1) Calling the entitled, greedy rich "Neptunecrats" doesn't sound right.
2) Percival Lowell!

I'm retired and only work on Slashdot part-time as a freelancer. No authority, and I'm sick enough (heart problems and diabetes) that I don't really want any.

Ummm... You may want to change your sig. Beta seems to have disappeared into the void along with the late, unlamented autoplay.

Be still my heart.... I was getting ready to quit over autoplay. Those of us who actually work on the site have been begging management to get rid of it since the moment it raised it's ugly head. Success at last! Now all we need is a volume control in the player and we'll be golden. Yay.

And yeah, beta. I think it's gone, too. Haven't seen it lately, anyway. Another Yay.

My balance is gone due to several illnesses, so a two-wheeler is no longer safe for me. Instead of a bike, I now ride a recumbent trike. I go for at least a short ride around the neighborhood most days when it's not raining. Since I live in Florida (near Tampa), I ride year round except on exceptionally cold days, i.e. below 60F (or so).

I have explained more than once to more than one Slashdotmedia management person that autoplay videos were the work of the devil. The leader of the autoplay cabal (obviously) disagrees.

Ever single person who works directly on Slashdot has an opinion about autoplay videos that is somewhere between dislike and raw hatred. One editor sent a 1665 word plea to kill autoplay videos up the chain of command, and yesterday I growled like an angry dog at the boss person who oversees Slashdot. The guy has always seemed pretty smart to me, but for some reason he is determined to inflict autoplay videos on us despite our ongoing, deepening displeasure.

I just sent an email to a management person I *think* may be far enough up the chain to fix the video autoplay problem -- and the irritating lack of a volume control, too.

Nobody who works directly on the site likes autoplay videos any more than you do.

I wish I could do more, but I'm just a part-time hourly guy; not even a full-time employee.

It didn't say 20 million companies with over 1000 employees, just "20 million companies."

I wondered a little about the first name thing, too.

- Robin

Some guy is showing off 3-D printed cars at the Detroit Auto Show this year.

1) You could use the last 4 digits of the package tracking number as the delivery driver's PIN, and tell him or her what to do in a note stuck to your front door. Well, *you* could, anyway. These insensitive clods forgot that a lot of us don't have garages, which means their product is useless to us.

2) Leave packages with neighbors, and if they're not home leave them at the trailer park (or apartment or condo ass'n) office. You can stick a note on your door telling the delivery driver what to do. Of course, this would require the invention of post-it notes or masking tape. Oh, wait....

Yep. I try various video editors every year or so and for the past 7 or 8 years have kept coming back to Vegas. Stable, does even the most complex things I need to do including fancy title work, and is the fastest, least hardware-hungry NLE I've found. Stable? You bet! I'm running a so-so HP AMD duocore with 4 GB RAM and I can't remember the last crash. "It just works."

Improvements in Windows stability over the last few years have admittedly helped. But Vegas gives my clients the best value for their money even if it means I need to boot into Windows to use it.

Is this partly because I'm accustomed to Vegas, to the point where I could give classes in it? You bet. But familiarity is also why I stick with Ubuntu (when not doing video work), LibreOffice, GIMP, Pidgin, Bluefish, and other FOSS (and a few commie) programs I've been using for a long time.

I thought it was sarcasm, too.

Dictatorships that control their subjects' access to information like to have all Internet connections in their country pass through a single choke point so that they can maintain control. I once visited Saudi Arabia and met the guy responsible for all Internet traffic in and out of the country -- through a single link with a single backup.

This is good if you want to give your people only the access you want them to have, and to block everything else. At the same time, it means your whole country can be knocked offline by a single attack, which seems to be the problem N. Korea is experiencing. Imagine trying to knock the entire U.S. offline! It couldn't be done.

Cuba, OTOH.... well, that one may change soon. But N. Korea? Probably not, although I wish it would. A far more miserable place than Cuba has ever been.