With recent advances in machine learning, a large number of which have come from American universities and companies, and the amount of telemetry data available via mobile phones, America has a golden opportunity to lead the world in automatically personalized fart apps.

What if I am very still while watching TV? And roll around a lot while sleeping?

Your city doesn't require any camera for monitoring by police. You do need a permit and so does your alarm company. Perhaps your alarm company told you that but they are just trying to up sell you their camera system.

The way it might be sort-of-true is that if all the police get is "alarm going off in X neighborhood", they're typically not going to treat it as an emergency, because about 99% of the time it's a false positive: alarm set off by homeowner who accidentally opened their door with the alarm set, or by an over-sensitive motion detector getting set off, all kinds of things. If you call in with specific information like, not only is the alarm going off, but we saw two people enter through the front window, then they'll take it more seriously.

That's probably true of a number of people on Slashdot, but I think not that common among the general public. Sports especially are one thing keeping people on cable; a huge percentage of Americans watch live sports, and webs of TV contracts make it hard to get them otherwise, at least if you aren't internet-savvy enough to find pirated streams.

That will probably eventually change. The major sports leagues periodically re-run the numbers on whether it'd be more profitable to just sell direct streaming subscriptions to the public, rather than sign exclusive deals with TV networks. But so far the answer is that it isn't. So instead they're laying the groundwork for it, starting their own networks that could be delivered via other modalities in the future if it becomes profitable, and experimenting with selling streaming subscriptions to whatever content isn't locked up in the exclusivity deals.

What if what you're unhappy about is how it seems like it's passing so quickly?

In this case afaict the politicians never said that public wifi was going to be banned. It was the police who requested public wifi to be banned, which isn't surprising since police always want these kinds of things shut down. The government initially didn't comment on their request, and now commented that it's not in favor.

She's been pretty frequently castigated around here too. A by-no-means-exhaustive list of previous Slashdot articles on Feinstein doing or proposing stupid things: videogame control, persecuting Snowden, trying to kill net neutrality, defending NSA surveillance, etc.

On a side note, her husband, a hedge-fund manager who somehow got himself appointed to the University of California board of regents, isn't too great either.

A million monkeys poking at a million CRISPR kits could have some interesting results.

Automatic updates to software too. Windows, OSX, and friends regularly pull down big updates. So do game consoles, Android and iOS apps, etc.

Reducing staff is the intent, but so far I'm not sure it's being realized. At least for the handful of companies where I have some view into how they're using AWS, they have an awful lot of people who look like IT staff, but have been rebranded from "sysadmin" to "devops". Some are even doing pretty similar things as before, like building and maintaining OS and application images, keeping up on security issues, writing big piles of scripts to automate deployment, etc. The forms are new (Ansible scripts, VHD and Docker images, etc.), but a lot of the work looks familiar.

What I don't get is why SXSW didn't just provide them both some security, instead of this reaction. SXSW is a big organization and can afford it, and the amount of security needed is realistically probably not huge. This isn't like hosting a Mohammed Cartoons talk or American Nazi Party talk or something, where you might worry that you'd have a large number of possibly militant people show up to disrupt it.

One historical reason is that a lot of the other agencies were created during the period between 1924 and 1972, the 48 years when J. Edgar Hoover was head of the FBI, and nobody really wanted to give him more power if they could help it.

Charter schools are almost always legally considered governmental entities, just ones that are given a degree of organizational autonomy. Here is what this school's website says,

Liberty Common School is a charter school in Fort Collins, Colorado, operating in the Poudre School District. A charter school in Colorado is a public school operated by a group of parents, teachers, and/or community members as a semi-autonomous school of choice within a school district. The school operates under a contract or “charter” contract between the members of the charter school community and the local board of education.

I.e. It's a public school that operates as part of a public school district.

The court seems to be saying that there's no problem with Bob Schaffer's personal speech, so it doesn't seem like a free-speech problem to me. The focus was on whether the school, a governmental entity, should in its official capacity make comments for or against a candidate. Governmental entities don't really have free-speech rights.

If the government could make its mind up and stop wasting time, the US could rapidly diminish and even eliminate its reliance on fossil fuels

I'm not sure about that, unless by "make its mind up" you mean the government makes a big intervention into the economics, rather than merely streamlining the regulatory process. The crash in natural-gas prices has really killed the fundamental economics of a lot of nuclear plants that were in the works. With the huge up-front capital costs of nuclear plant construction, you can't compete in a market where cheap-to-build natural-gas plants can be fed by gas that's selling wholesale for under $3/MMBtu, barely above the price of coal. I don't see that changing unless either fossil fuels get hit by a significant tax (e.g. a carbon tax), or nuclear gets much larger subsidies than the current ones (which are mostly just loan guarantees and liability limitation).

Even in politically supportive areas, a bunch of operators who had announced planned new units in the early and mid 2000s (in places like Texas and Florida), announced around 2010-2012 that projects were being put on hold due to the unfavorable market conditions.