Casablanca, now that brings back memories. For awhile you pretty much had to operate with $IM_OFF if you didn't want to get GPF'd into oblivion every couple of minutes.

Lockheed is certainly working on it. They put out a press teaser about their efforts last fall, boasting that they'd have a working fusion reactor within 5 years. It was seen as an odd move from a traditionally conservative contractor.

I haven't paid for a magazine or newspaper subscription in at least 10 years. Companies like Mercury Magazines and FreeBizMag exist to put eyeballs onto print magazines and papers. Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Field & Stream, Flying, I get those for free and have had various others over the years. In exchange, I encounter a few easily-skipped ads for Viagra, Harbor Freight, Sporty's, and Dr. Winnifred Cutler's Athena human pheromone love potion. I used to get the WSJ tossed into my yard every morning for free as well, but found I didn't have the time to read it, so I cancelled.

I wouldn't pay to get any of those with ads. I might pay to get them without, but they don't offer such an option, they sold their souls to advertising.

I've never heard of Phoronix, and since Ars came to be, I've considered it a good companion to Slashdot. As for El Reg, their stories used to be a daily thing on the front page here, but I rarely see them referenced anywhere anymore.

15 years ago, Slashdot was a very good source of timely tech news. They'd have news before CNet's news.com did. It's slipped a little; now most of the stories are at least a day old and have been reported in many other places. Here's the thing, though. Slashdot is a news aggregator. People submit links to things that are reported elsewhere. Even long ago, it was rare that any news "broke" on Slashdot. That simply isn't how this site works.

The web has evolved to become a far more real-time medium than it used to be. When I started on Slashdot, things like Facebook, Twitter, and reddit didn't exist. There were no smartphones, there were no apps, "going viral" wasn't a thing. Now a lot of people get their news in a massively crowdsourced/swarmed manner through social sites and apps, so by the time anything gets here it's bound to be "old news" to a large part of the audience.

Slashdot still offers a unique enough community that I keep visiting every day, even if the news is a bit stale.

Has this changed on Slashdot? "Excellent" is still all I see. I know there used to be a hard cap of 50, but if that's changed and my "Excellent" translates to something >50, I don't see what that number is.

Was Ulbricht charged with selling fake passports to murderers or rapists? Or even facilitating the sale of such? I must have missed that.

Step 1: Turn on "NBC Nightly News" any weeknight at 6:30PM ET
Step 2: Wait for the penis pill commercials and the painful vaginal intercourse after menopause commercials to come on
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!

DHI is Dice Holdings, Inc.

We do need to find some solution that holds the police themselves financially responsible for their misdeeds, otherwise the ones who behave recklessly have no incentive to stop doing so.

I'm afraid that taking settlements out of the pension fund might have the opposite effect of what's intended. If you think it's hard getting cops to report or testify against one another now, imagine how bad it would be if their collective retirement benefits were at stake. The blue wall of silence would grow ten times as tall and ten times as thick. Officers would never speak ill of one another, knowing that if another officer is found guilty of a crime, their own pension fund takes a hit.

Perhaps it's time we require all police officers to take out insurance policies for this sort of thing. As an example, many states require real estate brokers to maintain an errors and omissions (E&O) insurance policy covering a minimum of $1M. To sell houses. Surely it's not unreasonable that a police officer, authorized to use deadly force under color of law during the course of their job duties, could be made to carry insurance against the mistakes they might make... Mistakes which often have far more severe consequences than messing up a real estate contract.

I'm not sure how to feel, and I'm not sure how to feel about that.

On the one hand, I'm no fan of the death penalty, because I've read about far too many cases where such a sentence was handed down and the accused turned out to be innocent. We're freeing death row inmates on a regular basis now, paying them millions of taxpayer dollars for the period during which they were wrongly incarcerated. Worse, we've executed some who were convicted and later, posthumously, exonerated.

On the other hand, in this particular case, part of me wants to say "let him die, and if you can't figure it out, I'll drive up and do the deed." I don't know any of the victims. I wasn't on the jury. I don't know all of the facts. I presume him to be guilty (why?) and assuming he's guilty I want him executed (why?). It's not very often that I find myself contradicting my own strongly held principles.

This case raises an internal moral conflict that I'm neither used to feeling nor comfortable with. I'm very grateful that I wasn't on that jury. It isn't my place to hold another person's life in my hands.

If you're going to quote Bob Sullivan's article in the summary, the least you could do is link to his article instead of a re-hash on IT World.

Oh, wait. Submitter jfruh sure has modded up a lot of firehose submissions by user itwbennett, and vice versa. No sense questioning what the "itw" stands for, as ~itwbennett's profile links straight to IT World. Thankfully it doesn't appear to be "our" Bennett, but come on. If you work for IT World, and you have a Slashdot account set up to promote IT world, submit the IT World article from your IT World account. Plenty of astroturfing makes the front page these days, there's no need for subterfuge.

That's an awfully nice way of framing the fact that Disney routinely poaches ideas from the public domain, while simultaneously lobbying to extend copyright terms so that no Disney work will ever fall into the public domain. Mickey Mouse is 87 years old now, but no one else will be allowed to use him when he's 95, or when he's 120. By then they'll have bribed enough lawmakers to codify the Constitution's "limited Times" as being "limited" to the existence of the company and its successors, assignees, and receivers in perpetuity.

So is this part of the article talking about identity thieves, or companies like Choicepoint-Elsevier-LexisNexis and Acxiom? I'm not sure I can tell the difference anymore...

If this is such a pressing issue, they need to start turning some of the Disney stars into developers (whoops, sorry, I mean "coders," that's the trending buzz word).

All these people should have their own prime time shows about the exciting life of a software developer. The basics of CLIs and text editors on multiple operating systems. How to use version control. How to write unit tests and pass continuous integration. How to help QA your own dog food. How to diplomatically interface with folks in other departments. How to write documentation. How to triage trouble tickets. How to train your own replacement.

Oh, wait! None of that's sexy. Kids wouldn't tune in to shows like that because it isn't what most of them want to do, any more than most kids wanted to do in decades past. The ones who really are interested in development will pursue this path on their own, as many of us did. We don't and won't have any lack of competent workers, because some percentage of us will always be nerds who love this stuff. We do have a surplus of companies who want to save every last penny by farming jobs out to H-1Bs, and we do have a corresponding surplus of unemployed competent Americans.

We're at a point where entry-level tech support jobs are routinely requiring a bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent, junior analyst jobs are requiring an MBA or foreign equivalent, etc. Companies are quick to complain that there are no qualified local workers, because they can't find an American with a four-year degree who knows Linux + Solaris + J2EE + Servlets + IIS + SAP + Oracle + 10 years with Sharepoint, and is willing to work 70 hours a week for $35,000 per year. Meanwhile they have a guy from Bangalore whose resume claims he does precisely all of that, and maybe they won't check out all of his qualifications if he's willing to share a room at Extended Stay America with 5 of his peers for a year or two, wink wink nod nod.

The market is already saturated, and will be for some years to come. Where's the federal push to create more tradesmen (plumbers, electricians, mechanics, carpenters)? To create more lawyers, or accountants, or any other career path? I'm growing weary of this idea that every child in America must be a developer^Wcoder. It serves no purpose but to suppress salaries across the board and even further encourage the H-1B loophole.

It wasn't the weight of the olives, it was the scale and sheer cost. One olive seems like a pittance, inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. But when you fly many thousands of flights with several pax being served salads on each flight (this was the 80s after all) that one olive per salad turns into $100,000. In the 80s, that paid a captain for a year. Now it would probably pay two, but I digress.

You're intentionally distracting from the point. Passenger weight will fluctuate whether paper manuals are on board or not. The weight of the POH and other documents is a known quantity; the airline does know, at least in approximation, how much the dead-tree manuals and a big book of Jepp charts weigh. Eliminate that weight and you will see savings through the fleet. Passenger weight is going to vary whether you're going with paper manuals, AA's app, Foreflight, or some guy who thinks God is his F/O.