Could be worse. There are sites (yes, slashdot, I'm looking at you) that re-edit your URL to put the mobile site back.

Good points. I'd been under the impression that link local addresses were the only ones based on MAC address, but a little investigation shows me that there are schemes that also use the MAC address for public addresses.

And you're also right that admins are likely to choose addresses that are simpler for them if they assign them manually.

But all this is moot if a working firewall is in place. And that's really no different than the IPV4 situation.

Simple nmap scan? Yeah.

If they can scan 10,000 addresses a second they should be able to scan your home address space in not much under a million years.

Assuming you didn't do something radical, like, maybe, used a firewall.

It's more like saying a fax isn't an answering machine. Both use the phone network, but neither depend on the other.

I live next door to a Costco. If I'm running low, I can run next door.

If I had one of these buttons, its battery would be dead by the time I need to order again. My Costco package of TP or paper towels usually lasts me about three years. Laundry detergent maybe a year or so. My 4-pack of giant toothpaste tubes is a couple of years worth.

It's not so much that I'm organized, but I usually become aware that I'm low on those things a month or two in advance, when the gaping hole in the closet where I keep that stuff jumps out at me.

OK, now that the whole front page is non-fool gags, are we done now?

Either post some actual April-fool type stories, or go back to regular news.

Please?

I don't have any experience with MOOCs, but I can tell you that (in general) if I get an older student (30+) in my class, he or she is very likely to be near the top of the class.

The older students generally know why they're there. They have motivation.

I'd imagine the same thing holds true with MOOCs.

There was a time when I looked forward to coming to Slashdot on the 1st of April. All of the April Fool gags from around the Internet (or at least most of the ones of nerd interest) were linked here.

It's OK to have *one* home-grown gag. **One**. After that, it just doesn't work.

I briefly had a roommate who was a pilot with a commuter airline. His salary was $8K. This was in 1983 or so.

Image a robot that can only pick things up off the floor and put them away.

Then work on that problem for ten or twenty years until you can build what you imagined.

It's not conglomerating a bunch of tasks together that's hard, it's that some of the tasks themselves are very hard.

I'm not exactly sure what the rules are. My initial attempts at a password contained "^" -- I figured it was safe, because it was in the list they suggested. I kept simplifying the password and it kept rejecting me. Each time I had to re-enter half the security choices -- it kept my answers, but not the questions.

I finally gave up and chose a completely new password, and this one didn't include "^". Took it the first time.

The most menial.

That turns out not really to be the case. If you had said the most repetitive jobs, I'd be more likely to buy it.

A housekeeper or a janitor is a fairly menial job, but it is a very difficult one to automate. It involves recognising randomly present items (clutter) and dealing with them (putting them away, straightening them or whatever.)

Assembly lines are different -- those are very repetitive. It's not nearly so hard to automate, since the variety of actions and the judgment of when and how they should be carried out doesn't change much.

Don't lose sight of the fact that the majority of stories in I, Robot were about the failure modes of the Three Laws. Why they didn't quite work as intended.

Does that mean you no longer get a pop-up?

Because if that's the case, putting it in the calendar might be better. Not good, but better than a pop-up. What I'd really like to do is disable notifications entirely, or at least selectively be able to disable various functions' abilities to display notifications. Like printing.

You run a script to print out a hundred or so separate files and the side of your desktop fills up with announcements of files that have been printed. Why?

Not me. I always used the same name.

"Cash."

Sometimes they'd try to convince me to give them more and I'd glare a little and say "Cash!" with emphasis.