They don't talk about the choke specifically, but they do say... "The distribution of pellets is influenced by all kinds of factors, such as the height of the gun, the distance to the target, wind direction and so on. So this distribution is not random. To get around this, they are able to fall back on a technique known as importance sampling. This is a trick that allows mathematicians to estimate the properties of one type of distribution while using samples generated by a different distribution."

All kinds of questions are answered in TFA. I know, I'm new here...

> In 99% of the US, "not driving" amounts to
> a sentence of death-by-life-on-welfare

If you get your license pulled, they usually allow you to drive to and from work.

Seeing as how his question says "About ten boxes here are still running Windows XP" I don't think he uses a single thing you mention. Not EVERY company has 50k machines, not do they have a huge staff with many years of experience.

That said, it all comes down to "what tools do you need to do your job?" Some places live and die by Office-specific features, other places wouldn't even notice if you switched office suites as long as they can use a spreadsheet app to make color-coded 2-dimensional lists. He's going about it exactly the right way -- setting up a small test environment.

If you won't believe some random guy on Slashdot, will you believe some random guy on Wikipedia?

"Pure water has a low electrical conductivity, but this increases with the dissolution of a small amount of ionic material such as sodium chloride."

Yes, pure water has very low conductivity. The reason you always hear "OMG NOES don't get electronics wet!" because all the water you encounter in day-to-day life is nowhere near pure. Tap water and bottled water are safe from a human-consumption point-of-view but that is very different from chemically "pure" water.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

OS X only gets mildly more annoying once a year, as opposed to Windows, which is a monumental fuckup every few years.

... what about the fact that about 95% of "revenge porn" is fake -- just staged to look that way and then sold to people who like the idea? Take a look at gfrevenge . com (purposely not made into a link; absolutely NSFW) and let me know if you think there's one piece of actual revenge porn on there.

Start working at a medium/large-ish company in any random capacity.
Start solving problems with code.
Piss off I.T.
Eventually join I.T.*

Source: my career at a publisher, 1995-present.

Education: BA, History, 1995. Math minor.

* Optional; not recommended.

You Don't Know Jack still exists? Huh.

> Even if you put the screen up by the window, with
> a mirror you can always move your head a bit to
> get a bit more visual context.

What if the camera let you see 3x more in the first place? You wouldn't need to adjust your field of view.

Also, watch this before you try to speak for him. Unless you think he's just lying his ass off up there.

> Which is a largely fabricated phenomena constructed
> by corporations to sell you a product

Partly. These things always 1) start in a genuine way, then 2) others see the originators and want to be like them, and then 3) when there's enough demand, companies step in to supply it. No company created rock and roll, or hip-hop, or skaters, or surfers, or punk music. The first 2 steps are always natural and genuine.

> Will Wheaton was never a "geek" or "nerd"

You do know that he got his start on a little science-fiction show, right? Actors in nerdy roles are perceived as nerds. And perception is reality. He may not have thought himself a nerd, but everyone treated him as if he was.

> He wasn't a persecuted Poindexter

Oh really? Do you think there's an appreciable difference between being picked on in school and the whole damn Internet picking on you?

You've got it exactly backwards. The whole point of April Fool's is to -- get this -- FOOL people. So instead of a bunch of OBVIOUSLY wrong stories that fool NO ONE (and are totally un-funny to boot), you sneak in one or two plausible-sounding stories among the rest and fool people.

In other words, Slashdot doesn't want to just list a bunch of jokes that other people made -- they want to play some tricks themselves.

I much prefer this to "shitty jokes that make Slashdot totally unreadable" day.

> Amazingly enough even in the depths of Slashdot,
> there appear to have been no postings or
> discussions about it.

Because it was old news when the site was founded?

The Scroungers Guide to Satellite TV
By Gary Bourgois
Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, The Birdwatcher's Report

Why? Because patents don't necessarily mean ANYTHING. Here's one from a DOZEN YEARS AGO about an Apple patent on color-changing cases. Still waiting for those...

I don't believe that gmail is 10 years old today. This must be a hoax!