That's all true, but maybe we should let people buy their own snake oil with their own money, rather than the rest of us having to buy it for them via insurance or taxes.

Why does my Slashdot look exactly the same as it looked six months ago? I've been reading the outraged comments and I still see comments under the summary as always.

I don't know. Only my front page looks different, in the same ways people are complaining about

I almost never go to the homepage. I monitor /.'s RSS feed (used to use Google Reader, switched to TTRSS when Google Reader went bye-bye) and go directly to articles that sound interesting. A bunch of other sites are also configured in there, so I can quickly see what's new there as well.

As I've seen things, /. Beta fscked up page formatting for a while, but the "?nobeta" hack took care of that. Then at some point, it no longer became necessary when article pages started looking more or less like they previously did without manual intervention.

That's only if they were sealed correctly and stored right. There was an article a few years ago about how a lot of discs were coming up unusable after only 6-12.

My oldest CDs are somewhere on the other side of 20 years old now, and not one of them has gone bad. I reripped them all a few months ago as part of a transition from AAC to FLAC. They've spent most of their time on a shelf indoors, though they've been in a box in the garage (dry, but subject to the temperature fluctuations typical for Las Vegas) for the past four years.

I suspect that as long as your CD collection never spent time in a flooded basement, it'll be good to go for decades to come.

What API would you use?

WebRTC, IIRC. I recently rolled out a webapp at work that case workers can use to help determine eligibility for potential clients. One minor capability within it is photo capture. Along with a slew of questions about demographics, disabilities, and such, it'll also take a picture and stash it in the database. If someone is then accepted as a client, that photo is then available so that (for instance) our delivery drivers can compare the photo on file to whoever answers the door to make sure the client's at home to accept delivery. We could've just had the user take a picture with the phone's camera app and then upload into our webapp from there, but this is a seamless approach that's easier to use.

There's not much to it, either. The page that handles the capture is 28 lines of HTML and 114 lines of JavaScript, a fair bit of which was cribbed from examples I found with a few seconds' googling. It provides a live view of what the camera sees, lets you switch between front and back cameras, and lets you preview the capture before it's sent to the server.

So you will have to 'structure' it into smaller pieces.

...and if you try doing that and end up getting caught, the feds'll send you away to PMITA prison.

Now, take a teenager, and try to explain punching holes in a 360K 5.25" floppy so you could flip it and get 720K.

360K is already double-sided. A more typical use case was to double capacity from 140K to 280K when used with an Apple II.

I want to know why Putin fucks goats and why all evidence has been erased

Because they were MALE goats and we all know Putin's stance on all things gay.

Wide?

Plex’s lack of extensibility, scraper support, and local storage support drive me up a goddamn tree, but Plex works and XBMC doesn’t. I’m not a linux person, but I am a nerd - code is not my day job, but I’m teaching myself at night. Sweet baby Jesus, I tried XBMC so many freaking times that eventually I just gave up.

The easiest way to get XBMC^H^H^H^HKodi working is OpenELEC. It's pretty much an appliance that just works; the only part that remains slightly tricky (and not by much) is setting up a shared database if you want more than one. I have it set up on an Acer Aspire Revo in the living room and a Raspberry Pi in the bedroom; each is set up with a Playstation 3 Blu-ray remote control (about $20 each, plus a Bluetooth dongle).

I also have Plex up and running, but it's mainly for remote access. Automatic transcoding is a big win. Around home, though, there's more than enough bandwidth to just let OpenELEC grab files straight off the server.

Sounds like you want Fokkers and Spads game from the short story "Dogfight" by Michael Swanwick and William Gibson.. in Omni 07/1985 or 'Future On Fire'!

My company of 80 employees has already done this, nobody has a phone on their desk except for the customer service reps.

Self-driving cars might lower accident rates, but they won't do away with them completely. Equipment, especially complex equipment, does malfunction, and there are limits to what equipment can do. There will still be unexpected icy spots that the computer can't compensate for, and blowouts, and road debris, and so on.

And then there are the drivers of the OTHER cards on the road. Even if self-driving cars became a reality in 5 years, it will take years, maybe decades, for the cars to become economically priced. And then there are all the existing cars on the road. The average car on US roads is 10 years old, so we have to add at least another 15-20 years before the number of human-driven cars drops to negligible numbers.

Self-driving cars will do nothing to change the need for comprehensive coverage, such as hail damage, or theft.

Insurance coverage and pricing will change, but it won't be going away.

HIPAA imposes fines for each patient's record lost through security breaches, even if the medical provider "did not know (and by exercising reasonable diligence would not have known)" https://kb.iu.edu/d/ayzf that there was a breach. These kinds of punitive rules have scared the entire industry to death, and yet the open secret is that nobody is safe from breaches, or these fines. This story illustrates how the law has done little, if anything, to actually protect privacy.

Most providers react to HIPAA in one of two ways:
1) They over-react, creating stupid policies like refusing to tell even a patient's own spouse the details of a patient's medical condition, unless the proper paperwork has been filed, or
2) They under-react, blissfully ignoring any privacy concerns.

If we're going to try to regulate privacy in the medical industry, how about let's focus on the device and software makers with certification programs, and let hospitals and physicians get back to doing what they do best: treating illnesses.

It doesn't work out like that in practice. I spent a decent chunk of time in the Bering sea on the Carl Vinson during Pacex '89 and the primary constraints for flying were not ice on the deck.