Oh, gimme a freakin' break. Appendectomy, really? Polio victims are crippled and won't pass the qualifying rounds. Or did you just come up with ridiculous examples for some unclear end?

When there's money in it, people will cheat. That's what causes all the drug problems.

Just like car racing, we need different divisions for athletics. One for stock, unmodified humans like us. No drugs, etc. And the "top fuel" division for prosthetics, hormones, steroids, etc. My interest in several sports (bicycling, weightlifting) has already died because of rampant drug abuse. Heck, if you don't do drugs then you won't even qualify for televised events. It's sort of like F1 racing, it's not really a competition between humans, it's a competition between scientists.

Ever since the Olympics went professional, it's been boring. Of course, once these two divisions have been established, the athletes will still cheat in the stock division. Because there's money involved. Even the Korean Starcraft players cheat for the same reason.

People who run adblock aren't going to click on the ads anyway. I'm sure it makes them better to get all self-righteous about it, though.

Run defrag. Done. Even idiots knew to do this back in the XP days. Still doesn't answer the question.

The article says, "phones feel slower over time as they hold more software". How does this follow? How does the phone get "slower" just because more software is installed? This sounds an awful lot like the cargo cult thinking of "well the hard drive is full so we have to buy a new computer because this one is slow."

I know some software will start agents on boot, but they just sit in the background and do little. top reveals very little CPU time and memory consumed by these.

Funny how this only applies to far-left organizations and not to mainstream conservatives. Hypocrisy.

Gas lines need nonconductive sections to protect from becoming long ground loops.

It sounds like this transformer had its center tap grounded and was the path to ground on one side of a ground loop as the geomagnetic field moved under pressure from a CME, inducing a common-mode current in the long-distance power line. A gas pipeline in an area of poor ground conductivity in Russia was also destroyed, it is said, resulting in 500 deaths.

One can protect against this phenomenon by use of common-mode breakers and perhaps even overheat breakers. The system will not stay up but nor will it be destroyed. This is a high-current rather than high-voltage phenomenon and thus the various methods used to dissipate lightning currents might not be effective.

In March 1989 much of Quebec lost power for the same thing.

They lost power because the common-mode breakers tripped, not because their system was actually damaged.

Poetry isn't for left-brained types. It is the province of free-thinkers, of artists, it's not really intended for anyone else. The low number of comments on this article is evidence enough nobody cares.

"Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's," wrote Philip Larkin, "and everybody else can fuck off."

It's outdated. Newer is better, with the surgery you don't need glasses any more. You wouldn't understand, old fogey. The only reason to wear glasses is uncorrectable vision or fashion, in which case the glasses are worn without lenses. Only oldies don't update to the newest styles.

This story was not accepted for publication by Slashdot, and I am submitting it to another venue for consideration. - Bruce

Seeing as the Communist Party was dedicated to the overthrow of the U.S. Government...what would you do?

It's not a witch-hunt if there really were Communists in the State Department. Hint: there were.