Would you rather be surrounded by smart people or by normal people?

Better schools give you smarter peer groups, and you learn from and with smarter peer groups.

1) Putin is just posturing re: tactical nukes.

2) If Russia used tactical nukes, at least against NATO troops, it would go *very* badly for Russia. We're talking collapse-their-economy bad at the absolute minimum.

Power lines make communities much, much uglier if you actually stop to look at them. Convenience almost always trumps annoying the reticent.

The more people who know about the developer, the safer he is, at least while he is being harassed by relatively minor officials. We should be happy to accept a post or two about a nerd who is under threat by a government seeking to hide the truth about a military invasion.

Science is done best when it is done with the free exchange of truthful information and ideas. A nation which hides the truth is operating in a way fundamentally contrary both to the ideals of the open source community and to the spirit of intellectual exploration.

Nerds who don't care about that aren't nerds at all. There are a lot of diatribes about the authenticity of geekdom or nerdery. Most are just people trying to identify with one group or another and somehow believing the label affects their status in a way that people around them care about. But at the core of all Slashdot-related identities lie knowledge, intellectual expression, and the taking of joy in the exchange of information.

Not really. We already have self-driving cars, and we have a lot of data about traffic accidents and mortality. The cars aren't available at retail yet, but they exist. Teaching them to drive in a way that makes the right safety tradeoffs is appropriate. (E.g. driving slowly through a stoplight might cause more accidents and fewer deaths; that's a hunch, but we have lots of data so there's a moral calculation that should be made based on the data and desired outcomes.)

A "seriously" tag should also exist. It's not the satire that's problematic--it's the real news that is so absurd it seems to be satire. This pops up with amazing frequency.

Parent A/C is right.

This is entirely about marketshare. Apple decided its market in China was worth making it really easy for China to take Apple's data and use it against people. It's an understandable business decision. You know, like when the Pope didn't denounce Hitler.

Not necessarily. Suppose the back of the ticket agreed in advance to sell the copyright to any media you take, or to grant an exclusive, irrevocable license, or the like. Then you get to fight about whether that's a valid agreement, but you may not own the copyright.

The lawyers and judges will be happy to spend hundreds of hours trying to figure it out.

Even in the US, it is arguable how much context, and what kind, you would need to give the video in order to make it fall under "fair use." Even major television studios avoid using game footage without permission, even when they know they have an absolute right to use it, in part because of reputation issues but really because they don't want to be sued. You also have the issue of breaking copy protection by using the analog gap, at least in theory.

Bottom-line: if you're risk-averse, don't do it. Instead, describe it with your pretty words. If you want to do it, pay a copyright and sports law expert in your jurisdiction a few hundred euros to give you his best answer and listen to his advice. Do not get legal advice on slashdot.

History has always been altered. Napoleon was the greatest general in the world not because of his generalling, but because he *bought the newspapers*.

People who had a bad reputation used to be able to move to another town. Now we have tracking.

That's good because it warns us when someone actually has molested children, but bad because it makes people unemployable even a thousand miles from their home because of stupid mistakes they made when they were 18 or 19, for example.

It's not black and white that all history should be preserved. Some history hurts the future more than it helps it. If tomorrow the whole world forgot the Israel-Palestine conflict, would it make the future better?

Actually, if the employee was selling Amtrak's proprietary information without Amtrak's consent and was keeping the money, they are guilty of embezzlement and DEA employees may be guilty of crimes related to arranging that activity, e.g. conspiracy or solicitation.

If the employee was selling Amtrak's proprietary information and giving the money to Amtrak, the DEA was breaching its contract with Amtrak. The DEA has to share the proceeds of drug busts based on information that comes from Amtrak with Amtrak, and this method circumvented that deal.

You will be punishing the service reps, not the people who make policy.

The problem with this kind of tech is a combination of false positive and police harassment of false positives.

Suddenly anyone with high blood pressure is a suspect.

I wonder if when tech will get deployed at customs.

When an institution or a person does something right, I find it useful to commend them for it.

There may be many other things they can do right in the future, that they are doing wrong now. And there may be things done in the past that were profoundly wrong.

But they've still done a good thing.

In the United States, communications professionals (and the people they coach, like our politicians) avoid admitting when they are wrong, avoid even *engaging* in serious discussion, precisely because people so easily latch onto any words acknowledging another position and turn it into a sound byte. Attacking people who do the right thing for not doing more encourages them *not* to do the right thing in the first place.

Here, a company admitted it was wrong and apologized. It may or may not be disinformation to distract us from spying on behalf of the Chinese Government; and the company may or may not still be doing things we consider wrong. But the company's message was the right one, and they deserve praise for taking responsibility for a foul-up and acting to correct it.

Patent examiners are not experts in the sense that we think of experts--they are not, for example, in the top 100 people in the world working in a given space, nor do they even have lots of professional experience in the space.

They are also not laypeople. They need to have a technical degree, and the degree they have is generally but not always relevant to the patents the office has them review.

So while they are not experts and not supposed to be experts, they are also not the clerk from your supermarket--unless the clerk happens to have studied engineering.