Do Slashdot users still need to be taught to "hold their beliefs up to experimentation"? And do they need to be taught this by a reality TV show?

My concern with pop skeptics is that they don't believe in holding their beliefs up to experimentation, and instead decide what is "woo" based upon their feelings.

Until Mythbusters confirms it, I'll just say it's Plausible.

Mythbusters' pop skepticism is the very definition of junk science.

If you're waiting for confirmation from Penn Jillette or some other aging magician or Skeptical Inquirer, you missed out on a successful career as an economist.

I've never heard of either Razer

Razer is one of the biggest manufacturers of specialty gaming hardware for PCs, including keyboards, controllers, mice, high-performance mousepads, and headsets.

They've been around since 1998 and have around 400 employees. Don't confuse them with a kickstarter campaign.

a little rumba that comes out and vacuums up the crumbs from my desk and keyboard.

Make it look like an official NHL hockey puck and I'm in for 2. Or, combine a miniature Roomba with a quadracopter so it could just hover over my desk and suck up the dirt. Wait though, I guess if it's hovering it's pushing air down and all that's gonna do is blow the dust everywhere and irritate my eyes and sinuses. OK, forget that last one. But a quadracopter that could vacuum up dust (if it was physically possible) would be cool as hell, and it would prevent my cat from trying to sit on my keyboard all the time because my cat hates those miniature quadracopters. I mean hates as in wants to kill them but is too scared to do anything but run under the furniture and hiss and growl.

Wait, what about a beer & wine cooler and a little arm that would serve me a fresh one or a refill? Innovation!

Or a little quadracopter that would freshen up my drink when it sensed the fluid level in my glass got below 20%.

There's got to be something I can do with a miniature quadracopter besides terrorize my cat.

It has to stop or we're going to start actually hating each other.

I'll never hate you, Karmashock.

In fact, I wish I knew how to quit you.

But mine is directly related to sabermetrics....and....nevermind.

I understand, but we're talking about baseball, and every conversation about baseball eventually gets around to Bull Durham.

I just went directly there instead of waiting.

One Facebook to rule them all. At least Google gave it a try. I guess the end Facebook's dominance will have to be a long, slow process of attrition like with MySpace. It has a critical mass of users that cannot be overcome with money or other Web presence, as proven by Google. It may also take the young generation growing through it - most people under 20 do not have much interest in Facebook at all. They have accounts of course, but very few are very active.

Remember the old Sun slogan: The network is the computer.

[ Yes, I'm that old. ]

People I didn't mention that could be honest so far as I know:
Scott Walker
Ben Carson
Rand Paul
Ted Cruz
John Kasich
Bobby Jindal
George Pataki
Jim Gilmore

We can take them one at a time:

Scott Walker:
http://www.politifact.com/pers...

Carson:

"A lot of people who go into prison straight, and when they come out they’re gay."

Rand Paul:
http://www.salon.com/2015/02/1...

Ted Cruz:
http://www.politicususa.com/20...

John Kasich:
http://mediatrackers.org/ohio/...

After that, the list becomes too trivial to fact-check. "George Pataki'? Really?

Obviously the push is on to sell more copies of the professional version rather than the home version. Either get to play crash test dummy for M$ or pay the extra $99, bwa hah hah, suckers.

... can we try to vote for someone that hasn't been CAUGHT lying... yet?

So, you're a Bernie Sanders supporter?

Which of the GOP hopefuls hasn't been caught lying yet?

By the way, where are these panels being made?

They're being made in countries that started subsidizing their solar industries years ago.

Shouldn't we collectively agree on what is needed, before we collectively decide to pay for them? Is this a democratic republic?

You can have one or the other. You can be a "democratic republic" or you can decide things by "collective" agreement. Which one do you prefer?

As long as we're doing baseball movie quotes:

"Man that ball got outta here in a hurry. I mean anything travels that far oughta have a damn stewardess on it, don't you think?"

While I understand the appeal of such a system (and tried it briefly years ago), it seems somewhat bizarre to me if you actually want any security. Yes, it will stop some random hacker who obtained a password list from site X from automatically logging into site Y by just applying the old list.

But if a hacker actually gives a crap about what he's doing and actually wants to get into your accounts, a system like this is well-known enough that he could guess your passwords to other sites once he knows one of them.

Obviously you said this isn't what you use exactly, but to really make it reasonably secure, you'd need to have a much more sophisticated method of generating password modifications for each site (e.g., disguising the name or manipulating it in a non-obvious way, performing some non-obvious modification on your "core" password based on the site name, etc.). And once you go down that road to generate something non-obvious, then you need to recreate those steps of generation every time you try to remember a password... which could be tedious and annoying unless you design it well.

Anyhow, for accounts you really don't care about, something like this sounds fine. But GP was talking about strong passwords, which should probably be more individualized for accounts you really want to keep secure.

Yeah, except I'm sure they break half of the password policies at various sites anyway. That's the primary reason I started using a password manager -- even if I used a system like yours, I'd still have to remember all the random constraints on passwords for a various sites.

For example, some sites have length maximums that could be anywhere from 8 characters up. Some sites will accept a longer string when you try to login, but they won't warn you that your password must be shorter, so you keep typing in your 20-character phrase and get rejected because your password is actually the first 12 characters or whatever. And then you have sites that don't accept special characters, or sites that require special characters (but only from a certain list), or sites that don't allow you to begin your password with a number or a special character or whatever, or sites that don't accept strings of more than X letters in a row (yes, those exist, and you have to mix up the letters with numbers or special characters).... or whatever other random constraint applies.

With a password manager, I can have 30-character passwords or whatever on all the sites that accept them. If they use special characters, I can randomly generate a password with them. If they don't, I can specify a random alphanumeric password. Or whatever. And if the maximum length is 12 characters, I can specify that too without artificially limiting the length of my passwords on other sites or having to remember "Oh yeah, that site only allows a short password and it won't warn me if I try to enter my long one..." etc.

I'm not saying password managers are the best option for everything. But for remembering random website passwords, they can work pretty well.