A thousand times yes. I won't buy these any more as they simply do not last; at least not in my house. I might get year out of them. Maybe a little more, but not appreciably more than a normal incandescent bulb which are considerably less expensive. I'll continue to purchase incandescent bulbs until they are regulated out of existence, or newer technologies come down to a sane price where the value (lifetime/cost) is on par with older technologies.

I highly recommend to everyone reading this discussion to listen to this 16-minute NPR Money Matters story:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

Them if you have some time, This American Life tells the dealer's side of the story:
http://m.thisamericanlife.org/...

I'll warm you now that your blood may boil, and you may turn into a rage monster thinking about the sheer absurdity and stupidity of the car-buying process.

The "machine learning algorithm" is a euphemism for three hairless teenagers floating in pools of milk.

Watch out for the spiders.

Yes, it certainly sucks that a very ignorant but very vocal minority can cast a dark shadow upon a vast but comparatively silent majority. If you don't like the preconceived notions that are hung upon the religious (as perceived by the non-religious), you may want to encourage like-minded individuals to speak up on matters of science and scientific literacy. Right now the media is controlling the message that this is a two-sided debate, mostly because that's an easier sell. But it's also due to the fact that there is a HUGE contingent of people of faith who recognize a place for science in their lives, but are cowering in the corner. ISIS uses threats of violence to get the masses to bow to their whim. It's not a sword, so what is the far-right hanging over your head?

We all get and deserve the world we make.

Agreed. He's an outside contractor working for the NSA. I think for a man in his position that's more of a water cooler kind of conversation, so he can use nuance and visual queues to establish casual concern. There's no way he's going to put his objections into writing where all of that is lost. He likely would have been fired, investigated, had his family members interrogated, and all of his credit cards would have mysteriously stopped working.

So I suppose the end result is the same, except that we probably wouldn't know the truth if he sent an email.

I think the OP's inference is justified. A rephrasing of the sentence should be used to describe an ongoing program. Also, the article clearly states that the program ended in 2011, lending some support to the inference.

I also do not believe for one New York second that the program is suspended, or if it is, it is only because it was replaced by an even more Orwellian (and dare I say, anti-American) program with a different name.

It goes back even further for me. I had to buy a TI-81 in 1990 for freshman year in college. Then I had to take a class (Math 148), that despite its description, was really just to teach you how to use the TI-81. In the two subsequent classes (Math 150 and 151), we barely used the TI-81 for much more than basic calculator functions that I recall, although that was a long time ago. Of course, I never used the calculator again after that. I came away from the whole experience feeling like it was scheme cooked up between the university, TI, and the book publisher.

Board Games (broad-ish appeal, nothing heavy):
Cards Against Humanity
Zombie Dice
Settlers of Catan
Ticket to Ride
Pandemic
Dominion
A couple of Magic the Gathering starter sets
Plain old deck of cards

PC:
Diablo II - This is the only game I think I consistently install from one PC to the next. It usually involves one of my friends saying "Hey, we should start an old-school D2 night once a week!" Because of this, I think every PC I've had since 1997 has had Diablo on it at some point.

RPGs:
Pathfinder, or whatever your favorite flavor of D&D is
Shadowrun

Android/iPhone:
Clash of Clans

While it is news and it does matter, I don't feel Slashdot is the appropriate site for this article. There are plenty of the other online news aggregation and discussion sites where this would be entirely appropriate content.

As such, I'm afraid I must boycott this article by not posting!

Yeah, it's hard to miss that WotC had their events in the Sagamore Ballroom for years, but Paizo has had that space for the past two years and WotC has been relegated to a small corner of Hall C.

I've played most editions of D&D going back to 1984. My gaming group and I generally play the "living" campaigns. I didn't mind 4e so much, and LFR is a great campaign setting. We were often tapped to play-test 4e LFR's a few months before the cons. I just thought the combats in 4e could take too long if not properly designed. I like the way LordLucless above regards 4e as a "tactical skirmish" game; I think he's right. We play-tested Next a few times and I wasn't impressed. I just did a 5e this past Saturday at Gen Con and hated every second of it. I played a pre-gen archer and it was 2.5 hours before I loosed my first arrow. WAY too much RP. That's obviously module-specific, but a poor choice to introduce 5e at a con.

We left D&D for Pathfinder PFS a year ago when WotC/Baldman dropped LFRs from the Gen Con lineup without warning, and with nearly nothing to replace it. It's ok. I think what really needs to happen in tabletop RPG's, at least with living campaigns, is that modules need to have rating system for how they've been written. I'd like to know in advance if this module is geared more towards combat or role-playing so I can choose accordingly.

I've been getting into Shadowrun 5th edition lately and liking it more and more.

Thanks to the awesome new browser plug-in called Greenhouse (how has this not been on slashdot?), here's a little context.

Congressman Mo Brooks gets his biggest financial contributions from the aerospace industry. Among his top-10 contributors are Lockheed Martin (1), Northrup Grumman (2), Boeing (6), and Raytheon(10).

Both congressmen Coffman and Gardner have Koch Industries in their top-10 at 7 and 5 respectively. At first, this didn't mean much to me, but I found the coincidence intriguing so I dug deeper. Koch Industries purchased Molex, Inc. in December for $7.2 billion. Among other things, Molex makes wiring and connectors for defense and aerospace. Is that enough to push a couple of congress critters to voice concerns about Space X? I don't know, but following the money is usually a good first step in determining motive.

I was thinking they smelled like a lost opportunity.

It's the reporting. This wasn't a peer reviewed scientific discovery, and it didn't claim to be. It was just a paper that laid out how the experiment was done, and what the results were, nothing more. Just because IFL Science, like every other tech/science site, picks up the story and hints at trips to Mars in a matter of weeks, doesn't mean that's what the experimenters were claiming.

This is how science works. You do experiments, you post your methods and results. Other scientists may do the same. If there is enough evidence that something may be at work, you do more. If you end up showing that everything we thought we knew about the universe was wrong, THEN YOU START CHANGING THE TEXTBOOKS.

The law of conservation of momentum, like all scientific laws, comes with the caveat that our understanding of how the universe works is correct. They are not immutable. Given reproduceability, predictability, and strong empirical evidence, it probably is correct; but that doesn't mean it may not need "tweaking" in the face of new evidence. It could also be that no scientific principles are being broken here, it's just there's something else at play we don't understand.

People who claim otherwise are really just religious zealots in a lab coat.

In the decades past, it was viewed as harmless...even cute when the little golf-cart like robots crawled across the surface doing their little experiments. But then in 2025, Earth attacked. It was without warning or provocation that the vicious spikes penetrated the community, and this action would not go without swift and formidable retribution. So the ships were fueled and armed, and a vast armada launched into the sky and made their way to seek...not revenge, but justice. The Earthlings, with their antiquated detection systems, didn't even notice the approaching fleet with weapons ready to unleash hell.

But alas, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was swallowed by a small dog, and no justice was served that day or any other.

Apologies to Douglas Adams.

Obligatory South Park reference:
http://beta.southparkstudios.c...