems like such a trivial thing but when you consider that its primary feature is basically not having to pull your phone out of your pocket it needs to not introduce any hassle whatsoever to make it worth it.

It's not just that, but that we behave and socialize differently based on context. Cops being recorded conduct themselves differently, you talk to your best friend differently than you talk to a coworker on the job and to your boss. A workplace social network by default imposes the workplace context that causes people to limit their speech with any code of conduct necessary. Even if you try to divide it up by topic and level of formality, it is still recorded and under scrutiny. It's much better to get a close knit team behind closed doors where they can speak frankly to each other (whether that's vulgar language that's only deemed appropriate by all parties within the conversation or criticizing work done by colleagues outside the group) without fear of offending a third party.

It depends on what you consider happiness. If Happiness means constantly slightly elevated dopamine levels as produced by non impairing drugs, yeah it's not going to do a damn thing. If by happiness you mean fulfilled by the work you do, no marital trouble at home, no crippling financial issues or personal crises outside of work taking attention away or requiring effort that leaves the employee sleep deprived, then yes it will make a huge difference. Happiness doesn't have some special effect in and of itself, but it is an indicator that problems that can creep into work time are manageable or nonexistent and that the person is a least somewhat motivated to do their work, which will produce much better results than the opposite circumstance.

Happy doesn't mean never ever stressed or unchallenged.

From the looks of it it seems that this ruling only applies to the data stored on phones, not information passing over the network. This doesn't apply to the mass surveillance of communications and it doesn't mean that the FISA courts aren't going to blanket approve every single warrant like they have been for the past several years. All this really means is the police can't search your phone when they arrest you or during a stop to gather evidence against without first getting a warrant. While this is definitely a step in the right direction it isn't nearly as wide reaching as you would think.

Only morons deal in absolutes, and horrible analogies and delusions of living in a fantasy world where we conquer nations steal the natural resources and sell them to fill the national coffers like we're in a fucking video game.

"I think" doesn't merit a call to action and "denied" and "seriously discouraged" are two very different things, one of which would merit direct action to change how the college admissions and job application processes work and one simply a discussion with the aim of changing perceptions on gender roles and fighting ethnic discrimination.

You're asking him to prove a negative which is impossible to do without exhaustively looking at every single woman and minority applying for tech related jobs and confirming that not a single case exists, which is absurd. What we can do fairly easily is look at the demographics of people applying for tech degrees and look at the rates at which those people are getting hired and what kind of salaries for like for like positions and like for like experience. Women as a whole apply for far fewer Computer Science degrees so it's expected that they would make up less of the workforce in those fields. If minorities are applying for fewer Computer Science degrees we would expect to see the same thing. Now, if there is evidence that minorities and women are meeting significant barriers to entry to get those degrees and motivated people are not being given an equal chance to get those degrees then we should take action to address that, but that comes long before blame can be laid at Google or Yahoo's feet. Not only that, but if certain demographics tend to show higher employment numbers that we aren't pushing to equalize the employment numbers in then by default we can't expect that we'd be able to equalize the numbers relative to population in other fields without the numbers equalizing there too. In summary, as long as people aren't being denied opportunities based on their ethnicity or gender then diversity for diversity's sake isn't helping anyone. We should be working on identifying the cases where people are being denied opportunities they want to take and taking action there.

I'm actually not opposed to getting rid of the notion of net neutrality in theory. If private entities want to invest in their own infrastructure, compete in an open market and provide a service at the cost and convenience of their choosing then so be it. However you don't get to take billions of public dollars, setup monopolies and then fuck over your customers who have no other options because you made sure they didn't.

No you're totally right. Today's DRM is impenetrable and will hold strong for a thousand years. And all those content creators I'm sure will maintain the DRM for centuries and both abandon their products and fight piracy of them at the same time.

If some more professional research and design was put into this it could be extremely useful for motorcyclists. When most people drive they're mostly just looking for other cars and a motorcyclist that looks extremely visible to a dashboard cam in the aftermath of an accident can easily go unnoticed by an inattentive driver. Something like a large red light bar at the top of the backpack that could triggered by the motorcycle's front and/or rear brake could give a night time rider a more similar profile to a car in poor light could them more noticeable and safer. Some work could be done to figure out what kind of profile any additional lights and patterns could be used to make them more noticeable too.