Ah, here it is. Even better that it was accidental.

Wasn't the first practitioner a computer store in Pakistan? Your computer would just display a message saying, "to fix this message, $$$ to this computer store in Pakistan" or something to that effect. Even had their name in it and everything.

More and more of Slashdot is just astroturf white noise: AC's for whom Slashdot is not nerd discussion site, but a platform for paid anti-American histrionics. It was amusing at first; now it's tiresome.

That's not how the encryption export laws work.

Won't someone please think of the poor Chinese nuclear weapons program?

The article makes an interesting conjecture from an observed correlation. It's not the finger of God writing on the wall. You may stop burning the heretics anytime you wish.

Has the employee been watching Office Space on repeat? He's about to leave.

As Miriam Ferguson, first female governor of Texas, said, "If the King's English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for the children of Texas!"

One of the beauties of English is its elasticity. Without a single authority governing its rules, English is truly a democratic, utilitarian language, and it becomes what it needs to be to fit the situation. It's a kludgey, ad hoc mess, yes, and its inconsistencies are truly maddening. And yet when another language needs to borrow a word for a new use, English is ready to provide it. We loot and barter vocabulary easily, stealing words from France and trading them over to China because we don't give two shits about the cultural sanctity of language. We are the Swiss army knife of linguistics.

To take that away; to smooth out the inconsistencies and impose a logical order on it would be to rob English of its greatest use to other languages; to be the unstable alpha branch, readily accepting commits from whoever ares to contribute, and letting the best features rise to the top for adoption by other, more stable branches.

According to Apple, iOS users are more virile, and have love-making stamina for hours.
According the Microsoft, Windows Phone users are endowed with the power of invisibility, which is why they are so elusive.

The "outdated business model" I speak of is having gaming as a gated resource. You had to be at the mall or the movie theater, you had to have quarters on hand for every round, and you had to share your machines. God help you if you wanted to play the popular games; the line was a mile long. Home gaming was inevitable; that it so thoroughly wrecked arcade gaming is a testament to the fact that the arcade model for gaming was survived on consumer captivity alone; as soon as consumers had an economical home option, they took it.

No one forces me to do anything. There are a number of subscription-based services out there, for a multitude of media*, and I use only the ones that have value for me. The rest I can do without.

*Not just gaming, so this whole line of thought is actually a non sequitur; the death of arcades did not lead inexorably to XBox Live, sub-based PC gaming did

I for one, am very thankful for the money I saved having an NES and not having to pump endless quarters into my local arcade, and I am most especially thankful that I never had to wait in line for my favorite game. It is not Nintendo's responsibility (or mine as a consumer) to protect someone else's outdated business model. Arcades lost, and consumers won.

It also leads to rampant, self-diagnosing webochondria. I will admit, I am an offender in this respect.

LOL Slashdot is telling us things we either don't give a shit about, or are already well aware of.