I think you make a good point. These services tend not to flesh out as fast as they need to. But for example any of the dating apps are free (with ads) via Wifi (in your home) So if they really wanted to drill this out (see my note above, emergency codes help) you could for example text 911 on a dating site for free.

It comes down to how much they want to actually help people vs the political capital. It's not hard to monitor "911" on any of thirty dating apps if they spread the word to solve exactly the problem you mentioned.

See my note above.

For example let's forget tinfoil hats and assume that for once the cops are on your side. You go visit them on a nice safe day and get a series of codes.

Then you folks work together to make a few pre-recorded 911 texts with those codes and stuff they will need as mentioned in the article. Responders are at work, it's not like chatting, they don't mind a Wall of Text. So with some sort of few keystroke system if you can send any of nine 911 text messages in 12 seconds, that's gotta be plenty for them to get started with. Yes on the rare case you send that as a joke you get a fine, but the life saving side will way outweigh it;

Maybe I've seen too many TV shows but if you have a pre-recorded text for 911, something like seven key strokes can send it silently whereas the standard voice call risks the attacker hearing you.

I wasn't impressed with the article. At a higher level there has to be some coding you can send that says "can't speak, puts my life in danger". I don'tr know what that would be, but it rises above the article's cheap promotion of voice calls.

This is a topic highly prone to what AC was meant for in the best sense.

It's rather narrowly presented - all on the officer side. Pretty soon the members of the public will have their own running cameras if for no other reason than just in "today's social media / blogging culture". So then suddenly the defendant has a video but the cop doing something "forgot" to turn his on?!

That's gotta be good for a defense lawyer!

So the next level is both sides have theirs on, and everyone is tracking everyone else, and we become a giant game of Pac-Man. Go Atari.

Well gee, the top half of this story threads are wrecked, so I'll reply to you.

According to the (non-optimized) version I learned, you're not wrong. The Bottom Middle Non-Corners were the bear of the solution. You had both rotation and orientation to worry about. The Rotation was 18 moves long and the Orientation was 18 moves long.

So one fun prank was to take display cubes and throw them off by the 18 move orientation move, and know that "it looks so close" but no one could fix it, then they have the minor guilt of leaving a "almost solved" cube in shambles! : )

But the various modern tricks make sure you have an easier time when you get there, but like someone else said elsewhere, my horribly clunky method was enough, so I never felt the interest to super-optimize it.

Reversing the "what could possibly go wrong" sentiment, this particular article is noticeably short of the backing science paper for the detail hounds to pore over. The meager analysis presented is too simple - "so if this species dies, another one will just step up the food chain", like maybe that Asian Tiger Mosquito. So then just rinse and repeat a second time. "Kill all the mosquitoes and we win."

Unlike things like the Africanized Killer Bee, which as I understand it was greed gone wrong, there's a life and death upside to winning this attempt, so I'm being careful with my words. So straight up, what *could* possibly go wrong? My best guess is something like knocking a hole in the ecology chain and getting unlucky that we did three rounds, celebrated a couple years of victory, and then discovering that mosquito eating bats are in trouble and then damaging the balance of ecology with whatever eats those or something.

But the snark question is also a fast shorthand for containability risk. Unlike a problem say with a temporary dominance of destructive wolves, making a mistake with insects could be really hard to fix.

(Extra CamelCaps mine for emphasis)

I got tired of the caps in HughPickensDOTcom so I finally punched it in...

And there isn't a site! Instead, it's a rewrite to PoncaCityWeLoveYou.com of PoncaCityWeLoveYou fame previously here on Slashdot.

Anyone know why he rebranded into a shell redirect name away from the old one?

As for not mentioning things, it's typical lax editorial policy allowing their favorite submitters to slam stuff through.

"And you are all missing (surprinsingly) the ability to add things such as 3d printed guns, knives, hooks, crossbows, dildos to your hand.
Why settle for just a boring old hand when you can become inspector gadget?!"

Yours is the most general comment I've seen, so I'll reply to you.

Slashdot comment chains run in themes, so once about five themes get going plus some flamebait, that's about where the discussion centers.

But for you, I'll remark that a couple of science fiction writers did stories on 3d printing. For a while that stayed science fiction rather longer than some of the other candidates such as cell phones. But now here we are - a few stories down again today, the 3d gun topic came up. So it's really going to be thrashed out heavily now for the next six years.

Yeah, but not since the original days of Libraries has there been a chance for Library/Staples option to "rent a 3d printer".

That could bring down the price to print something to say $100 + materials and Bring Your Own Design.

"Now here's an easy question to give me a straight answer to: What's the process you follow for submitting these? Are you just filling out the submission form like anyone else and for some mysterious reason the editors post it?"

Just sayin', I noticed you're trying to pin down the question we've all been wondering for years, but he'll keep wriggling around it. Clearly yes he is "affiliated" because there's whatever "infinitely" (to use his favorite synonym of Very Large) close to zero statistical random chance that the only blog posts are his. We just don't know the exact nature of the transactions involved.

Meanwhile in the context of this particular piece, he does seem to be making lots of mistakes. So maybe he thinks "what's the value to me to shake out my reasoning if the commenters will do it for me?" There's no downside for him because we all say our bit, he adds some unclear replies, then he gets to start all over the next week.

"Actually, given the size of the Slashdot audience, I'd wager anything that doesn't amount to mere gibberish will spark some discussion."

Your wager is correct, so I'm not taking it! : )

An easy way to show this is that if someone posts an attempt at a insightful/informative note in the comments, *especially early enough*, it does two things. The "discussion sparked" is directly trackable because the subsequent replies tend to carry that subject title X far down in the threaded format, stopping at the next "highest level node of the tree". Then yes while there are *other* ways, a good post tends to eventually get noticed by the mods and gets at least a couple +1's.

The other thing is if you get a good early start in the thread before the humorists show up, the whole thread becomes better because we don't care as much about those memes farther down after a story is X hours old with 180 comments.

This feature is actually a killer app on the dating phone apps. When you're logged in it encourages meeting new people directly because the apps shows you two are close by, (or not). It's a huge icebreaker to say "hey, looks like you're about five blocks from me, wanna get coffee?"

So for the Facebook aspect I'd focus on the implementation of the Opt-In (to make sure no Facebook silliness is going on), then the key is you *toggle* it on and off all day.

Taking you seriously, this is one of Nostalgia's finest moments.

A ton of us were *exactly* in the right range to use of the three or four Commodore comps from the mid 80's to change the worldview outlook forever. We don't pretend to do much more than hobby projects with them now. But those are the comps that *made us*. It was back when computing, and a little light hacking, was fun. The NSA wasn't (overly) noticeably destroying computer infrastructure. You could get a few long distance calls. Make a few Maze games. Make a couple of Eliza clones. Play seven Pacman clones. Ultimate Wizard. Bang out a homework essay and even get it to print.

It's about the Simpler Time. Nothing _____.

Awww, I gotta chime in here too.

I was at the crucial intersection of age, difficulty, and timing between C64 and C128. C64 proved too difficult to Non-Genius me at 9. C128's extra commands allowed me at 12 to create some thirty programs, just enough to taste programming, but still hit Go64 to play the old games. A couple times in the passing decades Commodore Basic was the only language I could whip up a quick test experiment without learning entire new languages. RIP C128.

I gotta chime in on this one.

Luckily I was a young enough whippersnapper that I didn't know better. But "Keypunch Software" took the IgNoble-80's prize.

They were notorious for using *Ascii* graphics moved by keystroke in their games!