I guess the Russians found out that under "Summer Time" the livin' wasn't...

(puts on sunglasses)

...so easy.

YEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Fair point, but I'll put that stupidity down to the fact I was on a five-minute break at work :-)

Let me guess... eventually it burned a hole all the way through the centre of the screen until one day it got through and (a) blasted the woman whose job it was to collect the change from the machines' head off or (b) lasered her, segment-by-segment- via an early-80s pseudo-computer-effect- into the Asteroids machine itself where she was forced to play life and death computer games and interact with anthropomorphic, sentient realisations of abstract computer concepts, while finding some way to prove that she *was* due the five hours overtime they'd refused to pay her?

Which begs the question- would it be worth someone's time to buy some of these unwanted out-of-the-way buildings and then fund (possibly fully) the construction of a line and station covering that area?

That quite obviously wouldn't be cheap- to put it mildly- but given the ludicrous value of some buildings and land in Tokyo, the returns could be huge.

Its four weapons are fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope... and the original version of Space Invaders. Its *five* weapons are...

Intel has already come up with an Atom CPU with integrated FPGA, but only for the embedded market.

I'd already been thinking about the possibility of end-user-accessible, on-the-fly-reprogrammable FPGA functionality as part of a "regular" computer before I heard Intel had produced an integrated CPU/FPGA (though it's not clear how easily configurable the FPGA was there). I raised the issue in that previous thread and got a *very* interesting and informative response (thank you Tacvek) that pointed out some major problems with the concept of general access to such functionality.

The issues raised there explain why Intel are unlikely to be making an easily-reconfigurable hybrid product like this available to the general public any time soon, however smart and exciting the idea sounds.

One of these spiders was going around telling people "Actually, I'm a vegetarian."

When I pointed out that it was eating a fish, the spider replied "Oh yeah, I can eat fish, that doesn't count."

"Also, I'm permitted to eat Carrot Top."

Given the existence of undocumented- and more seriously, undisclosed- yellow marks output by various laser printers which have in at least one case been proven to be steganographic markings *and* decoded, it's certainly not "moronic" to consider that a similar scheme could in theory exist hidden in some digital cameras.

Frankly, in the wake of the Snowden revelations I wouldn't even consider this possibility ludicrously paranoid any more. Of course, digital cameras can have giveaway signatures like naturally-occurring hot pixels (and other signs) anyway, so in a sense it's already there. I don't think it's plausible that a non-GPS-advertised device would have a hidden detector inside, or even any method (e.g. WiFi triangulation) of detecting its location if that wasn't already designed into it.

A camera on a GPS-enabled smartphone though? If my life depended on it, I wouldn't bet against the possibility.

People who berated digital as being convenience-over-quality compared to their 35mm cameras a few years back (back when digital wasn't as good as it is now) seemed to forget- or didn't realise- that 35mm film itself was always a convenience-and-cost compromise over quality compared to medium and large film formats.

Images shot properly on larger format film have always been able to knock spots off their 35mm counterparts purely because they're starting with a massive technical advantage. Unfortunately, though one can buy a film-based medium or large format camera for a very affordable price, their digital equivalents- or more specifically the sensors that can deliver comparable resolution and performance to those formats- are, as you imply, prohibitively expensive.

That aside, as the other reply said, it's unlikely that the students in question are using 4 x 5 cameras and the like, and more probable that they're using bog-standard 35mm film cameras, so this is ultimately a red herring...

True, the universality is a benefit, and that's why SMS will probably remain as a "baseline" service for quite a long time. OTOH, it *is* very limited, even by the standards of the late-90s when it first became *really* popular. (The 140 character limit is more reminiscent of limits imposed by the tiny RAMs of late-70s computers!).

Also, rather obviously, you can't SMS text a photo of your butt(!), and most of the end-users of other services are probably only doing so for ephemeral use- let's face it, that applies to text messages as well! In Snapchat's case, the whole *point* is that it's (supposedly) ephemeral. (Of course, I never trusted that as far as I could throw it, and apparently Snapchat were in trouble for retaining images themselves, which makes it even worse, but that's beside the point here).

OP's wasn't that great a joke, but it was a fair reference to the infamous slogans used in pre-release hype for the game Daikatana- "John Romero's about to make you his bitch" and "Suck it down".

Aside from how this would have come across at the time, it probably backfired even worse when the game was significantly delayed and turned out to be a damp squib when it did arrive, something that must have rendered the apparently arrogant hype- and by extension, Romero- laughable and hard to take seriously, even if it was tongue-in-cheek and Romero later expressed regret at (reluctantly) approving the slogans in the first place.

This may be true, but is typing on a smartphone's virtual QWERTY keyboard the same skill as old-school numeric keypad texting that the then-teenagers of 10 to 15 years ago picked up on their Nokia 3210s et al (i.e. three letters to a physical button)?

In fact, as far as I'm aware, "texting" in its original SMS sense is in decline in Western nations, (*) which doesn't surprise me as smartphones have other ways to send messages. My technophobic Mum seemed quite proud of the fact that she was actually quite comfortable with texting now (she has a no-frills feature phone that suits her). I didn't have the heart to tell her that she'd got there just around the point that "traditional" texting was starting to decline.. :-(

(*) SMS is apparently still rising in absolute terms, but that probably has more to do with the growth of mobile phones into new developing markets, and the fact that smartphones aren't quite cheap enough yet for everyone there- though they will be sooner rather than later.

I got to be a relatively fast typist for a hunt-and-pecker after several years of using computers, to the point that some people at school were quite impressed. (Course, this is back when computers were still geek things- and I was a geek!- and most others only used them for games if at all).

Even so, further computer use alone- i.e. practice- would at best have made me a slightly better hunt-and-peck typist. There's no way I'd have picked up touch-typing if I hadn't made the decision to intentionally learn it (something I ended up doing via Mavis Beacon, less than coincidentally).

Can't say how much it improved my typing speed without the ability to go back and compare. Bearing in mind I *was* already quite efficient- and happy- with hunt and pecking after 15 years of computer use, was it worth relearning from scratch a totally different technique? Another 15 years on, I'd say probably yes, because since then I've been almost exclusively a touch-typist. For example, I'm using a keyboard with German-language (QWERTZ) letter and symbol legends that don't match the US layout I normally select in Windows. This isn't a problem, because I rarely look at the keys themselves anyway!

Nothing magic about touch-typing, and most people could learn it. However, as I said it's not something you'd pick up simply by practice alone.

"That plastic 'ore"?! I don't think that Katie Price is for sale at the moment...

Unfortunately, given that the original "Yo Dawg" was marked as "offtopic" by twice as many people as thought it was funny, it probably *is* necessary.

Shame, as the minimalism of the original poster's joke worked- for me- because it assumed that most of us were familiar with a long-established meme to be able to dispense with the full text (i.e. playing off its clichedness rather than it being a boring rehash of a now-tired cliche) and also that we were smart enough to figure out its relevance to the headline story.

Not sure if the moderators didn't get the reference, or just couldn't figure out how it applied. This is why we can't have nice, minimalist jokes on Slashdot without it being necessary for someone else to overegg the pudding and explain them. :-(