Shh, don't tell anyone but part of what makes this joke so funny (IMHO) is that 1) the truth about geek sex lives is far closer to the "average person" than it is to the "can't get a date - ever" stereotype 2) we (geeks) know it, and 3) we are comfortable enough in our own skin to tell this joke about ourselves.

I find it ironic that with a 9+ year old account, I'm still "newer" than either the very-long-time 5-digit-userid Slashdotter Hedrick who criticized my humor or the somewhat-senior-to-me (by userid) editor gurps_npc who made the original sex comment.

I wish I'd realized gurps_nps's lower userid before making my first reply - I might have included a few more "old-timer in-jokes."

Cue "get off my lawn" in 3...2...1...

Self-deprecating humor can be funny even if it's outdated or for that matter was never completely true in the first place.

Texas A&M University is one of Texas's two flagship universities, and it is highly-ranked in some academic areas not related to agriculture or mechanics. Yet "Aggie Jokes" are common and most Aggies (present tense - there's no such thing as an "ex-Aggie") understand and even partake in the humor value.

The time to stop telling jokes like this is when either 1) a significant percentage of Slashdot regulars no longer think they are funny or 2) the telling of such jokes is causing a non-negligible amount of real-world harm. I'm not seeing either of these happening this year. I would say "or this decade" but technology and life move too fast to predict "Slashdot culture" 5-6 years down the road.

This is Slashdot. You must be new here.

Denial Of Service, not DeNial of Service. My bad.

To put things into perspective, if I wanted to kill someone by mucking with their pacemaker, would it be easier to "hack" the pacemaker or just point a tight-beam lethal-to-the-pacemaker microwave at their chest for a few seconds?

The same goes for other implants: If it's electronic or for that matter even just electrical I can probably disable it at a distance of several yards with a high-power narrow-beam microwave or other purpose-selected radio frequency burst that isn't powerful enough to kill or even hurt flesh but which can zap the wires. Even if it's non-powered, if it's metal I can heat up the metal enough to sear the adjoining flesh with a shorter burst than if there was no metal.

If I wasn't out to do serious harm but just wanted to annoy someone or make them waste time and money talking to their doctor, I could turn the power down low enough so it doesn't fry the device but just degrades it or heats it up just enough to cause momentary pain then repeat the burst every few days until he goes to the doctor.

Heck, I can even go one better and a lot cheaper: Go to a populated area and spray an areosol of something that very-slightly damages the coatings found on modern eyeglasses. Everyone around you who wears glasses will go home wondering why their anti-glare or anti-UV or other coating on their glasses isn't as good as it was the day before.

No, I'm not suggesting anyone try this (if you do and get caught, you'll almost certainly face criminal assault or destruction-of-property charges and rightfully so)! My point is that the risk of people using your own medical devices to cause you grief has been around long before they went digital, but it's very rare that you hear about someone maliciously tampering with someone's medical device.

In the novel Jurassic Park, Dennis Nedry disabled the park's security by disguising a backdoor function call as an object constructor in what was pretty clearly a C++-like language, in an attempt to pull a fast one on anyone who might audit his code. (The novel had screenshots of his IDE and everything; wonderfully geeky.) That C++ enables this sort of behavior makes it complicated and risky to use in certain scenarios. I can imagine kerbnel developers blanching at its use, or keeping it to a restricted subset.

Ah, but think how much bigger Windows *could* have been, if it had followed its historical growth curve!

If the FCC doesn't have the authority under current law, what agency should regulate situations like this (assuming for the sake of argument that Congress intended for such situations to be regulated)? The Federal Trade Commission perhaps?

What you were doing was arguably more ethical since you weren't making money off of people using the service, but if it happened today you would be denying other companies (namely, cell phone carriers who sell wifi hotspots and who charge by the byte) the right to conduct business.

While your points about desktops and the web are spot-on, not all Linux or for that matter Windows computers are used as desktops, not all desktops are used for browsing the web, and not all desktops that are used for web browsing are used for general-purpose web browsing.

A server, a desktop computer that isn't used for browsing the web, or a desktop computer that is only used to browse the web for certain web sites that work okay with ancient browsers can work fine with "ancient" video drivers, provided of course that the machine doesn't have a bad security profile (e.g. closed-source non-maintained video drivers, sigh). Ancient "vga" or other generic-video drivers should be fine under such scenarios, and some of these drivers are open-source and likely still maintained.

Here are some examples of special-purpose PCs you may actually touch in everyday life:
* ATM machines
* Library card catalog or on-site-only-access library database computers
* Touch-screen kiosks in stores or hotels that by design only let you do certain tasks
* Media players running a general-purpose OS like Linux, BSD, or MS-Windows under the hood
* The list goes on

The list above doesn't even count your home media server, the servers at your workplace, your home router, etc. etc., any one of which may run Windows, Linux, or a similar general-purpose operating system behind the scenes.

So all any 17-year-old - or 12-year-old - can get any his bank in trouble by walking up an ATM machine and *fill-in-the-blank*??? NOT.

I seriously doubt the bank would be prosecuted unless they didn't call the police as soon as they were aware that they had under-aged porn on their security cameras.

Oh, and if your reply is "the cops would arrest the 17 year old" yes, they probably would, so substitute "kid still in single digits living in a state where kids that young can't be prosecuted even in juvenile court" (I'm pretty sure the feds don't charge kids in single digits).

An OS needn't, and shouldn't, be more complex than is necessary to get the job done. By keeping Windows at a constant level of resource-intensiveness, Microsoft has made more room on modern hardware for even more advanced high-end applications -- and has made it feasible to refresh old PCs with the latest Windows. (Really important; the typical corporate drone's PC is profoundly rinky-dink.) This is stuff we used to cheer Linux for doing while Microsoft operating systems inflated with each generation. Now we bemoan Microsoft for keeping the size of Windows down while Linux bloats up the way we made fun of Windows for doing. (Have you seen GNOME 3?)

Microsoft deserves full credit for keeping their system size and complexity down over the past few revs.

People should have the right to record their own lives, subject to not infringing on the privacy and other rights of other people.

The right of adults to share the recordings of their lives even if those recordings were made when they were minors and even if they were made by others without the legal consent of the now-adult participant with other adults who wish to view such recordings should generally fall under free speech protection.

That said, there is an argument to be made that under certain circumstances such as a staged rape scene or a scene that involved animals, if the subject of a pornographic photo appears to be a pre-teen or younger minor, regardless of the actual age of the participant, it might be considered legally obscene even if the same photo would not be considered obscene if the participant appeared to be an adult, even if the participant was in fact a minor.

There is also a strong argument that the wide dissemination of such material is bad for society, and as such it may be in the state's interest to prohibit anyone other than the person depicted in the image from making any money off of it and to prohibit the dissemination of such images to minors.

It was less than 2 years ago that the Linux kernel dropped official support for the 80386 chip in the "current" kernel. It's successor, the 80486, has been around since 1989.

Several versions of the Linux kernel that still support the 386 are still officially supported. See http://www.kernel.org/ for details.