You have to show you skills. Make a name for yourself. Contribute validly to some projects.

If you're skills ultimately are matter of 'gimp' playing-around? Than you're probably screwed and haven't learned anything real yet.

(Well, unless you want to specialize in photo-editing or graphic-design or some-such... in which case, community college might be your best bet) If you want to be hired as a coder, without the often-times nonsense of formal education, than you have to prove yourself. Contribute to a meaningful opensource project. Be noticed for contributing some code that actually does something (vs. confused bug reports). Real skill is rare enough, and a resume that shows an active participation and contribution to a notable project is probably a better thing that a formal accreditation (from many schools, at least).

MOD PARENT UP! Seriously.

(I was first... lol)

Myself, I generally don't bother to pirate things much... but if anyone pulled that sort of nonsense, I'd be seriously tempted to start downloading crap left and right, and encourage all of my friends to do so as well.

Let's see them kick -everybody- off the internet, and see how that works, hmmm?

The real problem with electric cars is the limited lifetime of the battery. Modern lithium-ion batteries degrade, and are good for maybe 700 charge/discharge cycles. (The initial Hybrids extend this somewhat, IIRC, by avoiding charging above %70 or so (and beneath %30 or so) of design capacity), but the electrodes only have so much 'flux' of absorption/dissipation they can handle, before they begin degrading significantly in performance.

This is one of the real issues with electric cars that's going to bite people in their shiny-metal a**ses sooner than most of them expect. Especially the people who hardhack their hybrids to run fully electric. Replacing those batteries after 4 or 5 years of normal driving is going to be extremely expensive.

Heck, I have the replace the Li batteries in my phone every two years years or so because of this. I'm sure you've noticed it with laptops too... when it was brand new it'd run for four hours on battery, now you're lucky to get two and a half or three. These cars have a -lot- more battery.

Success in propagating a meme isn't necessarily related to it's truth-value, merely to it's value in engendering behavior in others. But the mechanisms of intelligence are involved even there. Appeals to emotion or other assorted well documented fallacies have been well described (by reason). The problem, perhaps, is in some philosophical jig where the word 'reason' (traditionally the most gloried phenomenon of human thought) somehow takes on multiple meanings. ...So what is reason? Is it logic? The claims (referred to in) this article, would seem to negate a pure aristotelian glory of A implies not B and the like. Thus it would seem to cheapen the idea of those who bother to think logically. It leans towards suggesting that 'reason' is merely a sociological, nay, anthropological phenomenon. A matter of primates beating their chests, albeit with their brains instead of hairy arms. And this is utter nonsense. First of all, it denies the fact that fallacy is -necessary- in order to convince another thinking being of a false truth, and then turns around to imply that reason has no truth outside of a group phenomenon. Obviously, pre-and-up-to-humans evolved language to share ideas. (It's audible telepathy, afterall!) And that was adaptive ..why? Because a meme, a social construct, a compellingly successful narrative could coordinate collective group behavior in an adaptive manner? Of course. But however does any argument manage to do such a thing? By presenting a compelling explanation to other individuals that they fail to refute the truth of. It all comes down to the personal analysis of truth of the part of the recipient of an argument, though. To be crass, we all have personal bullshit detectors. ;) And some worse than others, of course. But to decry the the fact that false but compelling arguments can be accepted too-readily negelects the very fact that they succeed BECAUSE THEY ARE COMPELLING. That they make a logical and self-consistent sense to the recipient. To the recipients own personal sentience, thought, and reason (however mistaken). Many people may be ill-educated, worse; evilly-educated into a false set of hot-button moral certitudes (due to the social-darwinisticly-adaptive usefulness of such levers, perhaps, so as to facilitate obedience to certain top-down social hierarchy command structures)... But it's still the reasoning of their own minds that reaches either accepts or rejects any such rhetorical exercise. Reason is beautiful. Were it not for man's ability to reason, we'd still be living in caves, at best! Nowadays we use ion-beam lithography to carve out features thousands of times smaller than a single hair on our bodies. Nowadays we know the chemical composition of the outer atmostphere of stars billions of light years away. And how? From reasoning.

under: "Settings" -> "About phone" -> "Battery use". Perhaps more akin to 'powertop' than 'top', but it shows what share of battery power is being consumed by what applications. It's incredibly easy to spot a resource hog and choose to uninstall or not run it!

In my experience, usually at least %60 of drain is from the display alone (well, %50-ish if you're running an instant messenger in the background). ;)

Why the heck do people complain about the lack of something... that IS ALREADY BUILT IN?!?

Never turn on account sync in the first place. If you -do- have a gmail address, create a separate one just for your phone (since google makes it mandatory to have a gmail/google account to use android, for -some- reason I can't imagine...)

Disable all 'back up my data to google' options in the sub-sub menus.
Problem solved. Your phone won't have any account credentials worth worrying about, outside of through the browser (standard cross-site-scripting exploits, etc) or reasonable apps that ask for no permissions beyond internet (connectbot for ssh, etc)

Biodegradable cellulosic based car parts? I can't wait until I leave my new car out in the rain for two weeks, and fungus starts growing on my bumpers, the same as it grows on the fallen trees next to where I park.

Yikes, you're right! Taking close to %50 on a 3.2Ghz 6-way AMD!

Serious usability issue Regarding the new live code:

I often only have a chance to read slashdot on the weekends (such as during periods of crunch-time at work, etc). And I'd made the habit of always visiting it in the daily view mode to read where I'd left off due to being otherwise busy: i.e.

http://slashdot.org/index.pl?issue=20110125

(To view the stories of jan 25 2011, for example)

Or, say, I missed the first week of december.. and now want to finally get around to skimming back over what I'd missed... It used to be I could immediately jump to the relevant pages of daily postings with ease. This increasingly common trend on so many sites towards nothing more than a linear "Many More" button, with no other option for directly jumping forwards and backwards to some specific point in the past, is so -indescribably- annoying. (Reddit did this 4-5 months or so ago, and I spend far less time there as a result). It's a major loss of power-user functionality to only be able to access the most recent stories (or n-1, n-2, n-...) without being able to jump around arbitrarily in the timeline of previous posts.

PLEASE FIX THIS, or provide similar functionality!!! I'm begging you. Seriously.

Don't take away my previously-missed-slashdot-goodness.

Yours truly, a long and devoted slashdot user, from the days when karma was a number, and not merely excellent ;)

"You can't smoke anywhere in public now, or within 20 feet of another person's residence.

You're confused somewhere.

PLEASE let them involve the ever-redacted-in-all-ways torture photos. Something to make people wake up to the (you would think.. so obvious!) war crimes of the current administrative branch. I say 'current', for it hasn't changed between nominal figureheads.

Personally, I have a bluetooth A2DP (or whatever it is) adapter, that allows my smartphone to play music out to my car stereo. (Newer cars have a direct jack.. in my case, lacking one, I bought a device that listens to bluetooth and transmits FM stereo).. Anyway, 'texting' is illegal in my personal jurisdiction. I've often wondered if someone will try to arrest or fine me for changing the song I'm playing, (as it's coming from my smartphone), compared to the EXACT SAME DISTRACTION I'd experience (if not more) if I were putting a new CD in my stereo. Distraction is surely there. One must merely be careful.