I always find this particular argument horribly ironic on Slashdot, a site just fucking chock-full of commuters. I'll bet a good portion of the portion of the readership of this site which still has a job is driving more than an hour to reach it, and the biggest portion of those people live where there is no public transportation option which covers their entire route, even given a reasonable bicycle ride at the start.

I am all in favor of solving the public transportation problem in this country, but it's one which was deliberately created by the auto companies. We're not about to force them to fix it, and they couldn't afford to if they tried. We're going to have to pay for it.

Which cultures develop technologically is only occasionally a result of specific leadership and is typically more a result of resources.

For the benefit of the men, of course. But really, everyone would benefit from more integration of more kinds. When businesses more accurately reflect the makeup of the nation, they better serve the nation. Corporations are legal fictions which could not exist without the nation, so they should serve it to some degree.

The question is whether enough people who saw it would recommend it to people who hadn't seen it to get this many asses in seats, so that the movie would be successful. This is a question that probably cannot be answered, but I suspect that the answer is actually no. When people come to the theater determined to have a good time, it's more likely that they will, and if they didn't have a good time then the terrists woulda won, by god and all that is holy, et cetera.

No, I'm turned off easily by crudeness substituted for cleverness, and violence used in lieu of plot. The idea that viewers cannot be arsed to care unless something is exploding and/or someone is dying is insulting.

And if The Interview were released on its own merits, the same thing would happen.

...nobody would ever be allowed to drive, period, because your brain chemistry is variable even without the influence of substances which are acknowledged as drugs. And that does make some sense; if what you want is public safety, then we should eliminate all cars entirely and move to rail-based PRT, which would utterly eliminate most classes of transportation accident.

Then they should be converted to rails, because alcohol is a factor in less than a third of accidents. There's just too many reasons why a car can crash. If your goal is safety, then you should ban the car.

If you're making that much money but can't afford to drink, either you already have expensive hobbies or you've made poor life decisions.

The rest is just corruption, and you're okay with that. Which is why you're part of the problem, and not the solution.

If you're legally intoxicated, then that's against the law.

...unless they have internet access. Whoops! Like we all do.

What? It doesn't matter if you're making or receiving the call, the same amount of traffic is flying through the air, and the network has to do just as much work. The negotiation part of the call is brief, it's the actual call that takes up bandwidth and it takes up the same amount no matter who makes the call. I know I said that already, but it bears repeating because you not only said what you said but you also got modded up for it.

There's lots of things which are ridiculous about cellphones in the USA but paying whether you make or take a call actually makes sense. We could argue about whether the prices are justified, but there's no technical justification for not paying for incoming calls.

When you plan for the future, you get to look smug.

Yay insurance.

Why is this on Slashdot?

I think a story like this belongs, because it can bring together knowledgeable people who can speculate on possible technical issues that may have been the cause of a problem...

As far as anyone can tell, there's no actual use for people here, unless you count self-propagation, pollution, and destruction. But any bacteria can do those things.