I'm as big of a facebook hater as the next guy, but it seems like Slashdot's favourite pastime is getting on a social network for being, well, social.

If their inference is that facebook should become an antisocial network, I think Slashdot honestly has that market segment covered pretty well already.

The best way to increase profit is by reducing cost.

I know this is verging on off topic, but I have to disagree with this completely. This reminds me of the corporate tactics of today. Surely if we aren't spending money, we'll make tons of money!

The only way this strategy ever works is when you are guaranteed to have maxed out on every single opportunity for growth, be it "vertical", "organic", "synergized" or otherwise. Cutting cost isn't always the best way to increase profit, its simply the easiest because it doesn't require any thought other than "get rid of that".

Sorry. Off topic but I see this so often at my company that every time I see it elsewhere I rage.

Kudos to everyone involved in the story.

(He's probably the only one that would, too)

"This would have made an excellent episode of house."

Too busy marveling at this to make any lean/robot/overlord jokes. Very cool.

I'm not sure I feel that same sense of hope when we have someone teaching at a higher level institution who leaves ten years of his work up to chance.

He's "lucky" it was stolen. There's a lot more things that can happen to a laptop that can render its data unrecoverable.

Maybe he'll learn his lesson and store his data in more than one place, lest he become devastated once more.

Kudos to the thief, though.

"Local authority's twitter account has been hacked"

Its far lower than second place, in my mind.

The monty hall problem has significant and reasonable applications - the understanding and application of the theory behind solving the problem can be, at worst, useful on a game show, and at best applied to hundreds of other similar situations.

Proving, understanding, debating that 0.999... = 1? Okay, great, now what?

I can't see how (dis)agreeing with this theory is going to impact me in any way, shape or form. MAYBE i can make jokes about static const ONE = 0.9999999 on TheDailyWTF now, but that's about it....

That's a good point - I was aware that it was primarily with red and green (and apparently yellow/blue as well? Had that come up in a UI with one of my users and he goes "I can't see the highlights!").

I guess I forgot to think about the fact that it's a limited amount of colours, and the fact that it'd just show up as....what it looks like today, which is monochrome.

I'm not trying to be overly critical - maybe a tad skeptical.

This is definitely *cool*. What's the point in this, though? I'm a programmer/developer, but I've never been a hardcore "programmer" or user of calculators. As long as I can do some basic graphing and standard 4-function stuff, most calculators make me super happy.

The first immediate con I can see of this is...usability. If I'm colourblind - I'm not going to be very thrilled about this.

The first immediate pro I can see of this is.....help me out here.

Sure, this is cool, but why do I want to pay $130 for a color model when I can get a standard monochrome one for $50ish?

This is what would happen if my "boss" was in charge of this initiative.

(Superceding other hits as: "Let's just use one database", "Let's just make that field bigger", and "just guess")

This is probably more of an Ask Slashdot type of post, but I'm reading through the article, and I know anyone can agree on "LOL u texted me ur password via text its abc123" and its immediate idiocy scale.

Looking to the more proactive side of things, I have to question how we best fix this. Let's take a look at three of the suggestions:

"One site, one password"

Okay, this makes sense. Let's play this out, because I think this is a common one with solid foundations for why many of us do it. I have an awesome password. My password is "23mQi*f4". This is a secure password, and it works great for my online banking site.

I also pay my credit card bills online. Okay, no problem. "galacticpotato84%jfd(" is my password for that one.

3 more credit cards, 2 webforums, three news sites, one credit union, 5 gaming sites, 2 web email accounts, and an amazon account later I now have almost 20 passwords, all of which are unique, and you're telling me I can't save any of these credentials in my browser? And I shouldn't write them down, obviously.

So now I need to, in a perfect world, have a next-world memory, or some sort of security manager for all these passwords. As a technology professional, I'm not even sure the best answer (My closest guess is a password manager, but that's an all your eggs in one basket kind of deal) to this - certainly you can't expect regular joes to know how to handle this.

"Change your passwords often!"

Again, at face value, no one is questioning this. This makes sense. But when you get down to applying it - now I've got 18 passwords that need to be updated yearly/monthly/whatever. This is more an extension of the problems outlined above than a brand new set of problems, but it definitely complicates things.

"Make your password unique"

This seems to go in direct conflict with the first point. I need 20 different passwords for 20 different sites, and each with their own, unique, yet "memorable sentence" as the site says structure.

I'm not arguing any of these points, I think they make sense, and I think it's really easy to laugh at someone who's password is hunter2, and it is texted, emailed, and shared to everyone and their mom.

I think it's a lot harder to proactively fix this in a reasonable way, that the masses can consume. It's EASY to say "Change your password, idiot". But really, how do we get this assimilated into our culture? Futhermore - what is it really helping? In all these studies i've never seen anything that's to me, functionally useful, IE:

- Risks of using a shared but secure password (Not written down, committed solely to memory, shared with no outside persons or systems. 64 character string, alphanumericspecial)
- Risks of using unique, secure passwords that are stored in external media (Written on a piece of paper and stored in a safe, stored in a password manager)
- Risks of using semi-unique, secure passwords that are committed to memory using some sort of algorithm (IE: Amazon - i04&f_24amazon, Ebay - i04&f_24ebay, Slashdot - i04&f_24slashdot)

My problem with these articles is everyone knows the basics - and even those that don't know the basics can easily comprehend "This is bad, don't do this". What is never emphasized is how to easily transition to a better scheme, and what it actually offers you. Maybe I've been jaded and corrupted by the corporate world, but if you can't give me some idea of an ROI, all i'm going to do is look at your proposed plan or idea and then ignore it and move on to the more critical issues to me.

If you bother to read the article:

"IBM say they have improved artificial intelligence enough that Watson will be able to challenge Jeopardy champions, and they'll put their boast to the test soon, says The New York Times. "

Do you realize what this means? Ken Jennings versus robots. They could make an entire new show out of this and I'd watch it religiously.

"Its okay, this project/software is using 'internal resources'"

"Say, Jim, would you mind working a few extra hours for the next 14 weekends in a row? I know you're salary, but we'll make it up to you once this project is done..."

And that, my friends, is how you completely ignore hidden costs and justify even the most lingering of projects.

At least at my company, anyway.