I think much like many tech groups I "grew up with", slashdot has gone from a large number of high school and university students hacking stuff in their basement to predominately professionals working out in industry. Some of the "hacker spirit" has vanished and been replaced by practicality, and you see these kinda responses to projects we all probably would have found cool 10 years ago.

I'll admit that even I have fallen into this kinda thinking. I find myself approaching my hobby stuff the same way I approach a problem at work, and sometimes it worries me. I miss the old me who thought he could rewrite everything "a billion times better".. the current me that acknowledges maturity as a vital component of systems engineering is kinda dull at times.

I too have a tungsten E2, and I even did a little programming for it. As others have said, it's a really shitty platform and equally shitty device. That said, sometimes it's fun to get old stuff working for the hell of it. The problem you will run into is exactly what you are seeing.. the documentation, tools, and community that would have helped immensely is mostly gone. Don't really have much in the way of advice. Archive.org might help, but chances arr you are going to have to re-learn or just plain discover on your own how to make shit work.

Life also becomes a lot less turbulent once you are done school and into a career.

Yes there are still big problems later on in life, but the major stress drivers you find while still in school/starting your career are mostly resolved by that point (for better or worse).

It actually feels like they are trying to put a positive "victim" light on themselves.

"We hired this company because we felt our good side wasn't being shown on the internet and asked them to market all the good stuff we've done, and they turned on us and just started spamming garbage everywhere! That's not what we wanted!"

Whether there is any truth to that, who knows.

Indeed.

He's got crazy ideas, but he seems to be able to make them happen. We'll probably see consumer level electric cars and private space travel due in large part to his efforts.

He's pretty much the only person in the world who if announced had discovered perpetual energy, I'd probably believe.

I love how this guy just does crazy awesome things to make the world better.

Or what if this email was going to be evidence in a case against Goldman Sachs.

This is exactly why this goes through the courts. Sorting stuff like this out is kinda why courts exist.

This all seems fairly reasonable to me.

You have enough people doing enough things, eventually someone is going to make a stupid mistake. In hindsight there is probably plenty of stuff that could have or should have been in place to prevent this, but then there always is when looking back at a problem.

Google seems to be acting reasonably. Putting a process in place where companies can quickly and conveniently "take back" emails seems like a bad idea. Requiring a court order ensures that this goes through a strict process and is well documented. Google doesn't seem to be "fighting" this so much as saying "get a court to tell us to and we'll happily do it for you".

And I don't get the impression that Goldman Sachs is pounding their fists on the desk here either. They are doing everything they can to repair or prevent damage caused by a mistake they made. They are seeking out the court order and probably other stuff internally.

Certain areas around here they have ridiculously long lights.

The idea is basically everyone gets a turn, so everyone gets a flashing left arrow, then both directions get a green.

Traffic throughput is probably the same and it's probably way safer than the traditional "wait for an opening to turn left" approach, but damn if it doesn't piss off just about everyone.

Context is king.

The fact that he mentions "disabled folks (except deaf folks, naturally)" in the same sentence makes it perfectly clear that "regular" in this context refers to people who are not disabled (excluding deaf folks, who in this context may fall under the category of regular).

It's not politically correct, but I doubt many people were actually confused as to the meaning of "regular" in the OP.

There's always nano :)

It's useful in a very small handful of circumstances. The main one that comes to mind is checking the time in a meeting or other situation where it would be inappropriate to haul out a phone (although the social expectation of not playing with your phone in these situations is eroding fast).

Mainly though, it's a piece of jewelry. I know some people are repulsed by the very idea of wearing anything more than the most utilitarian of cloths, but I like wearing one. Mine has a clear faceplate showing off the intricate mechanical workings, which is something I find cool and suits my personality. Other people get something out of the workmanship that goes into those $2000 watches.

Not everything needs a practical purpose. Some stuff is just cool.

Or after I hit submit.

There is no case where a user is going to want a tag (or an accidentally created tag) deleted. It's always something the user does not want. There is no valid reason for a user to intentionally enter something in the assumption that it will be removed for them prior to being posted. Warning the user that invalid tags have been removed from their post (or would be removed from their post) seems reasonable.

This I could at least understand as a cultural thing. A fun gotcha left that way intentionally.

If they actually added new features like this to beta, rather than just making a shittier and less functional wrapper around what we've currently got, it might give beta a reason to exist.

It's not about broken tags.

It's about instinctively typing <some required parameter> when describing the syntax of something and having it unintentionally treated as an (invalid) HTML tag, causing it to be disappeared.

My point was that some kind of warning might be more helpful than just silently deleting the content.

It's a sad moment of realization that I actually like getting cloths for Christmas now. Mainly because I suck at picking stuff out myself and hate shopping for cloths in general.

Having a job, a fiance, hell owning a house (or well a gradually increasing piece of one) doesn't make you an adult. When someone gifts you a tonne of socks (sister works at a Marks Work Warehouse and gets some ridiculous employee discounts) and you think "awesome, I really needed these", I think that's the moment one realizes they are an adult.

In my completely impractical approach, it would be up to the user (or whoever controls the gateway) to decide what data the device can send.

So you also have an IDL that describes the fields, potential values, and update rates for your earthquake monitoring, that a user can either allow or deny.

Obviously it starts to become easier to slip in data covertly, but this idea is impractical anyway, so what the heck!

You really do highlight the problem though. There is a great amount of legitimate useful purpose for this kind of stuff, but there is really no easy way to control that data once it's gone.