dyndns.org is dyn.com, so that won't help. That being said, they do offer paid services for more or less a couple dollars a month if you're attached to their featureset or something.

Blah. I clearly meant 8 (2-pair vs. 4-pair).

It's Ethernet. I'm pretty sure nothing bad will happen if you accidentally switch two of the wires. You just won't get a connection. Their job was also a bit easier in that they used 4-pin rather than 6, but I guess they decided they wouldn't need GigE for whatever this was designed for. :)

Actually, he should apologize to us for being anti-gay-marriage and donating to Prop 8.

Nobody used it because it sucked. My recollection is that it was basically another way to use Facebook Chat at first, around the same time that Chat and Messages were confusingly combined into one. I read a comment above that says it just forwards it to your registered e-mail address now. Regardless of whether they were able to monetize it or not, I can't see the appeal, and I bet nobody relied on it.

I don't think that's accurate. Most LEDs I've seen are a little more efficient fluorescent bulbs, plus they last a lot longer. While the LED bulbs are still more expensive initially in most cases, I think the increased efficiency and longer life will balance out in their favor at the end. You might be right if (only) the fluorescent bulbs were free.

Actually, I took (four years of) Spanish in high school, then tested into the advanced Spanish classes in college, which were mostly composition and literature, and I only had to take them because I had a Spanish minor (or I would have tested out otherwise). I also studied in Mexico during this time and was obviously able to converse, but I learned the majority of that during high school and would have been perfectly fine then, too. Some people are just not quite as good at learning foreign languages as others, and certainly the quality of education varies (I went to a really small school, by the way, but I think we had good teachers, including one native speaker), but it's absolutely false to claim that you won't learn anything in an HS language class.

A computer programming language, however, is completely different. While I think it's useful to learn both, this proposal seems to lump them under the same skill, and I don't think that's accurate or a good way to do it. (I have a BA in CS and an MA in linguistics, including applied/SLA, so I do have experience with both, by the way.)

Really? Accidentally a word in both the article and the headline? Doesn't seem like an accident to me. I think this is usage is catching on among non-techies. I'm just surprised that such usage made it to Slashdot (where, yes, an editor should have done something).

Are we really just calling this "a USB" now instead of "a USB flash drive" or something similar?

Gosling didn't "forget" to grade OpenOffice.org; he was the (co)creator of Java. That's why this article is treating his assessment of Java as special. You wouldn't get that with OO.o.

Good thing it isn't intended for consumers, then. Look, I know this is Slashdot and it isn't cool to RTFA, but, really, from TFA:

Despite the convenience of over-the-air management, the GSMA says the embedded design is not meant to replace conventional SIM cards, even though this exact idea was floated when ETSI was deciding on the future of the nano-SIM in 2012.

Yes, for the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, did you even read the article? (Actually, you clearly didn't. I know, I know, that's fairly normal around here.) The alternative is licensing lyrics from the publishers--which most that I have heard of (e.g., azlyrics.com) are actually doing. I have honestly never heard of most of the unlicensed sites (top results: rapgenius.com and lyricsmania.com). The industry claims licensing is cheap, and their problem is that sites that don't license are making money from their ads to such an extent that the industry questions whether the lyrics aren't more valuable than the actual music.

If you read TFA (I know, I know...) you'd see that there are sites that are licensed to post these lyrics (presumably a "we aren't going to post them, but you can" situation, which is as close as we'll get to what you mentioned)--quite a few, in fact. The takedown notices were for the sites they determined were not licensed to do so.

The first link says that Mozilla plans to continue supporting Firefox on XP; it gives no end date, so they presumably mean indefinitely (though practically probably not much longer than a few years--for example, they supported Windows 2000 until Firefox 12 in April 2012, a bit over 2 years after its EOL; on the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if they went a bit longer with XP given its larger user base). The second link says Google plans to continue Chrome support on XP into at least 2015. Neither one of these links talks about Firefox or Chrome ending support for Windows XP. In fact, both mention the exact opposite, at least for the foreseeable future, so I'm really wondering where the author of this summary got this information.

Mediacom (consistently ranked poorly in customer satisfaction) has the same here, but surely you have other Internet options. I use DSL from CenturyLink. (Yes, I know, connection speeds. But that doesn't matter when the other doesn't work, and in practice, they aren't that different.)