...Steam Boy?! :D Really? STEAM BOY?

...would love this.

Imagine them getting access to everything about your health, they wouldn't need to get it from a doctor, so they could make their own assessment of your current health status and habits, thus increasing the price of your insurance, or denying it altogether.

Yeah, for a split second there...I read it as:

Court finds port scanning to be fair.

50-70$ will give your students a good if not excellent used analog scope such as suggested from numerous members in here

Other than eBay, less obvious sources for getting a scope on the cheap would be your local HAM (radio amateur) club, there is always one in your city, look them up (they're really friendly and love new faces). Another way to get some cheap scopes, is to visit the various electronics repairshops, service dept. etc. Ask nicely, perhaps bring a free pizza to the overworked technicians, and who knows? Maybe you'll end up with a Scope for the price of a decent pizza slice. (I KID YOU NOT, I've heard friends of mine who have done this, and even gotten a free Spectrum Analyzer, albeit old...but working).

Yet another source is the various tech-schools out there, they have old surplus equipment too, one of my friends also got a serious stash of scopes from them, perfectly legal. You could even look up military surplus sales, they often sell truckloads of much better stuff, some people make a killing buying pallets of Scopes, analyzers, bench multimeters, solder stations and much more from the military auctions, and re-sell them for seriously high prices on eBay.

A few things you may want to know about old scopes though, is that they are FRAGILE. Scopes around 20mhz are useful for low-end digital experiments and standard old audio & CCTV repair and experimentation (enough to teach you!) A 100 mhz scope throws you into the digital era, you don't need much more than that. When you find one (beggars can't be choosers, but if you pay a little...) then you may want to check that all the knobs are okay (yes, you can lube them yourself, but check for broken plastic bits, if it breaks - stay away), Good strong CRT (no hefty burn-ins or weak display), also look for the famous LOST TRACE (this means loose parts inside, again...stay away unless you know what you're doing).

A couple of good scope probes can be as expensive as the instrument itself, you may actually want to purchase those from China, they're okay...and cheap. Test leads are the only thing I recommend people to purchase new, because they take the most beating.

...because if you truly were a "villain", you'd not want to call attention to yourself, and by asking for deletion of your "data" - you're almost certainly in the limelight of discovery.

Besides, as almost every Slashdotter knows, your data won't be completely gone, in fact - most of it will be here and there forever. WayBackMachine anyone? Not to mention the numerous dark corners of the net Google don't have any control over, have your data too.

Aaaaw...an anonymous Swede that got his feelings hurt, it won't please you to know I'm 100% Scandinavian, born and raised, white too (as if it made any difference).

I was in fact planning to move to Australia before I moved to Sweden, I moved to Sweden because they have cheap houses I could pay for in cash so I didn't have do put myself into debt for the rest of my life. But now that you mention it, Australia might be next - Australia is however a bit of a challenge to get a Visa/Green Card for. Even for a Scandinavian as myself, even pretty well educated.

In Sweden we have no minimum wage. We're said to be one of the richest countries in the world, but there is a dark underground that very few speak about, and that is about all those people who work for LESS than the US call "minimum wage". It may sound like a joke to you (especially if you read the numbers), but I can assure you - it is not. When I was new to Sweden, I had to work for LESS than minimum wage as a substitute teacher in some small city. Substitute teachers have no rights, receive only what they can negotiate (which is usually very little, and we compete with foreigners and FAS3...gov. unemployed activity candidates) for the scraps.

The same thing with burger flippers, and now also train-personnel (they're currently on STRIKE in Sweden right now, for the rights to work full-time instead of being paid by the hour and shared amongst many desperate job seekers).

This seems to be the net outcome of the society we've chosen today, to let the few have 80% of our assets, and the rest just work as slaves for the 10-20% rich elite. I must stress that I am not a socialist or communist by a long shot, but there is something wrong with a society that can't pay their workers a proper wage.

Has this study been peer reviewed yet?

Epic comment by mr. Torvalds.

Personally I think he handled those tweets with grace and excellence, however - I do miss his "F*CK YOU NVIDIA" attitude sometimes, keeping it real, sticking it to the man and all that jazz.

Here's a fun fact, I met Mr. Torvalds in a parking lot of Astoria (Oregon, US)...he was just leaving Bridgewater Bistro with (his wife?!), albeit he has never seen me before, he obviously doesn't like fanboys too much as he grabbed his (wife?!) hand and ran like mad towards his car when I tried to say HI! ... Hm...those Hollywood stars, what can I say?!

Oh wait...

You want to know what I HAVE noticed?

There is an old saying that says, treat people like you want them to treat you. This also goes for most Slashdotters I've ever read in here, we have a moderation system for a reason, it is to sift out the intelligent conversation from the lesser, and it usually works a treat.

Nerds can get angry just like a regular person of course, but my experience with nerds is that they have brain and pretty much use it, which means they usually down spew out a lot of mindless drivel, but pretty much like their code - seriously think things over before they talk. That's nerds in my world.

...most of my life, obviously - because I don't ever recall EVER seeing a geek/nerd in my circles stalking anyone, threatening a girl and never mind hitting one. I'd say they'd improve their life if they even TRIED to HIT on any woman at all.

Most of those I know are frightened at the very concept of dating, pretty socially awkward I guess, but kind and gentle caring people who wouldn't even DREAM of hurting anyone. Sure, they'll kick your mental-a** and hurt your coding feelings by pointing out the numerous bugs in your code, and flaws in your theories, and possibly sweep the floor with your ego in gaming, but no way they'd ever even lift a finger to actually hurt you.

Nerds are usually unsure of themselves, usually excellent at SOMETHING and not so much at everything else. This is usually because they have spent so much time coding and learning very complicated stuff that takes a LONG time of anyone's life, so it's bound to steal some time from the usual life that just about anyone else live, learning the ropes of networking and social skills.

I must have been living under a rock the last 30 years or so.

Making up for intellectual disabilities?

Oh boy, I better run and invest in stocks right away, if they can do that...I'm gonna get rich!

...I remember my first meeting with Slackware, it was a Linux distro that provoked any user to learn stuff from scratch, and you HAD to use the command line (bash/shell) to install it if you wanted to use it. This forced me to learn Linux. (At least some of the basics)

It also came with a Kernel compilation system + all the needed libraries and packages, so compiling to your own computer was a few commands and worked right out of the box. And then my curiosity got piqued and this drove me to go into the configuration and find out how I could optimize my kernel to fit my needs. In the beginning it was a lot of trial and error, and it looked real daunting, but after a few tries - it wasn't nearly as scary. Before you knew it, I was coding my first stuff in C++. A lot of fun, actually.

So yeah, by all means - if you guys have the time, the curiosity, do go ahead and code something, but do yourself a favor - start off easy.

Forgive me for not mentioning all the other details, like the brand of my motherboard, my graphics card (which FYI was supported, it was a professional Nvidia Quadro card and very much supported, with the proper drivers even.) We even ran it in software mode, same errors. Do you honestly thing I would be stupid enough not to try SOFTWARE RENDERING instead of Direct3D or OpenGL to test for the bugs we had for 6 months?) No offense dude, but get off my lawn.