Subscriptions were added in 2002. I think the ad-free for Excellent Karma users followed, but I could be mistaken. It's been well over a decade in either case.

I remember in college, they actually did have unconnected ethernet outside of the engineering building. Of course, it hardly mattered since we were the first school in the country to have wifi. Unencrypted, open 802.11b. Oh, and the network was entirely flat and without any firewalls to the dorms. You could drive by, connect to wifi, and execute NETBIOS attacks against students in the dorms.

I'm not sure Unreal Tournament 4 is a good comparison to anything. It's stupidly fast. It may easily have the most beautiful graphics of any game I've ever played, yet plays effortlessly >60fps at 4k with a R9 390 with ultra settings. Keep in mind, too, how fast the action in this game is.

Games like Battlefield 4 and Tomb Raider on the other hand, play at 60+ fps only with slightly tweaked settings and still have occasional frame drops during moments of high action. They're really not any prettier. The Batman games do well with FPS but still stutter for reasons unknown, but seemingly related to CPU (PhysX? Texture loading?). Point is, UT4 might be in a class of its own.

By the way, one other thing I've noticed is that older games do not necessarily run much faster with beefy hardware. This surprised me. Some such as Doom3 scale well with the newer hardware, whereas games like ROTT 2013 and Serious Sam 3 don't, having worse graphics and performance than newer titles.

They've invented the acoustic coupler!

This is basically the plot of Continuum [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_(TV_series)], which is currently in its third season.

I know this is a tangent, but there is a pretty good intersection of interests here on Slashdot between science-fiction and rights of the people versus government. The show makes it interesting because the viewer is meant to basically hate both sides, plus it has time-travel.

*shrug*

Go is still the best game online. I play at KGS and IGS. (KGS has better tools, IGS is easier to find an (apropriate) opponent on short notice.)

http://pcpartpicker.com/ does exactly that!

Get off my lawn.

Nobody should intend to film in portrait mode except in rare conditions that do not apply here with phones. The reason people do it is because it is the natural way to hold the phone, not because it is the natural way to watch the video. The phone should fix their mistake by cropping the image down to landscape or square. I don't understand what you mean by "sensor space that would rarely be used". With a square sensor, the recording would ALWAYS be square regardless of portrait or landscape orientation. It might be different than what users expect, so the cropped area on the display could show application icons for various features that are often hidden in pie menus.

Even if the rest of the world did this, too many other countries (notably those part of FIVE EYES / FVEY) will simply share data back to the USA. Then, you have the problem that other countries such as China, Israel, Singapore, and Korea will simply do the same sort of surveillance as the USA is doing today. In fact, if you think those countries aren't already engaged in such activities, even if only to a smaller extent than the USA, you're living under a rock.

My employer as well as our direct competitors are looking to use what might be considered DRM to protect servers that run hypervisors for untrusted VMs.

We use SecureBoot to make protect against attacks against our unattended installation / provisioning layer. We use it to make sure binaries aren't seeded into our environment. I.E. we're using trusted computing.

Not an obvious one, but build quality would be first. With computers becoming "good enough" for most people and purposes and being viable for more and more years, I'd really like to see build-quality improve.

I see what you did there, Anonymous Coward!

I'm excited about the idea of new forum software. I feel like Google, Facebook, and Twitter have made reasonably good conversation interfaces that forum or bulletin board software could easily borrow from. Having good search facilities, an interface with lower friction (i.e fewer clicks and scrolling) and snappy performance would be a great start.

Recent improvements in web user interface frameworks such as Twitter Bootstrap would go a long way towards making a mobile friendly and easier to use forum interface. It seems strange that popular forum software doesn't use those technologies.

" I wonder if it will ever have an NNTP gateway."

I don't like when anonymous posters tack on some irrelevant piece of opinion on the end. I don't even know *who* is wondering whether it might support NNTP or why that might matter. It's like an anonymous comment trolling except that it is on the front page.

Why is this added to the article and why do the editors choose to publish it? /rant