Actually, I buy maybe one new item or two per year. And I do have the money to buy more, but I almost never have any need. What the hell are you buying if you need to buy new electronics all the time?

It's quite obvious that people are abusing the system and that results in increased prices for everyone. As someone who doesn't abuse that, I welcome the move so we honest people get things cheaper. Screw those who ruin things for everyone else.

What BS? I was talking about making tax software, not filing your own taxes. When you're making tax software it needs to account for all possible scenarios, and it needs to be kept up to date.

Seriously, this is the kind of product that is done with help of lawyers and accountants, because it is really complicated. Specialists rarely work for free with open source products. You really don't want some 18 year open source coder's "product" (who just filed his taxes for the first time and quickly coded up something) for this. They just don't understand all the different tax laws and practices, especially in some corner cases. And it is YOU who will be responsible when the program gets it wrong. Using open source instead of a program made by professionals with the help of accountants and tax professionals is incredibly stupid!

Wait, so did Apple innovate or not? How did they get that (supposed) patent if someone else had done it before?

Despite the perceived "fanboyism", there is some truth in that too. I used to think Apple users were huge fanboys before. But this year I got MacBook Air and despite some quirks like different keyboard layout (I'm used to PC) and Finder trying to hide much of the file system, I am quite impressed with it. It is very polished, and despite the GP saying that Apple doesn't innovate, I haven't for example seen multi-touch trackpad in any other laptop. It makes a great difference. The quality of it is also much better than I have used before, as is screen and audio quality (I always wondered why my headphones sounded like shit with my old laptop even while it cost 3000 dollars!).

The overall product is very finished. On top of that you get a nice UNIX system on the background and tons of apps that come with it. For example Automator and the system-wide services menu for your scripts make a HUGE difference.

And of course, there are also many commercial games available for the platform and now that Steam is too, there should just be more. Linux just cannot compete that. Even if you are a geek, OS X is a very good choice, as it's pretty much what Linux on desktop should be.

Actually, any website that is properly optimized is already serving most of it content as static. That is what caches are for. And yes, you can (and should) cache even parts of the page. However, even with dynamic content there is a very clear difference between serving with apache or nginx. Sure, someone who really knows Apache can maybe hack it to work as fast, but how many persons actually know? Let's be realistic here.

Most of the time just switching to nginx and properly caching your content can mitigate DDOS attacks. Sometimes you may need more, but the point is that you should fix these bottlenecks first anyway.

You do understand that there are different kinds of DDOS attacks and flooding the available bandwidth is just one of them?

In fact most DDOS attacks rely on causing heavy load on the server. Bringing down server like that requires much less resources of your own than flooding it with pure traffic.

Geez, slashdot, this is one of the fundamentals of DDOS attacks.

If it helps against DDOS attacks, how is it stupid advice?

nginx performs much better than Apache. The latter one is really bloated, which shows extremely quickly when you're under DDOS. nginx is designed to be lightweight and fast while still offering many features. It was originally created for Rambler, a huge Russian search engine and portal when other web servers couldn't handle their needs. It truly kicks Apache's ass.

Actually, a few times there have been comments by homeless persons and hobos. So yes, there are hobos on /.

Considering the high cost of 32" touch screens, and their almost non-existing serviceability (once you break it, it's gone), is this really such a good idea? It will probably just lead to stealing and breaking, especially during night time. The pay phones itself aren't that expensive, and consists of several parts that you can fix (and they are bulky). These touch screens are.

Besides, even if "tax payers don't need to pay for them and they will be supported by advertising", they will have to eat the costs initially. Advertising will just recoup the cost in the long run, IF it's successful project.

Just wanted to note this before slashdotters get all jiggly about the evilness of PS3 and Sony's music divisions. They are actually Sony's most profitable divisions, and it seems like Sony wants to cut out the less profitable divisions like chemical products. PS4 is already in the production and as noted on Slashdot before, will contain even more DRM. So this is not really "news for nerds" at all, as it's completely different divisions of Sony that will get the cut.