Not a military member, but from what I understand, the military doles out ass-chewings like that behind closed doors, not in front of the public. Dressing down people in front of the men/women they command or the public is frowned upon because it leads to undermining the chain of command.

Punishments that are viewed by the public, like court-martials have a much more professional air to them. I don't see why Linus couldn't do that, or do his ranting and raving in a personal email to the man instead of a public forum.

After many long years on Slashdot, can I be the first one to actually confirm that FreeBSD is dead?

Does your mom count? Because that's the one that said it to me.

I guess we didn't learn anything from when 9-11 happened and we created the TSA, a group of intrusive busybodies at best and molestors at worst.

Or organized all federal law enforcement under the DHS without actually thinking about how it would coordinate things so we have another layer of government that is busy trying to justify their existence by going after random stuff. I hear they do copyright enforcement now?

I suppose we are set to see a Cybersecurity Agency with powers to monitor everything and permaban people from the internet based on anonymous accusations like the no-flight lists? What's the worst that could happen?

I often hear of "Russian hackers" and the hacker scene is supposedly pretty big, and I've always wondered to what extent the government there had a hand in that. Anyone here have any experience with the Russian scene?

And why is the hacker scene so big there?

I know Amazon is trying to get everone to store everything in the cloud, but I really hope they put a media slot (micro or regular SD) on the new Kindle.

I'm seriously considering the nook tablet over the Kindle or Nexus 7, because I can't imagine doing anything on a tablet that really pushes the CPU/GPU, but I can see needing more than 16gb of storage. And not having a nearby wifi spot for the cloud, or the patience to download everything over wifi instead of swapping out a memory card.

I remember in the '90s overhearing a conversation between two RPGers at my college, waiting for the bus. There was a business-major looking guy in a suit next to them reading a newspaper.

The two nerds are talking about how the Cyber Adepts created the internet to control the world, so it's ironic that the internet is actually diluting their power.

I don't play RPGs, but most of my friends do so I recognize the talk as being about a game. The guy next to them, however, obviously does not know so he seems slightly worried about the apparently crazy people next to him.

Then the nerds start talking about wraiths as if they're real, and then casually mention "It's a good thing we nuked the wraith centers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" and the suit guy's eyes go wide and he comically moves his newspaper up to cover his face. This whole time the nerds are oblivious to how their talk sounds to non-nerds around them.

Hide your powerlevels, guys. Normals are not going to understand.

Repost of this story from earlier today

I guess they're so excited, they decided to tell us twice!

>Still, overhead sound seems like a good idea for some kinds of movie.

What kind of movie would that be? I already think the surround audio is overdoing it, since your attention is supposed to be right at the screen, not wondering what's behind you.

Recently watched Naussica Of The Valley Of Wind in a local theater, and I'm not sure the sound was even stero; all sound seemed to come from speakers behind the screen. But I didn't care, because it was an awesome movie, with good visuals and audio effects. Some of the music may be questionable, but the orchestral stuff was still tear-inducing.

NS:DC (Not Surround: DIdin't Care)

Actually, yes you have to protect against vacuum, because it would cause decompression sickness (the bends) and possibly actually boil your blood because of the lowered boiling point of water.

True enough, that's what the original old-timer lament was when the university was the main source of new internet users.

The 'endless summer' comes from newer generations of net users and forums where the influx is in summer from all the kids on vacation spending their time online instead of school.

At first I was surprised that there was a new posting with the DEC logo, but then it turns out it's a newbie who doesn't know what the symbol means.

It's summer, it's endless summer...

Let us start a discussion of VAX and Alpha to compensate.

Those of us still grandfathered into the unlimited plan will be forced (when upgrading)

Whelp, looks like I'm going to be stuck with this Palm phone forever. Ah, WebOS, I guess you're not that bad...

I had a friend who broke his Mac by writing his own drivers for the graphics card. The screen ended up having rainbow streaks and black spots, IIRC. It stayed after switching his driver back, so he broke the hardware somehow - maybe overheated a chip?

Despite this, he got a job writing OpenGL drivers for the chipset mfg (can't recall whether it was ATI or Nvidia). Guess learning through breaking things does work :)