I love how some commenters in this article talk about how the parents should have anticipated the 300 lb security robot might be a hazard for their kid, and taken steps to keep their kid away from it.

You have a shiny, light-flashing robot that looks similar to EVA from Wall-E and designed to look friendly and nice. You better design the robot to safely handle kids coming up to it if you are putting it in a mall. The argument that kids should not be brought to malls is stupid. Who do you think malls target to bring money to them if not parents of kids, especially mothers of small children?

Good luck being the mall that says they don't care about child safety and keep away from our robots or we will run over you.

You must not work in tech. Disabling Java in my browser would make it impossible to do my job. In fact even updating Java can break the ability to work with certain equipment. What I do is have the most compatible version of java in a browser I use to connect with devices only. and I have it disabled on the browser I use to connect to the internet.

Now if only companies would stop building web based gui's that use Java. Although I'm not sure what the alternative is.

"people like me"?

You don't know anything about me except that I feel that Islamic fundamentalism is a threat that should be addressed. Notice I have never said what steps should be taken to address it or what freedoms need to be limited.

I find your post to be poorly thought out and internally inconsistent. You may want to consider reading your posts before posting them, and trying to figure out if they make any sense.

Standardizing a road test is very hard to do. You have to have identical inputs and loads, which is impossible for a person to perform.

I'm sure this testing procedure will be cheap, easy to accomplish and not inconvenient to the myriad of drivers. I know I would love to have my car driven by the test people at the emissions centers.

It may end up that the environmental rules were simply unacheivable by affordable modern day technology. Simply because a government agency sets up a goal, doesn't mean it is able to be met. Watch for what happens when 50mpg average mileage for cars becomes a standard.

If you fail to see how Islamic Terrorism is an existential threat to freedom and democracy worldwide, there isn't a post in Slashdot that will change your mind. In World War II there were people that refused to see Germany and Japan as an existential threat as well. Simply because there haven't been successful attacks for a while on our home soil, does not mean there aren't real threats that need to be addressed around the world that threaten our interests.

But THIS time their predictions are accurate, and they really mean it. Sure, the goalposts keep moving, but the important thing is their prediction is apocalyptic, so you HAVE to listen and take action. The actual accuracy of the predictions isn't important.

Oh wait, you are interested in actually dealing with reality instead of an agenda?

Both believers and non-believers have people in their camp with tact and without tact. Your own personal biases will color whether you attribute that to someone else's personal beliefs. In the age of the internet, you will always hear more from people who lack tact, because tactless people bray the loudest. What you read in these comments reveal more about a Slashdot user's personal perceptions than any larger reality.

Although some have expressed concern about the helmet being made of polycarbonate, there is no proven advantage to other materials over polycarbonate in a helmet, as long as it is done well. The helmet appears to be high-quality, and it is pretty light. It looks about as distracting as good mirrors and a nice gauge cluster, as long as you know how to use it. To me it looks worth the $1500. Not that I would buy it, but I see where the money went. It looks like a well-designed helmet and interface that is likely the future of helmets. Whiners that are scared of it are probably the same type of people who were scared of phones, radios, and any other technological innovation.

I think you will find that those Republicans have industries that compete with Space X in their districts. This means Space X is doing so well they feel the industries in their own districts will lose money. Perhaps you could appeal to Republicans who don't have competing space industries in their district. But complaining about this as if its just republicans doing this is disingenuous. Politicians do this to give industries in their state and edge all the time.

Phil Plait:
"That’s why this whole thing looks to me to be a transparent attempt from members of our Congress to hinder a privately owned company that threatens their own interests. I’ll note that Boeing (the major SLS contractor) has a big plant in Alabama, Brooks’ (and Shelby’s) home state, and United Launch Alliance has its HQ in Colorado, home to Gardner and Coffman (it’s even in Coffman’s district). This sounds more like they’re trying to protect their own turf more than honestly wanting transparency from SpaceX."

You can read that here: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad...

One I wish I could do with the programs screen is to put the tiles down to text only if I want to. I have too many programs, and it is confusing to sort through colorful boxes instead of a nice alphabetical text list. The search feature is way stronger in Windows 8 than Windows 7, and I appreciate that very much. Windows 8 just had so many things about it that were ALMOST really good. Then some odd UI decision made it annoying instead of great.

They clearly state how much lead is shown: "The lead concentrations are roughly equivalent to what you’d get if you dissolved a small spoonful of frozen orange juice in 200 Olympic-sized swimming pools, Noble estimates" Of course, they never identify how much lead is in frozen orange juice, so I take my statement back.

I agree, covering your son until he is 26 is a great thing. I think it would be even better to cover him until he is 72, don't you agree? Why stop at him being 26?

Do you see what the problem becomes? The problem becomes what do we want to cover and for how long. The answer depends on the amount of resources you want to devote to that issue. We could cover every medical condition for everyone forever until they die. Do we want to pay that amount of money as a society? What are the other implications of developing that kind of system? What abuses will occur? When you start taking other people's money to do something for yourself, you will find that other people have other priorities. Maybe they prefer to save their money for retirement. Maybe they prefer to use that money to provide their kids an education instead of healthcare. Maybe they want to buy a nicer car instead. Who knows?

The problem you have is that we as a society don't agree on what the best use of our money is yet. Clearly we agree it was wasted on this website so far. What other waste are we going to find? If we find too much problems with the system, we don't have an easy out when its run by the government. When it is run privately, we can take our money somewhere else. Don't like this hospital? There is another one down the road. Don't like this doctor, go to that one. Don't want to pay this money for all the options on that health care plan? Here is an alternative cheaper one that doesn't cover quite as much.

When you have the government run it you start losing the options. And you don't have the option to picking up your money and taking it elsewhere. Unless you are open to moving overseas.

Darn it, what am I going to use for Checkpoint command line then? Because with Checkpoint, SPLAT is where its AT!