Baptism would be a fascinating event... at least for high voltage robots anyways.

Yeah, hiring troves of border protection agents is hard when Americans don't want to do that job for the rate I'm willing to pay, but that gives me an idea... does anybody know where I can find people who are willing to work for low pay, in horrible conditions, and if I don't like how hard they work, I can just send them back to their own country? Anyone? Anyone?

+1

That is all.

I love this rant, because it's so true, but it immediately struck me: Why is it that the same company that makes the darlings-of-the-industry Photoshop and Illustrator also makes the pariah-of-the-industry Flash? I vaguely remember that Adobe bought flash from Macromedia, but still, they reached a point where they said "Push forward on the stick and let's auger this baby in..."

I love a good train wreck.

I find it interesting that you have no vitriol for the people who run this site... they are the ones who make the decision to employ an ad network in the first place... why no hate for them?

I see what you did there....

Ironically, if his own data was breached, he would likely be forced to recuse himself from the case.

I'm still waiting for a simple way to control my TV, and DVD player. Universal remote is a double negative (or a double positive resulting in a negative?) While it's possible to unify a TV, a receiver, an xbox, and a cable box; it is far from simple. If you need a CS degree to get your IOT house in order, I really don't see it being mainstream. So yeah, in short, the OP nailed it... never simple.

Well, both sides of the debate love pithy sayings, and it's never cool to be a moderate anything... we must be extreme, lest we lose any ground, and therefore lose the fight. As for me, I'm pro-gun, but I'm way to moderate to align myself with the NRA or any other officially pro-gun group. Those guys scare me more than the gun-control groups!

The providence of a pithy saying is hardly relevant to the debate though... do you reject out of hand the saying "thou shalt not kill" just because you disagree with something else in the bible? In the end, truth is truth, regardless of what other truths or lies surround it. To recognize truth, one must test it independently. I'm not in a position to spend my workday researching this, so I won't assert that it's true, but I do like the saying for what it tells you about the person who uses it... I think it says that person WANTS a society that can be both polite and armed. There are many towns in the west where this is exactly the case, and that's what people latch on to when they use sayings like that. The counter argument is that there are lots of quiet beach towns that while largely unarmed, still enjoy an equal measure of brotherly love and politeness. Either way, I'm good with a polite society. The one thing we should not have in our society is the in-your-face-about-my-guns-because-that's-how-i-defend-myself attitude. In my opinion it's just warmongering and serves to undermine a rational debate about gun safety.

A brief note on science-fiction authors though: their job is to makes stories about dystopia and make you think... so controversy is right up their alley. I wouldn't judge any society or societal goal by statements made by science fiction authors.

Whew man are we off topic or what? Back to cell phone theft!

Wow you're a killjoy.

I'll cite my personal experience in the first case... and I won't bother providing a citation for the second case, because I never claimed it to be true. I've known several people who started carrying sometime after I knew them. They each got more polite. That's my experience. Sorry it's not the cold hard facts you are accustomed to getting on slashdot.

I was simply pointing out the GP's erroneous assumption about *who* gets more polite in an armed society. I was just trying to bring a little levity to the conversation. To me it looks like you are just trying to pick a fight.

The trouble is that a fast ride to good eating establishments will raise demand... and therefore price. So your half price beer is only half price because of the difficulty in obtaining it.

I guess I don't understand the insurance industry all that well then, because it seems that an insurance company would want to have a way to locate that phone. If the insurance company asks around to the major carriers and says "hey, has this phone been activated on your system after ..." then they could contact the new "owner" of the phone, and track it back to the seller. (assuming the phone carriers really want to help stop phone theft).

Is there a reason phone carriers don't want to do this? Is it a privacy issue? I know it's a lot of work to track back that way, but that's what police work is for... and if police cracked down on this, eventually it would stop... or maybe that was the original problem all along, is that police didn't want to make the effort needed to crack down on this.

I just think that the kill switch becomes a buyer beware problem rather than a seller beware solution. It doesn't result in the arrest of the thief, and if a guy can move fast enough, he can probably still fence a lot of phones. Thinking about those grab-and-run thefts on New York Subways, I could totally see a thief in a big city advertising on craigslist for a phone that had yet to be stolen, and after getting the details of a "meet up" to buy the phone, then going out and stealing one an hour or two before the meetup. The kill switch won't ever result in the arrest and prosecution of that thief, but the buyer will get screwed every time.

You completely miss the point sir... the person who caries becomes more polite, not the neighbor. The neighbor has no idea who carries. Likewise, the person who commits crime is less inclined to do so because he/she can't tell who carries and who does not. Unwilling to play the odds, they move to California or New York to ply their trade. Its a win for everyone (unless you live in California or New York of course).

I'm curious what the motivation is for a person to sell their phone, take the cash, then report it as stolen. Where is the profit in this? It's just malicious. I seriously doubt that would happen enough to justify any concern by the general public.

Easy... the republican trolls do it for free.