And, as another poster pointed out, aide workers/doctors/nurses could be vaccinated when they go into an infection zone to treat patients without risking infection themselves. Even if the immunity only lasted a few months, I think any doctor would take the occasional jab over risking Ebola because they were so hot and tired when taking the suit off that they made a small mistake and got exposed to the disease.

You're going for funny, but too many people would say that 100% seriously. As the parent of a child with autism, I resent the implication those people make that a child is better off dead from measles than "damaged" with autism. Sadly, too many people have skewed risk-benefit calculations because they hear horror stories about vaccines and haven't seen first-hand the horrors of the diseases vaccines prevent. I guarantee that an Ebola vaccine would be greeted by long lines to get the vaccine and not questions about whether 1 case in 10,000 will have some minor side effect just like nobody said "Let's hold off on that polio vaccine until it is 100% safe" back when polio was raging.

They're all in search of the next big thing. Smartphones, right now, have hit a plateau. You can tweak some feature sets here and there such as adding some additional CPU power/memory/battery life, but overall pretty much any smartphone is the same as any other smartphone. If a phone manufacturer comes out with a "more power" smartphone, all it will take is their rivals packing more power into THEIR next product to dethrone the "more power" phone. So phone manufacturers are resorting to gimmicks to get an edge on the competition. Unfortunately for the manufacturers, none of these gimmicks has caught on. And, if it did, it wouldn't be long before other manufacturers copied the gimmick, all-but-completely negating the advantage for the original manufacturer had.

The UK averages less cop shootings in a decade than the US does in a year

As much as I think that there's a gun problem that leads to shootings, I've got to ask the obvious question: How many officers are there in the UK versus the US? If there are 10 times as many officers in the US than in the UK, simple math would indicate that it would take 10 years for the UK to amass as many cop shootings as the US. If there are 100 times less police in the UK than in the US, then the UK's per-cop shooting rate would actually be higher than in the US.

And that's the big hole in "Right To Be Forgotten." You can't apply one country's (or a group of countries') laws against the entire Internet. Russia can't demand that US hosted pro-gay rights materials be taken down because they violate Russia's anti-gay laws and France can't demand that Google's United States website delist pages because French courts decided that those pages should be forgotten. For better or worse, you can't just demand that the entire Internet forget about you.

And the French court's decision essentially would mean that we would all need to abide by Russia's anti-gay propaganda laws while online despite not living in Russia. Other countries have tried applying their laws to the Internet as a whole and they always fail. You can apply your laws within your borders, but you can't declare that EVERYONE needs to follow your rules no matter where they live.

What Google is essentially saying is "When a user in the US goes to Google.com, he shouldn't get filtered results because a French court said 'Don't include these listings.'" I completely agree with Google here. If you go to Google.fr and the court said "listings for X should be filtered", then Google has no choice but to filter those rulings. (Either that, or get out of France.) The courts of one country, however, shouldn't be allowed to decide what can and can't be shown in other countries, though. If that were the case, then Slashdot would need to take down any comment that mentioned Tiananmen Square because China disapproved and any website talking about gay rights would be nixed because Russia doesn't like that. As the Google statement said, you'd quickly limit what anyone could say online because some country somewhere has probably declared such speech illegal.

Even the article doesn't mention the "privacy mess" too much. It mentions the "Wi-Fi Password Sharing" non-issue, says "by default Win10 will be sending a lot of your data from your computer to Microsoft that they never had access to before", and then references ANOTHER article that details what settings Windows 10 has that might be used for privacy invasions (but might also be used for feature enhancements). If you're going to claim that there's a privacy issue, at least give more of a summary instead of just linking to another article.

There have been incredible advances in technology (especially in battery technology) since the late 1800's/early 1900's (when ICE cars took over).

I agree that, for most people, electric car don't make sense right now. The key words are "right now", though. Electric cars will come down in price until they are price-competitive with gas models. The range will also be increased and could one day match gas cars. As for apartment dwellers, that could be a different issue, but perhaps people will get creative on how they charge.

The ideal for electric vehicles would be to have a fast charge time (around the same amount of time it takes to fill a gas car from 1/4 tank to full), long range, and a price point around that of gas cars. If all three points are hit, people would flock to electric cars and gas stations could convert into "Recharge Stations" to stay in business. The closer we get to the ideal, the more electric vehicles that will be on the road.

We've owned a home for 11 years now. (Yes, in NY.) There are definitely days where I see something's broken and I wish I could just call the landlord, say "have this taken care of", and not have to worry about the details. Then again, when we were living in our apartment, our rent would increase every year and our landlord would blame the repairs he had to make. "The central air conditioning system was broken and needed to be fixed so your rent is going up next year." (As if leaving everything broken was a valid option and he was doing us some big favor by fixing what broke.)

I completely agree. A large net is completely unrealistic. Now, an incredibly huge flyswatter... that might work.

I think the reason that people are skeptical whether or not he would survive the trip to the trial is that Snowden angered a lot of people who a) have a lot of power, b) aren't afraid to use it, and c) have been known to use said power "behind the scenes."

Would the director of the NSA walk up and shoot him in the head? Of course, not. However, it would be trivial for the director of the NSA to arrange to have the holding prison's chef "accidentally" spill some drug into Snowden's food, Snowden could wind up dead from a "self-inflicted drug overdose."

If he really wanted to torture us, he'd buy it and have Balmer help him rewrite the moderation system.

"Ugh. That post is horrible. I'm going to down-mod it." *clicks THROW CHAIR link*

If Bill Gates purchased Slashdot, wouldn't the logo be the classic "Gates as Borg" with the caption "You have been assimilated"?