Am I the only one who has no idea what this poll is about?

Letting technical writing people doing the writing won't work. A large part of the scientific writing is the discussion of the experiment, which not only helps the scientist clarify his or her own thoughts and gives insight into future experiments, but also really only is worth reading if the scientist or members of the experimental team do it themselves. Technical writers really only would have the ability to write the experimental procedure, and even then it would be hard. Since science is so specialized you'd have to have technical writers for thousands of subdisciplines, etc. This goes especially true for mathematics, where the writing procedure is very closely related to doing mathematics.

Already because of this, no time for the scientist would be saved. A Google moderation system would have two problems. First, it wouldn't save any time because you still have to have some person doing the reviewing, and secondly you have to have someone qualified doing the reviewing whom you can trust to some extent to review in confidence, for otherwise if there are certain major problems with the paper but a few good ideas, they can be "stolen" by others, which may become a problem.

Time travel, and it runs in Emacs now.

Even in a seemingly anti-apple place like this, I don't think there's much negativity towards OS X. It started with the iPod and continued with the iPhone/iPad because they're not open enough.

I dislike the iPortables because without modding I can't open a terminal and browse the filesystem, install arbitrary software, and look at the source. I suspect a lot of geeks want something that 'Just Works' AND is open. The anger comes from the thought that IF only Apple opened the iDevices then geeks could finally have this.

IMO the n810 which I am typing on now (and similarly the n900) is pretty damn close if only more developer efforts were directed towards it. Sadly few people care about open source so right now devices like the n810 show promise and the fade away into obscurity.

Hopefully Nokia with MeeGo will come a bit closer.

How are porn and strip clubs unethical?

This thing doesn't look at your surfing habits, and it's not available to those who download more than 30GB/month, which probably excludes many Slashdotters.

Please tell me you don't think Tor is secure in the manner you suggest?! It's not meant to be. Tor is for anonymity, not security for your information.

To put it more concretely, you want to use Tor if you don't want someone to know _you're_ doing something, which is not necessarily bad I should add. For instance, if you want to blog about what you saw last night in the alley. Tor isn't for sending information you don't want _anyone_ to read.

Anonymity protects you, not your data. So, you should use Tor for complaining about the government, and not to broadcast the location of your buried treasure!

Well, 640 light years ought to be far enough for anyone!

28 is a perfect number. It is the sum of all of its proper divisors. 1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14 = 28.

How about just not visiting Slashdot for a day? The fact that you're so annoyed means that you'd probably benefit from less internet for a day. The internet doesn't matter that much. Who cares? It's just silliness.

This isn't as cheap as I'd like: http://www.pocketbookreader.com/PocketBook_360.html, but at $240 it does run Linux and supports DJVU along with many other formats. You can even download a terminal emulator for it. I've been looking around for e-readers and I'm thinking of getting this one. I would like to test it first but unfortunately it's not sold in stores around here.

A few years ago I was at a museum listening to the Goldberg Variations on these headphones attached to the wall. The displayed CD cover had Glenn Gould on it. Immediately when I started listening I knew it wasn't Gould; I turned the CD around and it turns out it was just a virtual recording, produced by technicians studying the record and trying to implement Gould's style. It wasn't anything like Gould. I mean, sure on the surface it was similar but it lacked that little bit that makes Gould so special, and that separated him from the rest. There will always be a place for real music.

Except that you can watch YouTube on the iPhone.