Some people can actually think past the next quarterly report.

High frequency traders are busy looking at the next 1 second's report. If they can buy AFTER they sell by taking advantage of the fact that two different trading platforms do it two different ways, then there is a serious risk that the dollar will be toast

No one cares if it takes one second longer to log in to a .NET system.

Quite a few people care that there are traders who probably have devoted weeks to figuring out how to sell the entire content of Fort Knox, and buy it back one second later (or earlier, according to which time standard you are using) at half price.

It won't matter when you get scammed by the market traders who use the discrepancy to steal your entire pension fund/house/car or anything else tied to "the system". Yes, planes may crash becaose of a 1 second error in interpreting GPS signals, and possibly even ships run aground.

I care about these things. It seems like some other people do too.

The solution is, of course, "international agreement" on how to handle the issue. Does not matter which approach, so long as everyone agrees on it. Good luck with that one.

Surely this sets a precident: the laws against theft seriously damage the profits of the average prospective pick-pocket. They must be illegal too! Not to mention the impact of the public smoking ban.

To hell with it! The Mafia cannot be made illegal - it would be a crime!

Google needs to implement a "nerdsearch" feature, where they actually do what you ask, with quotes and -/+ operatore, etc

They also need a "Do not put any commercial results in here - I am not planning to buy anything, and have no intention of clicking on anything that looks like an advert - and I AM SERIOUSLY CONSIDERING SWITCHING TO BING" option.

If I have a cake, and share it between zero people, how big is each person's slice?

The answer is "that was a dumb question"

You cannot share a cake between zero people. The cake may be still whole, but no person has a part of it of any size. Maybe they "could" have a part of almost any size, but that was not the question. (Maybe it should have been, but in that case, you have to provide for different max and min answers, and should have asked the question differently ).

What is the answer to x/0? The answer is "you have got the question wrong!" - otherwise known as Error: divide by zero.

How you report a divide by zero error, is of course somewhat context dependent. Silently ignoring it could well be the right approach if decoding VoIP. If controling a driverless truck - probably is not .

Conclusion: Yes, after rather more than 70 years of computing, we actually have got this one right!

My laptop has a fingerprint scanner, but I have stopped using it because its faster to type the password in! - 8 characters, mixed case, with numerics. Because I type a lot, and scan my fingers rarely.

Might be OK on a touch phone, where typing is a painful process. Mine doesn't have a fingerprint scanner, and AFAIK, none of the ones with removeable batteries and SD cards do, so it is not an issue I am likely to encounter.

In reality, the hardened, central hub that shares the same hacked router credentials and NSA back door with the rest of my home.

Nope - the answer is not there.

IoT is the best known way to donate all your privacy to the lowest scum on earth - by which I mean all of them collectively, not the exact lowest - exactness will be missing.

Ha, I've seen the Marco Polo serial.

Mind, I was about ten at the time; it was being broadcast on CBC I think the year after it first aired on BBC.

About all I remember from it is a scene where they're crossing the desert, the TARDIS being carried in a wagon, and The Doctor supplies water to the party "collected from condensation on the inside walls", and the incredulity of the others who aren't aware that the TARDIS is smaller on the outside.

Also saw the first Dalek episodes when originally aired on CBC. Probably others too, but not as well remembered.

What is your position on Zombies?

Wealth is not like a cake, which is there to be shared out equally or otherwise. Wealth is created, and those who creat it get the lion's share. The economy is like a fire: if you take way the hot coals at the centre, it goes out. It is in the interests of rich people for poor people to have money: rich people get what the poor spend, just as the poor get what the rich spend. You might want to read up on the French Revolution of the English Civil war to see what happens when the poor start taking - it does not end well for the poor.

I am not saying there is not a problem, or that it is not getting worse: the issue is that we have created an economy that is designed to promote (pay for) large numbers of people doing factory/office work, which can be done by robots/computers instead. The last thing we need is the Socialist Worker's "fight for the right to be exploited". Unions leaders want more factory jobs, because it means more union members.

We need to have an economy that pays for (values) other activities which are less dependent on large, hierarchical corporations. Oh yes, we already have one: its called "the Internet" anyone can Ebay anything (of Fiverr, or whatever). However, assuming we actually want more children (not venturing an answer on this) we probably need to pay more in welfare payments to mothers so we are not in the situation where we are paying mothers so they can pay baby minders and go to work at minimum wage jobs, leaving men unemployed.

Why are footballers so highly paid? Because people value wasting their lives in front of the TV very highly. There is a lesson here, I just don't quite know what it is!

So it's not already obsolete. But it will be in the future.

In the future, the future will be obsolete.

C with Emacs on BSD will never die!

Because it is the undead

Open Hardware is not exactly a new concept. And the fact that it can have a huge influence with big players is not new.

LTO - Linear Tape Open - has been a mega success in driving up cross manufacturer compatibility, and driving down the cost of tape backup. As a consequence, tape use has gone up. (Possibly assisted by increased amounts of data, and the fact that it is now obvious than not even NSA and GCHQ can keep their data secure "in the cloud").

LTO is made by players like HP, IBM, Sony.

There is a possibility that Snowden shared data with sheep.

(It is at least as plausible as many of the other stories linked to Snowden).

Government is a system of oppression via violence.

You might want to try living somwhere where there is no government. (Other than your basement).

Please excuse this off-topic queue-jumping reply to your comment, but there are times when someone makes a very insightful observation that really, really should have gone in a more prominent position.

Sneak preview; three virtually identical questions of the form "How Much [language x] Should You Know For an Entry-Level [language x] Job?" going to the Dice website and "submitted" by the same Slashdot employee in just over two weeks.

Bonus; OP linked above correctly predicted this week's story and even got the language right.

That's almost funny, except that it isn't. Admittedly, Slashdot has been "going down the tubes" almost since it launched, but this is particularly crap.