Comment Tapas Acupressure Technique (Score 3, Funny) 517
Mmmm... Tapas!
Comment Re:Cruel and unusual punishment (Score 4, Funny) 914
The 18th amendment made life seem longer by depriving people of alcohol. It's already been abolished.
Comment Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto (Score 1) 138
19th Century: Saying "We changed our mind and decided that Ceres isn't a planet" is bad. Just say that Ceres and Pallas and Vesta and Hyperion and ... and ... and ... and ... are planets and be done with it.
Comment Re:Real geeks know statistics (Score 1) 334
Statistically speaking even if your body can live forever, some kind of accident will almost certainly kill you in that ten thousand year timeframe.
Wouldn't people get more risk-averse and change the probabilities? You've driven behind 70-year-old-guys. Now imagine 7000-year-old-guy is driving the car in front of you!
Comment Re:Tried it already. It kind of flopped. (Score 5, Funny) 459
"What health problems? My health is probably better than yours."
Is "Internet Healthy Guy" a new variation on "Internet Tough Guy"?
"My blood pressure could kick your blood pressure's ass!"
Japanese Firm Proposes Microwave-Linked Solar Plant On the Moon 330
littlesparkvt writes "Harnessing the sun's power is nothing new on Earth, but if a Japanese company has its way, it will build a solar strip across the 11,000 mile Lunar equator that could supply our world with clean and unlimited solar energy for generations." Some of the company's other projects look just as ambitious.
Comment Re:Gender neutral? (Score 1) 462
Let me guess, you are under the age of 30, yes? Probably under the age of 25?
This is location-dependent, not age-dependent. Singular "they" is perfectly OK in Britain, and I think it's something that Americans could find useful too, once they get over their grammar doubts.
Comment Re:Win for IPv6 (Score 1) 303
Oops! I should have used my IPv6 connection to do a search before posting! - http://www.timewarnercable.com...
Comment Win for IPv6 (Score 1) 303
Comcast have been rolling out IPv6, and I can now get all of Google/YouTube, Facebook, and Wikipedia. Slashdot is still only IPv4, of course.
TWC's installed equipment may delay a roll out right now, but a long term commitment to IPv6 would be good.
Comment Re:Wrong Design (Score 1) 213
Most of the Internet is built this way already. The Internet backbone is mostly idle and under-utilized. About 80% of the fiber that was installed for the backbone has gone unused as technology keeps pushing data transfers faster and faster.
Let's take round numbers - 100 fiber pairs between a pair of major cities, with 80 of them unused, and (say) 1Tbit/s on the other 20 pairs. That's 20Tbit/s of backbone capacity, and you might think of it as 80Tbit/s "unused". However, to bring those fibers into use, you need to sink the capital costs for the routers, optics for the 10 or 100Gbit/s ports, and the DWDM equipment. That's not a trivial cost, and people will need a business case for turning up new capacity.
It's a lot easier to upgrade the core than the edge, but the core router ports certainly aren't sitting there at some low utilization all the time.
Comment Re:Stunning. (Score 2) 227
Here's what the internet has to say ( http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming... )
Yep. 100% sure. I've even researched how so many people can believe this is an actual quote when it isn't (which is a strange phenomenon). I'm also a huge Simpsons geek.
The actual quote is: Wiggum: Well that's some good work, Lou. You'll make sergeant for this.
But almost universally people say and believe it to be "That's some (mighty) fine detective work, Lou"
Comment Re:BS (Score 1) 342
people have far more faith in the value of the U.S. Dollar and the Euro than they do even in Jesus of Nazareth
There's a wedding coming up. I'll try to use some dollars to get food for the guests. Any thoughts about how to get the wine?
Comment Re:Haven't heard a honk in a while (Score 1) 267
My driving instructor used to lean across to blow the horn and wave when he saw one of his former students. I noticed that a high proportion of his former students seemed to be pedestrians.
We both used to confuse "left" and "right" too, which sometimes worked out fine.
IE Drops To Single-Digit Market Share 390
New submitter fplatten writes "I think this is all you need to see to know what legacy Steve Ballmer has left at Microsoft, where its IE browser market share has collapsed from a high of 86% in 2002 to just 9% now. I guess this is just another in a long list of tech companies that failed to maintain its dominant market share. Also, IE may be the one product that never really deserved it, but just piggybacked on Windows, and users left in droves once decent (more secure) alternatives and standards became popular." Microsoft stockholders probably don't feel too badly about the Ballmer legacy overall, though -- browser choice is a pretty small arm of the octopus.
Comment Re:Might as well teach them Latin (Score 1) 208
We don't teach physics students the details of epicycles before covering Newtonian gravity nor do we teach students latin (any more) before learning modern languages like French.
That's very true. The only exception seems to be IPv4 addressing, where people are told about obsolete and confusing classful routing (A, B, and C) before the much more useful modern stuff (/24 etc.).
ProgramErgoSum should go and find someone who grew up in the 60s and ask them if they would have preferred learning about airships and blotting paper, or Saturn Vs and lasers. I know which I would have chosen.
