It sometimes bothers me that in the movies, people hardly ever make any grammar mistakes. Not even children. And when they do, it usually sounds artificial. Apparently, speaking like an ordinary person does is even harder to imitate than drunkenness. Now our obsession with grammatical correctness is certainly a very recent development in the history of the human species. I doubt very much that ordinary Roman citizens, or ancient Greeks, let alone Egyptians or Babylonians, ever mocked or corrected each other's grammar. I'd rather think that when people understood what you meant, your grammar was considered correct, so to speak. (Actually it wasn't considered at all.) Do the artificial languages you create, when they are spoken in fictional communities more archaic than our own, allow for more realism with respect to how people actually speak in their daily lives?

Being the best and being the most popular have always proved to be incompatible goals in the long run. Google had been used to being both for too long, and became erratic and increasingly evil when users started getting interested in non-Google stuff.

Back in the 1980s, Californian software company Epyx was said to own the trademark "Games" for anything video game / computer game related. They released titles like Summer Games, Winter Games, World Games, California Games -- all of these to great success. I do not know whether they actually ever sued anyone -- there were titles like "Eskimo Games" and "Alternative World Games" from other companies -- but they sure prevented anyone else from releasing Olympics-related sports games with any mention of "Games" in it. Epyx' final titles making use of the trademark were "The Games: Winter Edition" and "The Games: Summer Edition", again receiving much attention, but with many key artists leaving for Electronic Arts, Epyx decline was inevitable. The company soon went bankrupt and never recovered.

At special request, texture class "American Pie" has recently been added to the standard.

At 32c3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?... , Daniel Lange and Felix Domke presented their analysis of Volkswagen's "Dieselgate" software. It seems that that one doesn't look like ordinary code at all, but rather like code patterns generated from tables that relate sensory data to engine control parameters. Think of one of the earliest motivations for building computing machines in the first place: To create parameter tables for artillery aiming!

I think that, in the case of tennis players, it will be much easier to identify highly discriminating features of players than in the case of computer programmers. This is so because imagining to actually have what it takes to be a great tennis player is much easier than imagining to have the skills of a great programmer: If you can imagine having the skills of a great programmer, you do in fact have them. So, why not examine the stock example: Identifying chess players by their moves?

Problem 1.) Who wrote this https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ? Problem 2.) In the movie First Blood, Part II (a.k.a. Rambo II), when the camera pans through the interiors of Marshall Murdock's CIA base building, parts of the code listing of some computer program can be seen scrolling through some of the screens there. Who wrote that code? Hint to Problem 2: The person in question is also a Slashdot member.

When I was a kid, I didn't believe my mother when she told me not to touch the hotplate. The pain of burning my palm was a memorable lesson, though. Here, it's the difference between "I could have deleted your hard disk" and "So your hard disk has been formatted? Well, if you can explain to me how this could have come about, I might even provide you with a backup copy." It may not feel quite right to think of hacker kids as educators of the general public -- wasn't that a transient phase of the 80's? -- but while the current state of general irresponsibility in matters of systems security persists, we do need the occasional burnt palm.

...in the not-too-distant future, the html document you requested will not load, and you'll be shown a short notification instead, saying "please use an OS and browser that comply with our DRM policy"? I am already seeing lots of messages of that flavor while I'm browsing the web using Linux/Firefox, tracking disabled. The claim is that I am trying to view valuable content without paying for it (pop-under windows and user tracking being the currency).

Remember, she's the one who called the Internet 'virgin soil' last year. But she's not the only one who has no clue. Every other week some European politician speaks up, demanding billions of tax payer's money to create an independent European IT industry. These noobs really seem to think there'll be a day when they can say, "Look, Obama, we've got our own Intel, we've got our own Microsoft, you can kiss our asses." At the same time, these guys complain that they can't run their offices with Linux: "It's too complicated for our staff. Give us back our Windows XP, our MS Office, our Internet Explorer."

Why not put a tax on thingy? Would feel as stupid as to call for a tax on standing in water, once you realize what you're standing in.

What was Steve Jobs' handle in the Blue Box days? In iWoz, page 110, you write 'Oaf Tobar'. In 'Steve Jobs', Chapter 2.2, Walter Isaacson writes 'Oaf Tobark'. Which one is correct?

This link worked for me: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116863379291775523-_EQCu93LyjSommsN6J7qiCozuu8_20070122.html

titled 'Phreaking for Real' tells the story from Steve Wozniak's perspective. It starts "In 1971, the day before I headed off to my third year of college at Berkeley, I was sitting at my mother's kitchen table and there happened to be a copy of Esquire sitting there." After giving an account of the article and the excitement it gave him, Woz first mentions Jobs four pages later: "One of the first things I did after reading the article was to call up my friend Steve Jobs. He was just about to start twelfth grade at Homestead High School, the same high school I'd gone to. I started telling him about this amazing article, [...]".

The Chaos Computer Club is probably not adequately characterized as a 'hacker group'. It was founded in 1981 as a computer club and, while hacking has always been their most prominent activity, they have grown not only into a nation-wide association of about 3000 members, but into an influential civil rights organization as well. Their expertise in matters of IT security is frequently called upon by public media in Germany. The CCC is well respected even by many politicians and their expertise was cited more than once by former Ferderal Minister of the Interior Gerhart Baum during the trial that ended last year with the Verfassungsgericht (federal constitutional court)'s finding that the federal anti-terror law that obliged providers to retain all telecommunications data for six months was unconstitutional. The CCC organizes the annual Chaos Communication Congress that Slashdot readers might remember as being the event where some major hacks were presented to the public: http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/01/02/0231242/detailing-the-security-risks-in-pdf-standard http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/12/29/204253/Playstation-3-Code-Signing-Cracked-For-Good http://it.slashdot.org/story/09/12/28/1931256/gsm-decryption-published http://games.slashdot.org/story/05/12/16/2157217/hacking-the-xbox The CCC is also well know for Project Blinkenlights, which grew out of the CCC but is now an independent project.