Don't you guys also vote for local officials from mayors and town councillors and county officials down to judges, sheriffs, district attorneys, garbage collection department chiefs, etc.... ?? Or is it just in hollywood movies where district attorneys, sheriffs and judges are constantly worrying about being re-elected? Here in the old world the only ones elected in local elections are mayors and town/city councillors, and provincial/county level people. Lower officials than that are either appointed by whoever wins local elections or they get hired because they are the most qualified applicant for the job (well theoretically, sometimes they get hired because the are loyal party soldiers or because they are related to some local politico). Judges and police chiefs are appointed by the minister of justice but still with professional qualifications in mind (again... in theory).

Plutocrats throughout Europe and the USA would have a spontaneous orgasm if they read headline like that.... "US and EU agree on transatlantic effort to merge all internet service providers and media outlets to solve the problem of competition..."

The short answer is: NO!

End of discussion!

People like you are the personification of what's wrong with America today! While you latte slurping liberal intellectuals are debating history down here, the capability gap is widening, the Russians are winning the maneuverable space junk race. What we should be doing is get some maneuverable junk of our own so send your old VHS players, Pentium PCs, CRT monitors, ... to NASA so they can bolt thrusters to our old junk and and fire it into orbit by the meteric ton. I say, let's teach those commie pinko Russki bastards a lesson!

So what is a respectable British newspaper? The Sun? The Daily Mail? ... Does such an animal even exist?

  -- just curious.

That is true but not necessarily the way you think. In the long term the idea is to create substitute natural gas (SNG) from excess energy that would otherwise go to waste using hydrogen and CO2 for example with the Sabatier reaction. This is the same process Nasa is planning to use to produce rocket propellant on Mars. It's not a super efficient process but if you can harvest the CO2 from the atmosphere, you can still store energy that would otherwise be wasted and unlike drilling and fracking it's a closed cycle as opposed to a release of sequestered carbon. SNG it has the advantage of enabling you to recycle the existing natural gas distribution infrastructure.

“I guess the question I'm asked the most often is: "When you were sitting in that capsule listening to the count-down, how did you feel?" Well, the answer to that one is easy. I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of two million parts -- all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract.”
  John Glenn

I suppose buying from the higher bidder does not guarantee better performance. One thing you can be sure of, the bozos who gave Orbital the contract will be first among those to escape unscathed from this FUBAR.

Nah, Slashdot is not a religion. But you could for example choose one of the many religions organizations represented on Slashdot like: the Sacred Temple of the Apple, the Revered and Holy Shrine of the Android, the Evangelical Church of Emacs, the First Reformed Church of Vim, the Orthodox Church of WIndows or the Open Source Church of the Blessed Saint Linux on the Desktop ... the list goes on ... those are already established religions. Slashdot is more like the plains of Armageddon where the adherents of these faiths fight their wars of religion.

That's what I did, I got a 10 inch tablet but dragging the damn thing around with me all the time got tiring. So I got a bag for it only to discover that my 13 inch MacBook fit into the same bag and was only marginally heavier so why bother with a 10 inch tablet? And besides having a 4-5 inch phone, a 10 inch tablet and a laptop is expensive. A 10 inch tablet won't fit into any pocket while the iPad Mini, for example is on the verge of being to large for stuffing into all but the largest pockets and it can't make phone calls. Some of the smaller Samsung tablets can double as phones but I don't like them. I'm going to get an iPhone 6+ phablet that will fit into my pocket and leave the laptop at home when I don't need it. A 6 inch phone is too big and uncomfortable to fit into a trouser pocket but it is still small enough that it will fit into a sweatshirt or coat pocket.

Depends on what you want from a phone, if you only want a phone and e-mail/SMS terminal with emergency browsing capability and a nav app with a tiny map display then something the size of an iPhone 5/5s is fine. If, however, you want to do more like read e-books, edit documents, play games, etc... then a device the size of the iPhone 6 is at the lower end of the usable but a bit beyond the upper end of how big a phone should be. So the choice you have is a device that's the right size for a phone but a crappy size for a tablet or do you want a device that is a usable tablet but too big for a phone. The perfect mobile device has, what? something equivalent to a 15 inch or bigger display but is still physically no larger than a match box and those are irreconcilable demands until we are able to project holographic displays like they do in scifi movies. The Google glass is another take on this but I would prefer the holo displays. I suppose you could also go for the Borg solution and splice the device output through a wireless link directly into the optical nerve but I'm not that obsessed with the mobile lifestyle so I draw the line at surgery. Eventually this issue will be solved and probably with a technology none of us can currently conceive of at this moment.

Actually I prefer my phones to have a screen diagonal of 4.95" but I could only choose diagonals <= 4.9 " or diagonals >=5.0" so I chose 5.0"-5.4" so I could post and complain about this outrageous dearth of choices.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I had in mind. Take a photo of an orchid, compare it to a library of descriptors and get a near human accurate classification without routing the image through a super computer on the cloud. My use case was more like: With all networking on your device switched off, snap a photo of a plane and the app tells you that's a Virgin Airlines Boeing 737. Or: search a library of images for snaps that show one or more South African Air Force P-51Ds (including partial shots showing only, say, the rear half of the aircraft). Today we can probably do the "find me all photos that include a car" type searches on your garden variety PC with reasonable accuracy by using background processing but something like "find all photos that include a Fiat Type 135 "Dino" is future music, at least on consumer level hardware.

That's true, I looked into object recognition for image classification by content. Face recognition is proceeding fairly nicely but doing stuff like just programmatically classifying/tagging images by whether they contain a car, airplane, house, tree, dog, mountain .... without even trying to do things like identifying the type of airplane/dog/car is pretty much undoable in any reasonable amount of time with human level accuracy needed on garden variety PCs and tablets which is the application I'd be interested in. The fastest and most accurate image classifier/tagger is still a human. Am still looking forward to they day that changes but I'm not sure that will be within my lifetime.

Does badmouthing a saint count as blasphemy? Ah! What the heck..... BLASPHEMER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

More like the wrong demographic, for one thing there is no indication Erzebet Bathory was gay and secondly she preferred corn fed country girls for her grizzly beauty rituals so agricultural communities would be a more likely place to look for victims than towns and cities which is where you are most likely to run into lesbian Goths.