Self signed certs are worthless outside of knowing it's the same cert, which is still useful in an anonymous system.

A system using self-signed certs is vulnerable to MITM attacks, true. But performing such attacks requires far more resources than just passively listening to all connections, as is the case with unencrypted traffick. So they're still useful for protecting against mass surveillance.

Well the second paragraph of the summary makes it pretty clear it isn't just a database of "people who look like they could be criminals". They are repeat offenders of serious crimes. I don't really even get what you mean by "biased slice of the population".

If the likelihood of arrest and conviction are affected by racism, as seems to be the case in the US, then any data derived from said arrests is also going to reflect that same racism. Garbage in, garbage out.

As long as the program is fast enough you should be concerned about things like productivity, testability, and maintainability.

And thus use a language with compile-time type checking.

Then again, this is a glorified blog, not a real news site.

This is neither a news site nor a blog, but a discussion forum. Articles simply act as bait to draw out hasty opinions other users can then react to, hopefully creating a critical mass where, due to the law of large numbers, everyone can find something to disagree with. And we even have a built-in voting system. All of which comes down to a single conclusion:

Slashdot: reality show for nerds.

Cash and debit are far cheaper than credit. The problem is banks have addicted people to credit using rewards programs and charged the merchant to accept cards (which well and truly pays for them and some).

People are "addicted" to the idea that some fraction of the increases in productivity show up as increased income. That hasn't been true for a long while. Cheap credit has been used to mask this robbery of the working class, but now the ride is over and the bill is in the mail. And since middle-class buying power is no longer supporting the economy, it's slowly collapsing.

Oh well. At least future historians should find it interesting to compare this collapse to the collapse of communistic economies, seeing how they happened just a few decades apart, and were caused by failures to keep up the opposite sides of a complete economic system, supply for communism and demand for capitalism.

If you're using mirrors, why not simply point the panels down?

Speaking of mirrors, how about covering your root with an optical cable and pointing both ends on a solar panel that sits on the inside somewhere, presumably water-cooled?

This man is a victem of the politically moderated speech problem. He stated his beliefs and was then considered anti-female and anti black.

So who moderated his speech? No one. He was allowed to speak his mind, and then other people were allowed to decide whether they wanted to continue associating with him in light of what he revealed of himself.

Now, if you want to argue that being shunned for your opinions is censorship, fine, but do understand that there are implications for other people's freedom of association.

The notion of non-offensive speech is killing free speech.

And yet no one silenced Watson. They simply stopped listening to him.

While you forecast might turn out to be true, there are big differences between blacks, women and engineers.

If you ever become famous, this sentence will most certainly get remembered and misinterpreted.

Even if they were dragging planets with them (is it possible for planets to orbit that fast?)

Fast? From the viewpoint of orbiting planets, the star is at rest and it's the rest of the universe that's moving.

wouldn't the planets have been sterilized by the conditions at the center of whatever galaxies they came from?

Even if they weren't, any lifeform that somehow leaves its home planet is unlikely to survive hitting another at 100,000 km/s. Unless our yellow star gives it new superpowers as plot demands, of course.

Ultimately, the tweets serve more as a constant reminder that people DO get caught regularly and so, hopefully a few who read the tweets will skew their cost/benefit judgement since the perceived risk is higher, and opt to not drive drunk or not drink in the first place.

So this will be very effective convincing those people who calmly consider the long-term consequences of their actions while drunk.

It's not good for throughput, though: since you can only have one aisle at a time "open", it's good for things like tools or library books where you have a large archive but only rarely retrieve any individual item.

But of course you can have any ratio of alleys to shelves. Just keep tabs on how many alleys you have at use at once on average and concentrate popular items on the same alleys. You can even put that "users who purchased this also often purchase these" database to use and group so an order can be completed by minimum number of alley accesses.

You can even get help from compiler technology. Think of shelves as main memory and alleys as registers. You can only operate on values in registers, and there's very limited bandwidth available moving stuff between them and main memory. Given this, a recorded access pattern, and weights for both latency (how long it takes to complete individual order) and throughput, what is the optimal strategy for moving the alleys? How many should you have, given a limited floorspace budget and a cost for not having a particular item stocked?

I just wonder what people who were already in such dire straits as to put up with Amazon warehouse abuse are going to do instead.

Well, traditionally a combination of desperate people and victim-blaming has led to unrest and eventually to a revolution. The possible responses to this are social security or a police state. The political situation in the US makes the former impossible, and all signs from the actions of intelligence agencies to the build-up of military gear for the police point to the country preparing to fight a war against its citizens, so I guess we're in for stormy weather.

This system (which brings the shelves to the workers, as workers are MUCH better at plucking small, irregularly-shaped items out of boxes) has fascinating challenges all of it's own, mainly related to traffic control, safety, and where to put the shelves after you are done. (A fixed location is very inefficient, but neither do you want to stick the shelf in the first available space.)

The most space-efficient system I've ever seen was in a library and had shelves that moved sideways on rails. There were no space whatsoever between adjancent shelves. You had a single alley and moved that to where you needed it by moving the shelves.

Before a government implements policy to go after stone drivers to prevent accidental death, it needs to be shown that stoners cause accidents! You can't just assume that.

It is sufficient to show that driving while impaired causes accidents, and that cannabis causes impairment. You don't have to prove this separately for every single mind-altering substance or other source of impairment, any more than you need to prove "icy roads are slippery" separately for every single road.

Frankly, comments like yours make me wonder if they're some kind of underhanded anti-legalization tactic. It's hard to imagine anyone who has ever actually used pot or observed the effects on third parties to argue absurd bullshit like that in good faith.

Think about musicians though. It's certainly possible to execute very precise muscle movements with precision and control while stoned. Why shouldn't you be able to drive?

Because driving is not about motor skills but paying attention to your surroundings, which pot interferes with rather severely. Try playing, say, Grand Theft Auto while stoned and see for yourself.

How many Domino's Pizza delivery drivers drive while stoned?

Do you have any proof to back your allegation, or are you simply slandering?