A hearing aide you say?

"Sir" [taps you on shoulder]

"There's a conversation you may be interested in" [furiously working at semaphore/sign language/scribbling on paper]

It's bad enough that slashdot silently redirects all https connections to http.

For some extra amusement, here are some stories slashdot ran regarding expired certificates:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/02/23/1415231/certificate-expiry-leads-to-total-outage-for-microsoft-azure-secured-storage
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/03/05/0143218/microsoft-azure-failure-ssl-certificates-were-updated-sort-of
http://slashdot.org/topic/datacenter/azure-crash-blamed-on-expired-ssl-certificate/

It's also still there in the title tags:

  <title>Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters</title>

However, since many browsers, especially those on Windows, dropped the title bar for more viewable screen area, it's often not shown. It does flash up for a few hundred milliseconds in the tab text in FF on Windows but is rapidly replaced with "Slashdot".

It does sound like a badly done odd-one-out list, doesn't it?

"For 10 points, which of these are people who may actually be able to cure your cancer? Surgeons, homeopaths, oncologists, Chinese doctors, nutritionists and spiritual healers."

I love the juxtaposition of your comment and your sig.

Random off-topic trivia: £ on a standard British keyboard layout is reached by shift+3 - all the more confusing when referring to the pound sign with someone using an American keyboard layout as the convention is to call the # symbol a pound sign and it too is shift+3.

It is off a bit ;-) ((335,258,000 sq km * 0.77mm) * 1000 kg per metre cubed) / 200000 tonnes = about 1.2 million suezmax tankers.

The argument Stallman uses against this is that we, as voters, have no way to know whether the code actually running on the machine in front of us is the same as the open code that we have reviewed. Ultimately there will come a time when a very select number of people are responsible for compiling the code and putting it on the machine. If those people have a vested interest in some outcome or other then they could tamper with the machine and no-one would know any better. In fact, we would all be thinking it was a secure system because of the "open" nature of it. These things aren't like our PCs, we can't just install VotingMachine From Scratch and be done with it.

Topical case in point: Facebook buys Instagram photo sharing network for $1bn. Instagram was launched in 2010, has 13 employees and has just been bought out at a minimum rate of around $30 million per employee per year. That's an astonishing yield and all without actually taking the business to the full term.

They're brilliant aren't they? They crop up everywhere now. The BBC uses them with gay abandon and whilst I'm sure that they're just using them in their traditional sense (i.e. to delineate a quote) the results can often be hilarious.

Here's another amusing example from today on the BBC: 'Cloaking' a 3-D object from all angles demonstrated. You can just hear the derisive journalist as he writes the headline...