I can see where you're coming from, but I worry about the fact that "power users" are nobody's core audience anymore. What does consequently catering to the lowest common denominator do to a society? We now have UI that actually spreads tech illiteracy to a whole generation of young people, how is that a good thing? I also worry that we're losing any but the most basic functionalities, instead we're increasingly having advanced features being handed down to us "auto-magically" and behind the scenes whenever the UI designer sees fit - a process that lacks transparency and dis-empowers the user in a tremendous fashion. As users we're now spending a lot of time on deceiving the UI, tricking it really, into whatever we actually want it to do (and software gets better at thwarting us at this with every version that goes by).

And people who say that I can always drop OS X in favor of some open source pseudo-GUI wrapper around a commandline don't get it, either.

Crohn is not an autoimmine disease, it's a bacterial infection

While this is technically not a lie, it's at least a very misleading statement that obfuscates the underlying problem. Crohn is a disease of the immune system. Newer research indicates that it might be a deficiency in some immune cells' ability to produce immuno-modulating agents that are needed for a coordinated response to bacteria occuring inside the colon. This allows those bacteria to stage an attack on the colon's tissue. The bacterial infection itself is, however, just a symptom of the immune defect.

The Mac Mini is hampered mainly by its very slow hard drive. At work we recently replaced the hard drives of a couple of (very old, like 1.8 GHz Core Solo) Mac Minis with smallish SSDs, this made a whole lot of difference. Of course, if you need raw CPU power, this isn't going to help you - but if your typical usage profile is just "normal" productivity apps, this will definitely give your Mini a new lease on life.

As an aside, I then bought an SSD for my MacBook Pro - wow, the battery life and performance of this thing is just incredible now.

Have you tried putting a + in front of your words on Google recently? The plus is deprecated, they are going to drop it, it was all over the news. But even if the plus was supported in the future, it's a usability nightmare.

If they don't know why they're slipping, they should take a long hard look at their own front lawn instead of glancing nervously sideways at Bing. Google Search is getting more worthless by the day. Each time they "tweak" the algorithm it gets worse. The quality of the search results themselves isn't even the most problematic issue.

The main problem is that Google refuses to search for the actual terms you entered. They search for things that are sometimes kind of related to what you're looking for and they don't even show you which parts of your search term they ignored! The only way you're getting a real search result out of Google is when you trick it into doing its job by putting quotes around every single word of your search term (and even then it sometimes ignores you). It's mind-boggling to me how they fucked this up so badly, but it sure doesn't look like they're even aware of the problem.

I'm curious: why do they think it's fake? Are they flat-earth creationists or something? Or do they simply believe it's too expensive to launch an actual probe into the outer solar system? What's their motivation?

When one is a scientist, i.e. when he/she believes in the scientific method, he/she cannot believe in religion, for the simple reason that, when the scientific method is applied to religion, religion is falsified.

Exactly. I never understood those people who claim to be scientists and religious persons in one. If they're religious, they simply cannot be "real" scientists. They may still perform scientific work, but their mindset is clearly religious. In many cases, the difference between performing scientific work and being a scientist may not be so important for day-to-day activities, though.

I also guess there are many ways to support and overcome the obvious cognitive dissonance - for example, by moving the realm of the supernatural into areas that are not covered by whatever research is being performed. I vaguely remember a religious astrophysicist who acknowledged and believed in the veracity of the scientific models of the universe but couldn't bring himself to "believe" in evolution.

This trend of combining religion and science into an unholy chimera worries me, especially when the underlying assumption is that the two must somehow be brought together (by force if necessary) for our lives to make sense.

LTE will give 100Mb/s on the move and more if stationary ...why exactly do we need this and who is paying ?

Don't worry, if the 3G precedent holds up in 4G, the actual data rates will be MUCH lower and latency will be atrocious.

Our reference frame does not magically cause a photon to travel 21 million LY in zero time, so this did not happen hours ago for anybody. Just because information travels at the speed of light doesn't mean events don't happen before we see them. By your line of reasoning, the Big Bang just happened because photons from around that time are still hitting our detectors today.

It's amazing how many people get this stuff wrong. I blame physicists who make it a habit to formulate anything related to relativistic effects (or quantum physics for that matter) as misleadingly as humanly possible.

Damn'd. Now RealNetworks will confiscate all the /. servers. See what have you done?

Not only that, apparently they'd have the power to confiscate all the desktop and laptop computers of Slashdot editors' families as well if interpret this precedent correctly. To me, this is the most disturbing part of the entire thing. There is no way all of their computers are connected in any meaningful way to the site that this guy ran. Also, it's apparently enough to be related to an alleged copyright infringer in order for them to come and take your stuff away.

Then I'm wondering: if this code is not used for, you know, actual panty shots - where is all the consternation coming from? Lots of projects have not-so-clever names that are in no way connected to how they work. If the stink caused over this non-issue was actually enough to make a developer quit the project, then it's a big red flag for everyone to stay the hell away from this toxic community.

That's why they give you the option to get the stamp on a separate piece of paper that you can just take out of your passport when you no longer need it.

Clearly they won't ever actually be able to pay the fines, and by extension it's clear that those doing the suing never intend to collect these ridiculous amounts.

Of course the CEOs of these companies intend to collect these amounts. At the highest level, those companies are convinced that pirates make obscene amounts of money off their copies. And I believe the lawyer scum specializing in those kinds of lawsuits are paid or at least credited proportionally to the amount awarded.

In any case, collecting the whole amount is not the point. Ruining the defendants is. It's exactly the meaning of the phrase "suing you for everything you got". The system is set up so that the trial alone could ruin an average citizen - whether they are found guilty or not. And in case someone still has anything left, they'll take that when they collect the fine.

So what happens after they declare you guilty? The fines are so high as to ensure every last penny you own and every last penny you will ever make is going to them. That means you lose everything. Your house, your car, your job. What follows then is bankruptcy, which in many cases means simply a controlled descent into hopeless poverty.

Incidentally, these effects are exactly the same as when an average person comes down with a serious illness in the United States.