a wifi-enabled tablet that, while having 3G, can actually use it to... y'know... make fucking phone calls and such. If you're sitting on a bus using your 3G iPad while wearing headphones equipped with a microphone, it seems rather stupid to have to switch your headphones over (or remove them) so that you can answer your phone.

Sure isn't. That's why I just upgrade my original laptop instead of buying new ones with slimmer form factors and bigger screens. I mean... what a fucking scam... upgrading the battery life, thinning down the form factor and increasing the screen size... and then trying to call that "innovation"

The things these arsehole companies try to pawn off on the savvy consumer these days...

.. they're tired of playing catch up. So they're doing the logical alternative: innovating^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H resting on their laurels like a bunch of idiots.

This is slashdot. You take your filthy logic elsewhere!

so DNF in chaps on rollerblades?

Let's be clear - I think the app was stupid and offensive.

... but you do realize you're making those statements in reference to an act of censorship, right?

I think that's his point. That if you *are* gay, the act of *becoming* straight is likely a lie. Subjecting people to massive amounts of peer pressure in an attempt to get them to "see the error of their ways" is only likely to result in marriages that are more dysfunctional than the average, and a person who's playing the part, but is likely very unhappy.

Here's something I don't understand though... you've got a reactor core that was just hit by an earthquake. So, as part of your emergency measures, you drop control rods in, and then, because of a stray tsunami ruining your day, you've got no backup power. This leaves you in a bad spot because the core is still quite hot and it's creating immense amounts of steam, which is building in pressure to a point where something is going to fail - catastrophically, spectacularly and in a way that really fucks with people's day.

So you've got pumps which have no power and all this steam which is building up... if only there were, oh I don't know, a turbine or something that you could funnel that excess steam through, so that you could generate the power to drive the pumps.

I understand that, because of the earthquake and the high potential that something's been damaged, that letting the reactor continue to generate power at full steam would be a Bad Thing. ie. That removing the control rods immediately after the quake is not something considered to be a good idea.

What I don't understand is why it wouldn't have been possible to allow the turbine to continue operating, even at the limited capacity that a "shut down" core would provide? Why could they not have used the "shut down" reactor to power its own pumps?

Obviously it's too late, but I'm still left wondering at what technical glitch prevented that, because I have a hard time believing that it could have simply been an oversight.

... for the most part (net-neutrality issues aside).

The companies which end up "controlling" parts of it's evolution only end up doing so because market-share allowed them to. That market-share isn't just some meaningless buzzword! That's *us* ... voting with our wallets.

It's because they don't have to. The spooks have backdoors in most algorithms, there's no need to crack anything when you can simply decode it because it was sent using an algorithm whose creators were strong-armed by you.

Some fun reading if you're the skeptical type:Here and here.

Yes, but that would be a case of CGI augmenting the movie, or, rather, allowing the story to be turned into a movie. For LOTR, the story was the movie.. and not the cgi.

And hordes of movie execs suddenly cried out in unison:

but... but... THREE DEE MAN!!! THREE DEE!!

On an unrelated note - I heartily agree with your sentiment. The gimmicks should augment the movie.. they shouldn't be the movie.

... pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

It almost seems like the minister thinks that net neutrality is about the single/home user ("power-user" or otherwise) vs. the corporation, and that this is all about ISPs trying to get big companies to pay more than the single/home user for their internet usage. Either that, or he's trying to make the average voter think that that's the crux of the issue. The problem is that abolishing net-neutrality would make perfect sense if that was what was actually going on!

I can't help but wonder if this isn't a bit of misdirection or misinformation directed at the masses for the purposes of getting a bill (likely rife with kickback potential) passed.

What? Why spend all that time to hang with him... He's on twitter. Just follow him there.

I always thought these were kind of a neat idea: Kinetic Harpoon