I read the headline as "GCPD Warns It Is Losing Track of Serious Criminals" and immediately thought to myself "Damn it! Someone call Batman!". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotham_City_Police_Department)

If they're using the existing Tesla Model S with the intention to have them pull over open bays in the ground and have robots remove battery packs built into the undercarriage, then it will fail. On the other hand if they were to make a new EV that had multiple bays from which you can pull out and swap rails of cells, then they'd have a good chance.

The only future for EVs is to go battery-swapping and to make swapping possible with human muscle.

In the article, the Peter Singer states, "Someone killed 12 people and shot another 70 people at the opening night of Batman: The Dark Knight [Rises]. They kept that movie in the theaters. You issue an anonymous cyber threat that you do not have the capability to carry out? We pulled a movie from 18,000 theaters."

In some ways, the comparison between the response to this current threat against movie theaters and the rampage that happened 2012 shooting in Aurora, Colorado is appropriate. Both target movie theaters and the people in them. But that's where it ends.

The Aurora shooting has gone down in history as an unforeseeable tragedy the fault of which lay entirely with the shooter. Everyone said, "This was very sad," and no one's expecting any victims' civil suits to win anything.

In fairly extreme contrast, ***IF*** Sony were to allow the movie to be shown in theaters and ***IF*** someone attacked a movie theater for any reason relating to the showing of the movie, then Sony would be very publicly acknowledged as having fault in the harm done to theater-goers and would be sued out of existence.

Everything in this decision has to do with LIABILITY. Even if the probability is extremely low, the potential liability is astronomical. It doesn't make financial sense for Sony to allow the movie to be shown.

Aside: Notice who the puppets and the puppet-masters are here. Those making the threats hold the strings, but they're not playing Sony. They're playing the American public. They know that the American public are so unhappy with their opportunities to be super-rich that they see legal liability as one of their few chances to get MILLIONS! As such, the nation is extremely risk-averse thus thoroughly negating out espoused resolve to not be susceptible to terroristic threats.

To be cliche, the enemy is us.

Keurig coffee, with all their DRM, just adds to our waste-plastic problem and costs about twice as much as coffee you grind at home. (http://goo.gl/NiVJ8D)

Get yourself a stainless steel cup, throw some coffee in there, and use the pilfered K-Cup tag to make it all work together.

I use AdBlock not because I believe no one with a website shouldn't have the opportunity to make money via advertising, but because of the METHOD of advertising.

Flashing ads, quick movements, anything with Flash that can crash and stall my use of my browser, or any ad of more than 600 KB in size is intrusive. I don't mind being advertised at, but if you DEMAND my attention via tactics instead of attempting to CONVINCE me to buy a service or product with the facts of that service or product, then I will turn off and walk away.

Example of good Slashdot-based advertising for me: "Newegg - 15% off orders $25 - $100. December 8 ONLY. We know there's a couple things you've been meaning to buy. Be smart about it and buy them now. CLICK HERE to apply coupon." The coupon could take effect only via clicking in from Slashdot.

Also, I pay for my bandwidth and if you want to advertise to me, cool. Just don't take liberties with the size of your advertisement. Keep it small. Maybe a 2-3 frame gif changing every 20 seconds.

Lastly, I don't like the tracker cookies. I know some people say that tracking one's surfing habits enables more relevant ads to be used, but I don't like being tracked at all. Why not just use advertisements relevant to the site content? It's Slashdot -- post tech stuff. Slashdot builder? Then push 3D printer filaments.

As a result of some really BADvertisers, no one gets to put advertisements in front of my web-surfing eyes. I don't even know if a site has changed to less-obtrusive ads unless they tell me. (And if they do, I turn off AdBlock.) It's as simple as that.

My kingdom for mod points! (+1 Funny)

Yes, please.

Lyft's use of the term "Rideshare" is a knowing and willing deception. Lyft's creator, John Zimmer, actually made a Ridesharing webapp that is still in use by many Universities (Zimride). Zimride facilitates the creation of carpools and vanpools-- not rides on a confederated taxi service. Of course, Zimmer saw the big money in a taxi service and with his history in actual Rideshare and has tried to re-write the definition so that (hopefully) he could side-step taxi regulations.

By the way, "Rideshare" is a federally recognized term that describes an entire industry whose job it is to reduce the number of automobiles on the road by convincing people to take transit, carpool, vanpool, bike, and walk instead of driving. (Check it out: https://www.google.com/?gws_rd...)

Huh... there's a lot about this post that can be used to sprout new conversation.

1. PPOs are move expensive than HMOs. To save money, go to an HMO.

2. There is no such thing as a "modest six-figure household income"-- at least without context. $100,000/year in California's Inland Empire will get you a lot more than $200,000/year in the middle of Manhattan.

3. You're paying $1,000/month in premiums? Do you pay for it personally? One would assume that the employers that could facilitate a household's 6-figure income could negotiate a lower premium for its employees.

4. You didn't mention if there was any change to your coverage (for example, if you get a whiff of cancer, you'll still taken care of).

5. The law didn't require insurance premiums to go up. Insurers decided to jack up their prices instead of cutting profits. And no one knows if they simply used the opportunity to increase the prices on the independently insured.

6. I work for a major university system. My rates stayed the same and my coverage expanded. My household makes significantly less than yours. I guess we can chalk it up to my employer having more negotiating power than yours. But here's the big question: why does there need to be insurance price bargaining in the first place? Oh yes... the for-profit insurance industry and associated medical industries.

"While similar bullying applied to short rentals of private rooms through sites like Airbnb"

Look-- Uber, Lyft, and all the other distributed taxi services are being so heavily attacked by regulatory agencies because it is the responsibility of those agencies to protect consumer safety. Voluntarily make sure your company meets all the same safety and insurance requirements as an existing taxi system and you'll be set.

AirBnB is similar in that the repeated short-term rental of homes as hotels requires health and fire inspections of these distributed hotels, BUT there's an additional issue. Amsterdam is a massive tourist attraction. People want to visit Amsterdam, ride bikes, get high, and maybe visit a prostitute. However, Amsterdam is not that big... and the people who live there don't want it to get very big. In fact, if it got too big or too expensive, then you'd have no dutch people living there-- just tourist agencies and immigrants dressed in stereotypical Dutch garb-- "Welcome to Dutch Land, Americans!".

The ease of facilitating short-term tourism rentals via AirBnB makes it exceedingly profitable to buy a flat and use AirBnB to bring in more revenue per month than you could get renting the place out to people who actually want to live and work in the city. And that's the problem. Amsterdam should be full of the Dutch but without appropriate regulation, it will be full of tourists with some Dutch on the side.

I would love to visit Amsterdam, but wouldn't care to do so in the future if it's jam packed with tourists.

When selling to end-users, you should be describing cost per distance traveled. They will want to know how much it will costs them to use the vehicle day to day.
When describing emissions, you should be describing lbs or kg of CO2 or CO2e per distance traveled. Since vehicle mileage is easily tracked, we can use that figure to determine, with simple multiplication environmental effects of driving an automobile.

Of course, when you are using an EV, this goes out the window because the cost of refueling is highly dependent on when and where you charge. Moreover, the blend of electricity sources determines the actual pollution from charging the vehicle. (Charging in West Virgina is significantly worse for the environment than Southern California).

Countries most likely to require a bribe (per Transparency International)

1. Russia
2. China
3. Mexico
4. Indonesia
5. United Arab Emirates
6. Argentina
7. Saudi Arabia
8. Turkey
9. India
10. Taiwan

Sometimes bribery is just expected. Russians have been brow-beaten by their ruling class(es) since the dawn of time. If you were to moan about paying a bribe there, grandmother passers-by would tell you to nut up and just get it done. In China, it's simply an expected part of business-- gifts of all sorts and money are expected when visiting offices, homes, and closing deals. Mexico's just messed up. They've not had a stable government since the narco cartels took over.

No one NEEDS a smartphone either. People WANT and LIKE smartphones because it allows them to be less foresightful than before.

Just a quick correction because I see a lot of people buying Fitbits without understanding what they actually do. And then returning them.

Fitbits are very simple devices that act as an accelerometer, pedometer, altimeter, and a watch.

Worn Fitbits do not monitor your health or fitness. They cannot tell you if you're sick, developing cancer, or at risk for heart disease. They cannot tell you your BMI, your body fat percentages, glucose levels, or blood pressure. They can't tell you if you need a recovery day or if you're about to pass out due to dehydration.

Fitbits are not substitutes for regular medical visits. It sounds nitpicky, but as a go-to nerd, I've had to explain this to too many people who then feel dumb for the purchase. Everything you think your Fitbit is doing for you, you can do on your own or don't need to do in the first place.

I know next to nothing about what is required to inventory, issue, use, download, store, index, and recall all the hardware and video that would be required for such a system. I can only speculate. Has anyone had experience in this realm? Creating massive databases for video or images and indexing them in such a way that police reports could be tied directly to them and be pulled up as necessary?

If so, in your perfect world, how would you build the system and how much would it cost?

Where do you go to see RL gay people and women being verbally attacked online because they are gay and/or women? That's sounds like a horrible place. Why do you go there?

But are you certain it's *because* they have those characteristics or might it be, as suggested, that knowing those characteristics, the offender specifically uses certain terms and phrases to hurt that person?

There's a big difference between a person who thinks everyone woman is a slut to be hated and person angry at another person who happens to be a woman and (using the knowledge of womanhood) chooses the word "slut" as a means of honing one's insult.

Too hard to believe? Consider the angry rantings of a child.

Almost everyone has heard a pissed off kid say, "I hate you! I wish you weren't my mom!!"? Maybe you said it yourself as a child.
Which is the more likely interpretation?
(A) "I genuinely wishes that s/he had different parents. I would not cry if I was taken away from you."
(B) "I'm pissed that I didn't get my way. Knowing that you love me as a parent, I offer words contrary to my own knowledge and opinion with for the specific intent in doing you emotional or psychological harm in retribution."