Talk about a headline from the No Screaming Shit Department, of course happier programmers are going to do a better job. There's no motivation to do your job well when you're miserable. That's why the team dynamics are more important than individual skill. I've seen one hot-shot programmer with great coding skills and horrendous personal skills totally undermine the team dynamic. No amount of skill makes up for being an arrogant ass.

It's okay having a no fly list but not having a way to appeal being on it is an abomination. The irony is that sometimes actual terrorists are allowed to fly so they don't get tipped off the US is watching them. That's downright brilliant there. If the US is going to ban someone from traveling, they need to admit it and provide an appeals process.

As someone who used to answer the 911 psych calls for our volunteer FD in a rural area, a voluntary app like this could be really useful. Where we lived back then first responders were the only regular checks a lot of the psych cases ever got. By the time someone called 911, they were way off the sanity reservation. Then law enforcement got involved and packed them off to primary care. They'd stabilize on their meds, the hospital would cut them loose because they didn't have insurance, sometimes with a couple days worth of meds, and we'd start the cycle all over again. Anything that would alert medical personnel that someone was having a problem and find a way to get them some help before we got a call that they were chasing cows around in the pasture bare ass naked would be a good thing.

I learned that rural areas are full of crazy people because the cost of living is lower and they could be crazy and not bother as many people. It was kind of surprising to find out how many of our neighbors were genuinely, seriously out there howling at the moon loony tunes (technical medical jargon).

They're using very small values of evil.

Violence has been trending down for decades

You can't support that conclusion definitively. What's positively been changing for decades is the way police report crimes. That, combined with the sheer numbers of people we're imprisoning, might be contributing to a drop overall level of crime but until there are uniform reporting guidelines, that conclusion is, at best, fragile.

Around here if someone shoots holes in your apartment, unless someone is hit, it gets reported as vandalism, even though most sane people would agree that's a gun crime. If someone pulls a gun on you here, unless it's accompanied by a threat or robbery, it's not considered a gun crime. There was a big stink in the paper about it a few months ago that involved dozens of local PDs. How many other PDs are playing similar games with their crime statistics? Nobody knows for sure. Since that's where the FBI gets their statistics, then garbage in, garbage out would apply.

Their customer service sucks and their website (last I checked) is a hot mess.

Slashdot moderation needs an Understatement rating. GoDaddy is to domain registrars what Comcast is to the cable industry.

What happened to hiring the best person for the job?

I used to work for a state agency that was under-represented in black employees when compared to the surrounding population. It was a matter of some concern until HR did an audit and found the percentage of African-American employees at the agency was proportional with the number of applicants. There was no systematic discrimination against blacks, they simply weren't applying for the jobs in the same numbers. So then HR switched to having job fairs in African-American communities and encouraging more people of color to apply for jobs. That didn't work, either. HR, which was by far the most racially diverse department in the agency, finally just said the bureaucratic version of "fuck it" and went back to business as usual. All that shit storm and concern over nothing.

We lost our ad account when Google accused us of hosting porn. The "porn" they pointed out were links to fairly vanilla pictures posted by some of our long-time forum members. We weren't even hosting it. I appealed, they pointed out two more links like that one. Links.

I refused to remove content that really wasn't that offensive, posted by members and complied with our forum rules. It did open my eyes to how Google could be a giant, inflexible jackass.

If we were going to contaminate the Martians we should do it right and send them blankets laced with smallpox. Hey, it worked before.

Navy says that it envisions such systems having extensive use in first-response, search-and-rescue missions, or medical applications.

Just like drones were first used for intelligence gathering, search and rescue and communications relays.

I'm pretty sure that Adobe has had this in the works for over a decade now

I'm sure you're right. Just amazing too how customers, who might have otherwise used the same version of software for five or six years, suddenly warmed up to the idea of paying $600 a year, every year, year after year, and not really getting much in return for it. The video editors dropping Premiere is more than a minority. Sony and Avid have been gratefully accepting that new business. Since Apple tanked FCP with FCPX that leaves Avid, Vegas and a couple others to take up the slack.

This might be Corel's opportunity to kick up the functionality in PaintShop Pro.

the tech to make a "smart gun" just isn't there yet.

That's not what the manufacturers say, even companies that make both types of guns. They're well aware of what the stakes are when you need a firearm to work. Like you said, a lot of people are dismissing the technology without any actual data or experience with it.

I used to shoot competitively and any gun can fail, even my Sig. When they test those system they put thousands of rounds through those guns under highly variable shooting conditions. Yet people who shoot maybe once a month can somehow divine from a distance that the technology isn't good enough. Amazing that we have complete rubes with such astounding insight.

I've been trying to teach my dad how to use email on a tablet and the Android app is an exercise in frustration. It will present two different ways and dad gets confused. It's not like an interface that looks the same every time you approach it, so the less technically inclined can learn where the function buttons are located. It's a nightmare.

This may sound crass, but this is a problem that'll solve itself in a couple of decades

It's not crass, it's just a biological fact. That's what pisses me off about people attacking social security and medicare, that problem will solve itself over time. Expenses will climb to a peak and then level off as the population declines. By 2035 that big, fat swath of baby boomers will start running into the meat grinder of old age.

Focus on cost control and the actuarial tables will take care of the rest.

“Essentially I am in trouble for posting all of the stuff on Twitter,”

You're in trouble for bragging about it. It's amazing how many criminals get caught because they can't keep their mouth shut. To me that seems like Crime 101. The first rule of black hat hacking is you don't talk about black hat hacking.