This is the sound of the other shoe dropping.

>"If your argument is not able to stand by its own, without your name, your reputation or people checking your post history, it is no good argument."

One can have a reasonable argument, but also be completely unreasonable, socially. I agree that AC postings *can* have value. Yours is a perfect example. You are clear, respectful, and add to the conversation. The problem is that it often is just a bunch of nastiness or trolling. And because so many abuse it, people will filter it all out, or make negative assumptions about the poster's information or intent.

I am probably an outlier. Whether I post somewhere will full ID, with a pseudonym, or completely anonymously, I always write exactly the same way. With the same tone, respect, and diligence. I don't resort to personal attacks or inflammatory tone, I try to put myself in other's shoes and see multiple perspectives, and try to assume the poster I am responding to is acting in food faith (unless he or she proves otherwise in that posting). It seems this is far from "normal", though, which is a shame.

>"If you don't want to put your name to what you say then you're not worth giving a shit about. The AC thing has run it's course. There's no point in having it anymore. All it does is allow fuckwits to unleash their most fuckwitttest version of themselves."

I don't even think it needs to be your "name". (Note, you don't use your name.... I actually do, but that was my choice). At least requiring a login so there is some "handle" to show previous activity and positions is useful. And there is still a reputation to protect, even if it is not a person's actual name/identity. So I agree with you on the "AC" stuff on Slashdot. It is abused as a way to just attack positions or people without any reference.

I say this but am FIERCELY against platforms requiring verified "ID" in order to post. Even if they allow a public-facing alias. For me, that is a bright red line. And we are already crossing that line very quickly in this backwards methodology of "saving the children" when the real problem are having access to unrestricted devices, not the platforms, themselves.

>professors "struggle to accommodate the many students with an official disability designation,"

Do they also get to bring their "emotional support animals" to the test?

>"At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of undergraduates are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent."

Why does that not surprise me.

>"But I would say that insurance should pay if the scan turns up anything requiring medical attention - early detection saves money."

I would say it is very unlikely any insurance will retroactively pay for a non-medically-indicated (non-physician-ordered and with justification) scan. Even if it picks up something that is a valid concern. However, they should cover further investigation/treatment of something discovered. Including further scans to clarify and follow-up scans.

It would be insane to not get a copy of any imaging. You can't rely on some health system storing your stuff for more than X years and it will get silently deleted. And if you need an old image for a baseline comparison, you will be out of luck. Plus, if you wait until later, you might forget to get it, or not remember where you had it taken, or the company might have gone belly-up or sold and systems changed.

>"I've always wondered if there might be a benefit to a full body scan along these lines not for its own sake, but for what it could tell me later in life when something actually is wrong. Does having a "before" image help to weed out things"

I came to point out this exact case. There is probably a good reason to have a body scan sometime in mid-life as a "baseline" so you have something to compare back to. I believe this will probably become routine at some point. Maybe at age 45 or something. But for now, a full-body MRI it is very slow and expensive. A CT scan would be much faster and cheaper, but not as good.

Of course, when comparing back, it might still not be ideal because the resolution might have been too low, or would have needed some special contrast, or different exposure, or needed to be a PET, or something else.

It's long past time we had a real debate about the law, too. Just because something has been the law for a long time, that doesn't necessarily mean it should remain the law as times change. Clearly there is a difference between the implications of casually observing someone as you pass them in a public street, when you probably forget them again a moment later, and the implications of recording someone with a device that will upload the footage to a system run by a global corporation where it can be permanently stored, shared with other parties, analysed including through image and voice recognition that can potentially identify anyone in the footage, where they were, what they were doing, who they were doing it with, and maybe what they were saying and what they had with them, and then combined with other data sources using any or all of those criteria as search keys in order to build a database at the scale of the entire global population over their entire lifetimes to be used by parties unknown for purposes unknown, all without the consent or maybe even the knowledge of the observed people who might be affected as a result.

I don't claim to know a good answer to the question of what we should allow. Privacy is a serious and deep moral issue with far-reaching implications and it needs more than some random guy on Slashdot posting a comment to explore it properly. But I don't think the answer is to say anything goes anywhere in public either just because it's what the law currently says (laws should evolve to follow moral standards, not the other way around) or because someone likes being able to do that to other people and claims their freedoms would be infringed if they couldn't record whatever they wanted and then do whatever they wanted with the footage. With freedom comes responsibility, including the responsibility to respect the rights and freedoms of others, which some might feel should include more of a right to privacy than the law in some places currently protects.

That all said, people who think it's cool to film other human beings in clear distress or possibly even at the end of their lives just for kicks deserve to spend a long time in a special circle of hell. Losing a friend or family member who was, for example, killed in a car crash is bad enough. Having to relive their final moments over and over because people keep "helpfully" posting the footage they recorded as they drove past is worse. If you're not going to help, just be on your way and let those who are trying to protect a victim or treat a patient get on with it.

And what happens when you wash it?

>"India is weighing a proposal to mandate always-on satellite tracking in smartphones for precise government surveillance"

What? This is the same India that just tried to force non-removable government spyware on everyone's phones. Then claimed it wasn't spyware, could be removed, that it couldn't spy on anyone using it, and then claimed it was always going to be voluntary to use?

It is obvious that they are pushing the populous to see what they can get away with.

Considering that for the one-time investment of $150 and a half hour of your time you could not have to do that any more? Hell yes, you're crazy.

Samsung is collection of several companies and if you've ever spent any time working with them you quickly realize that they all prioritize other Samsung companies below other customers. I don't know whether it's because of anti-trust concerns, or market strategy, or just rivalry, but I've never seen any Samsung company that operated any differently. I worked quite a bit with Samsung Mobile and S.LSI, who are even quite interdependent (though S.LSI depends more on Samsung Mobile than the reverse), and they constantly ignored and even dissed one another.

There's no way your driver's ed class failed to mention that traffic is required to stop for school buses with their red lights flashing, and I think it's unlikely that your written test failed to include a question about school zone and school bus rules. Mine (Utah) certainly did.

In rural areas, like where I live, there aren't any marked crossings, and there really isn't any reasonable place to put them. If you mark a crossing it would only ever be used by the one or two houses near it, and only by school children, because there's really no need for anyone to walk across the street otherwise. The school buses stop directly in front of each child's house. There aren't any locations where a bus could pick up multiple children without making them have to walk an unreasonable distance, so each kid's house is a stop.

Also, the speed limit on my road is 45 mph, and cars routinely drive 55 mph... so having the "huge yellow beast" with flashing red lights and a flipped-out, flashing red stop sign is definitely necessary.

The question was literally, "What happens when all car manufacturers are displaying ads?"