I lived in LA a few years ago, and I remember there being plenty of places to walk in LA (few roads without sidewalks), so long as you don't mind the stares you inevitably get for not being in a car.

That varies tremendously by neighborhood, especially depending on when the neighborhood was built. Most places where the street network was put in before WWII have good sidewalks. Some cities kept at it after the war, but lots of places started treating them as optional or as afterthoughts. In my area, I rarely need a sign to tell when I'm walking across the Pasadena city limits because the sidewalks in Pasadena are much better than the ones in surrounding communities.

Geography is the core problem. There simply aren't many good routes between the San Fernando Valley and the LA basin, and the best routes are already filled with freeways. Not to mention that the routes for any new freeways would run through extremely pricey neighborhoods that would make them both politically and financially impractical, and that the construction would take a very long time even if/when those hoops were jumped through.

It would be a much better idea to build a light rail line paralleling the 405- call it the Sepulveda Line- from the Orange Line in Van Nuys down to the Green Line near LAX or even the Blue Line in Long Beach. It might need to tunnel under Sepulveda Pass to keep the grade reasonable, but it would let you put in more new capacity for the amount of space consumed than any freeway alternative.

If you were going to ask a "someone" how they meant to define "derived work", you would ask Congress, not the author(s) of one out of a million contracts which happen to make use of that term.

You're right that it's upsetting that (mostly) people who don't really work with copyright would end up answering it, but that's the nature of law, or at least until you start electing[/appointing/etc] authors. (Cynic: or until those people start funding election campaigns.)

It's only after you have determined that something is a derived work, that you go study licenses. Until that point, licenses are irrelevant.

Intel was still making some Atom CPUs with only 32 bit support as recently as IIRC 2012. An Atom is generally a pretty good choice for a FreeNAS box, since just about the only thing that will even touch multithreaded operation is the NFS server (or Plex, if you've hacked that in).

You have a point, that name could be taken the wrong way. You could use a code-name that describes it's benefits while avoiding that problemmatic pronunciation. How about: ""Another Plug-in Proc Succor"?

Thus spake sexconker, on advertising-supported Slashdot, which he has been reading and posting to for five years.

I've commented about this in the past, I think strong AI will be what allows us to take the "great leap forward". However, I don't expect us to have some general purpose AI. Instead I see us generating a domain specific AI that becomes superior to humans in it's understanding.

A good example might be to give an AI all the data from the LHC and then ask questions like "Does this data demonstrate the existence of X particle", "Design an experiment using the existing design of the LHC that would most likely generate X particle"

That same approach could be applied to any number of fields.

Lord of the Fries is great. What's even cooler is that most of those games now out of print are available as Print-N-Play PDFs on their website.

As for Kill Dr. Lucky, Titanic games licensed it and produced a really nice version of it. When my original KDL game fell apart from use I bought this and tucked in all the paper expansions.

In practice, a certificate is nothing more than a long password

Fail. A certificate contains a public key. This is nothing like a password. You're thinking of a private key. The whole point of a certificate is that you can prove your identity to someone without sending them your password.

Unlike the password in somebody's head or even on a sticky note behind the monitor, these certificate files can often be stolen remotely!

Double fail. Firstly, nobody actually steals certificates. Certificates are public. When someone says something was signed with a "stolen cert", what they actually mean is "stolen private key the public part of which is contained in a certificate signed by a trusted third party", but that's a mouthful, so we simply and say "stolen cert".

Secondly, private keys can and absolutely should be protected with a password! Or they can be kept in special hardware. However, as you may have noticed, Sony got pwned pretty hard so presumably whatever private key was stolen either had no password, or they were able to just keylog the password when it was used.

These people are a joke.

The joke is on you ..... certificates are not a replacement for passwords and if you think they are, you didn't understand what they're used for.

So... people who play Everquest or own off-brand prosumer content creation software?

I've said this before on Slashdot, but now is the time that I will say it again: I consider the fact that I have ascended a wishless Tourist more of an accomplishment than my bachelor's degree.

To expand on your list:

Carcassonne (this is a classic along with Settlers)
Ticket to ride (maps for US, Europe, Africa, Asia, etc...)
Kill Dr. Lucky
Quantum
Five Tribes
Takenoko
Edo

Cooperative games:
Pandemic
Lord of the Rings
Red November
Forbidden Desert

They're talking about building a rocket whose first launch is in 14 years. Yeah, I know it takes a long time to engineer something complex like a HL rocket, but I think in this case they're hedging their bets. A valid strategy might be to just go slow work up a design and then watch what SpaceX and NASA does and modify their design based on the lessons learned from those HL systems.

It's not a bad way to go, but it also means in the short term no Taikonauts will be leaving LEO...

More news (seems this story is unfolding right now) - apparently the driver did NOT have a prior conviction for rape at all, but in fact had only been arrested due to an accusation. So it seems that the first possibility was the correct one, and there's really nothing that could have been done here (unless you believe anyone should be able to ban anyone else from being a taxi driver for life with nothing more than an accusation).

W.R.T background checks, someone on Twitter has found a photo of a notarised police certificate stating the guy has no criminal record. So either whoever reported he has one is lying, or the police verification process in India is as unreliable as people say it is.

Regardless, I expect it will make little difference in the court of public opinion.