Best Before date for Slashdot?

I get my news from Slashdot and powersauce bars.

Hmmm.. Deng Xiaoping died.

This is true

The last time CO2 levels were at 400ppm was a very long time ago, way before neanderthals, at the time of homo erectus. Maybe it's not unreasonable to worry.

It's also closing in on the off-planet driving record. However, the current record was set by Lunokhod 2 on the Moon and isn't known very exactly.

I was trying to program in FOCAL at a dumb terminal hanging off a PDP mini when I was an undergraduate. Suddenly my screen had muchísimo scrolling text and the other people there had nada. Oops!

I disagree. In the first two weeks of April I've tracked 125 miles (200km) of cycling, running, and walking. I've used the calendar a few times to tell me where the next meeting is. I've read some pages from an ebook while traveling by train. I've taken 16 photos. I've even received four phone calls in that time. I could carry around specialized devices for all these functions, but it's much easier to carry a smartphone.

I don't think we'll get bored, and if something even more amazing comes along, then great!

The "next space shuttle" may take a while, but there have certainly been guns in space.

Also librivox.org has some good French content. "Ezwa" has a great reading voice and does many of the chapters in this book - http://librivox.org/le-tour-du-monde-en-quatre-vingts-jours-by-jules-verne/

Many thanks to Project Gutenberg and their volunteers. There is a lot of great public domain material out there, and I've especially enjoyed Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Trollope. Also Jules Verne's work is pretty good for French learners.

I think you are a little out of date:

• The Times counting people
• New Scientist counting years
• The Daily Telegraph counting YouTube viewers

The Economist Pocket Style Book recommended 10^9 for "billion" back in 1986.

Many Slashdotters seem to underestimate the importance of support and community. There are posts that criticize the CPU or memory of Arduino and Pi, but what you're getting with these is a lot of help with doing things. For me it's great using an Arduino/Pi combination just to get a nice graph of light level and temperature in my apartment when I'm traveling.

When I get some more stuff working I'll be able to sing "1, 2, 3, 4, 5.. sensors working overtime" <g>.

There may be some fun 10 meter long ice blades ("penitentes") on the surface of Europa that would be amazing to see close up (though maybe not so great to land on). Dr Hobley: "We are expecting a band around the equator where it is spiky."

It's down to what is possible in the next few years. 100G was originally implemented as 4 lanes of 25Gbit/s, which was challenging on the electronics side. There is also now a cheaper technology with 10 lanes of 10Gbit/s. To get further you need both more parallelism and higher speed serialization-deserialization. However, increasing either of these numbers comes with a cost. 400G looks possible with 16 lanes of 25Gbit/s, but an increase to 25 x 40Gbit/s would be very difficult indeed. Here's a link to a NANOG presentation - http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog52/abstracts.php?pt=MTc2MSZuYW5vZzUy&nm=nanog52

If most of the power lies with the active miners, then perhaps there will be a temptation to change the protocol to increase the production rate. The people sitting on huge stacks of previously mined bitcoins don't seem to be have much control over the current mining/validation.