Forgot about those. Personally, I was thinking in terms of Caprica's paper computer things people carried around in their pocket (link)

I'd love to have one of those.

Thanks a lot, I just lost three hours to TV Tropes again.

I assume he was at a casino. And at a casino they will not let you change your bet after placing it. I've seen it happen at a blackjack table where the guy claimed he didn't mean to throw in the $200 (of course this was right after the cards went down, although that does happen fast as shit). Easy mistake but once the bet is in, it's in.

Totally agree.
I mean, WTF is this? It seems like a blog entry from a blog I would never ever read, not a slashdot news item. I usually get pissed at all the "How is this news for nerds?" comments on stories that aren't all that slashdotty, but this isn't even news. The book reviews actually review something, this is just one guy who really wants to bitch about something but can't seem to find anyone to care so he's trying with us.

Uh, I was just extending the original metaphor, which if you recall, had the sheep being eaten. I think it's pretty clear I was stating the problems with the current political situation and why more direct democracy isn't the boogeyman that the OP was making it out to be, not advocating genocide.

Ok, so you've got four wolves and a sheep. The sheep votes for grass, and the wolves vote on eating the sheep. So the sheep dies, the wolves are fine. If the minority interest of the sheep is followed, the sheep is just fine, and the four wolves starve to death because they can't live on grass.

In the current system, there's a wool maker deciding what the wolves and sheep eat, and the sheep has bought him off with continued "donations" of wool. So he votes grass and the wolves are fucked. So next time, the wolves vote to pick a different wool maker to decide. He also votes for grass as the sheep has plenty of wool to spread around to both candidates. The wolves are fucked.

In case you didn't get it, we're the wolves, and we can't do anything about it because the wool makers have guns and won't to keep that steady stream of wool coming in.

Yeah, Jesus Fucking Christ. Microsoft does something good, going carbon neutral by trying to reduce their energy use and paying for carbon capture through trees and such and the entire comment threads are just anti-Microsoft crap:
"Carbon neutral doesn't mean anything"
"Google was already carbon neutral"
"i don't like windows"
"microsoft is going to fake it"
"blah blah blah"

Why can't we just be glad they're doing something they don't need to for social (and sure reputation) good?

Spell check? Who still uses that? The green and red squiggly underlines totally removed the need to ever use spell check.

You like things that everyone else hates, so...... you're a hipster?

Maybe you should learn how to tell jokes better.

He posted the article so we don't have to pay the $32 to get past the paywall.

I come to slashdot to learn about cool things and find that I learn quite a lot when someone who knows what they're talking about expands on the article with an in depth comment on the science or history behind the topic. For the videos, every comment is "Give me a transcript" or "This is an ad" and frankly that's because the subject matter sucks. I think it could be a great idea, but the content really needs to be better. We're all nerds here, we can handle something technical and interesting rather than PR buzz speak or "look what I can fit in my Jacket!" (really? WTF.) We already have YouTube, we don't need another.

Although what I'd really like /. to focus on is making a fucking mobile site that works. The /. demographic has a higher concentration of smart phones than the normal population and we like to use them, but slashdot looks like crap on every mobile browser I try and is hard to read without paning around all the damn time.

Also, thanks for providing me with thousands of lost work hours for free :)

Oh shit, how did I miss that? I didn't see a /. article about google maps doing that (and I avoided the internet on 4/1). Dragon Warrior was my first video game and I've made custom maps for them and everything. DQ forever! That is so awesome. Thanks for the heads up!

My eyes! Oh god! I thought old geocities and myspace pages were bad... This bitch needs to go to jail just for that website design alone.