A mimeograph? You had it easy. We didn't have a mimeograph, so we had to listen to a bunch of Welshmen sitting around a table telling jokes that had no vowels, and then type them up ourselves.

Are you absolutely sure Halo 5 is just a game? How do you know?

The missing micron is quite a bit funnier if you've just skimmed another recent story submission:

[Philae's] seven months of lost data were completely unnecessary, and resulted solely from the world's nuclear fears.

We don't even need to bring up Tepco, which is just as well since plutonium is a different beast. We are talking plutonium, aren't we?

Mars Climate Orbiter

However, on September 23, 1999, communication with the spacecraft was lost as the spacecraft went into orbital insertion, due to ground-based computer software which produced output in non-SI units of pound-seconds (lbfÃ--s) instead of the metric units of newton-seconds (NÃ--s) specified in the contract between NASA and Lockheed. The spacecraft encountered Mars on a trajectory that brought it too close to the planet, causing it to pass through the upper atmosphere and disintegrate.

No worries. Better theirs than ours.

If News for Nerds still can't handle Unicode in 2015, I think the human race needs to pull in their horns, and stick to long baths and the companionship of bright-yellow rubber duckies.

Currently I have a business level account account that I write off 100%.

Is that a synonym for costs nothing? Sign me up.

I dearly love my old Compaq keyboard, but he's a gap toothed beast ever since the "pivotal" moment where I hooked my fingernail under the exposed edge of my right-hand Windows keys and the key cap went catapulting through the air.

Another "pivotal moment" in my career was when I finally learned how to quickly hack together a user style to eliminate annoying bling on any web page I happen to visit.

I have close to 150 tiny user scripts in my inventory now, and no longer see any "social" buttons on any web site I frequent or any slider animations. As I don't actually use any social networks "share" decorations are just a visual plague so far as I'm concerned.

The worst web sites I've visited come up completely red with a giant profanity across the screen (those that pretend to offer something useful, but the hoops exceed any possible utility one might derive).

Just half an hour ago I coded up this user style:

body a {
      background: yellow;
      pointer-events: none !important;
      cursor: default !important;
}

This makes all links on all tabs non-clickable, for when I want to select link text using MakeLink to copy into my wiki. It's damn annoying trying to select clickable text. I pretty much always use double-click drag (whole words only) for the main selection gesture. This simply doesn't work on links. Correction. It simply didn't work on links. Of course, I have to turn it on and off manually. I'll work on a button later.

Oh, yes, another pivotal moment was when I took control over USB insertion events to prevent a certain device from auto-mounting every time I put it on the tit to juice up. That initiative required several freakish lines of syntax, but at the end of the day was entirely worth the effort.

Huh. That's funny. There seems to be a pattern here. All my pivotal events, pretty much, are when I finally suppress some irritating pimple-glint love child auto-bling from imposing itself on my happy cocoon.

Metro apps have ads built in - the provided Weather app has a block ad permanently lodged between the hourly forecast and the radar maps, for example. This has nothing to do with the web, the browser, or slashdot.

You deleted all the relevant bits of the post to make a non-point about some random ad blocker that would have no effect.

Well, back in my day there were only three episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus, which we quoted every day at lunch, and we liked it that way.

I intended to be snarky here, but the more I thought about it, it really is Dice's website. They post stuff, and we keep coming back and reading it, even though we're not paid to. What part of that do you consider "not OK"?

If you know Idle (Eric, not the IDE), you get the job automatically. If you can get me tickets to Spamalot.

This is Slashdot. You only get abuse.

Server: Supermicro mainboard, Xeon 1230v2, 32 GB ECC, 3 * Constellation ES in three-way mirror, SSD system volume, 2 TB NAS drive for /slop pool.

Laptop: Recently purchased and refurbished Thinkpad T500 with PC-BSD, CoreDuo 9400, 8 GB DDR2, 256 GB SSD. Obviously this wasn't purchased for trim waistline, but rather for abuse tolerance.

Upcoming desktop replacement: Supermicro mainboard, Haswell Xeon E5-1620 v3 with quad-channel 16 GB DDR4 ECC (expandable to a boatload more), also planning to run PC-BSD if the laptop experiment pans out.

Existing desktop: Aging CoreDuo with 8 GB DDR2, Sapphire Radeon HD5670, with three heads (all circa 22" at 96 PPI, two in portrait, one in landscape). Presently running an older version of Mint that needed to be upgraded ages ago, but I decided to hold off for a usable PC-BSD instead.

All my PSUs are premium Seasonic, and most of my cases are Antec P280 series. My ZFS server presently has over 2 years of uptime. Almost all of my system boards were purchased behind the technology curve, but with superior inductors, capacitors, and trace thickness.

I really can't remember the last time something resembling an electrical glitch took any of my systems down.

Lack of global foresight is very nearly our last remaining common ground with every other species on the planet—now or before—and sure enough we're just itching to get rid of it.

Humans. Bah, humbug.

If there are no large open source PHP projects that have good security, it doesn't give me confidence that I can understand PHP well enough to avoid security vulnerabilities.

Last I checked, MediaWiki was still written in PHP, though Lua is gaining. Though perhaps in your world it's not a large project, just a large deployment.

Part of gaining confidence about your security practices is being good at conjuring up exemplars of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Whatever list you file it on, MediaWiki should have been on your "what PHP can really do or not do" list.

I know C++. To me, anyone who knows python but not C++ is half useless. If you only know Java, you're 25% useless. And if you know only Visual Basic, you're 125% useless.

Too late. It's been touched.

For those of you not reading Slashdot on Windows 8, you may not realize that local advertising support was built directly into Windows 8, and ads appear in certain Metro-style apps, exactly like iAds on iOS.

Of course since the research paper was written in 2009, this still shouldn't come as much of a surprise, as you've all had six years of warning.