What?? That "crusty old relic" is the backbone of almost every GUI ever. The "command line" is just a convenient wrapper around the system() and exec() calls that programs use no matter what kind of interface they have. This is stupid. I can't believe I'm reading this stupid stupid. How can stupid so stupidly stupid the stupid stupid??

I wouldn't mind the prices if overall capacity was improving. Without the floods, and taking actual prices to be relative, I'd have expected the best price-per-gig to be 3-4TB by now. Last I checked a couple weeks ago, the best $/GB was either 1.5 or 2 depending on how much you're willing to skimp on quality, seek time, sata rate, or warrantee. This is slightly backwards from where things were in Oct 2011. I don't know how much of this is a normal bump in Moore's law or an actual slow-down of R&D due to floods, mergers or something else.

I'd hoped to rebuild a RAID by now, but it can probably wait til 2013. Sad that these floods have impacted our technological progress, and shame on price-fixing greedy corporate shills, but personally, I choose to be humbled that my hard drive woes are nothing compared to the displacement faced by people under the Thai floods. My life could be a lot worse.

The point is that libertarians who have completely reasonable analyses of government intrusion in their lives - given that they are wealthy enough to avoid all other kinds - are very shitty at linking this to the myriad "private" forms of intrusion faced by poor folks. If you're going to fight for privacy, fight for everyone, not just those who can afford it.

All this in defense of Anonymous Coward's comment, but not to sidetrack further. Now back to our regularly scheduled neckbearding.

And you're posting to /. from your "old simple Nokia" now? If you pay separately for internet through DSL, broadband or dial-up, or even have reliable access through school or work, I am not talking about you.

In the myopic libertarian fantasy world that comes from being rich, yes. But many ppls' only access to telecom is their Android phones, as that is by far the most economical way to get phone + internet in one bill.

I suppose you'd be telling 19C midwestern farmers to just sell their crops by carrier pigeon because "the railroads are a private company".

Too fat to understand the principles of strong encryption? Are you kidding me??? You must be new to the industry.

DNSSEC implementation has been dismal so far, so it's great that people are agreeing to progress, but there's relatively little that ISPs can do, other than upgrading their caching nameservers. Most of the bottleneck is client software and zone administrators.

Except TFA says the new TOS forbids automated scripts, too!

This project shows off a front-end, but what we need to think about is the back-end.

Step 1) We need a standardized format and data structure for referring to events on this scale - IMO the best way is to extend unix timestamps to 64 bits, which would encompass many times the full age of the universe. Most of human history would be negative numbers, but oh well.

Step 2) Write software that can accurately translate between this and conventional time expressions - anything from calendrical expressions to radiometric dating ranges should be usable. A lot of serious thought needs to go into this stage, as you run up against fundamental questions of what time and time spans even mean, given a spherical earth, relativity and the uneven historical progression of precise measurement. It would probably also mean forking the tz/zoneinfo database and extending its scope backwards before 1970, which is a formidable research job in itself. But worth it to get to:

Step 3) Write a Wikimedia extension where articles can be "chronotagged". From there you'll essentially see the full timeline of the universe be crowdsourced, and the data pool becomes a more important asset than the front-end. Then anybody could write cool ways of interacting with the data, whether you prefer HTML5 megapixel images, or something else.

No ... quite the opposite. Why do you think "corporate donations" are such a big issue? Really now.

You'd be surprised how much software from all business models is written by queer folk! Microsoft actually lobbies the state of Washington for gender-neutral marriage so that they can poach more gay programmers. Google does the same. Your OS, browser and phone were probably designed by fagets. The field of computer science was founded by Alan Turing, an internationally infamous faget. Face it dude, queers are too smart and useful, you'll never get rid of us.

Well that was a very disorganized, poorly paced retelling of what was probably an interesting talk.

Any 3.5 SATA that fits in a standard ATX case with a standard ATX mobo.

Time passing is narrative enough. Wii is crusty, people are ready for something new. Especially gamers who are often young, for whom 6 years is an eternity. But I'm personally looking forward to Wii-U because then original Wii will be cheaper and I can finally afford to play Mario Galaxy :P

So what was the exact document? Can the police post a link + md5sum? I need to know so I can make sure I don't download it myself.