I'm not a huge fan of what Disney has become, but I'm even less of a fan of lawyers, and this sounds like a douche-bag thing that a law firm is doing just because it's easy for them to do. I hope Disney counters for damages and wins.

LED lights are extremely directional, to the point it can be difficult getting them to diffuse like an incandescent bulb. Most streetlights (and now, lights in sports stadiums, parking lots and the like) are extremely directional, pointing straight down and having abrupt drop-off in illumination around the periphery. In fact, in my town, streetlights that are being replaced with LED are not as good because they don't cover as large of an area or fade out on the edges in a more natural way. They almost look light spotlights shining straight down - objects are either in the light or not at all.

So I guess the light pollution from LEDs is due to light reflecting off the ground? I'm just surprised LEDs haven't decreased light pollution because of how directional they are. They should definitely be decreasing light pollution outside of the visible spectrum, because that was always an issue with the various kinds of lights used in the past for lighting large outdoor areas. A big part of their inefficiency was generating unwanted infrared or ultraviolet as a by-product.

I always hear statements like this thrown around in various contexts, and while on the surface it sounds admirable, it's really not accurate at all.

The most important people on the planet are those with the knowledge, skills and the actual power and means to accomplish what needs to be done. Without the core set of human adults that actually feed our population, keep it safe, fix broken and unhealthy bodies and the like, there would be no children. Or if there were children they would mostly be dying.

Also based on that logic, the instant a "child" becomes an adult sitting in that seat you kept warm for them, they're not important anymore, and the real focus is immediately on people younger than them. Unless there's like a grace period of importance - say you get 5 years of still being most important after you're no longer a child? See what I mean?

Obviously we need children, and we want the human race to continue and all that, and to provide for them a planet better than the one we started with and with more opportunities, but saying kids are the most important people sounds good in a Whitney Houston song, but isn't very realistic.

100% of Americans want the time changes to go away. The problem? 50% think DST should become the permanent time, while the other 50% think it should be non-DST. That's the real problem.

Personally, I'd rather have the extra hour of daylight in the evening. If it's dark in the morning then schools can start an hour later (which some in my region actually did for a week last year).

Either way, if it ever goes permanent, you're going to have half the population unhappy with what became permanent.

I'd watch the live stream if Pauly Shore is part of the crew.

Literally Slashdot not respecting its own moderation system, promoting a post in summary (which is very rare) that has been downvoted to a 1.

I find it amusing when "solar powered X" can still make news headlines, when we've had things like solar powered calculators for 45 years now

Oh and an addendum. That spring has been maintained for the last 100 years, and the owners for the last number of decades have kept the site open to the public in general. All that is left is the spring house (the hotel is long gone), but you can still go fill containers or just drink right out of the flowing water.

If anyone wants a bottle I will ship you one for $40, in the spirit of this Slashdot post.

A century ago this was a big thing. In my county there is a natural spring that had "high purity" plus a "very healthy" mix of minerals. They bottled it and sold it all over the country (and this was just one spring - there were MANY springs around the country selling their water during that era). In fact it was so popular they built a convalescent hotel at the site, and had the spring water plumbed into the rooms!.

Looks like this fad is coming around again...

http://www.tazewell-orange.com...

Another way of saying this is that the number of US citizens is increasing, while the total number of people in the country may decrease.

It's simple. Force Amazon to disclose their license terms for that content in a consumer-friendly way:

"BUY (access until Sep 25)"

Not at all. This is no different than those times an employee cannot hear or understand a person and asks them to pull up to the window. Is that also an "awful customer experience"? Because I can tell you right now, humans are not right 100% of the time taking drive-thru orders.

Further, you're not even considering the responsiveness. AI begins taking the order immediately, where employees often have a several second delay before they can get to you, and that's assuming they don't flat-out tell you to wait and then finally take your order a minute later. It's been my experience that the AI ordering (at Bojangles which I talk about in another comment) is faster and easier than all but the very best employees (so in other words on average it's better).

I'm not sure if this is worse, or just different, than people being prompted into suicide by assholes online, or in person, etc. There was a point in time where it seemed to be a fairly regular occurrence that someone committed suicide because someone egged them on, or was just extremely insensitive to the reality of the person's situation, online.

This seems like a tempest in a teapot. All this system does in any anomalous condition is dump the customer over to the drive-through employee to take the order manually like before.

It shouldn't be difficult to define escape conditions for this. If quantity is over X (for ANY item), or if it's been more than 30 seconds and no item has been added to the order, etc.

A system like this doesn't have to work 100% of the time, just 95% of the time to take some load off employees to (supposedly) allow orders to be filled faster.

Bojangles (primarily a southern chain in VA, NC, SC and GA) have been using AI at the drive throughs and it works great. I don't know how immune it is to trolling, because I'm not an ass, but it works great for normal people.