Unless you're the person in the lane next to the Uber car when its high-mileage, improperly-maintained components break, or the person crossing the road in front when the Uber driver falls asleep, and then you get to be in the accident too.

Regulations on commercial drivers exist for a reason, and it's not just for the benefit of the passengers inside a commercial vehicle.

Providing an alternative that is competitive merely by virtue of not following the same rules as everyone else isn't an improvement. Compete on the same basis as everyone else, and then if your service is otherwise better you can enjoy all the well-deserved support you like. Otherwise, you should expect regulators to close you down.

Why not instead of baffles construct an array of wind turbines to take the energy out the wind? Fix the deadly gales problem and power the building at the same time.

Don't invest in UX. Invest in UI (user interface). The rot really started when this whole "user experience" fad began. If a user interface is giving me an experience, it is a bad user interface. User interface should melt into the background and explicitly be designed to NOT give the user "an experience".

Please don't continue with the "user experience" bullshit.

C# is a fine language but it pioneered nothing at all. Especially not lambda expressions.

Both are terrible, and started going downhill around the same time, racing each other to the bottom - beginning in 2005 (when you started getting shows like Deadliest Catch and Decoding the Past, which became the prototype for many future series of increasingly less "reality"), and then full force by 2007 where you start getting too many shows to name.

One thing that drives me crazy almost as much as the blatant pseudoscience presented as fact is the extensive acting presented as reality. I mean, okay, I get it, a purely "reality" program is pretty much impossible, the very requirements of filming it make it so. Even in stuff like Les Stroud's "solo" work he always had a base camp just a couple kilometers away from him and stayed in communication with them by radio. But now the stage guidance, product promotion, and "weekly scripted adventures" have gotten so absurd and obvious, they don't even try to hide it any more. I thought that they couldn't get any lower than the bogus survival show Man vs. Wild (where the host pretended to be living in homemade shelters and surviving off wild food, when he was actually staying in luxury hotels and show consultants prepped everything from making "rafts" for him to releasing "wild" animals for him to catch). But now almost all of their shows are like that or even worse. And the product promotion, my god - have you seen the Pawn Stars plugging for Skype? If you're going to have your "reality show" stars plug a product in your show, at least get people who can act.

The changes are so visible with time, too. Take Mythbusters for example - watch some of the early eps and compare with the modern eps and look at how much more is obviously staged acting with everyone reciting a script (not to the extent of Smash Labs, but still). Apparently Discovery Communications has decided that this is what people want to see - bad actors going on "daily adventures" and having "witty banter".

in an 11,000 volt cable

Actually, since it's for optical data transfer, not power transmission, it's a 11,000 volt line. When it's for power transmission, it's called magma.

Look at the amount of ignorance and stupidity around? See the number of university graduates thinking hoax mails/posts are true and spreading them...

So what would any sociopathic channel boss prefer to run? Stuff that most people would watch and talk about, or stuff that only a minority would enjoy?

It's about making money not educating people. That's why actually "public TV" can be a good thing. It's not like the private sector would care or even if they did at first, the $$$ pressures would change them.

Compare National Geographic's narration for their octopus vs shark video-
2006: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I prefer the 2006 narration - less annoying. But I guess most viewers would prefer the 2007 version?

And although many on Slashdot complain about the "Walled Garden", having an App store run by Apple itself provides some assurance to the customer that the App is legit and not some form of malware.

I don't think malware is particularly worrisome in the average user's mind. I think it's more about quality.

Speaking as an application developer, the vast majority of times I've had to say to clients "Apple won't allow that", it's been something that is self-serving and user-unfriendly if not downright abusive. Apple serve as a convenient foil for developers who care about users and stop developers who don't care from going too far.

As a developer, I know first hand how frustrating it is to have a great idea for something that Apple simply won't allow, but at the same time, I frequently see the benefit its policies bring to end users.

For instance, just the other day I saw a developer complain that a client wanted to force users to enter their personal information (e.g. age) before they could use the application, so that they could use it for marketing. Simple solution: Apple don't allow that. But Google does. How do you think policies like that are reflected in the average application quality?

Care to share pointers to the dangers of MJ use? If possible some where it's anyone's business but the person's who consumes it. Note: It's NONE of your business if someone wants to off himself in any way he likes.

I mean, the speed of light is 299,792,458,000 Millimeters per second. Maybe I miscalculated something (I always get confused with the way the US names its powers of 10), but doesn't that mean that in 15 frames of this movie, light only moves for about a millimeter? Someone with more background in physics may shed some light onto this (no pun intended), but when you're dealing with stuff SO fast that it approaches the speed of light, isn't measuring and recording subject to the problem that you cannot transport information (and thus also the result of your experiment to the observing camera) faster than said speed of light?

It's sort of cool, I guess, but I don't see the benefit of actually building physical robots rather than running a simulation. What has been achieved in the real world doesn't seem to have any practical application, even as an advertising gimmick or a work of sculpture.

I can't imagine sending out 100,000 of these gadget to do the half-time show at a football game, for example.

I didn't sense that this was just the beginning and that the same devices that self-assemble predetermined shapes could, with more advance software, harvest wheat or perform laser surgery.

When they reach the point where the simulated behavior actually has some real-world utility, THEN it makes sense to build them.

Speaking as a loud, proud AMERICAN, I'll give all you international whiners out there one more reason to learn traditional units. Next time you strike oil, and we elect someone with the IQ of a pygmy marmoset to the presidency, and the CIA gets the intelligence disastrously wrong, what happens next??? The bombs are gonna start raining down on your ASSES, the bullets are gonna start flying... ANDIT AINT GONNA BE IN METRIC!!! You all are gonna be welcome to sit there and sip your expressos with a smug, superior European expression on your faces and lecture all us Americans in your snooty European accents about how REALLY, they should be 226.8 kilogram bombs, and not 500 pound laser guided bombs, and it should be 12.7 millimeter machine gun bullets and not .50 inch, but FRANKLY I wouldn't recommend it. Cause when that happens, and you better BELIEVE it's gonna happen, we are gonna be opening up a big ol' can of American whoop-ass and when we do, well, you better believe that whoop-ass comes in good ol' 1 POUND can, just like the dirt-like substance we proudly sell as ground coffee in the USA, and it sure as freakin' hell DOES NOT COME in a can measured with some INTERNATIONAL system of measurements invented by SOCIALISTS in FRANCE! AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!

Sorry, but every cannabis sativa plant, whether of the recreational, medicinal, or hemp varieties produces some THC. Granted, hemp is a miniscule fraction of a percentage THC, but it does have THC.

Note: I'm not talking about communism, which dictates what a person is going to have the opportunity to do. I'm talking about a social evolution more akin to Star Trek than anything else.

The fundamental problem is the basic concept of "earning." It places an arbitrary value on the contributions of an individual to society, when in an equitable society everyone would receive the same compensation for putting in a decent day's work, contributing to society as a whole, whether they were making sandwiches for others to eat or performing surgery.

As long as society focuses on the concept that one has more "worth" than others based on what they do, there will never be equitability.

However, money and worth are intrinsic to the societies we have developed on this planet. And until we evolve beyond that, we're doomed to resemble the Ferengi more and more each day.