I'm (in a more civil way) with the GP: the distaste for Bennett and the vitriol in the comments feels like people driving across town to picket a porn store, when they could just stay home and not buy porn.
But your post -- "I usually don't notice it is a Bennett piece until I am halfway through reading it and say "Oh man, this is terrible"" -- makes me realize a lot of people read Slashdot differently than I do. I see Bennett's name before anything else, like this big BLINK hashtag, and know what I'm going into when I choose to click on that 'read more' link.
I'd love moderation on articles, but in the same way that groupthink buries unpopular comments with no basis on their actual merit, we might lose some good material.
I'm not saying Bennett's articles are chock-full of merit. He definitely has a higher word-to-concept ratio than I'd use. But I can't help feeling like at least some of the hatred for his stuff is because those of us who are both socially aware individuals and geeks cringe when we hear someone monopolizing a conversation by holding forth on his/her own pet subject of interest.
Maybe Bennett should set up an amazon turk survey for figuring out just how much text on a given subject is too much, and how much is just right.
But in the meantime, the internet is a dynamic array and I'd much prefer someone spend his time vastly expanding one small chunk of it, behind a link, than a lot of other things he could be doing.

I know people in their thirties who are willing to believe that obama is going to declare martial law. Jumping to wild conclusions has no age restrictions.
I may be reading you wrong, but one thing I think about every time I hear discussion of vaccination is how I've never met a single person who was 10 or older in 1952, who is even slightly anti-vaccine, because they all remember the terror of the polio epidemics in the early 1950's. They all knew people who died, or people who walked into hospitals and then spent the rest of their lives in iron lungs, and they all remember how the introduction of polio vaccines managed to turn 60K cases/year into ten cases/year in two years. It's people who don't remember a world full of crippled people in wheelchairs who think they can do just fine without vaccines. So in that sense, I think the anti-vax hysteria is almost entirely a stupidity of younger people.

This logic was used to ban Vioxx, which was an enormous help to a lot of arthritic people, because its side effects were awful for a very few people. It's not just vaccines, and sometimes the ban-everything-that-isn't-100%-safe-no-matter-the-consequences mentality wins.

I'd love to think you're right. However, there's a lot of evidence that once people believe something, you can show them factual proof that they're wrong... and they'll end up believing whatever it was they believed in the beginning, even harder. Here's a discussion of this specifically about people's beliefs in vaccination and here's one that's more general, about beliefs across a wide variety of topics on which people, if shown facts that contradict their beliefs, merely believe them even more.
This is in fact precisely why Creationists try to peddle their ignorant junk in schools: they know very well that if they can get their beliefs in kids before the kids are able to recognize them as junk, they most likely have the kids for life, but if they don't get them then, they're very unlikely to get them as adults who can actually think well and question what they're being told.

The damage is only a few atomic layers deep, more or less independent of how much material is removed.
A large limitation to how much you can remove is that you build this huge largely opaque cloud of debris blasting off the surface of the material so you can't get new photons into the surface anymore, but you can peel stuff off a few atoms in a burst or a few dozens of micrometers in a burst, with the same very thin heat affected zone at the surface. (Another is that all the stuff you just blasted off immediately sticks to the front of your objective lens, but they don't last long anyway when you have this many photons going through them: objective mirrors last longer but still get covered in junk. Some interesting stuff being done using liquid waveguides through which the laser moves and which wash off the debris, but then you have to not vaporize/ablate your liquid waveguide. And at least with the UV stuff we were doing, even the atmosphere absorbed giant amounts of the energy, so we had to do it in a vacuum and that made the crap-sticking-to-the-lens problem even worse.) My recollection is that people were trying to use laser ablation to do extremely thin heat-treatment, like surfacing treatment, but couldn't actually get it thick enough to make a measurable difference in wear characteristics, but A: I may misremember and B: people may be better at this now, so that bit could be complete hooey. I got out of high-energy lasers like fifteen years ago, when I realized that fully half my coworkers had pie blindness: they'd managed to damage some part of their eyes so they were missing some of their visual area, and stuff may have progressed a lot since then.

Sorry to reply to myself but since Wikipedia doesn't actually bother to talk about mechanisms, I will. You can remove a surface with a laser through heating, which applies enough photons to the surface atoms that they vibrate loose, which is a slow process that transmits piles of heat downwards. Or you can use a laser whose wavelength is shorter than the strength of the sigma electron bonds in the material, in which case the electrons absorb the photons, get popped into a higher orbital, and the bond that held the two atoms together simply isn't there anymore and the now free atoms can just drift away. There is in theory no heat generated at all. In practice there are so many photons coming in all at once that there's a metric buttload of photons being absorbed by everything, so what actually happens is the wavefront hits and turns the first couple of atomic layers into a plasma, that erupts away from the surface and leaves the underlying surface close to untouched. So that's the mechanistic difference between burning and ablation: photon flux and wavelength.

If I were doing this -- and I'm not claiming it's feasible, but let's call this a gedankenexperiment -- I'd use a system set up to ablate the material, which Wikipedia says so I don't have to: "Very short laser pulses remove material so quickly that the surrounding material absorbs very little heat, so laser drilling can be done on delicate or heat-sensitive materials," and " laser energy can be selectively absorbed by coatings, particularly on metal, so CO2 or Nd:YAG pulsed lasers can be used to clean surfaces, remove paint or coating, or prepare surfaces for painting without damaging the underlying surface. High power lasers clean a large spot with a single pulse."
When I was working with deep UV lasers (and got to learn what fluorine gas smells like -- elmer's glue, in case you were wondering, at least when it's dilute -- we were able to strip physical vapor deposition copper and nickel off polyimide film without damaging the polyimide. (We needed geometries too fine for chemical etching.) Removing organic material off steel should be much easier. Ablation can in theory remove single atomic layers with thermal damage only a few atoms deep to the underlying surface.

My company, which isn't quite as bit as Sony, but close, has badge access to every door in the building besides personal offices, with badge access control handled by servers located at corporate HQ. If you don't keep up with your ESD training, you're automatically barred from the labs, for instance. If Sony has something similar and they start taking stuff offline to stop leaks, there will be lot of side-effects.

Cool, thanks. I trust my corporate overlords and potential rogue elements within IT about as far as I can throw them, so I try hard to restrict what I do online to let them see as little as possible.
Well, except for this, which is going through the internet in plaintext. Yay.

Maybe you'd be the correct person to ask. I'm worried about exactly this, so as I have enough admin rights on my company computer to install software, I installed virtualbox and am running a linux system within that. My understanding is that since I performed the linux install, when I fire up a browser within the linux install and use https, I should not be susceptible to router-in-the-middle https proxy attacks -- or, at least, I should get a warning the first time I try to go to a site with https, letting me know about a certificate mismatch. Is that correct? or am I still open to the possibility of giving every IT person in my company access to my bank account if I were to do online banking from work? (I don't, but I do use gmail, which is https.)

>your dreams of tech as a clique-free meritocracy

How is a meritocracy not just another type of clique?
How is hiring people for their excellent social skills not a meritocracy?
There are so many implicit values embedded in the statement that it becomes a declaration of an extremely specific type of workplace the submitter (or editor) wants and thinks everyone else should want as well. It's the equivalent of the guy without a knife asserting that the guy with the knife should drop it and fight like a man.

I hate to defend institutions I don't like, but.. give Utah a chance. It's really beautiful, like, some of the most beautiful geology in the whole country. I spent last weekend there, as I have many previous weekends. Mormons are individually pretty nice people, despite the history of the church and many of its current political activities, and if you don't live there you don't get the shunned and isolated feeling that non-mormon residents get. Even rural towns now have coffee shops and places that serve beer.
For hostility and small-town religious closemindedness, northern Wyoming, northern Idaho, and North Dakota all feel far worse than Utah, to me.

A friend who teaches economics was posting about this the other day. Her contention is that for all of history until the 1800's, it was fairly easy to just leave and go find some subsistence environment, so if you wanted workers you had to enslave them and force them to work for you. Now that it's not generally possible for most people to find environments for subsistence lifestyles, there's no longer any need to enslave people. They have to find jobs to survive. At that crossover, work stopped being something the lowest class of society did under force, and became something that was considered a privilege.

Not only that, but as I recall, the movie showed the police having flying cars, and everyone else on foot or bicycle because they were poor.

As others have said, Subarus and Hondas are fairly easy to hack if you want to change existing ECU's.
But if you want a car the way you want it, and are going to do more work, look for older cars.
I have a 1975 Triumph Spitfire. I added electronic ignition, replaced the mechanical speedometer and tachometer with electronic ones, and am working on a custom fuel injection setup. If I want to put seat heaters in the car, removal of the seat pan doesn't take any bolts at all. It takes four screws to pull the door apart.
The problem, of course, is that I have to do ALL the work myself. There isn't anyone else doing stuff like this, so every project is brand new.
But there are precisely zero software or firmware barriers to doing anything I want, and the only hardware barriers are my skill limitations.
It's an easy way to sink 3000 hours into a car only worth $2000USD, though, and at the end you still have an old car with very dubious reliability.