Your law may not be properly upheld in practice but that does not change the situation of Germany being in the very small club of countries where the art of street photography is effectively illegal or at least very cumbersome.

Yes, and they keep constantly weeping about all the street photography they miss out. Well, actually, they don't. It seems they like their law like that. For some reason, people assume that street photography, or being able to shoot photos of whoever you want, is a right nobody would object to. Well, I do, especially in times of facebook, and it seems I am not alone.

Things like google glass belong, as far as I am concerned, banned, and its use in public places punishable by jail. In the same vein, cell phones should be forbidden from having a camera.

There is this thing with privacy. For some reason, everybody is for it as long as it is not them who have to respect it.

The best tools in the worst hands are far worse than the worst tools in the best hands. Yelling for tools is a specious argument. Someone has to do the work, and that someone may well bone the job.

A similar argument was put forward against the use of seat belts in cars. It just does not hold water.

The point of safer tools is to keep the reasonably good programmers from shooting themselves in the foot. Because as good as they may be, they are human and make mistakes. C needlessly invites a lot of mistakes, and even good programmers fuck up in C all the time.

Again one needs MOTIVATED AND QUALIFIED eyes AAAAAND good QA and test cases.

Perhaps using a safety aware language like Ada would be helpful too. C is known to be brittle, yet people insist in writing all sorts of mission critical code in it. I really wonder why.

The more troubling element of your claim is that regulation somehow solves the problems. What if a regulator makes a mistake?

You make it sound as if regulation was something completely exotic. Regulation actually exists, and there is plenty of it. To answer you question: If regulators make mistakes, they are eventually corrected. Happens all the time.

When it comes to something like donating money to help poor kids, I don't care who is doing it or why.

This is myopic at best. Part of the reason corporations get away with so much is that there exist people who are happy to let them off the hook as soon as they spend a little on charity.

The issue is that by giving a little to poor kids, this behemoth of a company can get away with the continuing destruction of the neighborhoods where there is affordable housing. It really is a PR move that does not solve any problems on a medium to long timescale. It is important to understand that charity is the sort of thing that just perpetrates problems and is only good as a stopgap. It would be much better if things could be aranged in such a way that charity wasn't necessary.

while we can argue the merits of AGW all day long that isnt what I saw here. I saw a smug son of a bitch tell an owner to go fuck himself.

No, the owner went way too far. Being an owner does not entitle you to behave like a pig.

[link] Has some relevant information.

Thanks for the link. I find it especially interesting how careful you need to be to not risk getting robbed. See this email on the bitcoin dev list for some details. Among other things, it permeates that the problems that bit MtGox haven't been solved conclusively.

Clearly, the average person on the street should stay clear of things like bitcoin, because you really have to understand the protocol and know exactly what you are doing. The folks at MtGox surely spent some thought on this, and now look at this fuckup. They are in huge trouble right now.

Do you have a right to an attorney in a constitution-free zone? Do you have any rights at all?

It might be tangentially interesting in this regard that, technically, all of britain is a constituion free zone.

Also, you do not have many rights even outside of those buildings. The UK has been steadily degenerating into a police state out of a SciFi movie.

If you tried before December 21, 2012 that was a pre-release. The 0.17.0 release was on Doomsday.

Well, I tried 0.17.0 and, heck, it managed to freeze my display. That didn't happen to me for years nor did it happen since. And lots of other things kept crashing.

Many of the themes were unmaintained, and the black one that came bundled had this gross faux-racecar aesthetics of a "pimp my ride" episode gone wrong. Well, IMO, anyway. But I didn't manage to get the others working. You could claim that it was my fault, but frankly, I don't think so. And I will not install a special distro just to use WM, because I actually work on my computer.

That said, I'll try again with 0.18.0. The promise of E is too good, even though the realization isnt (IMO).

It's not always laziness. I added outgoing filters to my routers so that it only allowed source addresses from my network. That was great at stopping DOS attacks, but as I found-out the hard way, several of my customers were sending outbound traffic with source addresses not on my network.

Interesting. What where they doing?

Oh, and it has AWD standard, and all sorts of fancy electronics to keep those gullwing doors (because that's what those are called, Elon) from whacking into stuff.

What's wrong with AWD?

The gullwing doors, however, really look like a stupid idea. Sure, they look great, but I would be surprised if they are anything but inconvenient unless you have lots of parking space.

If by "computer" you understand "general purpose / user programmable computer", then the differences are easy to explain. Neither the wi-fi card nor the smartphone have a built-in general purpose programming language/environment for the user to play with.

At least for android, downloading the sdk and running your first app on a phone is a matter of less than an hour (up to bandwidth limitations).

For the wifi card - well, it depends on your determination. It is possible to get root on the linux that runs on it, and since it has at least sh, you can program it.

Seriously - in a western society where everyone is well fed and healthy and has access to 24/7 entertainment there is nothing vital that (non health related) technology or science can add to our existence - its all toys, gadgets and gizmos that are a brief amusement until they get tossed in landfill and then we all go out and buy the next piece of crap.

That's not entirely true. There is a lot of cancer to be cured, and cured painlessly. Having a longer period of livable life would be very desirable, which includes delaying decrepitude as well as making old age more livable. There is a lot of sientific advance possible and desirable in those areas.

A piece of robot kit able to navigate a typical human dwelling would be a fantastic achievement upon which a lot could be built, not just vacuum cleaners. That said, I don't believe that you can make breakthroughs happen just by sprinkling money on scientists, especially a lump sum like this 5 million pounds.

We are contributors of stories and comments and "News for Nerds, stuff that matters".

Without us Slashdot is just another lame webscraper.

The kind of strident and petulant arrogance reflected in this and other similar comment makes me look forward to the slashcott, when all the morons like you just stay away. If you take a story this one, and substract the ant-beta vandalism from the comments, you end up with a very high level discussion forum.

And to the people suggesting usenet as an alternative: hell yeah, go ahead and have fun.

As to linkdin, I can't comment as I just joined yesterday. Looks OK. Found a few folks that I hadn't seen in years. What scared me a little is that they want me to import my address book, like that, unfiltered. But given the nature of modern employment, I see little alternative to being a member, unfortunately.

I see that as a major problem. Someone looking for a job has no choice but to engage in the dubious customs of the prospective employers. It really is a bit of good luck that the linkedin people don't abuse their power more, the way facebook does it.

...if they catch you running an illegal operation using Bitcoins, the necessary bribe to the authorities just got bigger.

Sure, and that is indeed an additional cost when doing business with bitcoins. That's what many libertarians that like bitcoin are unaware of: risk has its costs, and many people and organization have a low tollerance for risk. Especially needless risk, and few actually need bitcoin.

It is possible to outlaw cryptocurrency. It doesn't mean the state can stop it, just that it becomes very risky to use, which does diminish its use.

Speaking of libertarians. Where are all the property-is-everything, guns-and-freedom, company-defending people now? My opinion on the beta is, yes, it sucks. But do you guys really think you own this site?

While I enjoyed slashdot the way it was, I don't see any reason to pretend that the "community" only has positive attributes. The senseless vandalism of the last two days is disgusting and a case in point. Is this really the community a for profit company wants to be based uppon? After what has happened recently - why would anyone run a site with such a crazy and spiteful following?