If this tech is ever adopted, I doubt every single road would be replaced with them. Even now, not all of our roads are paved with asphalt, some are concrete, we still have some old brick ones, we even have roads that are just dirt. If this tech proves reliable, it will get installed in places where it makes the most sense from a cost/benefit perspective.

My free time is valuable. I may not be actively earning money, but that doesn't mean it lacks value.

Granted, thanks to modern technology I can spend my time stuck in traffic in the exact same way I'd spend it at home, reading and posting silly comments on Slashdot.

Asia is a fairly large and diverse region. India is considered part of Asia as is most of the middle east. The vast majority of Russia is also considered part of Asia.

Using "Asian" as a racial identifier is ultimately silly given that the concept of race is primarily driven by physical descriptions, which vary by a lot throughout Asia.

Diversity is not synonymous with Affirmative action. Hiring a woman just to say you hired a woman is Affirmative Action. Hiring a woman to gain the experiences and perspectives that she has is diversity. This doesn't necessarily apply to the obvious physical indicators such as black, woman, asian, etc. I'm a white male, but I can guarantee you that I have more in common with a black male from upstate New York than I do with a white male from Mississippi, and that black male from upstate New York has even less in common with a black male from Africa than he does with myself and the white male from Mississippi. Diversity is about recognizing this and using it to build a stronger team. The downside is that in promoting diversity people often focus on physical characteristics as being the only aspect of diversity, when those are really only indicators. I once asked a group of new employees if they felt they were a diverse group, and they said "no" because there was only one black person in the group (and all were male). Yet each one had a different religion, some had no religion, they were all from different parts of the country and each one had a different professional experience level. Granted, a racist, sexist or other bigot could probably twist the above to justify only hiring from their preferred demographic, others will recognize that pushing for greater diversity in the workplace, especially for companies which serve areas larger than a small town, can strengthen their business. A diverse marketing team will do a better job of marketing to a variety of markets than a homogenous one would. A diverse design team can leverage their cultural differences in the appearance and interface of their products. Similar statements could be made for engineering teams, sales teams, research teams, etc.

As has been said elsewhere, if your companies demographics don't match the general population that doesn't necessarily mean your workplace isn't diverse, though it may indicate social problems somewhere in the chain between hiring and grade school. Maybe your hiring practices are biased. Maybe the demographics of your applicant pool don't match that of the general population. Maybe that is because universities are biased, maybe only a certain demographic is actually applying to those university programs. Maybe that is because of problems in high schools or earlier, are teachers pushing students based on their race/gender/preference/etc? Are parents? Is the media? Is income a factor?

Just because the dialogue surrounding a topic is politically charged doesn't mean there isn't value to it.

I concur, with an extension to mathematics, programming, and spreadsheets.

In this house, we do not use the F-word!

But only 80MB?

No Excel file should use less than the system's available RAM.

This happens all the time where I work. A coworker of mine recently made a lateral transfer and inherited a spreadsheet that was being used to track all of the personnel in the department (over 200 people). At first he was just going to roll with it, until other users of the spreadsheet kept breaking things (the guy who he inherited it from used to just play clean up after everyone else). Now we have a database because you know, proper tool and all, user control, etc

Odd anecdote (a partial reply to you and someone else way up above):

These days I tend not to buy games when they are first released unless I think I'm really going to enjoy it (enough so that I'm willing to risk getting bit, usually reserved for certain developers and franchises). Ubisoft is not on that list, and Watch_Dogs is a new property so neither of those circumstances apply, it just seemed like something I'd dig.

I pre-ordered via Steam, preloaded prior to release and was playing within an hour of it being unlocked last night. Some notes: According to NVIDIA, my GPU (650M) is below the minimum required specs (GTX460), yet the game was playable at medium settings (didn't check actual FPS, but when I say playable I mean frame rate was fluid and nothing seemed missing graphics wise). I didn't even bother checking for driver updates (of which there was one) until after I got done playing (knowing my luck, it will now enforce that minimum spec and be unplayable).

Only played through the first hour or so of the game, some of the dialogue seemed a bit wonky, but the gameplay was fun, "hacking" traffic lights and in the middle of a car chase is a fun take on this style of game, though I could see novelty wearing off after awhile, as it's a rather simple system (hacking multiple traffic lights in a planned route would have been cooler). Initial impression is good, but I know it's possible to go downhill from there (I'm looking at you Assassin's Creed).

One issue I have with it is that it seems like every guard you run into on a mission so far is literally a "bad guy". These are guys working security for a major corp, and it feels like everyone of them have something negative in their profiles (child pornographer, drug addict, arsonist). Granted, I've only done one combat oriented mission so far, so maybe it's unique to that mission. I'm not sure how many people would agree with me, but I think seeing profiles like "Father of two", "Soup Kitchen Volunteer", "College Dropout" would give at least some players pause in how they would handle the situation. Overt combat or stealth? Do I really want to kill a retired kindergarten teacher? Then again, given another recent discussion here on /., I'm probably just weird.

I would argue that on an individual basis, the industrial revolution made us easier prey when placed in an environment outside our normal social centers (for those of us in industrialized countries anyway). We could even go as far back as the dawn of agriculture and urbanization, the technologies that enabled us to live in isolation from the rest of nature have made individuals easier prey when forced to leave the comforts of our population centers. We've been making clothing and weapons far longer than a 150-200 years since the industrial revolution and far longer than the 10000-12000 years since the oldest known agricultural revolution.
We breed and mature relatively slowly compared to most other species, to reproduce faster than we are killed requires us to be able to defend ourselves against potential predators over a long period of time. Our brains enabled that.

These revolutions have enabled many individuals to isolate themselves from potential predators, as those individuals do not have to learn the skills to deal with them, they would be at a disadvantage if forced to. That doesn't mean those individuals couldn't adapt themselves whether by seeking training before being placed into such a situation or by utilizing their own intellect to figure out a solution. Not everyone would be successful, but many would, and those that survived would pass on that experience to others (another advantage humans have over most other species, we can share knowledge).

So without our defining characteristics, we're easy prey? Of course! Our intellect and its products (technology, shared learning, etc) are exactly what make us tough prey. Throwing someone into the wilderness of Alaska naked is not a realistic proposition, aside from the fact that our bodies aren't adapted to the cold (again, clothing is technology, and part of who we are), it's akin to taking away a snakes fangs and throwing them back into the wild.

Some animals are born with physical defenses, some animals are born with the mental capacity to build physical defenses. The former are limited to the environments where their physical characteristics give them some advantage, the latter can put themselves in virtually any environment. Sure, some individuals would fare worse than others, but we wouldn't have spread to every corner of the planet without that ability.

If you're havin PVP problems I feel bad for you son, I got 31337 problems but bein n00b ain't one.

Everyone is biased, even teachers.

When I was living in Japan, I noticed that the dialect of English spoken by my Japanese friends depended on what their teacher spoke natively (usually from an adult conversation school). Though I also noticed that the further removed from the school they were, the more they tended to mix the dialects together as they're English speaking friends tended to come from all over as opposed to one specific country or region. Languages evolve, I'm sure the split between British and American English began the day the first colonists landed in what is now the states. Same goes for Australia, they just got a later start.

Additionally, many of the differences (at least in regard to spelling) seem to depend on which dictionary became popular in each country after the Americans split from the British. Of course, as stated by others, neither dialect is the same as it was 200 years ago, asking which one is "proper" or "correct" is rather pointless, and while different, unless you're loading up on regional slang, speakers from both countries typically have no problem understanding each other.

For some reason this reminds me... I've been working on a Mathematics degree in my spare time and when I have the money, most of the classes I've taken have been on-line. The school I go through is a regular regionally accredited public university that uses Pearson for their texts, and depending on the instructor/professor, offers online courseware as well. Most of my professors didn't bother with the online courseware and just assigned problems out of the book in the traditional fashion, which were then scanned an uploaded or typed up using LaTeX.

When I hit multivariable calculus, the professor decided to do everything through the Pearson website, homework an exams. This was obnoxious. The HW and tests were automatically graded as they were submitted and it was very particular about the answers. You could be off by one in the thousandths place due to the calculator or software you used for the final calculation and be marked wrong, where a human grader probably would have marked you correct, since at that level it's more about problem solving ability rather than calculation ability (again this was multivariable calculus, not arithmetic, so being off by 0.001 when dealing with basic differential equations involving trig and exponentials is generally not a big deal, especially when you don't have that many significant figures to start with).

At first glance I thought that problem was a bit silly, but that was mostly due to the notation. In my opinion, now that I've had some time to digest it, that example is an introduction of both algebraic and iterative concepts much earlier, which are an effective and efficient way to break down complex problems (even if complex just means bigger number in some cases).