Ubisoft made the equivalent of a Record Player Juke Box that requires your music player to have a modern equivalent of a telephone line hooked up to it.

When you want to buy some music, you find a retailer, and you buy the product from the store, who issues you a slip of paper with a single use coupon with a code printed on it, or you call up a retailer and order on the phone, then they give you the coupon code to write down after your credit card is charged.

The code allows you to go home, turn on your Juke box. You enter the code, and the Juke box uses your telephone line (modern digital equivalent) to fetch your song.

Because the music recording company is concerned about someone stealing your coupon, or your credit card coming back declined later, Your Juke box is required to make a phone call, every time you want to play a song, just to make sure that the coupon was good and not fraudulently copied or stolen.

One day the Juke box music recording company thought it would be a good idea to pick some preferred "favorite" stores in certain areas that were having a harder time selling the merchandise, so they would offer these stores a discount on the music coupons, and the stores could have a great big sale on their products, as long as they sell enough units directly to ordinary people.

Some other enterprising young chaps caught wind of the sale and ordered a very large amount of music, then brought it to their own stores to sell at a discount.

The music recording companies are very upset, because the discount is hurting their preferred stores in areas where their product can sell at higher prices, so to penalize the young chaps, they have talked with their preferred discount retailers to get a list of the codes purchased and report all their coupons as stolen, so the Juke boxes will not be able to accept them, and all that store's customers will have to bring back the product for a refund.

Do you want to label foods with foreign DNA added from other plants, insects and animals (or even entirely created).

That would make sense. Instead the survey is for food containing any DNA, so Tomatos would always have to be labelled, even if there were no peanut genes........ that is, unless the Tomato were non-biological synthetic and sterile, to avoid having any DNA-containing surface bacteria.

What about the employees breaking the law? Are they permitted to release them? Alter their policy of violating the law?

The new owners will of course appoint a new management, who will have authority to make the changes desired; the old management as a whole retained for a time in advisory capacity only, of course some managers not supervising the sales/marketing/telemarkting departments might be kept for the new management.

Those managers related to the abuse, stripped of all authority and credentials, transferred to a partner company (The McDonalds across the street) and forced to remain on and work full time in the lowest-level job available for 15 years, in order to avoid criminal prosecution.

They knew the law and they knew how many calls they were making...

They should fine them $1000 per call * 57 million calls = $57 billion.

Prohibited from releasing any employees or managers, altering policies, disposing of any property, or stopping any ongoing business operations in order to pay any portion of the fine. Any amount that cannot be paid in cash within 5 business days, to be settled by constructing a trust and transferring all remaining equity in the company to the trust, with the government assigned secure debt convertible in part or in whole to common shares on demand at any point in time, having value equilvalent to the greater of the number of shares valued at the deficit amount today and the number of shares valued at the deficit amount on the day of conversion.

I agree. It makes more sense to give all blind people car detectors than to make all cars noisy.

I don't know. In my state, there is a special law for pedestrians who are in a wheelchair or blind being led by a guide dog or carrying a metallic or white walking stick.

Drivers are required to ensure their safety, and they are guaranteed right of way at all times, even though not all pedestrians get that priority, and if you hit a blind person crossing, you are essentially going to jail.

My problem is, always starting from scratch has become too expensive for most customers. I see more and more online adaptive solutions that seem to be more flexible

Obviously, a solution from scratch is more expensive to develop than a templated one.

If you can throw up a cookie-cutter solution that satisfies the customer, it will be to your advantage for a good percentage of cases.

For customers that need high quality tailored code from scratch, that is just fine, but it's a different kind of project, and obviously the price to the customer should be much much higher. And you certainly can afford to do it, if you are being paid properly.

The catch would be customers who want Almas Caviar at canned tuna prices.

Exactly, dont like the political/religious message so flag it false and less people will see it.

If they want to go Slashdot mod style, they should offer a dropdown with multiple different 'false' tags.

As in, multiple different statements you can apply to a post, and your friends should be able to see how many friends applied different labels:
(1) Awesome content
(2) Interesting
(3) Very Funny
(4) Agree 100%
(5) Disagree with this
(6) Inaccurate Information
(7) Partisan political bullshit
(8) False and Dangerous
(9) Clickbait
(10) Scam/Bogus offer or contest
(11) Broken link, or cannot view content
(12) Page says you have to 'like' before you can see content (13) Links to malicious software, adware, or security attack
(14) Common Misconception
(15) Suspected Hoax
(16) Definite Scam
(17) Fraud or phishing attempt

the average third world drone is most likely of the variety limited to 500 feet and maybe full bicycle groundspeed. The F-35 on the other hand...

So is this really a military need?

What's scary is not necessarily military use of these, but possible terrorist use of these.

Imagine some terrorists launching a large swarm of cheap low-flying drones in NYC with programming to seek out large groups of people and armed with high yield explosives and capable of putting out large amounts of shrapnel relentlessly all throughout the highly populated areas of the country.

I would find that to be my greatest worry.

It may be more of a domestic security need to have some special defenses than a military need.

My plan is to install a 15ft high wire mesh completely surrounding my yard and gate and underneath my roof to block IR, Radar, X-Rays, and other RF signals.

Within my yard, I will generate disruptive signals which the mesh will fully contain but prevent the usage of any kind of drone or bug or other wireless device inside the shielded area.

Surely that should help discourage this kind of privacy invasion?

I understand the desire for students to learn about datatypes and working in a strictly typed language; however, it is not the essence of computer science.... it is a language convention. It is not fundamental to programming that you declare these things; it is a special requirement of certain languages that you provide a compile-time declaration.

To meet arbitrary outside requirements to learn about how to work in a static typing system; I would suggest having students learn the basics of another language such as Go, Objective C, C, or C++. While 95% of their assignments will be done in Python.

Or even Common LISP or Scheme might be a good second language, since it will require variable declaration as well, and it will give a chance to show examples of the functional approach.

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

~~Edsger Dijkstra

Most people don't want to become insurance experts or hope that their circle of friends is clued up enough to protect them.

If not for government regulation, both explicitly in complicated arcane rules, and implicitly in the form of allowing ludicrous litigation, liability, and protecting unions, then the cost of both replacing the car and providing healthcare would be so low, that a year's worth of auto insurance would cost $100.

Since it would cost about $2500 to buy a brand new SUV, and a week's stay in the hospital with all the medical attention required to address serious injuries from an accident would still be less than $3000. You could save up 4 years worth of premiums and stop buying any insurance..... thus creating a competitive downward pressure on insurance rates!

In other words, regulations created by the government are indirectly raising costs by a factor of 20000%.

other times it means avoiding using the computing resources.

Or using different resources... such as Dropbox for file sharing, instead of file server and VPN client.

Being close contact with diapers, how this chemical might be effecting babies ?

The chemical is basically a harmless salt not too different from sodium chloride (Unless you were to start eating quantities of it), and there is not a large amount of it in a diaper, so obviously the chemical is specifically used for its beneficial affects.

Use of the chemical improves sanitary conditions and comfort for babies wearing diapers, since it reduces undesirable moisture and wetness in contact with their skin: this is a health and quality-of-life improvement and helps defend against promoting possible rashes or fungal infections of the skin by keeping the skin dryer.

In reality, the baby will be more comfortable, so they will likely be requiring a change less often, which will spare plastic from the landfills.

I think the only real alternatives would be to either use no diapers at all... monitor babies closely and make sure the diaper is changed immediately if they wet themselves in the slightest, or use porous cloth diapers.

The chemical is useful for its ability to hold water. I guess they're just trying to relate the fact that this is a newly-discovered use for a chemical that is already widely used for other purposes, and the availability to apply this commonplace substance to a hard problem was "hiding right under our nose".

It's an inspiring tale that should be encouraging to would-be inventors that there are still new innovative uses waiting to be discovered for simple everyday things.