I'm a few years younger and I have found that now that I have a good career, good income and secure finances, I get a lot more attention from the female of our species.

I'm not married but I am in a relationship with the mother of my children. She was with me when I was working my way through college and living in my grandfather's spare bedroom so I know that she's here for me and not what I have.

I'd be extremely cautious about who I'd date if I were on the scene again.

LK

There are certain feminizing elements in our society who are trying to pathologize maleness.

Boys are more likely to be diagnosed with psychological issues and medicated for doing the kinds of things that little boys just do.

We have things like California's "yes means yes" law that criminalizes what's considered normal sexuality in the rest of the country.

Some guys are just checking out "Fuck this! I'll be over here with my video games and these porn chicks who won't make me just through a bunch of stupid hoops". They never planned to have children anyway so what's the point?

LK

It seems kind of dumb to on the one hand think you'll get everyone to help populate your data for free, and on the other hand that you'll get perfectly valid data in all cases.

I consider this Rule #1 in any kind of development project: Never trust the user's input.

It doesn't matter if you told the user to select 1 to 10 and gave them a drop down box to choose the appropriate number. Don't trust that only numbers from 1 to 10 will be coming to your application. Check to make sure that the input is indeed a number and not "1; Delete from Users". Make sure that the number is within your 1 - 10 integer boundaries and not -1, 13, or 3.14159265. Only once the input has been fully vetted/sanitized should it be used.

Obviously, things get more complicated when you get up to Map Maker levels of complexity. You can't simply run IsNewDataValid(x). However, this is where you should have someone review the data for any obvious issues. It won't remove all abuses (people might sneak in graffiti using many small, innocuous-looking updates instead of one big one), but it can help stop major abuses. It also can slow down approvals of user data, but sometimes slow posting of data is preferable to letting everything through and then looking foolish when someone posts something inappropriate.

I believe the summary said that that humans were in control of the cars during at least 2 of the 4 incidents. You can't blame the self-driving car if the self-driving feature is disabled and the human takes over. That would be like blaming Google Maps for bad directions if you turn it off, take a left turn when Google had said to turn right, and wind up lost.

With a 2 out of 48 accident rate, that's 4%. Of course, that's a very small sample size. It would be interesting to see how the accident rate changes with many more autonomous cars on the road.

Except, as delt0r pointed out, there's a difference between liability for "Office crashed and destroyed my resume" and "My car's air bags deployed when we weren't involved in a crash." The former is an inconvenience so a click-wrap agreement absolving the company from any damages due to their software might be annoying but isn't life threatening. The latter involves actual lives. Car manufacturers have already been held accountable for faulty automotive systems. Self-driving will be another feature of the car like ABS and air bags. If the self-driving mechanism decides that the two lane road actually has three lanes, the car manufacturer will face a recall at best and lawsuits at worst. I don't see the courts treating a car feature like software instead of like other car features. To quote delt0r: If car makers could have had "click-wrap agreement" equivalents, they definitely would have and you'd never see any recalls. ("Thousands of our cars' ABS doesn't work when it is raining? Must be a faulty system. Oh well, they all agreed not to sue us. Those folks better pay to get that fixed.")

I'm all for reducing the penalties for copyright infringement when there's no profit motive involved. For example, someone downloads a movie via BitTorrent and shares that movie out. Mind you, I still think there should be penalties, but the $750 - $150,000 per infringement seems too high.

This case, however, is one where people are intentionally selling books that they don't own the rights to sell and not paying the legitimate author. This is piracy purely for profit and can snag people who think these are legitimate listings. THESE kinds of pirates are the ones that the original copyright infringement fees were designed for and I will feel no sorrow for them if they are fined exorbitant amounts of money.

If an ISP wants to throttle video, as long as they do it equally among all providers, that seems fair. Or to give preference to online gaming, that's fair too. As long as the ISP isn't picking and choosing, or asking for money to give a higher preference.

Network Neutrality doesn't mean that an ISP can't provide QoS and say "All video streaming packets get bumped ahead of e-mail packets." What it means is that an ISP can't say "Video packet A gets bumped ahead of video packet B because provider A paid us for 'fast lane access.'" Even more, it says that ISPs can't say "All video packets get slowed down so that our service's video packets can seem faster and so we can use our local Internet access monopoly to get people to sign up for our video services." (Look at the Comcast-Netflix speed graphs for an example of this. Netflix's speed tanked until right when Netflix decided to pay Comcast for faster access.)

Depends where you work. I don't have a work contract, just like most everyone else in the US.

You're not the person that the government is targeting in their "War on Terror." They're targeting the majority of folks who see "cool news device in TSA line... it must be keeping us safe by buzzing if a terrorist passes through" and not "invasion of privacy combined with company-government kickbacks for selecting this device."

I've found that listening to music can help. If my brain needs to switch focus for a second, it can listen to the music for a few seconds and then go right back to the task at hand. What kind of music works best varies from person to person and even day to day. Some days, I need slow songs to help calm me down. Other days, I need a more "active" song to boost my adrenaline.

That's true. For the purposes of my comment, I was assuming that the FBI were "good guys" because they keep saying they are the good guys and need a "good guys only" backdoor. Even if we make the huge assumption that they are good guys and would never abuse it, a "good guys only" backdoor would still be used by "bad guys" as well.

As a web developer, I like the Firefox/Chrome updating system also. It means that the vast majority of FireFox and Chrome users will be running the latest version of the browser. Contrast this with IE where there are 4 or 5 major versions that I need to support - each of which has wildly different compatibility with the latest web technologies. Want to use border-radius or box-shadow? Sorry, too many people are still on IE8 which doesn't support it. Want to use placeholder text in an input element or ranged input elements? IE8 and 9 don't support that. I can still use those newer technologies, but need to do double work to make sure the sites are still usable to someone on older browsers. If IE auto-updated to the newest version, it would be so much easier for web developers.

No, but clothes clearly only inhibit police investigations and thus should be banned. Plus, it's well known that terrorists wear clothes. If you've got nothing to hide why are you wearing clothes?

Exactly this. It would likely take the terrorists at least a generation of "pre-911 hijackings" (where you fly to another country, have your hijacker make a big political statement, and then you all go free unharmed) before another 9-11 would be possible. The hijackers weren't even able to complete their 9-11 plans. By the time United Airlines Flight 93 was en route to the White House or Capital Building, passengers found out what had happened with the other 3 planes. Knowing that this wasn't your normal pre-911 hijacking, they tried to take control of the plane and it wound up crashing without hitting its target. This has happened with other terrorist wannabes. (Shoe bomber, for example.) If a terrorist got on a plane tomorrow with a box cutter and demanded control of the plane, the passengers would rise up and subdue him.

Notice that it's the "War on Terror" and not the "War on Terrorists."

Step 1: Government instills fear into the populace. (e.g. There are terrorists behind every corner waiting to blow you up!)
Step 2: The Government wages war on the terror it created by making the people feel safe (while actually gathering more powers for itself).
Step 3: Repeat Steps 1 & 2 until "terror" is destroyed. (Which, since they keep creating more terror to combat, mean repeat ad infinitum.)