Since I started skydiving and hanging out at the grill down at the airport, I've been surprised at how approachable private aviation is. If I wanted another 5 digit hobby, I could wander in to the office at the local airport and start pilot lessons immediately. As it stands,a jump ticket only sets me back about $25. The trip's only one way, but if you're sitting next to the door in the summer time, it's a hell of a view -- they open it at 2000 feet to cool the plane off and close it again at 8000 feet when it starts getting kind of chilly. I was the first out the door for night jumps last July and looking out the open door of the plane on the ride to altitude was one of the more amazing things I've ever got to do in my life.

So you're saying intelligent life is more likely to exist in a void?

Or maybe he just doesn't want it to stop.

I'm pretty sure it was "Catholic School" that's to blame for my atheism. Every time I meet an atheist (you know, down at the Church of Atheism) it's always the same story -- they spent some number of years in a Catholic School. Sometimes it's a little, sometimes it's a lot, but there's always some there. Sure this is anecdotal, but it's common enough that someone could probably get a research paper out of it.

Man with one atomic clock knows what time it is, man with two isn't sure.

I mean, it is cheap, it works and doesn't often have to be replaced.

My biggest gripe is the use nowadays of the fucking backup radar systems that never seem to turn off.

THey keep setting off false signals on my radar detector while trying to find cops in speed traps. It seems the Audi's are the worst offenders.

Wasn't there laws and regs against having radar in a car? Does it have to be always on, how about only when they are backing upâ¦.not needed when driving forward.

No, unfortunately, it seems about 2-3 years ago, for some unknown reason, they did away with all the April Fools stories.

I dunno why..I used to LOVE to see what would come up each year.

Sadly, slashdot lost its sense of humor for some reason.

OMG Ponies, R.I.P.

:(

to the good old April Fools day stories on Slashdot.

I used to look forward annually to see what would come outâ¦why did they do away with it?

:)

Seriously, one day of OMG Poniesâ¦was fun and funny.

RIP April Fools on Slashdot.

â¦to the good old April Fools day stories on Slashdot.

I used to look forward annually to see what would come outâ¦why did they do away with it?

:)

Seriously, one day of OMG Poniesâ¦was fun and funny.

RIP April Fools on Slashdot.

Everyone's autistic to some degree, and no one bothered to check before.

Or maybe Rust but with magic. What Rust seems to have is a bunch-of-new-players without pants running around bashing each others' skulls in with rocks kind of vibe. Now that I think about it, the new players on UO used to be similarly feral.

UO very much resembled a MUD. It was also a pretty awesome game until EA took it over and turned it into a WOW-style gear grind and started screwing with the skill balance. It was really the last MMO I've run across where player-crafted gear was the best gear in the game. Even in Eve Online, the best modules drop from rare spawns in low-security space, and although players can now research Tech 2 blueprints, the cartels that control the never-ending ones that were given out in the first couple years of the game have such a price advantage that crafting isn't all that satisfying in the game. At least not to me.

I used to make pretty decent coin in UO selling scrolls, spellbooks and location runes. That and making portals for people. The introduction of the later crap -- PvE-only areas, item insurance that would allow you to bind your best items to you and gear that would affect your stats, all made the game significantly less fun. Not to mention the constant tinkering that was required to try to keep the game balanced in the face of all these changes, so that all the players wouldn't quit in droves. Which they pretty much did anyway.

1) Encrypt it with the recipient's public key. You know, exactly how encryption always works. If you're writing a client with encryption support, it wouldn't be that hard to hold the public keys on the server and note when they change. Hell, you could just make a space for it on a contact's list. For someone expecting a man in the middle attack, making other arrangements to get a public key ought not to be difficult. The client would just have to copy his private key to all the devices he expects to use the encryption on.

2) I would fucking love for spammers to have to encrypt each message to each person on the list they're trying to send to. You want a spam filter, set your filter to reject unencrypted mail. Boom. Done. Even if they can automate the process, the additional computing and time requirement of encrypting each message to each person's key would substantially raise the cost of sending spam and lower the number of people a spammer could hit in a specific period of time. Since the encryption would (have to) happen the client machine, sending a substantial number of messages would require far more horsepower than just blasting a mail off to a list would.

After decades of wondering what's wrong with programming, did you ever stop to think that perhaps the problem... is you? If you don't like programming, why do you do it? I'm a programmer too, and I love it. I love making a thing and turning it on and watching it work as I designed it to. While other programmers wring their hands and wish they had a solution to a problem, I'll just fucking write the solution. I don't understand why they don't. They know the machine can perform the task they need and they know how to make the machine do things, but it never seems to occur to them to put those two things together. And I never, not even ONCE, asked why a playing card representation can't just look like a playing card. This despite having written a couple of playing card libraries.

This guy seems to want an objects actions to be more apparent just from looking at the object, but he chose two rather bad examples. His math formula is as likely to look like gobbledygook to a non-math person as the program is. And the playing card has a fundamental set of rules associated with it that you still have to learn. You look at an ace of spades and you know that's an ace of spades, you know how it ranks in a poker hand, that it can normally be high or low (11 or 1) in blackjack or in a poker hand. But none of these things are obvious by looking at the card. If a person who'd never played cards before looked at it, he wouldn't know anything about it, either.

How about they build an encryption API right into their service? Encrypt the message locally before it ever goes to the network. Oh, they don't want to do that. I see. So Microsoft promises to not read your mail, while retaining the ability to easily do so whenever it's convenient for them. That makes me feel so much better.