Somebody send the pope a copy of William Gibson's book, Idoru, where the main character wants to marry a computer character. That'll really get him going.

Seconded! Alpha baby is very neat if you own a Mac.
http://alphababy.sourceforge.net/
You're on your own with protecting the computer from the toddler, however. Little fingers can pry up keys easily. You will definitely need to supervise.

True enough. But as far as thoughtful contributions to slashdot discussions go, CodeBuster could have done much worse.

CodeBuster is referring to this: http://www.sonomamarintrain.org/ It may not be "high speed" but everything else he said is accurate. The measure was passed with 3/4 of the vote, but it will be a miracle if we see any progress made before the ice-caps melt.

If all cars could do this, would we still need cell towers? If every single car on the road was an open mobile hot spot, wouldn't a lot of the services the telecoms currently charge a great deal for suddenly become nearly valueless? (Assuming range and bandwidth was decent, of course.)

http://www.jolicloud.com/blog/

Let's just stop using it.

The Internet Makes You Stupid

"With bandwidth and storage increasing exponentially..." In the last ten years I've barely seen my bandwidth improve at all. Oh wait, he says he's in London. Maybe someday faster internets will come to America.

Also, great article.

Should an autonomous car be called an auto-automobile?

Switching to Dvorak worked for me. As a life-long Qwerty hunter and pecker, teaching myself to touch-type on Qwerty was too difficult.

Of course, by doing so you will freak-out other people who try to use your keyboard, but I actually enjoy that. Plus, it's easy to switch back and forth.

Whatever you do, avoid discussing whether or not Dvorak or Qwerty is superior to the other. Dead-end conversation. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/18/210216

Not taking BSD into account? Heh, Most BSD users love Apple since for the most part as a user OSX is a really pretty BSD. They took BSD into account when they made OSX, they just brought the BSD people into their camp so they don't have to fight against them, we BSDers fight with them!

Quite relevant to this discussion, I think would be that after prohibition ended (1933) the vast majority of organized crime *did* indeed lose all their black-market booze money, though there were still *plenty* of existing illegal activities for them to continue to capitalize on (prostitution, existing blatantly racist drug laws, e.g. the Harrison Act from 1914), and some new ones which conveniently materialized,only 5 years later, for instance: the Marijuana Tax Act)

Obviously we can't legalize actual violent crimes or bribing/blackmailing lawmakers, that organized criminals profit from. Though legalizing and regulating simple possession and sale of a freaking dried plant or some powder, would likely free up law enforcement resources to deal with those kinds of things. Again, one could argue that that's not a certainty, but what is?

We'll never find out *for sure* if "legalizing everything" will *drastically* reduce violent crime, unless we do it (it couldn't be more of a disaster than prohibition if that experiment failed) though, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that it wouldn't reduce violent crime at all, it's really pretty simple to see that it would.

The important question is: would legalizing the drugs cause more harm than the increased violence that their prohibition causes (directly and indirectly)?

I suppose that's a complex question, but I've never seen *anyone* present hard evidence that it would. In fact the evidence is growing from countries like Switzerland, Holland and even the UK -- that drug legalization/decriminalization programs do indeed have a net positive benefit to a society currently undergoing drug prohibition, especially when coupled with a good public health program for treating addiction, even though, seemingly there are some people that don't seem to be able to stop their self-abusive behavior. But if they are getting their drugs from a clinic, for free even, they're probably not out knocking over a liquor store.

Some of the same people who say that there's no climate change because it snowed last week would say that "the science isn't in" on this one too, and while they may have a point (albeit possibly for the wrong reasons) -- sometimes you have to do something, even with "limited data", simply because it's the right thing to do, even with risk of failure, or risk of making things worse.

Since hey, if it doesn't reduce violent crime, or generates millions of new addicts (yeah, right), then launch the war on drugs "reloaded" or whatever.

With alcohol people realized after only a decade that it wasn't helping (or maybe more because a few too many senators and their buddies got caught drinking.)

After over 70 years of racist, poorly-conceived reactionary drug policy, it's time to do something to change it. I'd suggest that "legalizing everything" would be less harmful than what we have now, in almost every way -- but ideally there would probably be some kind of regulation, which is something that would require mature, reasonably smart people, with the authority to enact law to sit down and discuss the issues and listen to people who have actually already studied and thought about the issues -- I wonder how long it'll be before the US has that.

The only problem is that no politician, no media outlet and the vast majority of the public isn't interested in phrases like "there is a 70% chance that global yearly average temperatures will increase between 1c and 2C in the next 50years (numbers subject to change as models and data is refined)". IF you want people's attention, you gotta talk about all polar bears dying in the next 10 years. Sad, but true.

When Scientologists start flying airliners into American buildings, I'll start taking that argument seriously.

Politics aren't a simple matter and hostilities *never* have a single reason behind them. If you believe otherwise, you're simply a fool who has never studied history in his life.