As a result, there is very little coordination, and we end up with sprawl because of it.

No, we end up with sprawl because living the American dream includes a home with a yard and not high density housing. And even when planners are forced to create HDH to reduce or slow sprawl, Americans would rather continue to spread out to get their piece of the dream than live in a 'Pass the Sugar' neighborhood or HDH communities.

The biggest problem with all of this is that instead of building transit infrastructure which makes sense, we try to retrofit half-broken models into areas where it will not work. BRT, supposedly LRT on rubber (we heard this in the 1950s - 1970s; oh how history repeats itself), was going to be the savior to the communities here South of Mpls/StP. What we ended up with are widened roads, a lot of construction, and the eventuality that express buses taking 35 minutes to get downtown will be eliminated so we can take up to 1.5 hours to do the same trip on BRT (they claim this won't happen but after spending 100+ million on the project, they will want it to be used and it won't be until they force it to be).

There are so many competing interests and opinions in our country that stating simply that 'building new roads is easier' is not entirely true. It sucks but we get to deal with it.

Yay for progress.

Black and white thinking is the thinking of someone who's in adolescence or an alcoholic.

The irony in your statement is astounding.

There was a recent job posting for some marketing company (I forget the name; I'm sure if you do a Google search you'll find it) that wanted a Klout score above 35 to be hired.

1. I have a 48 Klout score and while I work with marketing data analytics, I am not influential on any topics, at all.

2. If someone needs to have a 35+ on Klout, that shows just how irrelevant this number is for a marketing gig.

3. The fact that companies are interested in this number means someone is trying to make it relevant and thus the entire thing is scary as shit.

--

While Klout apparently believes I'm most influential in the "Twin Cities", "Food" and "Games" and one could make an argument for the first two, the third is just batshit crazy.

Klout is meaningless and should be completely ignored.

It's pretty crazy that I'm still with the same site I was reading back in high school and my freshman year of college.

I still remember my first +4 post and how I got contacted by the guy who in HS introduced me to the site I would continually contribute to as a commenter for the next 15 years of my life because it floated to the top.

I went to my first /. meetup after moving to Minnesota, a state where I knew no one and realized the community this site has built covers such a wide range of "nerds" that while I didn't fit intothe local area Slashbot mentality, I still had a community in which my opinions were read and sometimes read and appreciated up through today. I don't know many other places where so many different lifestyles and opinions about the same base topics can coexist happily.

However, to respond to the parent post, it was during these 15 years that I went to college, graduated, worked in many different fields, got married, had two kids, and changed from a die-hard Linux geek to someone who can appreciate all OSs for what they offer--something I would NEVER have imagined myself being when I was in my teens.

Best of luck Slashdot for another 15.

But does anyone really care?

I would venture a guess the 15+ million Mormons worldwide do. The fact that the Mormon religion is heavily invested in business (right or wrong considering their status as a religion), I would guess it wasn't Linus' brightest moment--apology or not.

I was out in Orlando for work in April and LA in May. At MSP (my home airport) and MCO we had a choice in scanner methods, in LA we didn't. I refused to use the scanner, instead opting for the manual pat down.

At MCO I was through the "traditional" scanner method quickly, 10 minutes faster than my coworkers who got their chromosomes scrambled. In LA, I was 30 seconds behind my coworker.

It's not fucking worth it to use the scanners. IMO we should all be opting out and forcing the TSA to work harder to get the job done. If people stood up against the intrusion it would be far more effective than the courts telling them to do X and them ignoring it.

They can't as easily ignore an airport full of VERY angry passengers waiting in long lines to do it the "hard" way.

That's bull. You can vote out the intruders and they have to leave. A business can keep on intruding as long as it can afford to.

Not necessarily. Politicians are voted in, staff are not and many times staff are the ones who have direct access to your data, not the politicians themselves.

But that was via assembling data people chose to submit to Target through their purchases. This is the government assembling data that their citizens probably didn't want to submit.

Remember, you have a choice not to support private business intrusion, you don't have a choice not to support government intrusion.

If you say so. I went with a Nikon instead of a Canon DSLR for the same reason.

The iPhone has a metal back now. I don't see your point.

I doubt Apple will ever copy the cheap feeling the Galaxy SIII has when you hold it in your hand. I have been an iPhone user since the 3G (10/2008) and was interested in seeing how the Galaxy SIII would be as a replacement device knowing all the great things people are saying about it.

I picked it up in the store and it felt cheap, almost like a child's toy. Light yes, durable, not so much. As someone who dropped their iPhone4 less than 72 hours after purchasing it and watching the back glass shatter, I wanted something more durable. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear the S3 would help me much in that area.

I played with the device for about 25 minutes and found myself saying, "meh". While I'm glad there is a choice between Apple and Android phones and a wide variety to choose from for those who like that sort of thing, I decided to stick w/the iPhone.

I picked mine up Friday morning (the Verizon store told me if I was there by 8 AM I could get one) and I have been pleased. It's not perfect by any means I don't want to say the device is flawless, but as someone who has used both, I still much prefer the iPhone to the S3 and don't see any copying at all.

YMMV.

This is why medical, law, and engineering schools heavily promote study groups where you appear IN PERSON to interact with your classmates. The nuance of the spoken word, and the nonlinearity of conversation, adds a powerful dimension to the student's internalization of the material in ways you just cannot duplicate with words on a screen or paper.

I learn much better by reading and writing, not by listening to people talk. While traditional education models do push for one method over the other, it doesn't mean that someone may learn better in another way. While I am not going to argue there are not faults in online education, just because a traditional model has been accepted as optimal doesn't mean it is and should be eliminated.

Disclaimer: I am a student of online education and I have worked in both public not-for-profit and private for-profit education institutions which offer online components or are outright all online.

Can we just post this link in the blurb on every Apple story so that we don't need to waste mod points on all the karmawhores?

There was no reason to have a native YouTube app included in the OS, was there? I can count the number of times I opened that app on one hand in the 4 years I've owned an iPhone.

I downloaded the new YouTube app, opened it once and then deleted it. It's the same shit you get on the web and it's mainly for finding new videos rather than anything truly useful. It's not like you need the app to view the videos.

This is really a non-issue.

Here in Minnesota MetroTransit officers come on the train regularly to check everyone's ticket/card to make sure they have a valid fare.

Several times I observed people jump off the train once they saw the officers and they didn't even chase after them; instead, they continued to check and scan everyone else who actually had paid.

I love paying the whopping $1.25 + tax dollars to fund this lovely operation only to be hassled by cops only to watch the douchebags run away free.