Sorry, but you don't go far enough here. As arbiters of the law, the police should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us, precisely because their career is ripe for abuse.

All investigations of the police should be handled by an impartial third party, and if at any point you or a family member have served in the police force, that should automatically bar you from working for that third party. And if you are found guilty of any misdemeanor as a member of the police force, you should automatically receive the highest possible penalty with no opportunity for appeal and (if jail time is involved) parole.

This, this, a million times this.

Ever fly a commercial airliner which programs itself, chooses its own route, and makes its own decisions throughout the flight, almost completely unmonitored while the pilot reads Playboy or snoozes? No, you say? (At least, you do if you're truthful.) So you'd like to make the leap to that future, would you? Yeah, I didn't think so. The autopilot thing is a fallacy: We're talking about journeys that are almost entirely free of things near you to crash into, along routes that were determined by a human rather than a computer, with a human paying attention at all times and with the only real risk coming during takeoff and landing where the computer is given significant external assistance in terms of its flight path and the actions of surrounding aircraft, and where it's even more closely-monitored by the crew (or simply disabled and the crew flies the approach and landing manually.) This is in no way comparable to a situation where there is almost no external indications the computer can rely on, other vehicles driving unpredictably all around it, and the computer is expected to make its own routing decisions. Apples to airships, my friend.

This. And doubly so when you consider that the human has to be paying attention all the time, or when the computer gives up / fails gracelessly and control has to be taken over by the human, it will take too long to assess the situation and take action. The only way to avoid the accident will be to pay attention the whole time, at which point you might as well occupy youself by simply switching off the computer and driving. Otherwise you're going to get bored and your attention will drift.

Of course, that won't happen. What will happen is that the drivers won't pay attention, and will also fail to salvage the situation most of the time when the computer has failed, simply because they weren't prepared and situationally aware. And that is one of the main reasons why driverless vehicles are a really, really bad idea. What we're doing is to create a vehicle that makes it less likely the human will be able to prevent a crash when (not if) the computer doesn't know what to do in the big, bad, dirty real world.

My Xperia Z2 is now a year old. It runs better than it did when I first bought it. It runs almost all Android apps without issue. I pretty much only charge it when I notice it running low -- I can't remember the last time it died overnight. The battery lasts at least 48 hours even with regular use. In an hour on the charger it is almost back to full charge. I've never had any kind of security issue, and if I lose it or it gets stolen, it is a brick to whomever ends up with it.

For the life of me, I don't see the advantage of your Blackberry over my existing Android device.

Android fragmentation exists because manufacturers refuse to maintain their phones. Pushing that job onto the carriers is a recipe for customer dissatisfaction and security breaches. If Google wants to solve this problem, they need to force the manufacturers to accept responsibility for updating their own hardware.

Balderdash. It isn't the carriers that create the updates, it is the manufacturers.

The carriers certainly hold up the updates for weeks or months on end for "testing" (read: making sure it doesn't brick the phone and all the contractually-required bloat is installed). But maintaining the phones isn't and never has been the carrier's job. It has always been the manufacturer's job, and to varying degrees, they do a shockingly bad job of it -- which is why Google needs to take it in-house.

This is the one and *only* area in which Android trails iOS: The availability of updates in a timely and bloat-free manner. Solve that and there will be no reason for iOS to exist any more.

Are you really suggesting that as a meaningful solution to bloat -- going in and force-stopping apps every time you start your phone, and quite possibly leaving it in an unstable state in the process?

Because that doesn't strike me as a solution, but rather as an attitude that's part of the problem.

My reply wasn't to you. Your joke was pretty obvious; I doubt there's anybody here who didn't get it.

Jesus. I knew there would be a big difference, but I didn't realize it would be that big.

Largely, they don't do it because the odds are carefully stacked in favor of those who paid for entry. With a TotalFark membership, you get to see the contests and prep your entries ahead of time, and because the voting happens from the moment their entries are posted *and* the entries are always shown chronologically, the winners are almost always among the first entries, and almost always from paying TotalFark subscribers. Which rather defeats the point of pretending it is a contest.

If it was actually a meaningful contest, voting wouldn't be possible until *after* entries had closed, and the entries would be shown in a random order to every potential voter. And if that happened, I'd probably start entering regularly again. As-is, the thing that made me sign up for Fark almost 12 years ago is something I almost never participate in or even bother to look at any more.

Yep, you don't want to drive if you're worried about code. There's a good chance your car contains close to 100 million lines of it these days. Wait, you bought an old car to avoid that, you say? GM has been using at least 50,000+ lines of code in all of its vehicles since the very early 80s, according to this IEEE article.

No kidding. The Airbus A380 is said to have more than 100 million lines of code in its avionics (ie. excluding things like in-flight entertainment, etc.). By comparison, the Boeing 787 is said to have "only" around 6.5 million lines of code.

How much longer can a site that's largely based around the same handful of tired old memes remain relevant?

The Xperia Z3 is also worth a look. Same standby time as the Z3 Compact (920 hours claimed), and even longer talk times (16 hours). Full disclosure: I have no connection to Sony Mobile, but I do own the previous Xperia Z2 and couldn't be much happier with it.

LED bulbs with far, far better than CRI 80 are available. Try the Cree TW-series with a CRI of 93 for a particularly nice example.

http://creebulb.com/Content/do...