Is mod point for articles themselves.

Imagine the possibilities.

Google has no fault in this scenario. GS has the problem, they want Google to help them out.

Instead of stating no, Google should have asked :"whats it worth to you?"

Google is a business, this is a service that they do not offer. you want a custom one-time service offering? Sure thing. Let me run some numbers on that and check your credit score and I'll get back to you.

If GS gets a court order and Google has to do this and they get nothing for it, then the situation is even more screwed up.

I have a hard time equating the cost center of a power company generating finite amounts of power that is sold to users with the "mostly fixed and generally stable" cost of maintaining connectivity for the IPSs.

You do realize that we're not "consuming 1s and 0s that the ISP has to go out and manufacture, right?

I'm not suggesting that every person should have the ability to have unlimited speed and unlimited capacity(bandwidth), but lets not paint a picture of US IPSs as working tirelessly to upgrade infrastructure and provide lower cost, improved service. It's not a competitive market, driving towards improvement. It's in their best interest to raise prices any way they can, such as through caps. It's Not in their interest to spend billions on new infrastructure to improve services and lower consumer costs, because they have no true competition driving market forces to make them improve.

We have a trash can in the garage, everything that's not actual relevant mail (bills, etc.) goes straight into the can without it ever entering the house. What a waste of paper, money, ink, human labor, etc.

The trick is to know how to accurately measure what you want to get.

If we want a test that validates human-like behavior in an AI, then the test criteria must rigorously define what that condition is. Tricking a single person in a subjective test is terribly skewed.

It's not like driver less cars will come out on June 1st and by end of year the entire population will have one.

If they are collecting that much per officer on average, then the solution presents itself...

1) Start reducing police forces as the gradual introduction of driverless cars comes and requires less policing
2) Transition police self-support income to increased tickets in other areas such as littering, domestic issues and other activities to replace only the necessary income required to operate the police.
3) Local governments currently using ticket income (which is an abuse no matter how you look at it) have a gradual decline to seek efficiencies or other income.

Local governments financing themselves off of ticketing is essentially funding government via a stupid tax (stupid enough to drive too fast, get a ticket). So while I have mixed emotions about the kismet portion of that scenario, it's still not a fair and just solution.

Does anyone else find this particularly ironic and posturing after the "Cisco Complains To Obama About NSA Adding Spyware To Routers" article earlier?

Assuming a collision is unavoidable, and the choice are Car A or B, it's not just a matter of choosing one or the other car to hit.

The logic should be actively working to avoid collision until the last second. The car cannot anticipate what actions the other vehicles may take. Until the actual collision occurs, maintain efforts to minimize the velocity and/or angel of collision. Better to hit the little electric car at 15 MPH after continuing to brake than to have hit the sturdy Escalade at 40 MPH.

Additionally, are there not some foundation rules that apply? We're taught that when in doubt, try and stay in your own lane, because hitting a car that suddenly pulled out in front of you is "less bad" than swerving into another lane and hitting a car that was obeying all of the rules. The basic scenarios need to be worked out and applied as much as possible. (not to mention the whole "oncoming car will be a much worse accident than a car traveling in the same direction as you are but at a different speed" scenario)

I think the scenario being postulated is a bit simplistic and meant to drive an ethics debate for attention. In reality this should be about improving the programs to the point of making the right choices based on more common sense rules than those proposed.

-sigh- bad day not to have any mod points

Thanks for posting an informed, reasonable response.

While you can get the same functionality on a phone, you cannot easily replicate the ease of use or the in-the-dark familiarity of a dedicated remote on a cell phone screen. I've run cell remotes and they are clever and better than nothing, but not better.

Having to activate your cell phone, get blaring light in your eyes rather than the dim theater room, and then having to load the appropriate app, and then start pushing virtual buttons, all to lower the volume on a movie is not very efficient or unobtrusive.

Agreed, it's a terribly misleading title. It has absolutely nothing to do with remotes (of which I have one that controls 9 devices in 3 rooms).

It's probably safe to say that you have a broader range of mediums (comics, network TV, movies, and now non-network TV) than most if not all modern content creators. What would you say the best (and worst) parts of each medium are for you as a creator?

I don't know much about bitcoin, I've been laughing to myself about the concept since I first heard of it years ago and so never looked into it.

But what I'm curious about, and maybe some of the others here with more in-depth knowledge can illuminate, is "What stops a guy, say a CEO of an exchange, and his trusty head programmer who helped build it(who would know exploits better?), from emptying all of the wallets in the exchange and laundering it through a couple of anonymous trades and then walking away with all of the money before bitcoin further devalues due to recent events?" Surely we're not just trusting in their morals from preventing this.

I'm all for modernizing UIs. Any UI that sits stagnant for an extended period can drift into a case where while it is much beloved, it is not as nice as it could be with some newer thought/style applied to it.

However, when the replacement UI does not keep, at it's core, the essence of what made the former UI so popular, one encounters significant resistance.

Many here will tell you that what makes Slashdot a part of their daily lives is not the articles. Sure the articles are topic starters and they contain some good information in many cases. But the reason many of us read Slashdot every day is that it is made up of a body of commentators who add the actual value of the website. Regardless of what the article may be, or how mundane or sensational the headline is, I have a clear "wait and see" response to it all until I've seen what the Slashdot community has made of the topic. I know that this crowd will dig into topics, look up facts, even unattractive ones, and find the interesting layers that are never part of the original articles.

Articles are the START of a conversation. The herd of intelligent, resourceful, knowledgeable detectives who live here are the actual product that I'm here to consume. I am THEIR audience, not Slashdot's.

All that being said, any changes that take away from my ability to easily consume the comments here is a step in the wrong direction. The new comments system for me is a complete non-starter. It lacks the view of the thread as the thread organically grows. It lacks the ability to see high rated comments inline while still seeing their position within the overall discussion without turning on everything. In short, it makes it harder to do what I'm here to do.

The rest is all window dressing to me. Bigger pictures, cleaner fonts and such. Yes, these things can be great when done well. I'm not suggesting that what we have in the beta is "done well" but rather that it could be done well if you scrap what you have and start over with a new focus on "what is our product" and realize that the answer is "our commenters".

Given the backlash that Slashdot is experiencing, my suggestion would be this:

Announce that you are cancelling the current beta and going back to the drawing board with a renewed focus on the site's content and purpose.
Make it clear that you do not believe that Slashdot is not "just another news site and should be formatted as such".
Show some appreciation for the legendary comment system that Slashdot has grown over the years and a dedication to remain faithful to it.
Then you can start over, and instead of going for a grand redesign, take an iterative approach. Small moves, in alignment with the community.

In the end, your readers are different than any other website news service, they know more about site design and site construction than you do. So tap into that and stop treating them like they are reading Engadget.

Hopefully this feedback helps out.