These accidents will likely be mostly minor fender-benders that result in the road-ragers losing their licenses (unless, of course, they get a self-driving car.) Or, That, and you'd also probably see road-ragers driving themselves off the road and into fixed objects. The automatic cars'll generally do a pretty good job of avoiding serious collisions--far better than even a reasonably skillled human driver could.

If a person is so lacking in maturity and self-control that they'd start ramming automated cars for not letting them treat the road as their own personal speedway, it's highly unlikely that these individuals are able to conduct themselves in a mature manner in today's traffic. We're not looking at a substantial net-up of people who have no business driving a car, y'know?

Slashdot most decidedly believes in project management. In fact, The Slashdot Consensus very fervently believes that project management is too important to be entrusted to project managers; like marketing, sales, management, and pretty much every other non-technical facet of business, project management is doomed to fail unless the technical people are doing it.

We'll call it "Slashdot's Rule of Business": No matter what the task, the only people to which it can be reasonably entrusted are the computer geeks.

...of course battery life on these is going to be low; they're designed to attach to one side of your glasses! Even if they had the space to put more battery in, they wouldn't, because then you'd have a device that was always pulling your glasses down one side of your face, to say nothing of the extra weight on your nose and ear.

Batteries are heavy. If you create a face-mounted computer, you're going to want to make it as light as humanly possible. This should not come as anything remotely close to a surprise or shock to geeks.

OK, new rule.

Every time Slashdot posts an asinine, hit-trolling, golly-gosh-gee-what-if article like this one, they need decrement all red hues by #01 and increment all blue hues by #01.

This rule will hold until Slashdot reaches a color more appropriate to the caliber of its reporting.

To all my fellow Baltimorons and Delmarva folks:

This summer's derecho had peak gusts of 66 mph at BWI. That storm lasted a few hours.

Sandy is currently forecast to be right on top of us at 2 on Tuesday afternoon with 65 mph sustained winds. If we're really unlucky, those winds are going to turn through 180 degrees as the core of the storm blows through.

There's every chance that this will turn out to be nothing to write home about. That said, it's a really weird storm that has a lot of non-talking-head meteorologists raising their eyebrows. Take the handful of really stupid simple steps to prepare--make sure you have a few days' worth of non-perishable food and water, have a flashlight with batteries, fill up your gas tank, charge your devices and keep 'em off if the power goes out.

Hope this all putters out, but be ready for a bad one. It could well be.

So a bunch of people who play near-photorealistic games of combat simulation, wherein rewards are meted out based on one's ability to kill brutally and/or efficiently, hold favorable views of their pastime's real-world analog?

Goodness me. I think I need to sit down.

"Final" and "Latest" both have specific, though different, meanings. "Final" indicates that a particular build is considered the official release for a specific version of a piece of software; contrast "final" with "alpha", "beta", and "release candidate". "Latest" indicates that there is no more recent version of the software available.

Thus, while a mature software package can have many "final" versions, there is only ever one "latest" version of that piece of software (discounting programs with multiple release vectors and channels, where each release vector will typically have its own "latest" version--i.e., you can have a "latest" nightly build and a "latest" official release for the same project.)

That must be it, because their actual hardware and software are garish, steaming piles compared to the competition.

This time you'd better live down to the expectations of technology pundits.

They're getting really tired of you succeeding despite their most dire prognostications.

Sincerely,
An obviously brainwashed Apple zealot

This is why companies love independent contractors for this sort of job.

There are plenty of studies that show us just how very little self-awareness and self-control the typical person actually has. Virtually everybody thinks they're made of stronger mettle than the other guy; virtually everybody thinks they can handle pretty much anything life could throw at them. Nobody wants to believe that they're the person who'd crack under pressure; nobody wants to believe that they're the person who would keep walking past a mugging. People tend to think that the flaws and limitations of the human race are things that apply primarily to other people.

Successful companies know this; manipulating people is a key part of how a company becomes successful in the first place. Google knows that this kind of work will eventually destroy the mental health of the person performing the work. Why would they shoulder the responsibility for dealing with this fallout when they have a nigh limitless supply of perfectly unremarkable human beings who think they're strong enough to hack it?

Note that I don't condone this behavior in the least; I find it reprehensible. But we live in a world where personal responsibility, level playing fields, and common sense are sacrosanct, and that's not likely to change anytime soon. Everybody thinks they're David; nobody ever considers the odds that they're one of the countless schmucks Goliath laid out before his ultimate fight.