Why does my Slashdot look exactly the same as it looked six months ago? I've been reading the outraged comments and I still see comments under the summary as always.

I don't know. Only my front page looks different, in the same ways people are complaining about

I almost never go to the homepage. I monitor /.'s RSS feed (used to use Google Reader, switched to TTRSS when Google Reader went bye-bye) and go directly to articles that sound interesting. A bunch of other sites are also configured in there, so I can quickly see what's new there as well.

As I've seen things, /. Beta fscked up page formatting for a while, but the "?nobeta" hack took care of that. Then at some point, it no longer became necessary when article pages started looking more or less like they previously did without manual intervention.

That's only if they were sealed correctly and stored right. There was an article a few years ago about how a lot of discs were coming up unusable after only 6-12.

My oldest CDs are somewhere on the other side of 20 years old now, and not one of them has gone bad. I reripped them all a few months ago as part of a transition from AAC to FLAC. They've spent most of their time on a shelf indoors, though they've been in a box in the garage (dry, but subject to the temperature fluctuations typical for Las Vegas) for the past four years.

I suspect that as long as your CD collection never spent time in a flooded basement, it'll be good to go for decades to come.

What API would you use?

WebRTC, IIRC. I recently rolled out a webapp at work that case workers can use to help determine eligibility for potential clients. One minor capability within it is photo capture. Along with a slew of questions about demographics, disabilities, and such, it'll also take a picture and stash it in the database. If someone is then accepted as a client, that photo is then available so that (for instance) our delivery drivers can compare the photo on file to whoever answers the door to make sure the client's at home to accept delivery. We could've just had the user take a picture with the phone's camera app and then upload into our webapp from there, but this is a seamless approach that's easier to use.

There's not much to it, either. The page that handles the capture is 28 lines of HTML and 114 lines of JavaScript, a fair bit of which was cribbed from examples I found with a few seconds' googling. It provides a live view of what the camera sees, lets you switch between front and back cameras, and lets you preview the capture before it's sent to the server.

So you will have to 'structure' it into smaller pieces.

...and if you try doing that and end up getting caught, the feds'll send you away to PMITA prison.

Now, take a teenager, and try to explain punching holes in a 360K 5.25" floppy so you could flip it and get 720K.

360K is already double-sided. A more typical use case was to double capacity from 140K to 280K when used with an Apple II.

I want to know why Putin fucks goats and why all evidence has been erased

Because they were MALE goats and we all know Putin's stance on all things gay.

Wide?

Plex’s lack of extensibility, scraper support, and local storage support drive me up a goddamn tree, but Plex works and XBMC doesn’t. I’m not a linux person, but I am a nerd - code is not my day job, but I’m teaching myself at night. Sweet baby Jesus, I tried XBMC so many freaking times that eventually I just gave up.

The easiest way to get XBMC^H^H^H^HKodi working is OpenELEC. It's pretty much an appliance that just works; the only part that remains slightly tricky (and not by much) is setting up a shared database if you want more than one. I have it set up on an Acer Aspire Revo in the living room and a Raspberry Pi in the bedroom; each is set up with a Playstation 3 Blu-ray remote control (about $20 each, plus a Bluetooth dongle).

I also have Plex up and running, but it's mainly for remote access. Automatic transcoding is a big win. Around home, though, there's more than enough bandwidth to just let OpenELEC grab files straight off the server.

While you shouldn't necessary pick a major based on the hottest job, you definitely need to pick something in consideration with how you will use it. And you sure as heck should go to college to learn and make yourself better--not just to receive a piece of paper. Racking up 5 or 6 figures of debt without learning anything of value is a terrible idea. Unfortunately, we haven't given students the tools or perspectives to understand the consequences of the decisions they are making. Everyone is always warning athletes coming into college "the chances of you making it as a pro are extremely rare". And yet, the chances of someone making it as a tenured history professor at a major university are probably just as rare. At least the athletes aren't going into massive debt.

Add onto the fact that we have massively watered down many majors to the point of uselessness. The reason liberal arts majors get a bad rap isn't that it is a useless subject. If people came out as hard working critical thinkers they would be valuable contributors. Unfortunately, it is filled with people who just want a piece of papers and do the minimum to get by. This is a generalization, of course, but I believe is backed up by stats on plagiarism http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...). And the courses are watered down to be worthless. For example you can graduate from Yale with an English without having a Shakespeare course (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/04/23/skipping-shakespeare-yes-english-majors-can-often-bypass-the-bard/). So in 4 years of education in English, you don't have to actually take a course in the most influential English writer in history. But, you know, he is challenging to read and understand. As an alternative you can take a course in Literature for Young People http://english.yale.edu/course... which includes J. K. Rowling and Dr. Seuss.

At least with Engineering/Math/Hard Science you have to demonstrate via projects and tests that you have actually learned something.

Mark Russinovich experimented a fair bit with this under Windows XP - there at least, you could actually kill off smss.exe and still have a working system; really, the only one you need to leave in place is csrss.exe, since that provides the userspace parts of the Win32 API, and without Win32 you can't run any "normal" Windows programs at all. Of course, you also lack important things like networking, making this rather academic - and you can't reboot any more either, since you've now killed off the process which handles that!

Trial and error, it's a great teacher :)

They are handy - ten feet off the ground, so all we can see is a strip of sky at an odd angle, and almost no natural light ever gets in, but it means we can tell if it's raining or not outside before setting off. I'd far rather have a/c though!

Morally and ethically, you have a point - but legally, no. Telephone companies in the US have specific laws regulating what they can and can't do - but if Google decided that from now on, any email containing the word "viagra" would get blocked from Gmail, that's up to them. Probably not a useful choice (spammers already use workarounds like "\/iagra" anyway, and the occasional legitimate email would get caught) but it is theirs to make. Indeed, this very site has a few rules to reduce spam and misuse - so you can't post very long words without getting random whitespace added (to combat the old "page widening troll"), you can't post more than a certain number of messages in one period of time - all rules they are perfectly entitled to adopt and enforce, since it's their own site/service.

Someone posted here earlier that the domain looks quite "spammy" on some of the heuristics Facebook and co probably use internally: it wouldn't exactly be the first time legitimate content got caught by a spam filter. More likely than a conspiracy theory about Twitter and Facebook being so determined to stifle criticism of TPP. As of right now, stopfasttrack.com is not listed in Spamhaus's database; probably someone got over-enthusiastic promoting it, and some of those messages got reported as spam. Nothing new there, either.

It doesn't work out like that in practice. I spent a decent chunk of time in the Bering sea on the Carl Vinson during Pacex '89 and the primary constraints for flying were not ice on the deck.