A firmware shipping with default settings isn't an example of hardcoded credentials. They're just default, not hardcoded. Hardcoded means that there are credentials that are inside the source code itself and they always work, no matter how the device is configured.

By definition, if the credentials can be changed by simply configuring the device, they aren't hardcoded.

2560x1600 isn't even "movie" widescreen, which is 16:9, it's 16:10. I like 16:10 a lot more than 16:9, and I wish it had become the standard for computer monitor instead of 16:9. So it could be worse...

Electricity is actually 100% efficient for heating. You might lose a bit of energy that escapes as EM if the coil is glowing, but other than that it's 100% heat. You're right that, if you're in the US and your electricity comes from gas or other fossil fuels in the first place, it's inefficient. You go from gas -> electricity -> heat instead of going directly gas -> heat.

I live in Quebec, much colder than anything you get in the US, and well over two thirds of our houses are heated by electricity. However, 90% of our power comes from hydro. There are huge advantages to using electric, such as being able to assign a different temperature to each room in the house and very fine control.

There's nothing inherently inefficient about using electricity for heating, unless you use a very inefficient way of generating electric power (such as burning oil).

That chart was made by asking health professionals about how each drug should be ranked. That's not a very good way of measuring addiction, because it depends on perception more than fact. Science is about observation, hypothesis and testing. Most studies done on the topic show that cocaine is about as addictive as alcohol.

For example, in a study in The Lancet, cocaine is listed as slightly more psychologically addictive as alcohol (2.37 vs 1.93), but physically less addictive (1.3 vs 1.6). In Health also published an article that lists cocaine as less addictive than alcohol. Most studies I've seen list them as relatively equal.

It's hard to get any serious and impartial studies done on the topic because there's such a strong political backlash, should the results be even moderately different than the official government stance.

I'm still not sure that legalization is the right way to handle the drugs issue, but I wish that the topic could be discussed with some objectivity. I'm not a drug user myself, but a large amount of my taxes go to paying for jail time for drug users, which I'm not convinced in the right approach. I just wish people stopped lying about it so that we, as a society, could handle the problem rationally instead of hysterical shrills.

Cocain, unlike heroin, doesn't cause physical dependance. Basically, all the craving for cocain is psychological, much like marijuana. It is somewhat addictive, as some studies showed that 5% of regular cocain users become addicted to it, but it's not essentially any worse than marijuana. The problem is that it needs to be processed and costs more to produce than pot, so addicts have to get more income to sustain their habit (leading to more frequent or more ambitious crime if the user is poor). Heroin, on the other hand, is addictive on the physical level. Users who try to kick the habit by going cold turkey will be violently ill for days and can even die. I never really understood why those two drugs are often bundled together when talking about the consequences of drug addiction, because they are vastly different. Cocain and heroin use don't have nearly the same consequences.

The point that people were making, and that you seem very intent on not getting, is that the e-ink kindle has nothing to do with android at all. It runs a custom linux build, but doesn't have any relationship with android, nor any shared code with android, unless you count the fact that android is also using linux as its kernel. Calling the e-ink kindle OS "android" makes just as much sense as saying that a Red Hat desktop PC is running android.

Am I the only one who "heard" this post with Charlie Brown's voice? Probably. Funny nonetheless.

I think people in the tech sector have a skewed perception of a decent pay. Perhaps because the cost of living in areas with a high concentration of tech jobs tends to be high, I'm not sure. Wages of $25 per hour ($50,000 yearly assuming 40h work weeks) are well over the median US income, (around $37,000), so I'd say that this is in fact, "paid pretty well". Your examples of earning over $50 per hour would put you in the top 10% earners in the USA, so that's not merely "paid pretty well", but exceptional.

Well folks, that's it, the beginning of the end. Instead of making sure the site stays attractive to hardcore geeks, the people who are managing slashdot are diluting its value by doing some blatant marketing pushes.

I've been reading slashdot daily for what, 8 years now? Between the stupid "vlog" and all the latest attempts at being something it should not be, I think I'm going to be done with this site soon.

Slashdot has always done only a few things, but these core qualities were done extremely well, making this site interesting for people like me.

1. Keep the signal to noise ratio high. The moderation system has worked well to keep the SN ratio relatively high. Browsing at +2, when not moderating, keeps the discussion fairly clean and interesting. It's degraded a bit over the years, but I feel this is still slashdot's strongest point. Compared to sites like digg and reddit, slashdot discussions are mostly sane, polite and flame-free.

2. By the virtue of point 1 above and being a site targeted at hardcore geeks, you often get to speak with people involved in the stories first-hand. Over the years, I read and participated in threads with some very smart, interesting people. On stories about solar powered car competitions, we had the participants pitch in. On stories about new wireless chips, we sometimes had the engineers who designed it comment. On stories about Star Trek, you had Wil Wheaton giving behind-the-scenes stories. This was possible because slashdot was a site where geeks felt comfortable having discussions. Over the last few years, slashdot has been slowly losing this quality.

3. Clean, clutter-free interface that doesn't attempt to be anything else than a good place to discuss news stories of interest to geeks. Geeks like function over fluff and slashdot delivers. It doesn't need to be ugly, just functional and not distracting. All the crap you've been adding to the site of late is detracting from this. Things like the stupid videos or the "pulse" poll; blatant advertising barely disguised as something else.

This is just one geek's opinion, but slashdot is slowly going in the wrong direction. I know that if you keep this up you're going to lose me as a reader, and I have the feeling I'm far from the only one.

Don't bother, the rest of the books are tainted by Card's religious zealotry. They are preachy, arrogant and generally terrible. Ender's Shadow, a retelling of Ender's Game through Bean's point of view is the best of the bunch, but it's still nowhere near as good as Ender's Game.

Having read them, I wish I had spent those hours reading something else instead. If you want to go with Tor, You have amazing series like Game of Thrones, or the Wheel of Time series.

That's because, ironically, you have to be online to enable offline mode. So it won't help you if you want to play a game but suddenly realize that your ISP is having connectivity issues. This has actually happened to me once, and I used my iPhone's network connection to enable offline mode and after that it was fine. I admit though, that if I hadn't had that option I would have been quite mad.

Not from my experience. Steam offline mode lasts forever, and it never bugs you to go online. I've had steam running offline on my laptop for well over 6 months (I hate it when it disconnects my desktop) and it never asked me to go online to play any game I've tried, and I have about 200 games in my collection.

Steam offline mode is just that, offline mode. The only check is done when you go offline, after that you can use it forever (or in my case, until there's a new game I want to play on my laptop that I have to download).