The funniest thing is that every story is filled with comments from whingers who don't realize they're being trolled by Slashdot. The editors are no doubt sitting in a conference room, keeping score on all of the comments. Maybe they've even turned it into a drinking game where they drink every time someone types 'stop', and have to chug for each goatse.

YHBT. HTH. HAND.

"I use them for smuggling. I never thought I'd be smuggling myself in 'em. "

If you do it right, you don't even need to change the references:

Desert Youth Radicalized by Bearded Religious Zealot
He seemed to others like a typical teen; having fun with his friends, going into town to pick up some power converters. But the boy's foster parents were worried he would follow a local anti-social, desert-dwelling hermit on some "damn fool ideological crusade". There are reports the old man may have lied to the youth about his birth father's involvement in the religious movement in order to gain his trust. From there, the two joined up with a couple of mercenary smugglers involved in human trafficking in an attempt to sneak past coalition blockades and gain access to military facilities. The old cleric apparently martyred himself in the initial attack on the base, which only strengthened the youth's resolve to follow in his mentor's footsteps. Even the mercenaries appear to have been radicalized, abandoning their business interests to join up with the movement.

That's a premature pronouncement, too. My Windows tablet is also now my laptop, just smaller and lighter. Not as light as my iPad, but the iPad has been relegated to a desk drawer because it's essentially useless compared to carrying around a tablet with a fully functioning OS.

If Apple were to install OSX on the iPad family of devices, that would indeed change the game again. But that would mean cutting into their insanely lucrative monopoly with their App Store model, so that's not likely to happen.

For many (most) traditional four-year college students, the primary value of the experience is something that a MOOC or Khan or whatever online can never ever replicate.

College is for many kids the first time you will live away from home, with all the distractions and temptations of the real world - but without losing your job and ending up homeless if you get too drunk and are too hung over to go to class the next day. It is a concentrated social mixing bowl where members of the opposite (or same as it may be) sexes come together with no parental supervision and have to figure out how to deal with each other - but also surrounded by a throng of peers to help them figure it out or support them as necessary. It is a halfway transition period between full-time schooling in which you are expected to learn and recite facts obediently and a world where you are expected to challenge authority figures and be fully responsible for all your own decisions.

It is, in short, the real world but with "training wheels" on.

I can't speak for anyone else, but four years of training wheels after high school just barely got me to the point of being a functional adult who didn't melt down when exposed to reality. (I also really, really, enjoyed it too.) Away from home, full-time, co-educational college is an experience at that period of life that I think is irreplaceable and can't ever be matched by a different model.

Yes, the law be equitable only in this situation:
    You are a prostitute, and are heterosexual. Somebody wishes to engage your services. You say no, because you don't swing that way...

Otherwise, frankly, what happens in my or anyone else's bedroom is NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS, because it doesn't involve you. Also, if your religion regards their relationship as a sin, I suggest you stop eating shellfish, working on a Sunday, and any gazillion things that are all old testament and have nothing to do with being "Christian" (the religion that supposedly follows a guy who basically preached love and acceptance, ya know).

How about, rather than an always-on camera, one that can be activated by certain flight crew members in the event of an emergency. It might not help if terrorists have already seized a plane, etc, but if somebody catches on before everyone is taken down then at least there will be a visual record of what happened.

You'd think that was true - and it was for awhile - but it isn't now. Many of the eTailers in Canada have pricing that's pretty close to the box stores when you consider shipping, but then you're getting an item that's sight-unseen and the hassle of possible returns. U.S. eTailers had better prices, but international shipping, - as well as the bend-me-over brokerage fees that UPS/Fed-Ex charge - dramatically raises the price of any cross-border online shopping. With the Canadian dollar in the shitter, that extra %20 makes it even worse.

So, unless you're ordering something from China (that you're willing to wait longer for, though pay much less for many things), there's no bargain there.

Where Future Shop f**ked up was the have box locations but stock-wise they're pretty much an online-store. Their video selection locally was pitiful, and everything was "if you'd like, you can order online and have it shipped." That does save you the shipping, but levels the playing field for Amazon-et-al dramatically in terms of wait-time etc
I tried them for some computer stuff, and even online their selection was pretty bad. I mean, if you're going to have an online store... why not increase your selection a bit?!

I understand this comment is actually a rhetorical question to comment on the morality of the Allies in the Dresden firebombing. (BTW, Dresden was never intended to be "Dresden." It was an area bombing with incendiaries and was thus expected to cause indiscriminate damage to civilians alongside the military targets; but nobody involved had any clue it would turn out to be the indescribable charnel house it became.)

But in case anyone is interested in the actual question for purposes of historical context: there was a putative purpose for the Dresden bombing, and two actual audiences that were supposed to receive different messages.

• The purported message of Dresden to the world was "Dresden has some military targets of benefit to the Wehrmacht, and we will show you that the Allies can always find and destroy them. This is part of an ongoing program where we will continue to find and destroy everything in Germany that has any military value. Please understand how fucked you are and save lives by surrendering."
• The actual intended message of Dresden to Germany's leadership was "Yeah, you have figured out that our bombers can't attack from a safe altitude and hit the broad side of a barn. But that doesn't mean we will just give up. Instead, we can and will fuck your cities up to the maximum imaginable degree by bombing far and wide, even though we know lots of civilians will die. We claim that's against our principles, but you know what, Hitler? Given what you have done so far, we are not going to lose any sleep over any collateral damage in order to get you, so please leave some Earl Grey in Berchtesgaden for us."
• The third message was from "Bomber Harris" and the RAF to SHAEF and Churchill - "Look, we are doing stuff to Germany that is visible and makes Allied civilians feel like Germans are feeling the pain of retribution. Oh, and by the way, look what a great job we're doing so after the war we should be a Very Important Branch of the Military." This, by the way, was pretty much the exact same message that Curtis LeMay's firebombings of Japan were intended to deliver to Roosevelt and then Truman.

Most of the people I see with those have jobs related to the Alberta oil-sands. Watch those disappear quickly now that the bottom is dropping out of that market.

Would that same attorney work for free to help them out when they did quit or move on to a new job? It's not necessarily just the contract that can be costly, but the court time/costs in fighting it.

Yes, but that still doesn't cover a lot of places.
Here: City of 100k, 400km (248mi) from the nearest 1,000,000+ city,
My house: 8km (~5mi) from city center
Bus service: 7:00am->9:00pm hourly. Weekend service ends sooner. Some holidays with no service. Uptown (where much of the shopping is) requires a transfer in town.

Hardly a McMansion, and not far from city center, but also no way to get by without a car when you work late/early hours, are on-call, and/or don't otherwise want to walk through thick snow in the winter.

There *IS* a corner-store in my neighbourhood. If I just need a loaf of bread and some tomatoes I happily get some exercise and walk... but for anything more than that - frankly - you need a car.

(yes, it would be nice to have better bus service, but no luck with that thus far, and sometimes we're lucky if they clear our streets properly during a heavy snow let alone bike lanes).

Even in bigger cities, weather is sometimes restrictive for travelling by vehicle, let alone by bike or on foot. Further east you're lucky if you can get out of your house in some places.

And using GIThub for your prod code is stupid, unless you fully plan on sharing it with the world, including possibly any "fun" stuff that gets included by accident like private company info, passwords, internal IP-space, users, or security flaws...