...I mean, mainstream Islam is seriously anti-gay.

So all these folks hounding this guy for his (relatively trivial) political support for a cause 6 years ago must certainly then be ardent and vocal in their anti-muslim rhetoric?

Because hounding someone out because of their 'intolerant' views is one thing.
Picking on someone because you know they're not going to fight back just makes you a pussy.

"...The only way to get HD versions of the episodes would be to re-render every single CGI and comp shot, and Warners will never, ever pay to have that done..."

Considering the processing power today in 2014 vs 1994-1998 (series run years), fans could probably render all the CGI scenes into HD on their Ipads between watching videos of cats over the span of a weekend:

For example:
Intel Pentium 90 (March 1994)
Transistor Count: 3.2 million
Clock Speed: 90 MHz
Process Scale: 600 nm
Thermal Design Power: 9 Watts
CTP Benchmark: 90 MTOPS
Benchmarks: 0.09 GFLOPS
Dhrystone: 107 DMIPS

Core i7-3770 (Ivy Bridge) (April 2012)
Transistor Count: 1,400~ million
Clock Speed: 3,400 MHz
Process Scale: 22 nm
Chip Size: 160 mm2
Thermal Design Power: 77 Watts
CTP Benchmark: 136,000 MTOPS (Base)
Benchmarks: 108.8 GFLOPS (Base)

So in turn you support Evangelical Christian companies boycotting people and causes in favor of gay marriage, abortion, etc? How do you feel about the Hobby Lobby case at the Supreme Court? OK with CEOs limiting services to people who disagree with them in their company?

Just making sure you're not a hypocrite, nor that High Horse you're riding in on.

The story's not that incredible (I wouldn't be surprised if the US government mandated all children be encased in bubble-wrap before leaving home, frankly), but this made me smell an April Fool joke: "... 13 to 15 deaths and 1,125 injuries may be prevented with the implementation of this new requirement...."

If serious, that's ridiculous. More people are killed by plungers every year.
If not serious, then very well played. A joke that's so subtly on the border of credulity that you have to actually figure out you're being pranked is well done.

By slashdot's standards (if applied objectively) the whole IPCC is flamebait, you tendentious fucks.

I've been looking for a router that can also host a HDD for network storage, and give me global access the data on it through FTP and HTTP. I've done this with various USB routers running TomatoUSB and the like, but the USB bus on those is so painfully slow that it's basically useless. This thing wouldn't suffer from the same problem, and the price and energy consumption are router-competititve. And compared to the price of NAT, this thing is a bargain! The way I picture it, you would need to add an 802.11AC radio to the USB3, and then you'd be set.

Not just because I'm a bit of nihilist on Mondays, I suspect that it has a great deal to do with the ossification of the various national and international systems.

We've had the longest span of great-power peace really ever in modern history...of course that doesn't actually mean "peace", but it does mean an absence of outright war.

Which means that there haven't been any cataclysmic shocks to the system. The dirt's not getting turned over, so to speak. The closest thing to a 'rewrite' since 1945 was the collapse of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact...but this means that the West has churned on obliviously for 70 years. The only time I can think of before that was the end of the 19th century and likewise we had a massive agglomeration of wealth and governmental systems that disregarded the masses (until they needed them in 1914, of course...).

More importantly to this discussion, in re the US, is that the US has been essentially free from any threat since 1812....200 years of safety has made our elites indolent, lazy, and self-indulgent because frankly they haven't been put up against the wall by an angry mob since well out of memory.

As long as they keep us distracted with TMZ, the Kardashians, the latest MMO release (and for the "engaged" the very meaningful red vs blue arguments between Republicrats and Democans, or are we arguing over abortion today?) the benighted public is like a cheerful herd of milk cows, happily tromping out in the morning, munching nice grass during the day, to be called in the evening to be milked. It's not a bad deal for the cows, actually.

"Really, the sky is falling! Really truly, we mean it this time. Don't pay attention to the previous reports that predicted the end of glaciers, an ice-free arctic, etc by around now, we were slightly off. But this time, we're absolutely positive the sky is falling.

Really.

Seriously."

In my view it's patently obscene that the government can step in and ban what is essentially a private transaction that breaks no laws.

Can they ban me buying vegetables from a neighbor, to protect the local supermarket?

Can they ban me paying a kid to mow my lawn, to protect the local lawncare service?

What the government CAN legitimately offer is licensure; ie, with a CERTIFIED "taxi" you have someone who has paid the fees, gotten the registration and the 'license' to do this for a living. This would nominally ensure that the carrier has insurance, is regularly inspected for safety, etc. I should expect to pay more for such a service, no doubt.

Seriously: FUCK YOU GOVERNMENT. If I want to risk my ass being robbed, murdered, or raped by some random stranger-driver to save a few bucks, that's MY business. I don't mean that sarcastically: as an adult that should be MY choice.

NO country complies with such rulings, unless it's in their interest do so, or unless they are compelled.

The problem with the US (who has since WW2 largely complied even with rulings against itself, contrary to your implication above) is that moronic recent political leaders don't understand that following such rules (except in extremis) IS in the US's broader long-term interest in fortifying the legal conduct of all other states.

The thing that I'm hoping for is that this was a panic buy because somebody at Facebook got spooked that a killer rival VR social app might render FB gradually irrelevant. So the purchase was a defensive move only, to make sure that they leading VR hardware comes from their own house and can't be used to undercut them. I think it's quite possible they didn't have any concrete social VR application in mind. This would not be a strange move for a rich and paranoid company. I'll call this the "playing defense" scenario.

If FB really is just playing defense, then maybe they'll invest in Oculus to make sure it's the VR standard, but they won't really profane it with stupid Facebook shit, because they don't really know how to do that anyway, apart from maybe some app that nobody will really use (except maybe webcam girls).

Of course, if they really are playing defense and they realize that VR isn't really a treat to their market, maybe they will cut funding from Oculus and let the project rot on the vine. That's a real danger, and it would set back the field for a while.

On the other hand, maybe Facebook knows exactly what they want to do with Oculus, and they are about to bend the project to their evil will. Whatever that would be, I'm sure I would think it's an abomination. This is why the gaming community reacted to badly to the announcement. But even if this is true, it might not be a total catastrophe. The important question is whether the technical issues that make VR so hard (latency, pixel persistence, motion tracking, etc.) will be getting a lot of attention, or a little. If it is a lot, then even if the final product is larded up with stupid Facebook crap, a hack will exist to remove it, thus producing an excellent VR headset. I just wonder how much FB is willing to invest in fundamental VR research and hardware improvement. Hopefully they won't neglect this side of things.

Setting aside artistic license, and the possibility that any artist may well have had chromatic aberrations in their vision, didn't we JUST have a story in the last month or two specifically discussing the changing of colors used in rennaissance paintings, and how displaying them in different colored lighting environments would likely allow us to see the pictures in (something more like) their original hues?

Seems like another effort to "prove" how the sky is falling, climatologically speaking.

If they're so miserable working there, they can go find another job suitable for their utter lack of employability.

Oh wait, they probably can't.

It's almost like people who have zero skills, experience, education are stuck with shitty jobs! /astonishing.

The Chinese government would certainly go up a point in my estimation if they'd now murder these people.

I'm absolutely serious. Then hunt down the sponsors of spam, kill them too.

Some people may think that would be unbelievably harsh; but what's the point of a despotic, reactionary regime if once in a while it can't do the stuff nobody else dares to?*

People always judge punishments as absolutes, when rational actors are taking punishment * likelihood = danger. If you can't increase the likelihood (because it's a world-wide thing) you can at least ramp up the punishment to crazytown levels and probably raise the resulting danger to a level where the subjects start to take it seriously.

Here's my guess: people would stop spamming from China.

Considering it is a process that brings in revenue with little to no effort, how else are those people ever going to be de-incentivized to stop? And if they send out hundreds of millions of ads a day that take 6 seconds to recognize and delete, that's tens of thousands of dollars of peoples' time EVERY DAY that they're stealing, no?

...connecting some things to the internet is simply a dumb idea?

Why would I want my OVEN connected to the internet.
One has to be there to put the ingredients, etc in, no?
And if it's going to cook food while I'm not there...will it then eat it for me too?

Seriously, the technophilia is just stupid sometimes.