Big data is like sex in high school. Nobody really knows exactly what it is or how to do it, but everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone says they're doing it, too.

I see a "Share" menu has replaced what used to be the link to read each story's comments. I clicked "Share" by accident, intending to click through and load the discussion. You fooled me and my muscle memory one time. In exchange, you've pissed me off and guaranteed that I won't ever use that feature. What's the point?

I think it's funny, there's a story just down the front page titled "Are There Any Search Engines Left That Don't Try To Think For Me?" I might ask the same about Slashdot, lately!

Not only that, but at the time of the Moon landing, the Russians themselves were rather heavily involved in that arena. Had the landing been faked, Russia absolutely would have known; they would have distributed the proof far and wide to humiliate and one-up the Americans. It's just a tad late for a Russian to start asking questions.

Announcing to the world that you've been infiltrated by Mossad is a decision that must be weighed by some enormous number of calculated steps.

If you're correct, you will be accused of being anti-Semitic.

If you're wrong, you will be accused of being anti-Semitic.

The only winning move is not to play.

Don't forget NOAA/NWS. Those folks really do save lives every day, unlike so many agencies claiming to do so.

I'm not really concerned with what Mozilla's VR research team wants, I want to know why Mozilla doesn't care what their users want. I want to know why the slick, responsive, optionally extensible browser with a low memory footprint that millions of people switched to because it was a slick, responsive, optionally extensible browser with a low memory footprint has turned into a bloated behemoth that now includes such essentials as a built-in video chat client. The list of things I have to manually disable on a fresh Firefox install is bordering on inexcusable these days. Just filtering on about:config for enabled, there are 24 options I've changed from their defaults.

If I wanted Firefox to be my fucking operating system, I would buy a device that runs Firefox OS. I don't, and I haven't. I, as a user, want a browser.

Mozilla's continued race to become Chrome makes me question more and more with each Firefox update why I don't just give in and run Chrome itself. At this point I really have to wonder if the Firefox project isn't being intentionally torpedoed by some Google plants on Mozilla's payroll. There seem to be few explanations left.

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.