No, and that's why Apple gets a shitload of press when people line up for their products and while every other company hardly gets a mention when their new flagship product becomes available for pre-order on Amazon along with (***yawn***) a dozen others. Even if one passionately dislikes Apple, one must also grudgingly admit that it's a pretty clever marketing strategy that has worked wonders for Apple.

Well, if we find rabbit bones stuck between the teeth of a Tyrannosaurus Rex we'll have to give creationism a second though.

Dear Slashdot management,
Can we please get a button, located at the top of each thread next tot he 'Post' button, that filters out any posts with the word 'Beta' in them when you press it?

Sincerely,
Those rest of us.

All of you who don't like the Beta, just put 'I hate Slashdot Beta!' in your SIG and find something else to talk about. Just for god's sake stop hijacking threads with this off-topic whining. The rest of us have all long since noticed that you don't like the new site layout.

It's been a while since I read about this so I may be shaky on details but I don't think the Poles nicked an Enigma but they did buy one. There were several variants of Enigma divided into two different classes, the commercial and the military units. You could buy a commercial grade unit quite without restrictions so the Poles did that just to get an idea of how it worked. Later on they bribed a Nazi customs official to get access to a military Enigma and inspect it because stealing it would have alerted the Nazis that the Enigma system had been compromised. The French also contributed data and that led to the construction of the 'Bomba'. When the Germans added more rotors to the Enigma in 1938 it massively increased the magnitude of the required decryption effort and the Poles didn't have the resources to construct the requisite machinery. That's where the British became involved.

Alan Turing was a indeed a colossus but he didn't crack the enigma code. He didn't even lay a lot of of the ground work for designing this machine, it was a team of mathematicians working for Polish military intelligence after Polish and French spooks had gained access various data concerning Enigma that included inspecting a working copy of an enigma machine. Their names were Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Róycki and Henryk Zygalski and they reverse engineered the Enigma based on this material using mathematics and created what they called the 'bomba kryptologiczna'. The famous Colossus was a 'substantial develpment' from this device. What Alan Turing and Co. did was crack the improved enigma machines (still a daunting task) who had been upgraded in 1938-39, but he and and his team stood on the shoulders of those three polish mathematicians. The British are very keen to take sole credit for cracking Enigma but they got a whole helluva lot of help from Poland and France and as a German I'd like it to be crystal clear to the world who exactly it was that kicked our cryptographic ass :-)

The fandroids are going to have a field day with this one.

I was in the market for a MP3 player at the time. In my neck of the woods the most common variety was the 32mb memory stick type. Other than that there was the NOMAD which was expensive and I had to look for quite a while until I found a shop that sold it, then there was the iPod. I picked the iPod because it was a nice compromise between small size, capacity and a UI that seemed to be designed for efficient one-handed use which was nice since I'm a keen cyclist. I didn't like iTunes either (still don't), but I decided I could live with it and while the 5Gb capacity was smaller than the NOMAD it was plenty more than I had music for at the time. This guy kind of summed it up for me. It's kind of interesting to take a look at the original slashdot thread:
http://slashdot.org/story/01/1...
It is full of recommendations to buy other players with more capacity and features but everybody still went out and bought an iPod. Judging from some of the posts in this current thread a sizeable portion of the Slashdot crowd still hasn't gotten over the shock of people preferring simplicity and portability over features.

Not entirely but the extent to which we fail to recycle human excrement and urine is quite new. Many ancient societies used human waste for fertiliser although that can be a health hazard. In Roman times tanners, people who dyed cloth and other such businesses actually had pissoires outside their shops and big signs inviting customers to please come over and relieve themselves. Apparently tanners and dyers processed the urine to get Ammonia rich solutions which they used to prepare their products. I remember a QI episode where Stephen Fry dropped this fact-bit about how the House of Lords in London used to reek of stale piss on rainy days because of the quantities of urine used to in the production of tweed fabric which was popular with the upper classes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries

And yet for some reason millions upon millions of people disagreed and bought the iPod, and don't tell me it was just marketing. There is always more to a blockbuster hit it than just marketing.

Ok, I revise my previous statement, you are not trolling, you clearly need therapy.

Why are they testing this iPod thing? I mean Creative Labs and others have come out with MP3 players already. The ability to quickly bring attractive and reliable products to market is a key factor in modern electronics industry (so there isn't a hope in hell this iPod thing will ever be a commercial success).

The thing is that first to market is not everything. You also have to design the stuff you bring to market well and Apple has a history of appealing to customers by successfully reinventing/redesigning stuff that others have implemented badly and Apple evidently believes they can do it again.

It's usually a good rule do thumb to never buy the first iteration of any computer software or hardware product at all, especially software.

The rest of your post is either blatant trolling or a symptom of some psychological disorder and so not worthy of a response.

Arrr... but at sea we use nautical miles, ye clueless landlubber.

No, that's not useless. If you were paying attention it may have forced you to learn some proper English. I'm not sure if the summary headline fits the article content completely. TFA seems to be trying to say (caveat. I'm not a psychologist and I only read TFA and parts of the paper) is something to the effect that for example: in the old days when there was no internet or the net was more limited than it is now, you had to solve your own problems and that stimulates your brain and 'trains' it. A person who has the internet at his/her disposal and solves most of their problems by hitting experts-exchange, stack overflow or some such web and benefits from hard thinking done by others does not have their brain stimulated in the same way because they don't have to remember this stuff and don't figure it out on their own. They can just book mark it whereas 20 years ago you 'd better write yourself a private howto once you solved your conundrum in case you ran into this again five years and that makes things concerning the problem it self stick a bit more than hitting [Ctrl]+[D]. If you just use search engines to search for solutions to problems the information retained probably has more (though not exclusively) to do with how to find the solution than how to figure the problem out by yourself. Basically if you are hit by tough problems when you are younger and forced solve them yourself and to exercise your brain it means that when you get older it takes you longer to remember things because you have to 'search a bigger database'. not because your brain is getting slower. Furthermore if your short term memory and analytic abilities decline with age you can make up for it with experience, expertise and 'brain training' received in your youth. Finally, as you age, you also gain the ability to notice subtle side effects of doing something as you get older that a younger person does not notice as a result of your brain being trained more and having more experience. Something like:

Younger person: If we connect this doohickey with that thingemabomb we get effect X.
Older person: Hmmmmm.....
Younger person: (impatiently annoyed) What!
Older person: Well, that's true but if somebody then presses button A while dohickey is in state Y the thingemabob will short out.
Younger person: (slightly embarrased) Oh, yeah right.