So let the sailors add the leap seconds back into their calculations. The rest of us shouldn't have to care about them.

Ignore it. How much does it impact humanity if the clock noon drifts a tiny bit from solar noon? We're looking at an impact of shifting noon by about a minute over the course of an average human's lifespan. The impact of ignoring it means that people who rely on sundials are left to solve the sync problem on their own, and that's a whole lot less of an impact than NTP.

Other systems that synchronize with natural phenomena, such as automated irrigation systems or automated lighting systems, can be adjusted by their owners.

If some purist insists that we have to fix it, let's agree to fix it once per century, and let the people 100 years from now figure out if it's important enough to them to worry about.

I still don't understand how they can control it well enough. It seems like 99.9% of the mods they might try to make would result in a cancerous tumor. And if that's the case, a back alley in Chiba City wouldn't seem so attractive after all.

Look at every other mass communication system, ever. They all have had to deal with noise. Online site owners have evolved some things that work pretty well, like Slashdot's moderation system with metamoderation, voting schemes, "like" buttons, etc. More than 20 years ago usenet news had cancelmoose. Offline we have long had people like newspaper editors, publishers, standards and practices teams, and even government censors.

Either publishers find a way to deal with spammers, trolls, and griefers; or readers abandon them once the signal-to-noise ratio gets too low as they collapse under the weight of carrying terabytes of gibberish and spam. Frankly I'm surprised Twitter hasn't offered this kind of solution sooner.

Congratulations, you win at Internet today!

By the way, Yahoo! called, they want their 1990s back.

What rights exactly. At least in a "right to work" state you don't have a lot of recourse unless you are being discriminated against. If an entire department is being laid off it would be hard to show that you were laid off for anything but legitimate reasons. Under what circumstances is a worker really going to end up better off turning down the money (plus the ability to collect unemployment right away, at least here in Mass).

I coukd see delaying signing to consult a lawyer maybe but I suspect in most cases they will tell you to take the money and run. its better than nothing.

A mimeograph? You had it easy. We didn't have a mimeograph, so we had to listen to a bunch of Welshmen sitting around a table telling jokes that had no vowels, and then type them up ourselves.

Are you absolutely sure Halo 5 is just a game? How do you know?

Unless he means actual rocks.

Yeah what would we do without the Google+ app.

Google makes a ton of money on the data they acquire from those apps. iOS users represent heavy consumers. Google needs access to those users and their data more than apple needs Google. That's why Google pays Apple to make sure Google remains the default search option in iOS.

Metro apps have ads built in - the provided Weather app has a block ad permanently lodged between the hourly forecast and the radar maps, for example. This has nothing to do with the web, the browser, or slashdot.

You deleted all the relevant bits of the post to make a non-point about some random ad blocker that would have no effect.

Well, back in my day there were only three episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus, which we quoted every day at lunch, and we liked it that way.

I intended to be snarky here, but the more I thought about it, it really is Dice's website. They post stuff, and we keep coming back and reading it, even though we're not paid to. What part of that do you consider "not OK"?

If you know Idle (Eric, not the IDE), you get the job automatically. If you can get me tickets to Spamalot.

This is Slashdot. You only get abuse.