Slashdot's been running awfully heavy on marketing promotional material, lately, with things that aren't even available yet. This one doesn't even have a price? I thought I checked the "ads disabled" checkbox.

Ah, we've found a new slogan for Slashdot.

This was a study on Italians. It also smells suspiciously like the old "games cause violence", "comics cause moral decay", "music causes moral decay" sorts of studies. Social networks are modern, so they're suspicious, and probably evil, right?

This word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

Always? They might be better now but, I've seen massive amounts of data turned to useless piles of crud by tapes getting tangled in the drive. Given that they were generally used for critical backups and only pulled out of storage when you needed them, that was not a good failure mode. Given how slow they were, your previous backup was somewhat out-of-date, and you'd also be needing to replace the tape drive that had all of your precious data wrapped around inside it.

I don't play WoW any more, World of Warcraft, but when I did, I was fully serious about it. I might spend 18 hours a day at it. I ran guilds myself and was a key member of others. And this apparently surprises people but, some of the core guildmembers were grandmothers. Grandmothers are people you really, really want in a guild. They're giving and forgiving and they can really kick ass. They've got more sense than the rest of your raid team combined and they're totally dedicated. Possibly until their grandchild picks a different server.

Is this supposed to be news?

Anything you have ever put online can reasonably be assumed to be permanent. If you had a blog once and deleted it, years ago, you can often still reactivate it with all of the previous content still totally intact. Aside from the companies themselves keeping all data of any sort forever, odd creatures like the Wayback Machine and RSS feeds eager to slurp down text will preserve your drunken 3am ramblings for posterity. Data space is very cheap, right now, and text in particular barely makes a tiny blip on the map.

I might point out that the power of the vacuum cleaner has no relationship to its noise level. The noise is considered a selling point, a feature, because people have this curious tendency to think, "oh yes, that's causing me permanent ear damage, so it must be doing a good job." People conflate noise with power.

Don't ask about the dust in the corner. I'm protecting my ears. I swear it.

You always see mice shown as gray in cartoons, it's their default state. I've had mice, and they're a deep brown loamy earth color... but my friends still thought they were gray. So, I don't know what that's all about but, there appears to be ranges of color perception that aren't really clocked as "color blindness", which may not be an entirely useful phrase for something that isn't exactly binary. Now, if you specify that you're "red-green colorblind" that gives me some practical information. I'd probably still be curious as to what color you thought a mouse was.

Not crimes, civil charges that were entirely disputable. Considering that he was a fairly attractive young gay man, he might also have had significant qualms about the old and generally inaccurate meme of prison rape.

We're straying off-topic here but, that's ridiculous. Even a large potato doesn't take more than about five minutes in the microwave, then an equal amount of time to finish cooking and cooling down. Just wrap it in a damp paper towel and put it directly on the turntable. It's easier than making popcorn.

Because, as an occasional server admin, I'm perfectly aware that it's easy to change the logs, timestamps, and permissions. Do you not know what a computer is? It's a tool for manipulating data. This is not reliable forensic evidence, it's something that anyone with fairly modest skills could fake up in fifteen minutes.

Product placement. It's advertising. I presume someone at Slashdot is smart enough to get paid for this, although that may not be a reasonable assumption.

Egg lig ibble? Really? Egg lig ibble?

I understand that the title "Slashdot Editor" is intended largely for comedic effect... I hope. Perhaps we could just get the place renamed to Slapstick.com ...oh, that's taken. How about Slapdash.com, that seems to be up for sale.

The U.S. Air Force, at least, is just fine with corrective eye surgery. It's been used quite a bit to improve the vision of prospective pilots.