Dammit. Clicked on an interesting title to find that it's written by Bennett Hasselhoff. This is Slashdot's version of Rickrolling, isn't it? At least this one isn't proposing a convoluted solution to a problem nobody cares about.

I had a bunch of third-generation copies of cassettes (yes, *cassettes*, dammit!) of Blue Oyster Cult albums back in high school. Never could figure out the damned lyrics. They *sounded* like "mistress of the salmon salt", and "the queenly flux, eternal light", but they couldn't be. Those phrases and most of the others I thought I heard made no sense. But try as I might I couldn't twist the sounds into anything coherent.

Then they invented the Internet, and I could look up the lyrics online.

Fuck.

I so want to see them make Mobius DNA!

Someone who wants to be offended can find reason to with anything.

• Barbie's a manager who employs male engineers: "This teaches girls that women need men to do their work for them!"
• Barbie's an engineer working for a male manager: "This teaches girls that women will always be subservient to men!"
• Barbie's a member of an all-female engineering team: "This teaches girls that women can't work on an equal footing with men!"
• Barbie's a member of a racially, culturally, ethnically, and genderally diverse autonomous collective who share all the tasks equally: "This teaches girls that women can only be generalists and never excel in any particular area! Oh, and socialism!"

It sounds to me like the group who should *really* be offended are the computer engineers for being so badly misrepresented. Oh, and Barbie fans because it makes Barbie (not women in general, just this particular woman) look like a freaking idiot. (Going on the descriptions here; of course I haven't read the book. Who needs actual facts when we're surrounded by all this juicy hearsay and speculation?)

And yes, "genderally" is a perfectly cromulent word.

And say, exactly, "Hi, I have a business account. I can't email my customers who use Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail, apparently because those providers are blocking mail originating within Comcast's IP space. This needs to be fixed or your business account is worthless to me and I'll consider it a breach of contract." Work with them. The answer might be to move you to a different block of IP addresses. Or, it might be to forward mail through their servers. There is undoubtedly a solution.

Also, talk to Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail about being blocked. Maybe they can tell you what criteria you're hitting. It may not be Comcast's fault. (I know it seems incredible, but it is a possibility. Really.)

Lastly, if you can't get satisfaction from Comcast but there really is no alternative ISP that works for you, you can purchase email service from hundreds or thousands of different providers out there. Get an account somewhere else and set up your server to forward through theirs.

I think the whole project is a performance art piece. It seems perfectly designed to stoke the biggest taxonomic flame war that has ever been seen since the day the MP3 "genre" tag was introduced.

Crap! The Chinese have hacked into the weather satellites. Now they control the CIA's Weather Dominator and will be able to make the polar vortex a permanent feature over North America! Oh well, at least this will expose "global warming" hoax that the Obama administration has been perpetrating with it. So much for giving this country the climate of his native Kenya.

"You are not looking for me to write a list API, you're looking for me to write much higher level code. If the environment you are using don't provide a list API, you are in trouble."

Speaking as someone who often poses that sort of question in an interview, yes, I know. I sometimes even preface that portion with, "I know that no one should ever again have to write their own implementation of this, but..." No, in the job you're not going to be asked to write elementary data structure code. It's just a tractable problem which can be done in the amount of time available, and makes a good starting point from which to discuss code complexity, time/space tradeoffs, and similar subjects which you *will* need to know in order to do this job.

And you would be amazed at the number of candidates who can't manage even the simple stuff. No, I don't need someone who can write yet another linked-list traversal. I need someone who can do much more difficult things! If they can't even do the sophomore-level stuff then there's no need for either of us to waste any more time. (Seriously, I've been to on-campus career fairs where by the end of the day I just want to tell people, "Pick a programming language. Any language. Write 'Hello, world'." Because I've come across a number of soon-to-graduate CS majors who couldn't even do *that*. I am not exaggerating.)

Assembly? That's for you mollycoddled youngsters. You don't know how to really program until you've entered raw machine code via toggle switches on the front panel of a CPU you built yourself out of nothing but vacuum tubes and a spool of wire. And don't get me started on macro assemblers! You may as well be using COBOL if you need training wheels that big.

This research brought to you by the letter "Duh!" and a grant from the Really Freaking Obvious foundation.

I suppose it's good to have a study to back up the obvious. It's just that, according to the study, the people most in need of convincing are exactly the same people who are going to most vigorously deny the validity of the study.

Right. I don't think many people would argue with QoS policies being applied uniformly across all providers of similar services. Having all video set to a different QoS than all email isn't a problem. Having one video provider set at high priority and another one set at low is a problem.

Came here to say just this. And now we know why the CDC was staging zombie apocalypse drills last year. THEY KNEW!

That's completely different. That was an RFID chip. This is an NFC chip. Totally different!

So, what was preventing researchers from storing stuff in their own private clouds before this?

I'm ashamed of you guys. Over 300 posts for an article mentioning "Black Swan" and not one of you has cracked wise about Natalie Portman, hot grits, and petrification? Geez, it's even almost on topic! This just isn't the Slashdot I used to know and love.