I'm genuinely curious - what does Lightroom do that iPhoto on OS X doesn't? I have extensive (non-professional) photo archives in iTunes for the easy import, automatic facial recognition, ease of posting to social media etc. but if Lightroom does really awesome stuff I would certainly consider switching.

Neat idea but it misses a lot of practical problems.

Many police cars are equipped with cameras that can read via OCR your license plate (called "Automated License Plate Recognition" or ALPR) and check against a database to see if your car has been reported stolen, is reported in an Amber Alert, etc.

However, the person driving the car is a totally different issue. Let's assume that there's no requirement that you have a personal driver's license.

The officer pulls you over for speeding and he/she says, "name please?" You say "Oliver Klozoff." Without that government-issued ID you can make up any darn name you want to. That officer has no way to get you to produce your real name, even if it is Osama bin Laden and you're driving around the country touring Whataburger locations. Oliver Klozoff isn't an owner of that car? Well, your friend lent it to you for the afternoon, what's wrong with that? So without the fact that driving without a physical license is a crime, the cop has no way to figure out if you are a wanted person or not. Not a great thing for catching wanted people (see Timothy McVeigh and his traffic stop arrest after the Oklahoma City bombing for example).

On the flip side of civil liberties - the officer pulls you over for speeding and he/she takes your picture and runs it against a visual database stored by the DMV. Unfortunately, because it's nighttime and lit only by the officer's flashlight, and you grew a beard since you had your driver's license photo taken and put on some weight, you are no longer recognized as a valid driver in your state. Why not arrest you just to be sure?

You get the idea. Think of a driver's license like a form of two-factor authentication. It's not the physical card itself which is important so much as that it is a token which only you are supposed to have, which links you back to a known set of credentials at the state level which can be attached to a permission to drive, a known wants/warrants record, or so on and so forth. Just like how your physical passport isn't what is important when you enter the country - it's just a good way to get started when they scan it into a database where the real information is stored that can figure out who you are.

To me, that's part of the point. There's no amount of badgering that should make you even consider doing it. In fact, if someone is badgering you about it an you aren't reporting it to the appropriate authorities then something is wrong with your moral compass.

If you are given a US security clearance - after a significant background investigation and detailed indoctrination about exactly how important that it is that you do not tell anyone - not your wife, not your buddies, not your colleagues who don't have the same clearances - about classified material... and then someone claiming to represent a foreign power approaches you about providing classified information to them... and you even take more than half a second to say no, you should not have been in that job in the first place.

This isn't luring someone into adultery, or petty theft, or embezzling or even facilitating Marion Berry smoking crack. This is a dude straight up offering SENSITIVE US DEFENSE INFORMATION to a known frenemy (depending on who's in power this week) FOR MONEY. There is no scenario in which you are a Good Guy who just got entrapped into something you didn't really mean or didn't think was going to hurt anyone.

It's sorta like how I can be sympathetic to men whose jealous significant others hire PIs/escorts to hit on them and lure them into adultery to see if they're susceptible to cheating. But this is more like trying to bait someone into hiring a hit man to kill their wife to see if they would go for it... If you even consider it, buddy you are not a Good Guy and deserve what you get.

That sounds awesome and all, but what you're describing is not a business, it's a charity. If they want to convert themselves to a 501(c)3 and take donations like NPR does (which serves a similar niche), then I think that's awesome. But it's not a business, it's a particular type of ego-driven charity bankrolled by the super-wealthy who are happy to lose money being associated with something that gets them invited to smart cocktail parties instead of losing money on something that does things like cure malaria or provide clean drinking water. (See also: "owning professional sports teams.")

I say this as a former professional journalist myself: if your publication is losing money, never get too comfortable and keep your LinkedIn up to date. Because your self-indulgent ownership today may change to an actual business person owner tomorrow, and if they ever do, shit is going to turn 180 degrees immediately in every way you care about. And don't be surprised or upset when it does.

A fair comment and I appreciate your civility (pretty rare on Slashdot these days).

My viewpoint is due to a specific bias of my own: I was a Journalism major in college and worked as a reporter at a couple "mainstream media" (EEEEEVIL!) newspapers before moving into technology. I'm not a deluded idealist viewing journalism from the outside with the "wool pulled over my eyes," I was a practicing reporter for several years.

And you know what? I was taught in college for four years to be above all else unbiased, and I damn well tried my hardest to do that once I got out into the professional journalism world. It's certainly possible that I didn't always succeed, but I always made a good faith effort to do so. No editor ever pressured me to add a slant to my stories, or favor some advertiser or some bullshit or something like that. My paper (the Richmond Times-Dispatch) had an Editorial department that was hard-core conservative, but that group had absolutely zero influence on the actual news reporters and how story ideas were declined/accepted and how those were ultimately presented. And from talking with my former colleagues and friends who continue to be practicing mainstream journalists, that continues to be true even to this day.

If you're a TV reporter for FOX News or a writer for the Huffington Post, then yes your editor will telegraph to you the conclusion that your story is supposed to come to. But there are LOTS of other US journalism outlets where I can say from first-hand experience that bias is NOT a desired outcome, even if you see it there.

No offense - and again I appreciate the civility of your comments even if I disagree with them - but this is one area that I think my several years of practical experience provides me with a little more direct insight than whatever "People's History of..." you have read that posits otherwise.

Perhaps not in your experience. For other people, including me, the opposite has shown to be true.

But you know what? Everyone has their own version of the plural of anecdote being data, so we will all work from our own individual experiences and be justified in doing so. But I wouldn't be so certain about identifying macro trends in your personal experience here.

Wow.

Just to recap here, you have basically: 1.) said Apple stuff sucks in the middle of a thread almost designed to be a flame war invitation; 2.) refused to explain why you think Apple sucks with any specificity; and 3.) given a follow-up response akin to "I don't have to tell you why I don't like New Zealanders. Just Google 'New Zealand' and read until your heart is content.'"

You, sir/madam either 1.) win the Internet brilliant troll of the year award; or 2.) should ask yourself why you bothered posting not just one comment but also two responses as of this writing where you could have just explained your problems with Apple in less text than it took to explain why it was beneath you to explain why you wouldn't explain what your problem with Apple was why you wouldn't NOMAD DOES NOT COMPUTE.

If that's what you think, you are reading/watching/listening to the wrong news outlets. It's the same reaction I have when I hear people say "there's no good music anymore" - that's completely untrue. If the radio isn't playing the stuff you like, there are lots of other places you can find good stuff if you just invest the time to look.

There are plenty of high quality news organizations out there today which are dedicated to providing an even-handed, responsible professional journalism. It's true that, as was famously once said, "the only truly objective journalism is sports box scores." And you can - especially if you are looking for it - find some degree of bias in anything. But there's a 180 degree gap from the minor and inadvertent bias you may find in an Associated Press, BBC World, New York Times (or even Al Jazeera - the American not Qatari version) article versus the intentional bias you find in a FOX News or Huffington Post story.

To your previous point, though, I agree that bias-free reporting is not necessarily dull but is - by design - afraid to answer the "why" of the "Five W's" for fear of losing balance. I try to mix my news reading between (generally) unbiased news from NYT or BBC with biased but (from my viewpoint) more insightful sources like The Economist or Slate.

However, I am strongly opposed to the frequent Slashbot trope that "there is no professional journalism left, it's all biased" and hence there is in general no credibility gap between what the NY Times prints in its newspaper about the Ruble crisis vs. what "iwantputinsbaby07" posts to Twitter. Professional journalism is real, and it will always have a place of preferential credibility to unknown sources with unknown motivations. Meanwhile, slanted journalism will still probably generate the most clicks - but at least if you're picking your news sources to be pre-sorted to agree with your opinions, you know what you're buying.

(Puts on pedantic hat.) You are correct that the Germanic/Old English "were" survives in words like "werewolf" and, for Tolkien fans only, "weregild" (as in "This I will have as weregild for my father's death" from the Silmarillion).

"Virile," however, comes from the Latin "virilis" via French. They are kinda sorta related but not really.

This is a gross oversimplification as any language scholar can tell you, but a fun exercise for any English language speaker is to study the roots of common "vulgar" vs. "high-class" words and find that their roots map very closely to Latin vs. Germanic. Old English was - once the native Celts and Romano-Britons had been displaced - largely a relic of its "Germanic" (Angles, Saxons, Jutes) conquerors and the language of the people. After the Norman Conquest in 1066 (Normans "Nord-mann" being transplanted Vikings who learned French) the language of the nobility in England became French (which was based on Latin) for hundreds of years. While over time the two melded together, you can still (again, oversimplifying) in many cases tell the upper-class terms for things (derived from French/Latin) from the lower-class terms for things (derived from Old English/Germanic). For example:

• Lower-class English term: shit (viz. German scheisse); upper-class English term: excrement (viz. French excrement)
• Lower-class English term: house (viz. German haus); upper-class English term: mansion (viz. French maison)

It doesn't hold true in all cases but it is in general a pretty fascinating window into the evolution of the English language, FWIW.

And this hypothetical search engine makes money how again?

Part of the problem here is a very poorly written (or edited) quote in the summary. The relevant quote from TFA is:

"Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today's renewable energy technologies simply won't work; we need a fundamentally different approach." (emphasis mine)

They aren't saying that today's renewables aren't good or important. They are saying that by themselves it won't get to where it needs to be, because carbon-emitting forms of energy will always be cheaper than the renewables of today (even including incremental improvements on those technologies in the foreseeable future), and the energy industry will always try to give people what they want: the cheapest energy possible. They then go on to posit (again from TFA):

"What's needed are zero-carbon energy sources so cheap that the operators of power plants and industrial facilities alike have an economic rationale for switching over within the next 40 years"

Of course, that's a bit like saying "I don't know how, but somebody should discover magic fairy dust." But they are not saying that they have the solution to the problem; they are saying that we collectively need to invest in finding some new, unknown rabbit to pull out of the hat because our current ones will never achieve their price parity objective.

Then how would people who want their purchases to help benefit this charity know how, when and where to buy it? Part of the rationale of doing something like this is that some consumers will want to modify their purchasing decisions or timing to support a cause they find valuable.

Let's say Crucial.com was going to give a portion of the profits on all RAM purchases on a certain day to the EFF. Wouldn't you rather know when/what products that applies to, rather than have Crucial announce "hey, we gave part of our profits from yesterday to the EFF. Hope you bought then!"

Ooh, lots of dubious assertions to riposte. :-)

There is nothing illegal about charging people different rates for the same thing unless the way you do it is in violation of regulated industry rules or non-discrimination laws. It is perfectly legal for me to sell identical used cars to you for $1000 and to the next guy for $2000 because you negotiated better. It is illegal for me to charge him $2000 because he's black and $1000 to you because you're white; or for my utility to charge you $200/kWh when the PUC says the maximum retail rate is $.00068/kWh. Similarly, there is nothing wrong for Disney to tell Apple they can put a Mickey Mouse icon for free on the Apple Watch but charge Microsoft $1M to do the same thing on the Microsoft Band. So no trademark legal danger there.

Was the day-care center in question non-profit? Otherwise then, no, it is not a noncommercial use. Either way, it's not whether it's commercial or noncommercial use that matters in trademark law. If I'm Disney and a nonprofit children's shelter calls itself the "Bambi Adoption Center," they are still infringing on my trademark just as much as if they were for-profit. I could be nice and let them license the Bambi name for a penny, which is not Disney's strategy... but either way it's still actionable infringement. While commercial/non-commercial may have some meaning in OSS/CCA licensing, it means diddly squat in trademark law.