Because while he was born in 1943 on earth, we all know his actual age - once you factor in the drugs, music, drugs, women, drugs, drugs, crashed cars, drugs, trashed hotel rooms, drugs, drug busts, drugs, and drugs - to be much close to around 500 or so. Or as Bil Maher said

Yes, I'm quite sure that is what ... oh, what was that pesky search engine called ... told me. Damnit infoseek!

Someone has manged to tag this "wtfisgenomics". Really, people? I didn't know there were that many slashdot readers who were still stuck in 1994.

They brag about the display but it is only 1920x1080. We did better than that with CRTs in that size range over a decade ago. I know I'm not the only person who has been waiting for the resolutions to finally start taking off.

Not everyone is physically capable of doing that, which could eliminate some potential thieves right away.

... costs a lot less than $280k. It barely costs 1/5th of that, and schools tend to treat PhD students as if they have all the time in the world. This company needs a better pitch line than telling us that it saves a grad student two years of work.

The analysts have been perpetually wrong on their targets for facebook. They originally forecast that it would double in value on the day of the IPO; instead as I and many others expected it lost nearly half of its value on that day. If anything one should be placing bets on the stock to lose more value as they don't have a good path to profitability and their "smart" phone (along with several other big announcements) was a massive bucket of fail.

The delays caused the investors to lose less money than they would have lost otherwise. Had things been happening at maximum speed people would have come to realize even sooner that facebook was wildly overvalued and the market correction would have driven the price even lower. Instead it only lost around half of its value on opening day.

My first exposure to programming - as well as to how to pause a program - came on the C64. I had a class in middle school that taught us "how to type" on a C64, which bored me to tears. I eventually learned that I could escape out of the typing program and go back to the C64 BASIC environment - I could go back in to the typing program but seldom had the chance to do so.

Our class was a half-hour of typing, followed by a half-hour of lunch, then another half-hour of typing. I would finish so far ahead of the typing drills on any given day that I would have extra time on my hands before lunch, so I would usually go write a trivial loop before leaving for lunch. Almost invariably I would get back after lunch to find that the teacher had reset my computer. This wasn't all bad, though, as it gave me something to do in the second half.

Sure, but our brilliant slashdot-mangled summary told us

So if someone were to click on the article and listen to it hoping to hear a Navajo expression of "droid" they would be sadly disappointed. The audio clip does give the Navajo expression for "computer" but not for "droid".

They said how to say "computer" in Navajo, but not how to say "droid". They only explained that R2D2 would be a concept along the lines of "metal thing on wheels that is alive".

So then why only question those amendments? Why not assemble a constitutional congress and reevaluate the entire thing? Congress has the power to do it, I think it is probably time they do so. That would probably settle things pretty quickly, as it would encourage the conservative southern states to team up and leave the union so that the north can prosper.

I for one don't expect that this country as we know it will last more than another 20 years. And I would much rather see it dissolved peacefully than violently.

I'm not sure why we should be so worried about lack of Wi-Fi when most of us don't have access to high speed rail, period. The only current high-speed line on the Amtrak system is on the east coast, which connects the biggest east coast cities but does nothing for anyone else. We can't really start comparing Amtrak to actual high speed rail until we start connecting more cities at speeds greater than what the average Hyundai can achieve. There is plenty of demand from passengers tired of requisite anal probes at the airports, it is time to produce a real plan and go forward. NYC->Chicago would be a great start for one.

Oddly enough I didn't notice the h->k substitution in your message, I had to go back to find it. That might mean I'm due to have my eyes checked again - once I can find an ophthalmology office that can correctly bill me, that is. Clearly, all the bullshit - complete with collections calls that never should have happened - is well worth it to live in a country free from evil, evil, socialism.

The last part of that in particular is why I keep ending up voting for democrats instead of third-party candidates. If the GOP get their way I will be unemployed, so even though I don't approve of what the democrats have actually done for most of their "action", I will keep voting for democrats to try to slow down the GOP effort to destroy my ability to work and contribute to the world.

I must confess to having not read every one of your recent chapters closely. Interesting fiction but I just haven't had much time for fiction lately.

That is, apart from the political fiction that permeates slashdot discussions.

Which is another argument for classifying Obama as another Republican - or at the very least, another conservative.

I'm not entirely sure how to distinguish between the second and third types.

Thank you for getting to that, I noticed earlier today that I was able to add someone to my friends list again. Any idea what broke it in such a peculiar way?

And while I have your ear (if you're reading this, that is), can you tell me why I never get moderator points any more? I used to get them at least once a month or so, but it has probably been two years now since I last had any points. Similarly if you could enlighten us as to why some people (apparently) receive 15 points at a time while I pretty much always received only 5, that might be interesting to hear as well.

Thank you