First time reading Slashdot, I guess?

Ditto the part about "persistently and without reasonable cause makes use of a public electronic communications network"—again, that only applies if it's for the purpose of causing annoyance etc. Despite what the first (more hysterical) linked article says, refreshing Facebook every 10 seconds won't violate this law.

(Unless, of course, you're doing it to deliberately annoy or inconvenience Facebook.)

...And the DAR portion of RADAR stood for "Detection And Ranging". So why the nerd rage? Someone just chose to deconstruct a portmanteau into its root elements.

The "Gimli Glider" link I should have provided in my first post.

Same for the Air Canada flight that ran out of fuel halfway to its destination. It had Boeing's new "glass cockpit" with computer screens for everything, and guess what? When the engines died for lack of fuel, so did the computers. The crew were left with a handful of the most basic instruments; something like artificial horizon, airspeed, and altimeter.

As I recall, the pilot landed that one safely because the plane had a mechanical backup system (an air turbine) that gave him minimal hydraulic power—and also because he was an experienced glider pilot who probably got more miles out of his starting altitude than most professionals (or computer systems) could have.

Atoms.

This! My /. nick isn't chosen randomly, but I haven't written a useful line of FORTRAN in nearly 30 years. (I'm not sure anything I wrote in COBOL could ever properly be called "useful".)

These days, I'm a programming god to my children for screensavers written in QuickBasic, fairly skilled in some specialized stuff, sort of an amateur in Python and JS, mostly baffled by PowerShell, and utterly ignorant of C, C++, C#, Visual C-minus, C for Dummies, Hi-C.....

Well, if you include the sort of nanoscale flying doodads that cloud the air of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, they would be:

• Spying on us
• Infecting us
• Coating our lungs
• Defending us from all the above

Life in the cloud, indeed.

aj bq cccc dhabi exxon fmc ... zx ##

Yeah, lots of English there.

Whichever my boss tells me, "Use this because sparkly! With icons!"

I think nerd vs. geek is more useful for judging someone's age than anything else these days. I'm old enough to consider geek an out-and-out insult, because I remember when even among circus freaks the geek was unpopular. (Hearing Fred Blassie's "Pencil Neck Geek" on Dr. Demento two or three times a month all through college certainly didn't help.)

"...over two meters and twenty stone..."

I do love the metric system so.

"...the preview of Azure HDInsight (an Apache Hadoop-based hosted service)..."

Anybody wanna take odds on whether this gets nicknamed "Hindsight"?

Well, considering that being a "spark" tends to mean ignoring that every mad scientist before you has eventually been destroyed by his own creations and going ahead with your lava-excreting giant cockroach experiments anyway...

Screenwriters.