Has slashdot really become a means for tech companies to inject free advertisement by a simple blog post made to look like real journalism?

Why, did you not get enough :CueCats and i-Openers? This is hardly the first Slashvertisement, and it's the only one from this company that I've seen.

That core was basically the Intel Atom of PowerPC architectures.

I agree with all of your sentiment, and most of your statements, but this one I have trouble with. Atom is basically an original Pentium, slightly modernized. To get that out of PowerPC, you'd need to start with a 603 or so, and bring it into a 2005 age. 603 migrated to 750 and 7400. But since the 7400 was essentially a 750 with a vector unit taped to the side, the 750 would suffice as an Atom-esque core. The die size of the 750 class machines in 90nm supports this.

The PowerPC core in the PS3 and 360 was derived from Power4, a server class processor, with bunches of stuff taken out and re-pipelined. The core was made in-order, the pipeline was brought down to allow the frequency to be amped up. The area of the PowerPC core in the Cell is about the same as the entire die (core and cache) of a 750 in the same 90nm technology.

Pistols are also the best self-defence weapon

Dogs are the best self-defence weapon. Their barking scares away countless intruders. They're armed even when you're not home. THEY GO AROUND CORNERS. They can be recalled, do not kill instantly, and can quickly recognize friends by smell.

20 years ago, my dad and I came home from a camping trip a day early, but late at night. If my mom had been armed, she would have shot at both of us. Instead, the dog woofed to wake her up and then went to go greet us.

if that were true you'd have been able to get a cool name on slashdot. And "were" would actually be spelled the way you spelled it.

You are ignoring the fact that it seems like one highly intelligent and technology-developing species could probably not evolve in coexistence with another one on the same planet, at some point one would win and kill off the other one.

I'm sure it's been proposed/discussed many times before, but I don't know if this concept has an "official" name or not.

They would laugh when they learned that our supposed evidence of the big bang was actually just us picking up their interstellar music streaming service.

Directionality is a mostly irrelevant consideration.

The fact that an antenna is 9db or 30db higher in one direction quickly becomes irrelevant with the vast distances of space. Antennas don't work like flashlights. They are more like a light bulb with a two-way mirror on one side that reflects 50% of the light and lets 50% of it through out the back. At VHF and above, things like mountains act like mirrors that reflect signals straight up (among other directions), as well.

You are somewhat wrong about AM... at least broadcast band AM is mostly only directional in the sense that there's dead zones straight off the ends of the dipole. They are shooting quite a bit of signal upward. Our ionosphere does strongly reflect and attenuate what would make it out to space in those bands though.

This goes toward your comment about the 50s and 60s... we have far more powerful transmitters in operation now (some VHF TV the better part of 1 megawatt!), and in bands that aren't reflected by the ionosphere. If anything we are getting louder and louder.

Unfortunately the first thing they might see of humanity is free-to-air broadcast TV, and just assume that we are all complete idiots.

Any company that bans gun related stuff does have a political agenda.

Agreed. It's incredibly stupid and shortsighted for kickstarter to ban "weapons and weapons accessories".

I understand wanting to regulate full-sized military-style drones, but going after small commercial entities flying go-pro carrying quad-copters is a bit much.

A studio enforcing their copyright against personal-use downloads might be a somewhat crappy and ill-advised practice, but it's not "trolling". To me if you were going to call something "copyright trolling" it would be more like using copyright letters to silence people, aka SLAPP, not using copyright the way it was intended, to prevent people other than the owner from making copies of the entire media as a substitute to buying it from the media holder.

I'm seeing far more liberals (on the internet, generally pretty wealthy) that are pro-guns, so not that hard for me to picture. But I will grant you the average conservative probably wouldn't get it.

Ignoring the general stupidity of many TSA practices, and that this is an artificial market created by government inefficiency, what's so fundamentally wrong with paying more to get through faster?

If your money is worth more than your time, you'll wait, if your time is worth more than your money, you'll pay. That's a fundamental decision every time you say something like "I'll pay someone to change my oil because I don't want to spend 20 minutes and get dirty doing it myself", or "I'll eat out so I don't have to cook". Time/money/value decisions are something you make dozens of every day.