If you didn't see the article/service, it can now classify photos so you can search by something like "car" or "red".

Ooh, if they can extend that to automatically classify photos with tags like "FFM", "ladyboy", and "bukkake" I predict a HUGE market.

I've been saying this for 14 years now. Want to shove the final knife in America? Send a suicide bomber to blow up a long, crowded security checkpoint at an airport. You'll completely shut down air travel while we try to figure out how to secure the by-definition insecure side of the checkpoint. Better, send guys to multiple airports, and if you have any left send a few to sports stadiums and other places with moronic security bottlenecks. You'll see the US collectively wetting ourselves to shred the Constitution in the name of safety.

That this hasn't happened yet tells me that either the terrorists are really, really dumb or that maybe, just maybe, there really isn't an army of turban-clad boogeymen just waiting to pounce.

Dear Slashdot,

I have a sweet high-paying job that might not last forever. Rather than risk losing it at some unknown time in the future and having to take a pay cut with a new job, should I just switch careers now and guarantee that I take a huge pay cut right away? PS., I'm barely scraping by now. I couldn't possibly support my family on less than the almost quarter million a year that I'm making now.

That several coffee a day habit could translate very well between 1000k-5000k thousand a year depending where you live and where you drink it.

I know trendy coffee places are expensive, but no matter where you are $1 billion a year is a serious habit!

Sounds similar to us. We're not totally open, we're broken up into rooms of about 6-10 engineers each. This is pretty much ideal for the way I work. I can talk with (and overhear) people working on the same projects I am, but I'm not bothered by lots of extraneous stuff. The rest of the office -- phone booths, conference rooms, alternative spaces, flexible hours -- all sound similar. We've always had engineers working remotely, so the concept of working somewhere outside the actual office isn't foreign to anyone. People work from home, or from coffee shops, or from wherever all the time with no advance notice. In the summer I often decide it's just too damn nice a day out so I head home, make a big pitcher of lemonade, and work from my deck overlooking the woods.

I think that's actually the key. They office layout itself isn't terribly important; the important part is that everyone's treated like grown-ups.

I find it a bit strange Guiness Records only examined the footage before granting the record.

Wait, seriously? The Guinness endorsement was the only thing giving this a shred of credibility in my mind. If they really only saw the video then shame on them. They've been suckered.

Wish I knew for sure. This bit from the CBC site is the only thing I've seen which suggests that all the Guinness Book people saw was a video:

"Duru had been working on a prototype for about five years and last August filmed himself flying his new machine over the lake, which is about 130 kilometres north of Montreal, before contacting Guinness.

"Guinness verified the footage and announced the record on its website Friday."

No vertical tabs 10 years after widescreen displays started spreading widely?

Yeah, Tree Style Tabs is the killer feature that's keeping me with Firefox. There are a couple of Chrome extensions that kinda-sorta-not-quite do the same thing, but nothing that just moves the damn tabs to the side so I can have a dozen open and still read them. I'm probably stuck with FF until Chrome has a suitable substitute or FF breaks it entirely.

Consider this: They're paying you to spend a full day at each gas station doing firmware updates. If they care about the time it takes you should be able to get them to spring for a bunch of laptops so you can load all the pumps at once, properly, without resorting to VMs and trickery. Issuing you 16 laptops so you can do three or four stations in a day is a hell of a lot cheaper than hiring three or four more technicians as babysitters. Argue your case from that perspective and don't bother with the half-ass solution. If they don't go for it, then find a good book and keep doing it one pump at a time. They've decided that you're worth the expense.

This is pretty much the thing, at least here in Michigan. For the sake of argument I won't even accuse politicians of spending on pet projects -- schools are partly funded by gas taxes. Average fuel economy is going up, which means that average gas tax revenue is going down. We just had a big referendum to try to fix the problem. Trouble is, everything is interconnected. Change the law so more gas tax goes to roads and the schools suffer, so you raise the regular sales tax to restore funding to the schools, but the sales tax just goes into the general fund, so you need rules to assure that schools don't get stolen from by other general-fund needs, and so on. What we got was a huge clusterfuck of interconnected laws that nobody could make head or tail of. What was presented as a vote to fund road repair turned into a major shell game and nobody was sure where the money was actually going to end up. People didn't just vote "No", they voted "Hell, no!"

Anyway, I think the Oregon idea has merit. There is a privacy issue, but they're addressing that: "Drivers will be able to install an odometer device without GPS tracking." It might still track out-of-state miles, though. They could easily add a GPS that records nothing and is only used to trigger when the odometer should be running. The state would get the number of in-state taxable miles and no other information. They could also make a sliding rate based on vehicle weight, and even give a further discount for hybrids and electric vehicles if they wanted to provide environmental incentives. It could work without getting all Big Brothery.

There are many reasons to oppose the death penalty, but cost isn't one of them. If killing someone costs more than locking them up and keeping them alive for 50 years, you're doing it wrong. You're doing it really, really wrong.

You could argue that the high cost is due to decades of appeals and other legal obstacles, but that's not a fault of the death penalty. That's a fault of a society that can't commit to using the death penalty. If you're going to argue on the basis of cost you shouldn't be arguing against the death penalty, you should be arguing in favor of it, and against the interminable appeals process.

(For the record, I generally oppose the death penalty. But if it's going to be an option it should be carried out swiftly. And it should be a damn sight cheaper than jailing someone forever.)

I woke up to five "We auto-reloaded your card" e-mails from Starbucks overnight.

I have a serious question: I assume you must see some advantage to using a refillable gift card or you'd just use your regular credit card in the shop. So what's the benefit? Discounts? Frequent drinker points? Mind boggling convenience? I'm just trying to understand the appeal.

Pixel art holds zero nostalgia for me. Give me something that looks good, and plays great, and I will buy it. Pixelated graphics do NOT look good.

Amen, brother! Pixel art was great when that's all that was possible. Compared to what's possible now it's just plain ugly. Oh, sure, there are a very few modern games that really benefit from the retro style. Good for them. Most, though, merely do it because good art is hard. Really good pixel art is hard, too, but barely passable pixel art is a lot easier than barely passable HD art. Nothing says "not enough budget to hire an artist, just have the programmer do it" like pixel art.

Most "glorious 8-bit retro style" games would look a lot better with HD artwork. It doesn't have to be photo-realistic; stylized cartoony artwork is great in most cases. Let's just admit that the choice to use pixel art is almost always a budgetary decision, not one driven by the higher artistic vision.

(Ghost Control, I'm looking at you! Put your game in the XCom: Enemy Unknown engine and it would rock!)

It occurs to me that a feasable plan for a sustainable mars colony is worth a *HECK* of a lot more than just $5K....

Don't worry, they're not actually looking for ideas. They have tons of ideas. They have people whose whole job is to come up with ideas. They have an army of very knowledgeable volunteers in groups like The Planetary Society who'd write detailed thousand-page treatises on solid waste recycling on Mars, in exchange for just knowing that the human race has an off-world outpost. They're not lacking for ideas.

This contest is just a way to get people to start thinking about a serious effort to go to Mars, as opposed to the Mars One suicide fantasy mission. $15k worth of prizes is cheap advertising. And maybe, just maybe, if enough people start talking about going to Mars our eternally-opportunistic politicians will decide it's a safe bandwagon to jump on and cough up some real support.

Because the guy kidnapping your daughter might actually be that boyfriend she trusted and knows her well and that she has to phone daddy every Monday or he'll get suspicious, so he lets her but listens in. She might need that way to make herself known without anyone else noticing.

You mean the boyfriend she trusted well enough to tell, "My dad is so lame! Not only does he make me call him once a week, he actually gave me a safeword. Can you believe it? I have to be super careful never to say the word 'trousers' or he'll go apeshit and turn into Liam Neeson." That trusted boyfriend? Good thinking.