So ... violent beatings are now considered "conversations"?

I guess next we'll see the police officer who committed the assault try to raise a first amendment defense against his criminal prosecution?

fuck store brands

I'm glad I don't live in the horrible world you describe, or at least don't shop at whatever terrible stores you patronize (Wal*Mart by any chance?)

At the grocers I use, store brands tend to be 100% the quality at 90% the price, and the normal brands aren't marked up at all (and are frequently cheaper than the store brand when on special offer). It's all very civilized really.

Have a nice week!

The man has created more jobs than Obama

Wow, that's seriously impressive.

I think the problem is that GNOME/KDE decided to become the DEs for the rest of us

Not the rest of "us". That's the problem: GNOME (and, to a lesser extent, KDE) have decided, for some reason, to become desktop environments primarily targeted at the sort of person who isn't even remotely interested in using GNOME or KDE.

It's like the Pope turned round one day and said "okay, we're going to rewrite our doctrines to make them more appealing to atheists!"

Using public WiFi spots is a much more dangerous issue, since a lot of websites still don't employ SSL encryption of the traffic and your POP3/IMAP/HTTP credentials can be easily eavesdropped.

That's not a problem Google can solve.

Protecting my passwords from people who steal my phone is a problem Google can solve.

Please don't divert attention from an easily-solved issue just because you think some other thing is more important. Or I might just ask why the fuck you're wasting time on Slashdot instead of working night and day to eradicate hunger and disease, which are clearly far more pressing issues than people eavesdropping on you when you use public wifi.

Like it's mentioned earlier not storing passwords in an open or reverse encryptable form is not possible, since your Android device has to supply plain text password to many Internet servers.

Yes, it's totally impossible to protect data at rest. All those companies selling full-disk encryption to governments and businesses are clearly selling snake oil. Truecrypt is easy to break and Bruce Schneier is an idiot, right?

Or maybe it's actually trivial to encrypt data, and while many users might choose not to use it or might choose extremely weak passwords for the encryption, it would still be better than nothing.

Yes, HL2(and ep 2) had those annoying boat and car scenes, but I trust Carmack and co to get this one right.

Annoying? The main annoying thing about them was the load times. Gameplay-wise they were pretty fun.

Clearly TFA was written by a sensitive atheist who is offended by the very concept of supernatural beings having the power to punish humans.

If this was a multi-player game for example (I don't believe that it is), malicious players could supply their own hacked levels and upgrades using MITM methods potentially giving them an unfair advantage over other players that doing things properly.

Yes, that sounds totally plausible and not at all contrived. I can well imagine many people being so eager to cheat at games that they will happily commit a complex and technically-demanding federal crime in order to gain a slight edge.

Amazon should also have insisted that the game disable the device's screen and communicate with the player only by blinking morse code with the device's notification LED, like in Cryptonomicon, because there's a serious risk that malicious players might try to get an unfair advantage via Van Eck phreaking.

Roundabouts (please note, they are called roundabouts -- a "rotary" is a different type of circular road layout) work best as a replacement for all-way stops, not for signalized intersections. Note that all-way stops also lack any provision for pedestrians, and are generally more dangerous since drivers have more to worry about -- they must monitor traffic approaching from all directions, whereas with a roundabout the driver only has to watch in one direction.

In my state, roundabouts generally have crosswalks a little way away from each entrance. These crosswalks work like any other crosswalk. It's not rocket science.

people that lack fast Internet aren't necessarily screwed, since Apple is allowing anyone to use the Wi-Fi in their retail stores to download the OS.

Oh, that's OK then. It's not like most of the people who lack fast internet lack it because they live a long way from the big cities where Apple stores tend to be located, or anything. I'm sure they'll be very happy to pay 500 times the cost of mailing a DVD in gas just to get their OS upgrade.

Customer service. Reinvented.

Your options:
1. Download at work.
2. Download at friend's house.
3. Download at relative's house.
4. Move.
5. Raise hell with Hughesnet.
7. Raise hell with Apple.
8. Cry.

Good God, how can you be posting on Slashdot and yet forget the best option of all?

9. Linux.

And yet when I go back and play classic games, often in emulators -- games made at least 15 years ago, and in a few cases over 25 years ago! -- I sure feel like I'm enjoying them.

And it's not purely nostalgia; I have enjoyed games from that era that I did not play at the time.

Do you have a smartphone? You now have an ebook reader

I have a smartphone. It has a lovely high-resolution display that produces crisp and beautiful text.

It's also completely unreadable out of doors, painfully bright in low light conditions, has limited battery life, and can only display a very limited amount of information at a time. Sorry, but I have no interest in tackling a novel on it, let alone a technical work. Come back when large low-power reflective displays are widespread in cheap multi-purpose devices and then we might talk.