"Why PC's Crash, and Mainframes Don't" (April 98) is still somewhat relevant today. I wish the archives were online.

is probably the "least bad" one I've seen. It would be nice if multiple ratings could be applied to a post, ("+1 funny, +1 insightful, -1 Troll") but it is fairly good at reducing the trolls and flamage.

But I don't expect that of the teabaggers infesting Slashdot these days.

Judging from the news stories the drive was recycled in 2011.

Don't worry, soon Slashdot will be coming out in favor of re-invading Iraq.

They bring them down!

Really, though? Can't they just contact them and grant them a limited use right or something? Or can't they contact them and say, "please change your site to include this prominent text, or contact us to discuss"? Why is it that these legal types have to be such dicks?

So nowhere near good enough to ID a person, or even a vehicle.

A feature to us, perhaps (although it's not that difficult to get non iTunes files onto an iPad), but to the average consumer? If it isn't priced aggressively it will have trouble competing against the iPad.

So it's probably about the same as the equivalent Apple Product. But without anything like iTunes behind it.

The real problem here is people logging on to "comcast wifi" or whatever it's called using the same credentials they use to log on to their ISP account. How hard will it be for nogoodniks to set up hotspots called "comcast wifi" (or whatever) and scoop up all the credentials?

Here in NoVa Cox is doing the same thing.

The idea of having an "open" society is that you know what I'm doing, I know what you're doing, and I know what the president or prime minister is doing and what Mark Zuckerberg is doing, etc. The way things are going is *not* towards this kind of open society. Just because Facebook knows a ton of stuff and sells it to the government doesn't mean we have an open society. Secret surveillance is not open.

I don't know about in the UK, but over here in North America, whenever you encounter bad design, the knee-jerk reaction isn't to fix the design, it's to put the onus on *everybody* to change their behavior to adapt to it. This is reinforced by a general public that loves to point out when other people do things wrong because it makes everyone else feel good about themselves. "Of course you got a ticket! What kind of idiot parks in front of a fire hydrant?" Seriously, a guy cut the end of his thumb off here at work, and rather than looking into the root cause to see if we could reduce the risk of it happening again, everyone literally made fun of him to his face for being stupid. So it's a cultural thing.

What more would you need?

It's hard to believe that some parenting activity like never letting your child experience a negative emotion is actually causing a increase in violent crime, especially since, from everything I've heard, overall violent crime is down significantly. Also, if there are lots and lots of kids getting this type of parenting, we certainly aren't seeing a cause-effect relationship here, because otherwise there would be millions of murderous little bastards running around, and we just don't see that. Seems much more likely that there are (and have always been) some people with mental illnesses, and some of them are liable to do nasty things that most of us would never do. Your argument is nothing more than the get-off-my-lawn variety (and I'm an old guy who likes to push my kids to experience failure once in a while).

The only useful comparison would be against a print-edition encyclopedia. What percentage of medical articles in a typical encyclopedia contain errors? The other thing is, just because it contains "an error" doesn't mean it isn't useful. We get through most days with a fairly flawed view of reality (most of us anyway).