Wait, I thought hipsters were the guys who liked the new things

They can like new things, but they have to be ironic about it (in the Alanis way).

Oh, the many, many books that people have tried to ban (or succeeded)!

From the American Libraries Association: Banned & Challenged Books.

Over 1,000 nuclear weapons have been detonated on Earth in the past 50+ years

And about half of those were detonated underground, after the 1963 Test Ban Treaty. The ban on atmospheric testing was put into place once people realized that irradiating their own planet and dispersing toxic metals was a bad idea.

Russia recently stopped all shipments of processed Uranium from Russia to America for fuel processing, a move that indicates they have no intention of reducing their arsenal.

Do you mean the Megatons to Megawatts Program? It ended of its own accord: the deal from 20+ years back was for 500 tons of enriched uranium, that amount was delivered as planned.

That the program wasn't extended seems more to be a lack of leadership than hostility. At the time when such an extension could/should have been enacted, when the New Start treaty was signed, the US was on OK terms with Russia. As the article points out, however, the hawks in the Senate stonewalled on ratifying the treaty unless they got their shiny new nuclear complex. They got what they wanted, and undercut the President's ability to negotiate further nuclear deals at the same time.

Nobody is using the size of cells that Tesla claims to be interested in producing

Tesla uses 18650-size cells, specifically because they are the most common Li-Ion form factor in the world. If Tesla is planning on producing a different-sized cell at the gigafactory, please provide a link.

Would you want your house destroyed by lased popcorn

Mmmmm. Tasty destruction.

Now what am I going to do with all these boards and 6-inch spikes? A girl's gotta have her standards.

The iPhone 6 is 4.7", and might fit your hand better than the 4.7" phone you had.

Because Apple measures inches differently than everyone else?

Apple. Measure Different.

Joking aside, what you say is possible, since the screen's diagonal measurement is hardly the only metric for the size of a phone. Aspect ratio, bezel width, thickness, sharpness of corners - all of these impact "holdability"

The Dev Board that Edison plugs into appears to have Arduino R3 headers on there, presumably for plugging in Arduino-compatible shields. That's interesting, and makes a fair bit of sense: there are thousands of Arduino-compatible shields out there, and adding some serious computational power in there plus wire(d)(less) networking opens up a lot of possibilities.

I suppose Apple had to join in on the 2009 smartphone market at some point. 5+ years too late, better than never?

So your 1009 WiFi calling transitioned from WiFi to cell networks without dropping call?

In the year 1009 my WiFi calling was implemented using swallows carrying the messages from place to place. Of course they had to drop them - do you think I was going to try and catch that damn bird myself just to get a message?

So if you lose or upgrade your phone you have to re-setup all your stored cards? That doesn't sound very Apple like.

If you lose or upgrade your phone you have to re-setup your TouchID information. Apple contends, and I haven't seen any research to contradict their claim, that the TouchID information resides solely on the device, not in the device backup, not in the cloud. So there is precedent for something that may not ordinarily seem "Apple like."

It's not like it is that hard of a procedure to re-enter your credit card information. How many cards are we talking about here? How long does it take to enter that information? One minute per card?

Then how exactly you want to control it? Artificial heart won't speed up/slow down automatically in response to oxygen needs of your body because it is not controlled by nervous system

Controlling it with a smartphone isn't going to cut it either. How often, and how quickly, does your heart rate change by more than, say, 5%? Ten times an hour? More? Do you really want to be whipping out your smartphone every couple of minutes? What if you set it wrong? What if you fat-finger yourself into a blackout? What if the phone's battery is dead? The list goes on and on. It's a terrible user experience! Ask people who wear portable insulin pumps - devices that need input tens of times per day, and can be lethal if done wrong. (Some of them can be operated via smartphone these days, too.) They will tell you, emphatically, that they don't want to interact with that damn thing any more than is absolutely necessary.

No, you want the device to have its own closed loop mechanisms for controlling heart rate. The heart doesn't respond solely (or even primarily) to the nervous system. It responds to blood pO2, pCO2, and other chemical signatures in the blood. These characteristics, too, can be used as the feedback signals for the internal control system. The use case described in the summary - commanding it into certain pre-programmed profiles - is conceivable, but I don't think you necessarily want to rely on that.

I only ask 'cause it sounds like it would have fit right in in Oklahoma

Nah, it would have been discounted as misinformation - placed there by God to test the faith that the Earth is only 6,000 years old.

[crunches pickle]This is wild. This is really wild!

The government knows all about this, man! Maybe you should read up about it on my blog.

Well, if the police have nothing to hide they have nothing to fear.

Most in the Slashdot crowd would scoff at using the "nothing to hide" argument as it applies to more widespread surveillance of ordinary citizens. At the same time, they would happily use it as a justification for more widespread "surveillance" (e.g., transparency and monitoring) of police, intelligence services, and government in general.

I do not think this is an example of doublethink, or a double standard. It's not a double standard if the situations it's being applied to are, in fact, different. There is a very big difference between the private matters of private citizens and the actions of government employees in the conduct of their public roles. For that reason, always-on police cameras seem quite reasonable, so long as they can be switched off or set aside as soon as the officer goes off duty and resumes being a private citizen.

Many of the arguments raised in debunking the "nothing to hide" argument are worth considering, and should guide the proper implementation of police cameras and other "watching the watchers" efforts. I don't, however, think the arguments are forceful enough for us to not implement police cameras, though.

It's likely that there's actually more than 2A going through that cable due to power factor and reactive current. The 2 A on the nameplate is the net current that is drawn by the power supply, but if the power factor is not close to 1.0 (low- to medium-quality switching power supplies have power factor around 0.6), then there could be significant reactive current, well beyond 2 A, flowing through the cable.

USB transfers DC, and so shouldn't have any reactive current.