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.

Maybe it's as simple as Jobs' advice to Cook: "I never want you to ask what I would have done. Just do what's right."

Or maybe it's a cheap way to buy out an antagonist, let him spin his wheels in a harm-free zone for a couple years, and do what Apple does with less angst.

You have clearly confused a "computer" with a "corporate media consumption box". Keep buying and soon that's all you'll be able to buy.

You seem to have ceded the entire media world, consumption and production, to the realm of commercial computing. Keep reminiscing in your sftp/emacs/netscape/troff/latex glory days of old, while the rest of the pragmatic computing world breaks new ground together: some commercial, and some fully open.

Was just going to comment on this.

The moon has days and nights, just like the Earth. Also, the rotation of the moon just about exactly matches the revolution around the Earth, so we constantly see the same "side" of the moon's surface.

I think the inaccurate term "dark side of the moon" to refer to the side we don't see originally came from the idea of radio darkness (no contact possible directly from Earth), but it's a persistent phrase even after people know the difference.

[Dr McAfee has] a determination to see justice done: Dr. McAfee has offered an award of $25,000BZ (about $12,500USD) for information leading to the capture and arrest of the murderer of his neighbor

That line reminded me an awful lot like:

Lawyers for O.J. Simpson yesterday announced a $500,000 reward for information leading to the "real killer or killers" and filed a motion accusing police of ignoring evidence that points to other possible suspects.

And yet, the IRS has abdicated its obligation to investigate religious organizations that get involved in political endorsements and attacks. Think of all the juicy tax money that could be flowing from the main street hatemongers' castles.

Obviously, lots of testing is going on, and will continue to go on. They use a methodology a lot more reasonable than your "I need to test-drive it" sensibilities, but yes, you'll be able to test drive before you buy your own autocar.

Walk into any Wal*Mart, Tesco, or other low-end mass market department store. Look at the way they communicate, how they decide on things to buy, and how they deal with navigating the aisles. Realize that over half of the people you see in that store drove cars to get there. Rethink your position that most people were raised to be a sensible human.

In other words, remember that half of humanity is below average.

I hope the pre-recorded foghorn caller is included. I think it's offering some travel package, but since the first thing you hear is a loud lighthouse foghorn sound, I haven't listened to the pitch for the last several years. They've been attacking my office line about 3 times a year for the past decade, from different caller ID numbers.

I haven't seen the standard, but it'll likely include a handshake that's a lot like the NFC coils, perhaps even simpler. Check every 250ms with a very short low-power ping, and if there's a compliant device, start supplying higher power to the main coil for inductive charging.

Until you revise the whole way people write software, adding cores is useful to a very limited point. Today's software can be split at one core per thread, or one core per process. If you try to get two cores to work on the same thread, you just increase serial contention, not decrease it.

Even thread-happy Java is only working on maybe 3-5 threads at a time, the rest are sleeping until a device wakes it, or until a certain time has elapsed. A new compiler may be able to help a little bit, but it's just going to be creating very short-lived micro-threads when it detects those few opportunities for them.

Graphics hardware is great for many parallel cores, because it's the same tight problem with different data, endlessly repeated. Multiply these 4x4s please. Fill these pixels please. Endlessly. Same goes for encryption, and maybe a few bits of video game AI logic. Not many other software naturally fits to using many cores.

For instance, in Genesis, God describes His creating all this in terms of days. And we are told later in scripture that a day is to The LORD as thousand years, and a thousand years are as a day. I can accept that 'day', despite the Hebrew word used, may in fact be figurative.

It's so hard to get adherents to follow this line of reasoning or thought. I'm generally agnostic, but if I'm inclined to consider faith, I agree with your description above. I go a step farther, and assign the "thousand years of peace" in Revelations to be the Seventh Day, and that means that we are still IN the Sixth Day, the day of man. This makes Genesis not just a book of the beginning, but a wrapper across the whole timeline of mankind, documenting past and predicting future.

Then again, that's only on the days I am inclined to consider faith. I've recently seen more people describe their faith as "apatheism," not caring if there is a god or not.

This seems like an unrealistic expectation once you remember that nobody bothers bug fixing and optimizing before release any more when they can just promise to ship a patch at some point afterwards

FTFY

What is not stated in this "Opt Out" disclaimer: PayPal will likely move to close accounts that opted out. It might be forceful and quick, in January. It might be a slower pressure move, done more insidiously, if they wanted to avoid big bad press. But I can't imagine they will move forward for long with a bunch of people who have opted out of their ideal arrangement.

The term meme has evolved (or devolved) rapidly. The "current" use, as far as I've seen, has come to mean "an ugly square graphic of a recognizable image overlaid with some large typeface text describing bumper-sticker philosophy or a barely ironic pop culture observation."

Just think of Minecraft as a world simulation where the Planck constant is equivalent to 1 meter and 1/20 second.