They should probably make an effort to get their instant video app into the google play store if that is the plan. I use a chromecast and an android phone to watch my content. Can't do that without jumping through a bunch of hoops with amazon instant video.

Is carpooling illegal in Germany? If not and I make an app that lets people meet others going the same place and also provides an escrow service to share gas costs is this illegal? I'm honestly curious where people think the line is here.

Equal opportunity for the sexes rarely leads to equal outcome. This is like complaining that yoga which has a similar 'bias' but in favor of women needs to be reformed. I'm a man and I don't contribute to wikipedia because I'm not going to invest the time to write something that somone else can tear down with the click of a mouse. I'm guessing for one reason or another most women feel the same. Combativeness can be a good thing to have in a field and the Wikipedia project has definately been a sucess.

I'm not sure offhand how you'd achieve what Wikipedia has on its scale with a different format for contributors.

I agree with this generally. I know some folks that work in the military doing wetworks type stuff and they're always being deployed and doing things I never hear about in the news (they never tell what or where but there is a LOT of crap going down day to day we don't hear about) -not when it comes to the no-fly list though. The judges request is reasonable. If we can't trust our judges at least as much as we trust the unelected folks administering the lists then we're in trouble.

It might be tough to measure. Obama certainly tweets more than past presidents but the answer to why is obvioius with the internet and maturity of social media. He also has had more sit down interviews apparently but both of these are mediums he controls completely with the questions known beforehand. I prefer the potentially adversarial relationship with the white house press corps to these but I could see from his perspective why he'd prefer to simply 'broadcast' his message without interference.

Well one metric might be number of press conferences. This is just in all presidents first term. I believe the impression is that he's having even fewer second term but I don't see anything breaking that down. I'm sure there are a lot of other inputs that could be included as well to test this. Subjectively.. he does seem less open and conversational in these as well compared to past presidents.

President Obama - 79

President George W. Bush - 89

President Bill Clinton - 133

President George H. W. Bush - 143

President Reagan - 27

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu...

I'm sure the UN response will be well intentioned but I highly doubt Putin will be losing much sleep over any action the UN might take and the US doesn't exactly have much credibility when it comes to threats of force at the moment at least until the next election. I'd exect any dem or republican elected to be a stronger presence that the current president so I'm sure that will change eventually but add to all that the EUs dependence on natural gas from Russia... The message we're sending Russia is "act now".

Like kill puppies :( http://www.businessinsider.com...

People are just getting into the office in Europe so all the moderation and comments may be skewed at the moment toward them. Europeans to a much greater degree seem to interpret regulations and protections as a blanket keeping them warm and safe. In the states we get the same 'blanket' but our interpretation is different. Maybe we were cold maybe we weren't but we never asked for a blanket, can't move very well and what kind of weirdo just walks up and tries someone up in a blanket? Any moment the blanket will probably be secured with duct tape, crammed into their trunk and we'll end up driven to a remote location for a little "it puts the lotion on its skin" action.

It will be interesting to watch and see if the slashdot moderations and opinions swing back as the more libertarian leaning US users wake up and begin to login.

I believe that generally this only holds true for the poor kids with but it's a valid point. Upper middle class kids actually take a hit as 'astonishingly' it seems they learn more not attending school in the summer than they do when attending year round. Makes one wonder what they might achieve if unshackled for the rest of the year...

This is not news. Verizon, Netflix and customers all already know what the problem is. Routing around the bottleneck (saturated interconnect) by using a VPN will obviously avoid the bottleneck... I don't understand why this was posted as a story.

I wouldn't watch a movie I thought I might enjoy in standard def... I realize you're in a bit of a bind when netflix doesn't have rights to stream a movie you want to watch but I would seek out other sources (apple, vudu). It isn't necessarily "ethical" but perhaps do a search for couchpotato howto. Doesn't justify it but the more content is pirated the more content providers should feel pressured to make their stuff available in a method consumers want.

Nations are sovereign but they are not immortal. Sometimes they fall and sometimes they are taken. It is certainly a position worth discussing that Iraq was wrong or a mistake. Remember that the same Iraqi regime forced us to war to defend Kuwait and the region at great expense and some loss of life some years before and only a cease fire was ever declared. One that Sadam repeated violated. I don't think Sadam had a right for us not to hold him accountable in some way but we sacraficed more than was gained in the invasion. That is certain both from our and the Iraqi peoples perspective.. The neocon position in the US would be that our withdrawl was the mistake and that we should have created stong economic and political ties and maintained a presence in the country the whole point being to create a stablizing force in the region. I'm not sure I buy that though I certainly don't understand why we left Iraq its chemical weapons and radioactive materials. We should have destroyed or shipped that content out prior to leaving. Now.. yay that material is in the hands of ISIS.

The fact that at best they might be no more or less competent than any other organization is the best point you could make against them having too much influence though given their structure many myself included would argue even that level of compentency. Why must we consolidate the power of every nation in the world into one organization? Does that really seem like a good idea? At the moment the UN is basically a place for countries to natter on to one another and that is fine, there is a place for that but to cede a portion of sovereignty to the UN? No thanks. They can issue declarations and findings with no teeth to back them up, maybe spark some conversation... good for them but to give them too much credibility is dangerous. I much prefer many individual nations each answerable to its on citizenry. Some nations will misbehave some won't but at least you don't have a single point of failure.

I don't think there is much debate that we impact the climate by some amount but even I have serious doubts as to how much of an impact we might have when it comes to CO2 and if it is in fact all that negative. The models keep predicting catastrophic scenarios and they keep not happening... I'd be lying if I said I was really all that concerned about a 1 degree change that can be said to "mostly" be attributable to global warming or "climate change". I just don't care and don't follow it. Too many alarmist predictions about tipping points that haven't come to pass. Pollution in general is something I care about but that is a separate discussion.