Anyone ever notice that 9 out of 10 Slashdot book reviews are related to Drupal? One of these days, some other publisher is finally gonna notice that Slashdot will publish most any tech book review, and start also taking advantage of this free visibility...As long as it isn't that one guy who uses Slashdot as his shitty blog...

Anyone else notice this? You kinda loose a bit of geek-cred when you mention that you buy into treatments that are not based on evidence...

The X-Prize competition decides what a Tricorder is. Their guidelines are here: http://tricorder.xprize.org/si...

The refactoring techniques they used were from Fowler's book, Working Effectively with Legacy Code. But it seems like they didn't actually bother to read his book. They are good techniques, and it is an excellent book, I recommend it to anyone stuck working on old crummy codebases. But the book tries to stress that the specific techniques are not nearly as important as determining when it is appropriate to use which technique. It further stresses that the most important thing is to get as much of the codebase covered by well written unit tests as is reasonably achievable. But there was no mention of either of these concepts in this paper. The article made it sound like they just gave a bunch of undergrads the list of techniques and instructed them to apply them. Undergrads generally have zero experience working on legacy code. Most of them only work on assigned programming projects from scratch. The only time I worked with legacy code was tweaking the Linux Kernel for my OS class.

This is the number one question asked on Ask-Slashdot. In my recollection, I believe this is at least the 7th time I've seen it. The answers are always unsatisfying. Such is life.

You can't go wrong with four simultaneous 24-hour days. It's all right there on the website!

I was under the impression that no one plays this game. The cities are so tiny that the game gets boring after about 2 hours of playtime. Support for the game has ended. And everyone went back to playing the previous Sim City game, or Cities XL.

Do you guys do zero review or investigation before throwing up fear-mongering bullshit? If you haven't read TFA yet, don't even bother.

God. I seriously miss the PBS before this. I guess I'm in the minority, but I'd love it if more of my tax dollars went to them once again so they didn't have to pull that shit anymore.

Cuban cigars are indeed good. And in the 60s, they were pretty solidly the best. However, the embargo lasted so long, and cigar interest has had big enough explosions in the past 20 years or so that the other countries, and indeed the Cuban manufacturers themselves have figured out how to make cigars that are every bit as good in nearby regions. It'll be great whenever they finally return to the US, but it won't quite be the massive cigar-renaissance in the US that some people expect.

Again, this wording adds restrictions to any such collections that may occur. It does not grant permission to do them.

Arg, link fail. I intended to link to the text of H.R. 4681 so you can read section 309 yourself.

Thanks for providing this, AC. I don't know what Mr. Amash is talking about. Section 309 doesn't grant any blessing of Executive Order 12333, or any other mechanism of collection. It just states that if any collection takes place without a court order, then it must be disposed of within 5 years with a few very-specific exceptions. The sky is not falling people. Do your research before you freak out based on alarmist stuff like this.

Here's the important part: "That type of collection is currently allowed under an executive order that dates back to former President Reagan, but the new stamp of approval from Congress was troubling, Amash said."

In other words, the only issue he has with this bill is that it acknowledges an Executive Order is in place. It doesn't even particularly bless it. Nothing is changing other than a slightly-less tacet approval of an order that has been around for decades. It's not a terribly long bill, check it out yourself

It seems like all of these articles trying to dig up dirt and spread controversy about Wikipedia come from wikipediocracy.com. It also seems like they are a very small group. All mentions of wikipediocracy in this comment section prior to this submission (under my default filter settings; forgive my laziness) are from two users, and one of them, the primary one, is the article submitter. I just have major trouble buying anything from a source whose entire mission is to criticize Wikipedia. That kinda just screams bias. This content is always coming out of wikipediocracy. I can't recall the last article posted to Slashdot critical of Wikipedia that didn't include a link from them. It feels like they are just trying to use the visibility of getting their submissions posted to Slashdot to build controversy. It isn't hard to write up a summary and get it accepted by Slashdot just by knowing to write a summary in the accepted style. People don't click the links often because it isn't very interesting, they just note "wow, people sure sound upset at Wikipedia" and don't notice that it's always this small group of people....