The issue is significantly more nuanced than that. Most people, and certainly most biologists and behavioral experts agree that there are certain animals that demonstrate sentience in a fashion at least analogous to the way humans think and feel. The great apes, and chimps, in particular, are among that rather rare group who share a significant number of emotional and cognitive traits with humans (little wonder, we're only separated by a few million years of evolution). So the idea here, so far as I understand it, is that those similarities are significant enough that chimps should enjoy, if not human rights, then at least some rights elevated from other far less human animals.

I tend to weigh on the side that sentient animals should receive protections similar to the protections we give to children or to adults deemed legally incompetent. That means they can't exercise many of the rights that we recognize adult humans have, but neither can they be wantonly exploited, physically or psychologically harmed.

But to pursue this in the courts is ludicrous. Personhood is fairly well defined in most, if not all, jurisdictions and it pretty much explicitly excludes anyone who isn't a member of H. sapiens. This is going to need to be something that is dealt with at the legislative level, and it's going to be a long fight.

The cooler thing would be if you have enough high speed printing capacity that you could manufacture and assemble a 1000 drone swarm in a very short period of time and overwhelm an adversaries defenses without requiring a ship big enough to carry a 1000 completed drones. And then another one, and another one. You would need a tanker full of plastic and a freighter full of batteries, electronics and propellers.

âoeKill decisionâ baby.

We are primarily a government contractor, and our main contract had a Siebel-based client management system (only a government would have the combination of money and stupidity to invest in an ancient technology like that, but oh well), and up until late last year, we had to run IE in the lowest security mode and IE7 compatibility mode just to make the ActiveX components function. The new version is by and large HTML5 compatible, and though they recommend Firefox, we've had only a few bumps running Chrome. I doubt more than a handful of our staff even use IE now.

Yes, well, we often hurt the ones we love.

About the only place I still see IE is on some web-based applications from the late 90s thru the mid-00s that were built using IE 5 and 6's very insecure ActiveX architecture. Up until last year, we were forced to use such software on one of our government contracts, and it literally meant viewing the site in Compatibility Mode with security settings cranked down to nothing. They finally updated the underlying Siebel engine to the HTML5 version, and after that everyone just seemed to go to Chrome. I suppose at that point where we start rolling out Win10 desktops, Edge might end up being used, but I have a feeling that MS has missed the bus here, and Chrome is king.

I think Firefox dealt it the mortal blow, and then Chrome finished the job.

Perhaps that is because it was written by SS-Oberscharführer Lennart Poettering.

So you regularly float at an altitude of 20 to 100 feet, do you?

I'd say if it's over my property at a low altitude, yes, I should have the right to shoot the thing out of the sky, and further, if I can determine who was flying it, I should have the right to sue them.

Drone operators are getting an incredible sense of entitlement out of playing with their toys. I think it's time for some serious and substantial financial penalties.

Keep your fucking toy way from my fucking property.

I would mostly agree with parent. Soylent is fine execpt the community isnt big enough so the comments are barely there or worth reading, the name is kind of bad and the stories are routinely just old enough to be yesterdays news on Slashdot or Hacker news.

Their Twitter feed, which is where I get my news feeds, also puts these really annoying lame "from the deptâ attempts at humor in the tweets instead of just the title of the story and the link:

Razer Acquires Ouya Software Assets, Ditches Hardware from the kicked-down dept

They will even thorten the title to make room for the utterly stupid âoefrom theâ.

The best solution to replace Slashdot would probably be if Hacker news grafted the classic Slashdot look, commenting and moderation system on to their generally good stories and great community.

There is a high probably no Sunday talk show would have let him speak once they found out what he was going to say. They are all owned by giant media conglomerates you know. They wouldnt risk the wrath of the Federal government. Pretty sure Snowden went to Greenwald because he was one of the few journalists with the balls to do the story. The Guardian was hammered by the UK government for running it.

Remember when the CEO of Qwest defied the NSA plan to tap all data and phones lines after 9/11. The Federal government pulled all their contracts from Qwest, hammered their stock and then put him in prison for a phony securities rap. Qwest was a rare corporate hero among telecoms, long since swallowed up by CenturyLink who are just as bad as all the rest.

I was just being mischievous. I think the editors are... adequate.

No kidding. They need to be dropped on to the street from a very high altitude.

The way DICE has treated it, it's worth about whatever I can find stuck between the lint at the bottom of the pockets of my pants. Everything they've done in the last 12-24 months has only served to devalue the site.

That's all I've got to say about that.

The Founding Fathers explicitly made the Senate a "house of the States", where Senators, essentially acting as agents of the state legislatures, had the power to amend or veto bills produced in the House of Representatives. However, being unelected, Senators while enjoying greater prestige than Representatives, were also in a position where their powers were not democratically derived. The "check" as it were on the Senate was that any significant interference in bills would inevitably be viewed somewhat more dimly, which is how it has worked out in most Westminster parliaments.

With the 17th Amendment, the Senate gained the democratic legitimacy which in facts leads to the greater possibility of this seeming end-run around the requirement that money bills originate in the House. You don't really find this happening overly much in Canada, where the lack of democratic legitimacy means that Senators usually do not feel they have the right to alter taxation or spending bills. In the UK, of course, explicit measures were put in place in the 1911 and 1949 Parliament Acts that heavily restrict the House of Lords' ability to tamper with such bills.