Agreed-ish, in general, on the thankfulness at least.

I've starting reading /. back in the mad mid-90's, eventually overcame my fear-of-registration, and have been a (semi) contributing member ever since.

Oddly, my only request these days would be to find a way to post -fewer- stories. I can't keep up with the current deluge and the "themes/tags" don't help because my actual interests don't break down cleanly into existing tags and I can't spend the time to be the first person to curate a new tag and filter it out. In the beginning, /. itself WAS that filter... if it made it in I could be assured that it was probably worth a few minutes of my time. The problem now isn't /., it's that there's just TOO MUCH STUFF happening all the time, and we know about ALL OF IT.

I do (and will continue to) keep /. in my RSS reader (with all my other visited blogs, internet entertainment, and newsy sites), but it has been becoming increasingly less attractive and somewhat redundant compared to other (more or less) curated news sources like TheRegister or ArsTechnica. I don't know what might be done differently, and I certainly don't know if those changes would make advertisers and investors happier, but I'm just throwing that out there as the sad, lone datapoint that it is.

Carry on Slashdot. Carry on.

As an opposing view... hundreds or thousands of people wil see that window sticker.
When you get a new car you can either got a new sticker (easy enough) or let your loved ones move on. Your choice.

I don't see anything sad about honoring a passed loved one in any way.

Whatever mayhem a "cyber-atttack" might cause, it is almost inconceivable that it could rival the destruction and loss of life of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
It is insulting to those who died to imply otherwise.

My Grandfather served in the navy during the war, but was not at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked.
He was, however, briefly assigned to the detail that had to help clean out the dead, bloated bodies from the ships that were sunk in the attack.

Leon E Panetta, you are an asshole. Unless we do something insanely stupid like hooking gas valves, electrical substations, or their like directly to the Internet, the possibility of a "cyber-Pearl Harbor" is a fllat zero. Respect those who lost their lives for our freedom and temper your fucking hyperbole.

"Wasn't a lot of anything except a lot of forest."

So only...
Old growth trees (extremenly valuable at the time for shipbuilding).
Vast tracts of untilled arable land.
"Easily displaced" indiginents.

Not to mention the coal and oil deposits discovered later.

We know a lot more about what's on the moon than Columbus (or the Spaniards) did about North America, but what we know is that it's not all that.
The moon, sadly, is kind of crappy resource-wise. It is, on the other hand, really handy for causing tides, which helped a lot of life proliferate down here, so go moon! (but don't necessarily go TO the moon)

+1 Tow truck theft

That's how I lost my first car (a VW Beetle that would stall at any stop light unless you gently caressed the gas pedal with your toe while keeping the brake down with your heel). Security guard didn't pay any attention to the seemingly legit tow truck that hauled it away...

No.

It's a very, very different thing to get a computer to:
a) Do something it's programmed to do (like start up and drive around safely), but for the wrong person.
b) Do something it has NOT been programmed to do (drive unsafely).

You can't just conflate the two with "hacking the system", as they are COMPLETELY different physically, electronically, logically and mathematically.

Just because you have some patents doesn't mean that they are valid or enforceable.
Just because you've convinced some companies to license your patents and pay you royalties doesn't mean that they are valid or enforceable.

The android phone manufacturers that pay MS royalties simply decided that just paying the royalty would be less expensive than fighting the legal battle to (possibly) prove the patents in question invalid. This means that there is, so far, no evidence that the patents in question have any value at all. Given that the SCotUS has been more strongly nudging things in the direction of "You can't patent software processes, stupid", there's a pretty good chance that they are, in fact, worthless. Unfortunately, proving that will require a company with a reason to take a stand, the funds to follow it through, and a top-notch team of patent lawyers.

It gets much, MUCH more complicated than that.

In the "most" difficult puzzles you can actually reach a point where you cannot gain any additional useful information by logic (even triples exclusion, X-wing exclusion and other less obvious to the naked eye things) and are forced to guess on a square, test the validity of that guess, then potentially rewind and guess again. Computers can actually solve any valid sudoku purely by this method, but it's not as fun as teasing out the logic (if it exists).

If it doesn't use the C-block, it's performance drops too close to that of earlier protocols that also don't use the C-block, which would result in PR and marketing suicide.

The creature has stolen the space modulator!!!
Delays... delays...

I am deeply sorry that you hang out with imbeciles.

Fedora.
Ubuntu.

Ok... are you not reading the same news and economic reports I have that say very clearly that the economy has improved considerably since he took office?

Maybe you're confused by the -polls- on the "news" lately that say that most Average Joes don't *think* the economy is improving.

I'll take the economists, thank you... they may deal in filthy lying statistics, but at least they base their opinion on something real.

"and then hope that amateurs take him down"

All the regular gun-carriers I know train regularly and frequently.
The fact that they don't get paid for it does not make them less proficient than people who do.

"based on how [b]load[/b] the stereo gets"

If you are going to have ironic spelling mistakes in one part of your post, the rest had better be clean. In this case, it was not.
"loud" is spelled with a "u".