Children generally have more time in front of them and therefore are being robbed of more when killed.

Also, children generally have less of a say as to their country's political actions. In democracies, adults can vote. In non-democracies, adults could decide to protest (often risking arrest, imprisonment, or death) or engage in outright rebellion. Depending on their situation, the adults might have a small say in what their country is doing, but it's still something.

Children don't even have this. You can't expect a three year old to march on his nation's capital demanding that the President-For-Life step down because of his militaristic maneuvers. You can't think that a five year old would cast a vote for the opposition party, risking his life and pre-k education to voice his political opposition to the majority party's policies.

The worst-case-scenario with kids is that they can be (at a certain age), taken by force and drafted into a quasi-army, but that still is the adults turning the kids into soldiers, not the kids deciding for themselves that strapping bombs to themselves would be fun to do after they are finished at the playground.

Of course you are a father, you are on Slashdot!

I'm not sure how to take this (lack of tone in text can be a killer).

"Of course, you're a father" because everyone on Slashdot is a geek which means, by definition, we all live in our parents' basement and never see real women in person?

Or

"Of course, you're a father" because everyone on Slashdot is male and no mother would come here at all.

I'm not sure which I should be refuting (or neither). I don't think it's gotten to the point of "Of course, you're a father because everyone on Slashdot is a parent" yet. It would be interesting to see demographic data on how many Slashdotters were married/not married and had kids/didn't have kids. If only to help bust the "living in mom and dad's basement" stereotype.

It had entries for non-barcoded food too. I could eat a banana, enter "banana" and know just how many calories (plus fat, fiber, etc) that banana contained. I could also set up custom entries for when I cooked dinner (which is more frequent than me eating food prepared for me). If I made a taco salad, I could figure out how much one serving was and enter that. Then, all subsequent taco salad meals could use that.

I used the barcode recognition more with ingredients. Add cheese to the dish. Scan barcode, figure out how much per serving we're eating. Add pasta to the dish, scan barcode, figure out how much per serving we're eating. Add frozen veggies to the dish (which I tend to use more than fresh since they don't go bad as quickly), scan barcode, figure out how much per serving we're using. Etc.

Even if you just use estimates, you can still benefit from meal tracking. What I've found tracking apps like this cut down on is mindless snacking. The "I'll just have a handful of these... and maybe a few of those... and a couple of those..." situations that result in people wondering why they can't lose weight.

The best way to lose weight is to burn more calories than you consume. One problem is that it is really easy in our society to consume calories. You just ate a plate of whole wheat pasta with veggies. Healthy right? No, because you likely had about 3 servings of pasta.

I used MyFitnessPal to help me track my calorie intake. One helpful feature is the bar code scanner. You can scan almost any product and get the nutritional information right into your mobile device. I dropped about 20 pounds while using that.

And, just as a reminder, the FCC first enacted extremely weak Net Neutrality regulations (not Title II) that actually wouldn't have done anything. Most of the ISPs liked these "regulations", but Verizon sued to get them overturned. It was *that* case where the court basically said "If you want to do this, you need to use Title II." So the ISPs really only have Verizon to blame for these tougher rules.

Not sure about a homicide, but there have been plenty of instances of people being accosted for using cameras or smartphones to take photos of kids. In many of these instances, the people accused were actually the fathers of the kids in question, but the accusers assumed the worst because Male Taking Photo Of Child = Pervert but Female Taking Photo Of Child = Loving Mother.

Google Glass and everything Nest are useless fucking trash. Even if they somehow becomes useful in the future, they'll never be worth the invasion of privacy and security risks. Take your "IoT" and show up back up your own fucking asses.

Are you talking the same features caused by a device with a camera and network capability like a cell phone? We should ban everyone wearing cell phones on their hips because they might be filming us!

Not to mention people with dress shirts who put their phones in the dress shirts with the camera facing out. Seriously, I never got the hate over Google Glass. Yes, it was overpriced (but then again it was a glorified prototype, not a consumer release) and, yes, it could record you without your knowing, but nearly everyone walking down the street has the ability to record you without you knowing about it. Walk into a bar/restaurant? Most of the patrons there are likely equipped with devices that can secretly record you. The only difference is that this is built into a pair of eyeglasses instead of a relatively small box that could be stuck in a shirt pocket or affixed to a hip.

Sir, we found the missing plutonium. It was under a pile of socks from the dryer, car keys, and TV remote controls.

Have you ever seen a movie where the bomb was defused with 3 minutes left on the clock. No-one will be interested until its in single digits of seconds to midnight.

That's why, if I ever turn super-villain, I'll set my bombs to detonate at 3 minutes and fourteen seconds. This way, the heroes will just be starting to decide that they should disarm the bomb when it blows up.

I wasn't saying "give parents a break because parenting is hard." I said that parents naturally want to see the good in their kids and not the bad. I do recognize when my children do something wrong and I will have serious discussions with them (backed up with punishment if need be) to explain why the action is wrong, what they should have done instead, and what the consequences of the action could have been. That being said, nobody wants to think they're doing a bad job at something. Especially when it comes to parenting. (We'll leave out those "parents" - and I use the term loosely - that don't seem to care about their kids and/or actively hurt their kids. Those people don't deserve the title "Parent.")

I hate to compare parenting to the Nigerian scams, but think of this as a similar principle. If you get hooked in a Nigerian scam, your options are to a) admit you were wrong and were fooled or b) keep believing that the whole thing is true and you weren't wrong. It can be very hard for people to admit that they were wrong/fooled so they persist with option B long past the time when any objective observer would say there was the slightest possibility that they would see any return.

Similarly, in parenting, there's a drive to think of yourself as a good parent and this means (in part) thinking that you've raised your kid right. If you raised your kid right, they should be able to make appropriate decisions about what to do and what not to do. So parents can easily fall into the trap of just assuming that their kid is turning out ok while not seeing warning signs of bad activity. It's a blind spot that parents can be tempted not to check.

The mother in the article likely fell into this trap and ignored warning signs. It doesn't mean she's a bad mother. The guy who was arrested was 19. Maybe he was very respectful to her, had a steady job, and just played some games online during his free time. To her direct observation, she wouldn't have seen anything wrong. As he was 19, I wouldn't expect her to supervise his every action, which means that bad behavior could be easily missed.

Parents have a big impact in their kids' lives, but we can only do so much. When our children get older, we just need to hope that the lessons we've imparted are stronger than any bad influences they are likely to encounter.

In defense of the mother:

1) When people are arrested, their friends, family, and neighbors routinely say "I can't believe he did that. He seemed like such a nice guy."

2) Parents naturally want to see the good in their children and will ignore any bad warning signs lest their kid be anything less than perfect. (Disclosure: I'm a father of two and while I think they are mostly good kids, they are far from perfect.)

Some people are just really good at hiding their misdeeds or limiting their wrongdoings to specific areas. (e.g. Calling 911 on people playing video games.)

they just insisted on privacy safeguards and advanced notification of customers and ensuring accuracy of the list of people they would be forced to reveal the information of

That's crazy talk. Big content companies should be able to get all of the personal information of anyone they want based on the flimsiest allegation of copyright infringement!

Content company dream scenario:

Content company: "We think these people downloaded something at some point."
ISP: "Here are their names, dates of birth, address, SSN, bank account information, credit card information, and employer name."

95% of driving is mundane: Stay in your lane, signal and turn here, stop there, etc. Self driving cars will likely excel at these maneuvers at first while lagging in the less mundane tasks like: avoid that car that just cut you off, snow is obscuring the road, deer runs into the road, etc.

Do I trust self-driving cars today? No, but the thing about technology is that it is constantly being improved. The first generation of consumer model self driving cars will be glorified cruise control. You'll put in your destination and keep your hands ready to take over on a moment's notice. You might even have to do this once or twice a trip. It'll be better than human drivers in most situations, but you won't activate it (or will take over from it) during risky situations. (Similar to how you disable cruise control when you see an accident ahead of you.) Subsequent generations of self-driving cars will improve more and more until the human driver backup is no longer needed.

Once self driving cars have had a few generations, they'll be better than human drivers and people will talk disdainfully about those meatbags who insist on manually controlling their automobile.

I agree that's sleazy. Just add it to the vast pile of reasons why I don't use Facebook. My social media experience tends to be with Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, etc. Those sites don't show you content unless you explicitly say "show me what this person posts." It makes it easy to avoid what you don't like and just view what you like.