actual meatspace storefront .... Please.

actually using the word "meatspace" and you're *not* a character in a bad 90's era cyberpunk novel? ...Please.

If you don't believe in abortion, don't have one.

Substitute "a slave" for "abortion" and you have some insight into how Pro-Life voters feel.

The idea that a black African was a "person" with rights equal to his white owner was as crazy to half the country a few hundred years ago as the notion that an unborn child has rights equal to her mother is to half the country today.

Who knows? Maybe in a few hundred years someone who survived a third-trimester abortion will grow up to be President and vindicate the millions who were killed in utero, the way Obama vindicated his slave ancestors? Wouldn't that be lovely?

D00d, you wrote a 2000+ word essay -- on a Slashdot Blog! -- complaining about how the practical applications of Transporter Beams weren't effectively realized on Star Trek (Which is fictional, by the way. FYI)

You're, like, The Uber-Geek. The ur-Nerd.

I got the same weird mixed feelings of respect and mockery reading that essay that is usually reserved for when I see pictures of some Steampunk Cosplay Guy who's built a working jetpack. Over nights and weekends for the past three years.

Well done, Sir! I think...

The Black Geary Books, as fans often refer to them, are "officially" known as the "Lost Fleet" books by Jack Campbell.

The first one is "The Lost Fleet: Dauntless." I believe there is a total of six in the series. He followed that series up with further Black Jack adventures in the now-ongoing series "The Lost Fleet: Beyond The Frontier."

The Amazon Link: http://amzn.to/R2vhfI

The neatest thing I found about the series (other than all the geometry), is that Black Jack -- a war hero revived after 100 years in stasis -- is the reverse-type to the trope of Ancient Badass Warrior Travels to Future and Kicks Soft Pasty-White Butts Living in Luxury Too Long. In Geary's "relative future," he is the Enlightened Man, using sophisticated naval tactics no longer taught at Academy because the peeps of that relative future are so angry and beaten down by a century of war that all they want to do is just ram their ships into the enemy and rip out their opponents' lungs with their teeth.

But I also enjoy reading pure Mathematics texts.

The Black Jack books are the first ones I've ever read since the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series where I felt the need to keep a pen and paper nearby. Half the time it seems that Black Jack wins his engagements because he knows how to use a protractor and his opponents don't...

I can consistently pick out the Hugh Pickens submissions just by looking at the titles in the RSS feed.

And Hugh, please don't construe that as a *good* thing...

...when you say "cult," are you referring to Mormonism or Linux?

Yes, yes, it's easy to mock online petitions and their traditional worthlessness, but THIS petition has been written by a member of the "technorati," so maybe it has a chance.

God Speed, Brave Technoratus! Make Us Proud!!

I am absolutely floored by the notion that there are still journalists and media who believe that Google is not already in the pocket of the government and is not thriving merely because of that relationship.

There is a group of guys at my workplace who do it every day on their lunch hour.
And not a one of them would understand this story

Or how to make a baby.

Wikipedia embraces "experts in the community," inflates them far beyond their objective worth when it comes to defending its credibility among legitimate encyclopedias, then goes all "Vonnegut in Back to School" when faced with legitimate experts who normally have little use for their sandbox.

Like I've always said: Want a wonderfully comprehensive summary of the 5th Season of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" or exegesis on some nearly forgotten Geek meme? Wikipedia's the place to go. Anything else? Not if your serious about it.

...is that, um, like a coder or a developer?

Or do you really build houses from floppy disks?

Sorry, proto-geeks: Language Evolves. "Hacker" now equals "Guy Who Does Bad Things With Computer." And really, no amount of slashdot user-submitted headlines and sympathetic editors is going to change that. You'd have better luck returning "geek" to it's original meaning. (Look it up.)

...who the fuck he is.

Note to Sales Department: I get that this is Yegge's slashvertisement ("anonymous reader writes..." sh'yeah, right...) but you still need the editors to set it up better than this if you want those click-throughs.

Twitter is a marketing tool for brands and industry. It's a dream mechanism for them: a fan, or anyone with a slight interest in the product/brand/artist, is encouraged to "follow" the appropriate twitter stream, and so is thereby locked into a steady barrage of product updates designed to also reinforce the vendor/customer relationship by adding the semblance of making it "personal.'

Of course, there are many Tweeters who aren't selling anything; theirs are the buyers' eyeballs being marketed to the sellers. It is important to make them feel like they are more than hipster consumers, and Twitter -- along with a Dutiful Media -- has done a great job in convincing them that their own tweets mean something, much in the same way that, 4-5 years ago, YouTube and the Dutiful Media managed to convince the world that bored suburban teenagers lip-synching to Aqua's "Barbie Girl" was somehow Art. "Citizen Journalists" have replaced the "User-Generated Content Makers," to the great amusement of the professional artists and creators whose pockets they continue to line.