As the "dept" byline heading says, thanks for endangering so many people.

My grandfather was a leadfoot, and crossed from NC to AZ a couple times a year under 48 hours. My dad was to follow him in a second vehicle once, and ended up slowing down and going his own pace, when he saw just how irresponsibly granddad was rushing things just for the sake of rushing. Grandpa never killed anyone but I'm sure it's been very close a couple of times.

When I was an undergrad with a part time job helping out in a graduate chemistry lab, there was a suite of utilities written in FORTRAN. People depended heavily on this suite to calculate all manner of things related to their crystallography research.

The problem was, it was mostly written during one of those years where Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit were massively popular again, and people were learning to program with hunt-the-wumpus teletype programs. The original author "amused" himself by naming pretty much anything he could after some fantasy concept. CASTLE, FRODO, DRAGON, and so on. Okay, so to map out van der Waals surface strength, you ran CASTLE. Many things have quirky codenames, you get used to it. But all the variables followed suit. Now it was a bit more obscure to maintain the program or trace the logic.

Worst of all, the comments. In FORTRAN, columns 1 to 72 were for your program, and anything after 73 was a comment. The author wrote an "epic" of his own, all word-wrapped in the column space from 73 to 132 (the width of common teletype paper and long Hollerith punch cards). What a waste of his time, you might think. But it was also a huge impediment to maintenance; you see, people in the lab LIKED his story (for a while), so they had to figure out how to patch the logic without breaking the flow of the story. It took years before someone stripped all the prose and got the rest of the lab to follow the maintainable fork instead o the prosaic one.

If you want a visual analogy that works, think of the "WOPR guesses launch codes" scene in War Games. In that movie, it's really just eye candy to drive tension in the plot, but it works in that general way for larger texts. If WOPR could somehow compute or infer that the third digit of the launch code is A, and can't be any other letter, then it "locks" that digit down and looks for other inferences it can make. Code breaking and sudoku overlap here too.

This puts a new spin on the Twain quip: "Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel."

For those who depend on TOR for their safety, more than they depend on a specific tool for their convenience, the following a safety advisory seems pretty rational. Air pollution in LA is bad on Tuesday! Young people and elderly should please remain indoors if possible!

What did you bring that old quotes book you know I don't like to be read to out of up for?

I once did the back-of-napkin calculations to make a scale-independent metric. Astronomers know that if you hold your fist at arm's length, your fist occludes roughly ten arc degrees in whatever direction you measure across your fist. My search found that someone's 20/20 eyes can generally resolve details to about 1 arc minute (didn't read Wikipedia's rationale). If that much screen area contains one megapixel or more, then the screen is well within the definition of a "Retina" display (at the given viewing range).

Please see Schneier's paper on the "compelled certificate creation attack." Rather than asking a CA for the keys from Alice to Bob, they could compel a CA to vouch for an Alice to Eve, Eve to Bob connection as if it were Alice to Bob directly.

And you can tell the difference between a Search-and-Rescue IR Camera drone from a Track-the-Perp IR Camera drone, from the ground? Or even a Take-Neato-Aerial-Photos prosumer level hobby drone?

I was just about to comment about the "uncertainty" in the use of the word moot; whether it meant "to discuss" or "to dismiss need of discussion." A perfect word for the topic, if you think about it.

When it comes to Microsoft, I must paraphrase:

Never ascribe to malice, what can adequately be explained as incompetent malice.

Agreed.

Logic: The Fifth Amendment is the extension of the Fourth Amendment into the mind. You cannot be compelled to prosecute yourself, for two reasons: (1) it's unethical to compel a sentient being condemn themselves, and (2) you cannot trust any direct product of a person's mind, like you can trust objective verifiable evidence. This already exists, but I expect more and more encryption tools will support a duress or plausible deniability passcode: give the wrong key and a less-damning content is revealed.

Per the article, it wasn't so much security, like denying unauthorized people from riding. It was security, like having logs that confirm or deny that Mommy's snowflake got on the bus just like they should have. It's still bullshit, it's just a different kind of bullshit.

I suggest you develop some sort of "story arc" or pathway or series of activities that build on each other, but where each step is fun on its own. Then new members can see how things will evolve over time, and not just be a purposeless hangout time that's easy to replace with Final Fantasy XX when that hits the shelves.

As an example, they probably already know about Minecraft. For a minimal cost, you can get two Raspberry Pi units, then expand as kids start acquiring their own. Get them interested in the simplest Linux environment, then install Minecraft for Pi, then a tiny bit of Python will let them construct various Minecraft structures or mob AIs using Python coding. Mix it up but stay in the theme by setting up a Minecraft/Bukkit server on your full PCs, and learn to write plugins there, using the Java that your seniors already know.

The timestamp here on Slashdot says "Mon 08 Apr 12:46AM". Hm, what year? What timezone? From what I've seen, when it archives, it still misses what year it's in.

It's already fuzzy, but it gives the impression of being very specific. Which is worse?

And I'm glad that all your rage goes to something so trivial, rather than something meaningful like fighting oppression at the local, national or global levels.