They haven't proven intent. (And I hope they cannot.) The driver has only been arrested and charged, not convicted.

Let's see. The Tesla S battery outputs 375 volts. So if I mount about 50 of these devices on the roof in series can I remove that heavy performance-sapping battery pack?

Oh, wait, I can do a lot better if I just rub a balloon with my cat. Of course, I have to feed the cat, so operation isn't free. And I had to bear the cost of neutering the cat long ago so he wouldn't accelerate unpredictably.

I would like to question a related but opposite question:

Should people want even a dumb watch? One that just tells the time, and maybe has an alarm and calendar.

Years ago I worked at a place where there were a number of radio astronomers. One carried a flip-open clamshell watch that was entirely plastic (no electronics) and contained only a 3D replica of Stonehenge. Worked for him... (You can still buy these. Google Stonehenge Watch.)

It isn't obvious to me that constant preoccupation with the exact time is a boon to humanity. It may be necessary in our culture, given the scheduling of media to quantized fraction-of-an-hour time, and the need to coordinate for appointments, and not have railroad trains run into one another. But other human societies have worked differently, and perhaps they work better in some ways. Or at least differently.

A wonderful and breezy introduction to cultural perceptions of time (and space, and lotsa other things) can be found in Edward T Hall's 1959 _The SiIent Language_. While this isn't even Hall's final word on the subject (see Wikipedia or Amazon) I bought a copy for $0.10 at a used book store back in the late 1970s, and reading it has helped me tremendously dealing with foreign-culture customers, travel. and even my foreign-citizen wife.

You haven't been completely clear, but if the mother has primary custody and wants to limit your misogynist contact, she can obviously control the amount of contact you have. The specific device won't matter if she won't let him use it, or simply takes it away.

If she has called you a misogynist pig in any way that was recorded and which can be proven, you need a lawyer to deal with this I'm presuming you are not actually a misogynist pig, so your wife's unstable slander would be useful if you want to gain more control.

As for specific devices, at 4 your son knows what you look like. Why is video chat better than simple audio phone? There is still this thing in the universe called copper-wired POTS. You can phone at times you both are available (if the mother doesn't interfere) and at 4, you might be able to teach him how to phone you.

Yes, but this prohibits use of Google's many server-side tools for editing documents, spreadsheets, calendar, etc. If confidentiality of your data is to be preserved, that data can never be transferred unencrypted out of machines you control. That prevents the server-side application from checking your spelling, evaluating your spreadsheet calculations, or anything else. The cloud becomes nothing but a distributed filesystem.

But Google wants to read your data in order to advertise to you. That's why they provide the free service and have implemented all of it server side. They are not dishonest about this, but their denial that they share your data with government authorities seems to ignore the fact that a government can force them secretly to disclose anything.

Ummm, if you want to store your data in Google's cloud, or anyone else's, then all you need do is encrypt it before uploading. Then the responsibility for keeping the key secret is yours. If Google reencrypts your data, there is usually no significant gain or loss of security. You can even share documents with anyone else who has the key, perhaps delivered by carrier pigeon. (Surprisingly, multiple different encryptions can sometimes be weaker than any of the individual encryptions - read that somewhere on Usenet long ago -- but I don't think this matters much in practice, otherwise a standard cracking technique would be to try reencrypting the encrypted data.)

Of course, this strategy won't work with Google's application suite (Google Docs, etc.) because your thin client talks unencrypted data with the application running in Google's cloud, even if the connection is ssh -- the data is unencrypted in the server until saved under encryption. Someone should explain to me again why accessing cloud-based apps from a thin client is such a win...

There may be conflicting law against the employer.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference

It could be argued that agreeing to the terms of Facebook establishes a contract with Facebook. That contract prohibits disclosing one's password to anyone else. Anyone trying to force a violation of that contract could be committing tortious interference, which could be actionable in civil court.

It might be that Facebook would have no losses in such a violation, but one's friends would have information intended only for friends to have acess disclosed to this employers. That loss of privacy could give thoe friends grounds for civil action.

I'm not a lawyer, and glad of it...

You might convince a team to write good code simply by trying to convince them to write bad code, provided you can obfuscate you efforts sufficiently so what you encourage is plausible.

Herding cats...

My reply may be somewhat off topic, but give it a read:

SlashDot is to journalism as COBOL is to programming.

I read SlashDot because it is an important and timely source of technical news. But all too often articles are incomprehensible (without research) to readers outside some particular narrow discipline. Writing a lead in to an article is a skill that requires more than technical knowledge -- it requires knowledge (and some assumptions) about the experience of the intended readership. Like several other readers -- who know a lot about lotsa things, but not everything about everything -- without some research I couldn't decide immediately whether I ought pursue the article contents further. My apologies to everyone else who knows s/he knows everything about everything.

I think SlashDot would be a better place (and more worth more people perusing every day) if more posters were familiar with basic tenets of reportage: "Don't bury the lead." "Answer the 5 questions in the lead." "Know no more than your stupidest reader knows." (The last quote isn't a real tenet of journalism -- I just invented it, and it is arguably baaaad advice.)

I have a friend who is a retired newspaper journalist. I wonder if I could interest him in devising some guidelines for ShashDot postings that even amateurs could apply with some improvement to the quality of their posts. Anyone enthusiastic about this?

BTW, I mean no disrespect to the original poster DrJONES. His article is otherwise useful and relevant, at least to some in the community. I'm suggesting only that SlashDot style ought be more self aware and aware of the readership...

Indeed, it has everything to do with evolution. Corn and rice and some of their weed pests have evolved according to the attempted controls of farmers. I remember learning of a weed found in Japanese rice paddies. Originally the plant looked nothing like a young rice plant, but since farmers weeded it vigorously, the weed evolved so that for some of its life cycle it resembled strongly a young rice plant, very hard to farmers to differentiate from real rice. (Sorry, references not at hand. Perhaps it was on something like PBS Nova.)

For an intelligent speculation on how larger or smaller brains might be influenced evolutionarily by nothing more than the natural environment, see Kurt Vonnegut's 1985 novel _Galápagos_.

I had thought of this same one-word comment before reading yours. But there is more to say.

That an airliner is solar powered does not require that it generate its power in real time, or even that the generation be performed by the airliner itself. An airliner could be solar powered if, for instance, it runs on stored (battery) power generate by ground-based solar-power generators.

But batteries have not yet achieved the energy/mass storage that hydrocarbon fuels achieve, so battery-powered airliners are not on the horizon.

But would not an airliner powered by more-or-less traditional hydrocarbon fuels generated by biomass fermentation be solar powered? The difficulties of this approach are trivial compared to designing an airliner powered directly by solar cells. Or even batteries.

Isn't the US Navy doing some experiments with biofuels for ships and airplanes? Hasn't this already been reported on slashdot?

The strategies to compute file lengths, then crcs, are generally wise. But they may miss the real problem.

In addition to detecting duplicate backup files, the OP ought think about how duplicates should be handled. The goal, one presumes, is to create a single tree of backed-up files where each file is represented only once, but which preserves something about the original organization of the original directory hierarchy.

I similarly have duplicate backups distributed between flash drives, burned dvd's and cdr's (some stored off site), external disks, and old-but-still-working computers and cell phones. Many of these repositories are ancient and were managed by software with odd naming conventions. But destroying that history may lose information, such as "With which camera did I take this picture?"

The easy problem is detecting duplicates. The hard problem is figuring out how to organize the resulting files into a meaningful new single tree.

There is a difference between "operating temperature" and "storage temperature".

When the ambient temperature is high, the temperature inside the device is higher (because there is thermal resistance slowing heat transfer from the device to the ambient environment) and deep inside those little plastic chips that dissipate all the heat, temperatures are higher still.

The classic harm from high temperature is that semiconductor impurities in silicon will migrate, and the other mash that makes up some other components will age and deteriorate. But if a device is turned off, the temperature inside all those sensitive components will not be higher than the usual temperature when operating. So turn off all those devices, and place the low (e.g. under vehicle seats) where temperatures will not rise quite so high.

Check the manufacturer's storage temperature specifications (although most manufacturers no longer publish technocrud like that). And of course, watch out for cosmetic components that might be aged by moderate heat that wouldn't bother silicon.

The one component where high storage temperatures are likely to cause aging is the battery. Lithium batteries are very sensitive to heat, aging much more rapidly over time when heated. So you might have to replace your batteries more often. Of course, if some devices have removable batteries, you could perhaps take them with you.

>> 'To the media, the term “hacker” refers to a user who breaks into a computer system. To a programmer, “hacker” simply means a great programmer.

I first learned the terms "hack" and "hacker" back in the summer of 1964. I don't know for sure how the meaning of the term changed so perniciously, but suspect strongly that some journalist simply misunderstood the argot. Languages evolve over time, to be sure, but the effective loss of this term of respect really toasts my muffins.

It would be really great of some interested language researcher could find the earliest recorded references to assign the original blame. Meanwhile, when referring to someone who violates computer security I try to use the term "journalist." Better compromise one of their labels than one of ours.

> Take 300 shots a day, and throw away 290.

And as your photography skills improve, you'll be able to throw away even 298 or 299 of those 300!