So let the sailors add the leap seconds back into their calculations. The rest of us shouldn't have to care about them.

Ignore it. How much does it impact humanity if the clock noon drifts a tiny bit from solar noon? We're looking at an impact of shifting noon by about a minute over the course of an average human's lifespan. The impact of ignoring it means that people who rely on sundials are left to solve the sync problem on their own, and that's a whole lot less of an impact than NTP.

Other systems that synchronize with natural phenomena, such as automated irrigation systems or automated lighting systems, can be adjusted by their owners.

If some purist insists that we have to fix it, let's agree to fix it once per century, and let the people 100 years from now figure out if it's important enough to them to worry about.

I still don't understand how they can control it well enough. It seems like 99.9% of the mods they might try to make would result in a cancerous tumor. And if that's the case, a back alley in Chiba City wouldn't seem so attractive after all.

Look at every other mass communication system, ever. They all have had to deal with noise. Online site owners have evolved some things that work pretty well, like Slashdot's moderation system with metamoderation, voting schemes, "like" buttons, etc. More than 20 years ago usenet news had cancelmoose. Offline we have long had people like newspaper editors, publishers, standards and practices teams, and even government censors.

Either publishers find a way to deal with spammers, trolls, and griefers; or readers abandon them once the signal-to-noise ratio gets too low as they collapse under the weight of carrying terabytes of gibberish and spam. Frankly I'm surprised Twitter hasn't offered this kind of solution sooner.

Congratulations, you win at Internet today!

By the way, Yahoo! called, they want their 1990s back.

A mimeograph? You had it easy. We didn't have a mimeograph, so we had to listen to a bunch of Welshmen sitting around a table telling jokes that had no vowels, and then type them up ourselves.

Are you absolutely sure Halo 5 is just a game? How do you know?

Metro apps have ads built in - the provided Weather app has a block ad permanently lodged between the hourly forecast and the radar maps, for example. This has nothing to do with the web, the browser, or slashdot.

You deleted all the relevant bits of the post to make a non-point about some random ad blocker that would have no effect.

Well, back in my day there were only three episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus, which we quoted every day at lunch, and we liked it that way.

I intended to be snarky here, but the more I thought about it, it really is Dice's website. They post stuff, and we keep coming back and reading it, even though we're not paid to. What part of that do you consider "not OK"?

If you know Idle (Eric, not the IDE), you get the job automatically. If you can get me tickets to Spamalot.

This is Slashdot. You only get abuse.

I know C++. To me, anyone who knows python but not C++ is half useless. If you only know Java, you're 25% useless. And if you know only Visual Basic, you're 125% useless.

Too late. It's been touched.

For those of you not reading Slashdot on Windows 8, you may not realize that local advertising support was built directly into Windows 8, and ads appear in certain Metro-style apps, exactly like iAds on iOS.

Of course since the research paper was written in 2009, this still shouldn't come as much of a surprise, as you've all had six years of warning.

Keep reading the report, and you'll see that they doubled back and covered their other tracks several times. Scheduling the malware activity levels to coincide with Israel's work week would be in keeping with the other forms of camouflage and diversion that were employed by Duqu 2.0's operators, and prove almost nothing at all.

Various leaks after the fact strongly implicated Israel was responsible for Stuxnet (including a YouTube video of an IDF general being congratulated on his team's creation of the malware at his retirement party), but Duqu? The only confirmed relationship to Stuxnet is that both were found in Iran's nuclear facilities. And several nations have as much interest in Iran's nuclear program as Israel, including the US, China, and Russia.