In my experience, it's isn't really about political ideology as it is about people who feel the need to make sure you know where you stand in the pecking order. If you, as a student, complain to a teacher's superior about something and it gets back to that teacher, the very next day you can expect a pop quiz or a paper or additional reading or something to make sure you feel the consequences of your actions even if they are justified. That happens in every situation where there is even the slightest bit of hierarchy and there are petty people involved.

This sort of reminds me of the Y2K scares 15+ years ago. Back then, there was a lot of FUD about Y2K and consequentially a lot of money being spent to deal with it. A lot of new equipment was being purchased. A lot of software was being modified along with a lot of older programmers being hired to perform those modifications since nobody else knew how to deal with it. Once Y2K came and went without any catastrophe, all that capital spending evaporated overnight. One could argue that this may have been a catalyst for the dotcom crash but that's a separate issue. My point is that a lot of very expensive equipment is being built to mine bitcoins. A lot of real money and resources, particularly energy, is being spent in an effort to mine something that has no other use besides virtual currency unlike metals. So when the last bitcoin is found, all that capital spending will vanish. Is this hardware good for anything else? If not, there will be residual effects.

This girl is now going to be subjected to a lot of insidious B.S. until she leaves. Teachers will likely be very harsh for any sort of subjective grading. School staff is going to be watching her like a hawk. If she steps one toenail out of line, she's going to be in a world of hurt. If it's one thing I know, when you have no power and she really doesn't, the people who do have even a little power will make your life miserable. And this crap is going to follow her for a very long time too because it's now got a life of its own online.

IMHO, this is what's so insidiously wrong about the patent system. Spherix didn't actually invent the stuff. They didn't do the work. The invention didn't come from the brains of the people who work there. IMHO, therefore, they should have no standing for a patent lawsuit.

If doomsayers used a number such as 6,967,231 nobody would believe the report. Yet somehow saying 7 million is totally believable. Humans are such a gullible species.

Why isn't Personal Audio suing the companies that make the software to allow podcasts to be created and served? Do they think those companies have a much stronger legal team and therefore are choosing to go after the defenseless?

I regularly find myself needing to make ultra short run parts i.e. a few every year. Not nearly enough to justify doing them in a CNC mill and I don't want to spend a lot of money on a few parts only to have them sit on the shelf because that's capital that could be better spent elsewhere. One of my real world examples is a custom electronics enclosure. The boards I need to house sadly are just a little too big for a COTS enclosure from Hammond or Bud and the next size up is ginormous. So I decided to look seriously at 3D printing. Sending the design to Shapeways or Protolabs was insanely expensive at over $600 for a brick-sized part. That may be fine for a one-off research project but not for short-run production. Then I looked at the sub-$3k offerings. I was at first impressed with the CubeX until I learned that you don't feed it with rolls of filament but instead have to buy their cartridges and they refused to tell me how much material is in each one. They said "Oh, you can print about a hundred cellphone cases." GAH! A cellphone case is not a standardized unit of measure. So their business model is stupid for the customer. Then I looked at some others that could handle the size part I needed to make and discovered how slow they are. I figured it would take about 8 hours to print one enclosure. Well, I suppose I could click "Print" and go do other things. But then I wondered how reliable the process is and I realized that I'd be pretty pissed if the print screwed up 7.5 hours into it. That possibility is pretty much confirmed by the fact that you can now get a shredding machine that recycles your failures into new filament. Finally, the quality of the results came into question when I read about people buying home fryer machines, filling them with acetone, and dipping the parts in to smooth the surfaces.

I still want one but IMHO, 3D printing is at the same stage computers were in the late 70s. Back then, if you were a geek, you totally wanted one but nobody did much real work on them. What's needed is the IBM-PC or Macintosh of 3D printing.

Some of us have better things to do with our time than monitor modding trends ;-)

Is the fact that at the time of this comment, there were only three comments rated at a 5 and not even root comments but responses to other people's low-rated threads. That says a lot about people's feelings toward this particular topic. Given that people with mod points are downgrading everybody else's posts, perhaps Slashdot should consider not accepting such stories on the grounds that it's nothing more than a pissing contest.

Some of you may have seen the common core style math problems going around the net. If that's the kind of B.S. that's being taught to future STEM students, we're in deep doo doo. When a bridge you designed collapses killing people, you don't get to talk about how you felt while you were designing it. The court will want to know why you did your math wrong.

Don't misunderstand me here. Slamming endless, pointless math problems pushes the very definition of tedious. IMHO, STEM education is too focused on theory as opposed to practical applications. No non-academic employer is going to care if you can solve differential equations in your sleep if you don't know how to make practical use of them.

Recently, FB decided that it needed to verify that I was really me when logging in. To do this, it presented me with a bunch of photos from my "friends" that had been tagged and insisted that I choose a name of someone in the photo. If I got enough of them wrong, it would "lock" my account. (Not quite "lock" but I had to try it again). Not only did it pull up obscure photos from "friends" I rarely interact with so I had little chance of knowing who was in the photo. But get this: It pulled up photos of people facing away from the camera and expected me to know who the person was from behind. Da fuq, FB? Seriously?!?

Greater acceptance in the business community? There are still plenty of corporate IT staffers who refuse to acknowledge anything made by Apple if for no other reason than the support requirements of a Microsoft environment is job security for them.

I'm a little mystified as to why some moderator decided that my post was off-topic. I consider "rollback" to include "let me install an older version if I have the discs for it."

Apparently, Apple, in it's infinite wisdom, has decided to drop support for Windows 7 in Bootcamp for the shiny new Mac Pros. Given that a lot of Windows users are saying no to Windows 8 and 8.1, one has to wonder why. My guess is that it was a concession Apple had to make to Microsoft in order to get Office on iOS.

Forces who don't give a rat's ass about cool tech or changing how Americans drive are giving a collective middle finger to Tesla. This guy had better study how things with Tesla are unfolding very carefully because he's next.