A US Supreme Court case found that if an employer was using skills testing that resulted in racial discrimination, then they were guilty of racial discrimination if they intended to be discriminating or not:

The court case is "Griggs vs. Duke Power"
For an explanation, see-
http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=1749

The only kind of testing that US companies can use now without fear of discrimination lawsuits, is educational requirements. Ridiculous but true.

And what happens when an Amazon drone smacks into someone's face walking down the street? ,,,,,,, Everything on amazon goes up $1 in price, that's what. ;)

The drone-package-delivery story seems to be rather unrealistic to me, just for the liability reasons--considering the one guy who died after flying his own RC helicopter into his head.

More likely they would just hire local people to deliver stuff using their own cars for minimum wage (or not-much-more than minimum wage).

I was under the impression that (US) doctors had to maintain medical record security. If Google is able to monitor everything the glasses are used for, how would this be possible?

This was sort-of my understanding of the big popular tax software also,,,,, that if you use the online services or not, the package is still only going to function for one year. And it's no accident.

A friend spent a number of hours over a few weeks entering tax info into a (big-well-known) program they had purchased the previous tax-year, figuring they'd just print it out and mail everything in, because they couldn't e-file it because it wasn't a current version,,,, and guess what? "Sorry, you need an upgrade to print. Click here to go to our website" -- or something to that effect.

A few years back a PC of mine got a virus. The main thing that the AV software said was that it had the signature of the "fuckyou" virus.

So I went looking online for info on how it might be removed, and found...... almost nothing. Because most forum software automatically censors the word "fuck", as well as any of its close variants. As did most of the antivirus company websites. One of them didn't--one of the bigger ones, Norton or McAfee. That was the only place that had any info on it.

So get ready for the "childporn" viruses. As soon as that word becomes unsearchable, there is no reason for malware writers not to use it to their own benefit.

It is not useful to simply compare the rate of vehicle fires. That is important, but it is only half of the question.

What would be useful would be to also compare the rate of non-Tesla car fires originating from the battery, with that of Teslas.

It would not be advantageous for Teslas to have 'essentially eliminated" the risk of fuel fires, if doing so also include drastically increasing the risk of battery fires.

Pursuing pedophiles is the new Inquisition, it is the last bastion of the bureaucratic tyrant.

No right of law is as sacred, and no punishment is too severe for those accused.

Plasmas were my last best hope--but when I went browsing online some months back, I couldn't find any dedicated PC monitors for sale and didn't want to pay for a TV.... -and couldn't find much of any high-quality CRTs either. Is there any PC screens (for desktop use) that don't have the LCD viewing angle issue?

{-that being, that the image at the top edge is never the same color as the image at the bottom edge-}

A few years ago I "upgraded" my CRT Viewsonic monitors to new-fangled fancy widescreen LCDs. The wide-screen part is nice, but I've come to realize that the LCD part sucks.

One of the news articles mentioned that merchants were supposed to record transactions manually and allow purchases up to $50. ...

The one I work for didn't. But then, they couldn't. There is no mode programmed into the (computerized) cash register system in the stores to allow such a thing (at least at the chain I work at).

Also, the lack of such a capability may be no accident. With no way to verify that a card was still good or had money on it, well, -the people might, um, forget how much they're really supposed to get? And get a lot more. Especially expensive stuff....

I am not in a position where I would make that decision--but I would presume that without a guarantee that the govt would cover 100% of all charges during such an outage, there's no way stores are going to take EBT cards they can't instantly verify. A lot of these same people already can't write checks, because the store's check-cashing system won't accept checks from them.

If they make this stuff, and it works, , , , just think? We can pour it into the ocean!

And then we'll have OCEANS of gasoline! :O

Where I work they have fingerprint scanners, so you swipe your ID card and then it asks you for one of the two registered fingerprints.

It don't work that well.... lots of false negatives, if your skin is dry... And occasionally I can use about seven of my eight fingers and get it to accept them, when only two of my fingers are supposed to work.

In this time-clock setup it is possible that the software involved is poor--and to that end, a device like a cellphone could get software updates pushed to it. Ultimately it would make more sense to just scan the fingerprint, and upload the image to a more-powerful remote system for processing,,,, but then, that blows the whole "fingerprints don't get uploaded" thing out of the water, as well as allowing for cataloging them permanently.

So they're probably lying about that part. I would bet. Maybe not right now, but eventually.

I don't recall it being very "new-age-y" until the last year or so, when it got very thin and most of the articles were about alien 'stories', crystal healing, ect. There was always the beginning page of the one section about UFOs, but that was it--usually.



I also loved it,,,,, except for the declining era. Easily my favorite magazine growing up. It'd be fun to see it again but print is a tough business to be in. There are huge foundations behind the magazines that deliver quality stories and glossy content regularly, like Smithsonian and National Geographic. To attempt such a thing isn't a minor task.

I have read elsewhere that usually about 85% of a print magazine's income is advertising. The main reason they place the cover price at a given point is to help tailor the demographics (why the Robb Report costs $15 an issue, or is it higher now?). These days it seems like most geeks I know (including myself) are heavily predisposed to shopping online for most items. Whenever I pick up a magazine I sometimes glance at the ads and think "would I buy any of this stuff?" and my answer is usually "no, no, no, no, no,,,,"

I was going to write a serious comment, but then I remembered that at least 75% of Slashdot accounts are just people shilling for the king of Thailand.

That is because you are like stupid.

This would be totally rad to make signs with the next time hipsters wear the V masks and have one of those "Occupy Mall Street" things again.

But...... the fish LIKES the shoe! And my feet don't smell that bad!