A huge percentage are frickin' snowflakes demand to be given the same rights and berth as automobiles

Can you imagine someone demanding the same rights as an automobile?

Everyone knows automobiles were endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights to have everyone get out of the fucking way.

Most of us are looking forward to the advent of autonomous vehicles.

Are you shitting me? Most of us were looking forward to the advent of flying cars, too.

Earlier this week...
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ru...

And who do they think is going to be purchasing all these "autonomous vehicles" and with all the twenty-somethings and millennials moving back home with their parents, how do they think they're going to afford them?

Look, I don't mind advertisements on Slashdot, but goddamn, please stop with the press releases from "anonymous" parties.

Mandated insurance makes no sense. It's not sufficient to cover anything but the most trivial accident. Compared to the costs and risks involved it's a completely token gesture.

Poe's law applies here.
I honestly don't know if you're being sarcastic or audiophile.

The makers of the cable didn't know WTF they were doing; they claimed it was better for music.
The testers merely were merely thorough by explicitely testing the claims, asinine as they might be.
By doing so, they are taking away any dumbshit rebuttal the makers might have had otherwise.

If there is no road sign that marks a road built especially for high speed motorized vehicles (like a freeway) then the road is built for general use, not just for cars.

As a cyclist, I am okay with that. But then the drivers ought to pay for their actual road and environment damage and for their parking as well. Would make driving completely prohibitive, though.

You need to upgrade your house shielding to prevent muons from wreaking havoc on the up/down quark balance in the helium-injected conductors. You do use helium-injected wiring, don't you?

The cheapest cable is frequently not even close to good enough. I've seen numerous $0.99 Chinese cables that actually have a loop of the conductor that obviously was laying flat against the side of the mold when the injection process happened. As a result, it sticks through one of the molded connector walls. Just a bit of rubbing and you've got bare conductor exposed.

I'm starting to wonder if all the loud music when I was younger damaged my ears. Every time I turn on the radio, everything sounds like shit.

I just gave my sysadmin an eightball of coke and a box full of Raspberry Pi's. He says he's "planning something big".

I'm starting to wonder if I should maybe tell someone.

If these politicians want the problem solved,

They don't. They want to play for the cameras and if they can also get another excuse to lock down the Internet, all the better for the Lidless Eye.

These people are simply never happy as long as anyone else is.

Unfortunately there has been a trend lately on Slashdot where the editors accept a lot of stories from people linking to their own site. I guess this is acceptable in the Twitter world but doesn't match a meritocracy where users submit interesting stories instead of pumping up their page views.

I don't think the editors have a choice in the matter. Slashdot is corporate, thus it must deliver bigger numbers every quarter or be labeled a failure and discontinued. Finding a niche and delivering a steady stream of eyeballs to advertisers isn't sexy with higher-ups, because they in turn must deliver exponential growth to shareholders. But exponential growth is only possible when you're way below what the environment can support, so the staff implements random changes to be seen doing something, which in turn end up driving existing users away.

People need to understand that the Web is not the frontier anymore. Dotcom bubble came and went, and sites like Slashdot are mature (boring) businesses which simply aren't going to grow significantly anymore. Put them into maintenance mode and use their steady revenue as venture capital to fund developing new, exciting things.

Patent Office Lottery

Depardieu is Russian now, so you are barking up the wrong tree.