Well, we can see how even the erudite and well-spoken can fall to four-letter epithets and ad-hominems.

This genesis is not so different from how Slashdot originally began, if I've read things correctly in my time here.

My thought: sustainability is going to be the key to any fork venture. It is well that we come to consensus, because without it the core of what makes Slashdot what it is disappears, and with it the horde that makes Slashdot a verb. You submitters, and commenters that stay at +5, you are that core. You particularly, girlintraining, I looked for your voice of reason in the madness. We agree the Beta sucks, but that is not enough. We need decisive action. We don't need to go the Patriot Act screaming-hysteria route, over-extend ourselves, and hoist ourselves by our own petards for all the world to point and laugh. We need a firm vision, and leadership to see it through administratively.

Dice has written off the entire community. We could have done much of their work for them, pointing out the bugs and what needs improving. You know it, I know it, they know it. They don't care. We weren't juicy enough economic morsels for them to feed off of, and they've decided to try reinventing themselves as the ultimate mediocrity: flashy clickbaiters. So this is where my concern comes in, because the status quo wasn't sustainable.

How are we going to do it where they have failed? What can we learn from the development and hosting of Linux and other FOSS, a similar and seemingly heavily-related community? One kickstarter is not going to do it. Donations are a tough business method. Ads aren't going to work with this crowd. Bandwidth is an ongoing cost, even if this doesn't have to be a for-profit venture. Do we charge for moderator status? Do we solicit patronage somehow? Find one of the rare MBAs worth his salary and get him to buy Slashmedia up with his company's resources? Goodwill and enthusiasm are fine, but they only have value if someone's actually buying, as Dice has discovered to their chagrin.

Altslashdot.org is currently... slashdotted. I might suggest we bring that info back here for just a little bit longer.

I just did one that had that AND "ACPI\SNYA008" as well: "SONY Wireless State Driver." Because of course, when I think A008, I think of the physical switch to turn off the wireless antenna. It's only natural.

Not to mention the tiny, thin screws that had a tendency to break off at the head and/or strip if you so much as look at them wrong- and which, of course, required a (smaller) different screwdriver head to take out, assuming you were successful. And the special ACPI devices which are unintuitive to get drivers for when you've got to do a reload. Whoever designed those all-in-ones with no access to the internals needs a severe talking too.

So is it then illegal if you're flashing to warn people about a speed trap that happens to be using unmarked/low profile interceptors, because you can see a few of them with their lights on with people pulled over?

Personally, I think the line should be that speed traps should be illegal if there is not a higher-than average accident/fatality rate in a particular location. I'd rather they focused on tailgaters and other people obstructing traffic flow e.g. by driving exactly the same speed in the fast lane as the car in the slow lane so that nobody can pass.

Dead on. I think of it as the "common sense" bias, where a category of "things that people know" include the local religious beliefs which give it an "unfair" advantage vs. all the other world religions, and thus the burden is squarely on the incumbent religion to prove itself from first principles to ensure this has not happened "to me" (this is the biggest argument I have designed for discussing religion with fundies; unfortunately the only time I got to do this, it was a guy who had converted to Islam after being atheist most of his life, so I didn't get to use this particular argument).

The thought to engage with is: how do you tend to those poor bastards that were unlucky to be "born into" the wrong religion? Well, naturally you've got to insist everybody carefully examine the evidence on both sides - and this is where it wraps back to an imperative on the fundie in question. You then put two conveniently-selected ideologies on trial with each other, and for bonus points, the null hypothesis (atheism).

You may never get them to properly examine their own beliefs in context or critically examine their own evidence, but this is the closest you're going to get, and a good opportunity to plant the seeds of truth they wouldn't ordinarily come across in their self-selected comfort zone.

One thing's for sure: it's not Cheep.

They'd just hire an extra intern (who isn't "critical/important enough" to have a tracking badge) to run around with their tag, doing productive-looking things, while their secretary is "alone" in that office "organizing paperwork"...

No, it is so they can steer by echolocation!

That would be awesome, but I don't think the tech is nearly ready for that. We have yet to produce a proper human clone - and until we at least get that process right, it's never gonna happen. I also wonder at how much the mitochondrial DNA matters as well - something a basic DNA sequence wouldn't tell you. The important thing, I think, is to catch the DNA at its original state, before it drifts as these things tend to do with age. Adult stem cells are never going to get around that issue, but they may be the next-best thing for awhile.

You clearly allow transferable organs, but where's the line? No nervous system tissue? What about quadriplegics injured in an accident, would that be so wrong?

What if that organ is the brain, and you can't guarantee perfect or even "reasonably good" memory transfer? Are they still the same person, and would you still want that if they end up acting very differently afterwards? Would you be dooming a new person to suffer the memories of the other person who used to have their body?

It's not as theoretical as it might sound. I have a friend who suffered tumor-induced amnesia. Her memory has recovered better than having to ask that question in her case, but after the onset of dementia you might run into that very thing. Another friend of mine is losing a grandmother to organ failure and dementia, and it's hard to say when she stopped being herself but it's mostly agreed that she is not, in fact, the woman her family used to know. At what point do you let go? In the grandmother's case, it seems unethical that humane euthanasia is illegal in her jurisdiction. Would I rebuild her brain if I could? I don't know.

Sounds to me this is more of an approach rather than a specific implementation. TFA talks about specific data types, such as credit card numbers and passwords. Reading between the lines, it seems like something that would be set up with input from a knowledgeable system administrator or hard-coded for a specific purpose; password manager is specifically mentioned.

So you write this program such that the data type information is not part of the encrypted data but explicitly provided as (for instance) a map that corresponds to valid password characters. After the algorithm is run on the encrypted data, you simply write the computed output to an integer value, and convert to ASCII using the aforementioned map (or, as you've mentioned, compression scheme). Similar methods are used to scale certain random number generating functions to any particular number range. This way, any binary dataset can be converted to text, but whether it's the real data or not is impossible to guess because it's by definition valid ASCII text. You're then free (as the user) to XOR the raw binary with whatever key your algorithm produces based on the master password typed by the user in order to produce the stored value.

Since I am not an expert in this field, the fact that it seems pretty trivial to me probably means either it's not new, and therefore not newsworthy, or there's some detail here that makes it special in some arcane way or niche application.

And they really have no excuse to plead ignorance in my opinion. A comment on a related Slashdot article linked an article indicating Mikko Hypponen, "chief research officer" of F-Secure is friends with these guys. You'd think these issues have come up once or twice in conversation.