This is something I've never understood. Why on earth would you ever use a debit card when a credit card can be used instead? As long as you keep your account balance at zero, you have nothing to lose by using a credit card. And you gain a few legal protections against fraud; your own money generally isn't exposed.

Do debit cards have any advantages at all?

To be honest, the New York Times' tech and science reporting (and that of most major news organizations) is largely incompetent. They're able to cover the business side well, but the technological aspects are usually described vaguely and inaccurately. For the Slashdot crowd, this means that the NY Times is not a highly relevant source for "news for nerds." (It is, of course, a great news source for many other subjects.)

Umm, this should be moderated "funny," not "informative." You guys missed the joke.

The video narration is inaccurate. What you see there is not a progressive JPEG loading (they might be using progressive compression for the JPEG, but it doesn't matter).
What you're seeing is progressive refinement, which is a raytracing rendering technique that starts to show an image immediately and continuously adds detail (rather than rendering the image in full detail immediately). The light and dark splotches you initially see are a typical artifact of low-detail radiosity rendering.
More information here.

It wasn't the listing of the shared host that was the problem. It was the fact that the university's filters resolve URLs in message texts to IP addresses, and block messages based on that criterion alone, rather than merely influencing a spam score. If you get a bounced message like this, you can't even report it to an administrator on the university mail network without removing all the URLs.

Block lists are useful, but, as several people in this article's discussion pointed out, they're not accurate or granular enough to be used for deterministic blocking. And this particular usage, resolving link URLs to block messages, is illogical for many more reasons.

My university does that, too. I run a student organization site that has a university subdomain, but is hosted on a shared host. The host inexplicably got listed in the CBL several times, and that screwed up email for the organization staff, and mailing lists for hundreds of students for days at a time.

I didn't realize anyone else used this brilliant filtering scheme.

The article contains an image of a pile of chromosomes, and the caption reads

Believe it or not, X and Y chromosomes aren't the only ingredients...

You mean decrease?

Actually, on LinkedIn, there seem to be many Independent Entertainment Professionals who are 0 degrees away from Kevin Bacon. By giving yourself a creative name (e.g. "Kevin Bacon"), you can be one of them, too.

Some people have been mentioning DTV tuners with Firewire other outputs. Under the law that enabled the coupons, only RF, composite, and possibly S-Video output is allowed on subsidized converters. See #54 here.

I'm not sure to what extent you're kidding, but I've seen similar occurrences going as far back as Windows XP. At fault is generally Wake-On LAN, which can be disabled through your Ethernet adapter's driver settings.

Who or what manages to broadcast wake-up packets with the right MAC address is beyond me, but disabling WOL on the card tends to stop these mysterious reanimations.

Following in the tradition of paamayim nekudotayim (::), I'm going to propose that the name for the new operator be lokhsan achori (\).