Just like they did with water, sewage, and the other utilities...

If only we had corporate monopolies for those too! I'm looking forward to my monthly sewage cap.

I have no idea, which is why I have no interest in owning one. For reading and notetaking, what does the SP3 give you that a cheap ARM tablet wouldn't give you with better battery life and less mass?

If tablet tasks are what people use it for, then now I'm stumped as to why anyone would pay that much for one...

Huh. Looking back, every Surface Pro I've seen was always being used with a mouse and keyboard. I never really thought about it at the time.

To be fair though, the Surface Pro is really a laptop without an integrated keyboard and mouse. Its niche seems to be that of a laptop that you can use like a tablet (like those weird old Thinkpads with the rotatable screen, but not as thick and heavy). Metro crappiness aside, it's easier to do real work on a laptop than a tablet/phone and real work almost always requires a keyboard and mouse.

Doesn't this study show that women and men don't work as well together as they do separately, and that trying to increase diversity results in less effective teams, and was a bad idea all along?

So, the smart thing to do is separate the women off away from the men, encourage them to form teams entirely composed of women, and give them some meaningful tasks to do that won't overly burden them physically and will exploit their particular strengths.

This is very innovative stuff.

Obama veto a bill... yeah right.

The current president has used the veto less than any president in over 100 years. He's used it twice in eight years and has happily signed into law bills that directly countered the platform he ran for office on. If this managed to make it to his desk, he'd probably sign it just the same.

OSX is horrible. Really, really horrible.

Like an OCD wife that puts your tools away while you're trying to use them because everything has to look clean and nice at all times.

Whoosh? Mac OS X is BSD.

If the trendy new flat grey-on-grey visuals annoy you, try the "Increase contrast" option in the Accessibility System Preference. It doesn't restore the visual scheme to what it was (which had its own problems), but it's different enough that it may appeal to you. My eyes are fine, but I'm not a big fan of the war on contrast.

An air rifle would be fine for city use. A BB has next to no kinetic energy by the time it returns to the ground. Air resistance is a real energy sapper for things that small.

A thrown rock or a slung projectile will be larger and more massive and so retain more of its kinetic energy on return. The attacked drone falling from the sky will do more potential damage than any of the projectiles you'd use to bring it down.

A lottery for representatives would be the ideal. Even a hereditary monarchy (with a constitution and veto, perhaps in the form of a guillotine) would beat what we have now.

The problem isn't so much that people are too dumb as that our system selects for corrupt, greedy, and power hungry sociopaths. The only way to become a "representative" is to want to be one. But anyone who wants that job should be denied it on that basis alone. The people may vote sub-optimally, but every single choice available to them is a bad choice. Our system is designed to distill out anyone who is remotely suitable for public office.

Replacing the system that self-selects the most horrible people with one that operates on complete chance would be an improvement.

Is there a way to reclaim Slashdot from this constant barrage of psychological assault on IT professionals by outsiders?

I'm a bit of a nerd and I'm an IT professional. This place used to be a place to find news of interest to nerds and IT professionals. Now it's a place where there's going to be a daily article about how shitty a person I am and how shitty my industry is.

Is this what the rest of you guys come here for? To get shit on daily? It's kinda feeling like Slashdot has just become a bad habit I do when I'm bored because I've done it so many times before.

Is your target audience people who are nerds, or is it people who are envious of nerds? It's kinds feeling like this place has become the latter.

I've found that many of the telemarketers either use a random number with the same area code as the number they're calling or an 800/866 number for the caller id. I've had the same phone number since college and don't know anybody at all with that area code. So any call coming from my area code is a drunk misdial or a telemarketer. Very handy for filtering two classes of annoying calls.

Terrible. It insulted my intelligence at every opportunity. To pick just three:

1. A hard drive that's been at Ground Zero of a Chernobyl-level event, exposed to hundreds of sieverts of ionizing radiation, extraordinary extremes of temperature, a hydrogen-oxygen explosion with such tremendous overpressure that it blew the containment dome, and seawater pumped through the building as a last-ditch effort at cooling the core, is still somehow so readable that it just requires a classified forensics program to recover it fully.
2. The main bad guy's ultimate plan involves speculating on the future of a commodity that isn't exactly rare.
3. Targeting nuclear reactors in the U.S. and China as a practice run for the real attack is pretty stupid, as the practice run is so devastating that it guarantees an immediate and vigorous reaction from two world-power countries known to have active cyberwarfare programs, thereby announcing your presence to exactly the people you want to keep completely in the dark

This movie insulted my intelligence at every turn. I have a long (and spoilerific) list of all the what-the no-they-didn't good-Christ moments I saw in the movie; if there's interest I'll post them here.

Think of it as evolution in action. You can stay on one planet while some disaster takes it out. We have lots of choices of disaster, don't we? The human race can continue via those "space nutters".

Sure, we should try to avoid the disaster, etc., but planets are not forever.