This article is from 2009. Why is this now hitting the front page?

It was in Taco's backlog. Now that he left, someone's going thru it, finally. And they're at 2009 already, we'll soon start seeing current news!

(Jokes apart, Thanks for so many years Rob!)

. Facebook no longer has any idea where I live, have lived, what high school I went to, what college I went to, hell I'm not even sure it knows what year I was born. I had to get rid of all of that a long time ago (although in retrospect, I'm think I would have anyway and am glad I did).

It's funny cause you think taking the information off your profile deletes it from FB servers. Odds are, they still know where you live and how often you poop.

And even if you never told them in the first place, with a large enough network of relations they can most likely infer it.

I'm surprised.

To curb the social features plague, I heartily recommend Disconnect and WidgetBlock if you're using Chrome. Can't remember their Firefox equivalents but they exist IIRC.

Also, on the client side, blocking ads clearly works (tens of avoided requests, some of which prevent rendering the page until they're complete), but some people object to that (I block by default and whitelist some sites).

On the server side, the webmaster should load the page in Chrome, then rightclick and choose "Inspect Element". Go to the Audits tab, select "Reload Page and Audit on Load", click Run, read all the advice. Also, after that, switch to the Network tab and be amazed. It's not the only tool in the world for the job, but it's already in the browser many people are already using.

As far as I know, they are. Are you using a web proxy? Because if so, unless you are also using a proxy autoconfig ("PAC") javascript file, you are implicitly delegating DNS lookups to that proxy.

Oddly enough, this is not the case with Firefox unless you explicitly tell it to. Which is done by setting network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to true in about:config.

Not if you freeze them with dry ice and hit them with a hammer...

We're not still discussing girlfriends, right?

but everything else I said was 100% wikipedia accurate.

Or it will be in about 5 minutes, hold on...

The name change and their actions make this so blatantly obvious I'm surprised we're even debating this.

$delay won't solve squat as you point out, but rounding everything down to the nearest second might alleviate some issues. "All orders between 08:13:35.000 and 08:13:35.999 are considered simultaneous and will all be recorded as 08:13:35".

With 1 second "tick" even a human player might have a chance vs computers! Cue Watson jokes.

Why is this news? None of the several hour long outage calls I've been involved with were ever on the news.

Cause it's about Linux, it's News for nerds, stuff that matters (to us, at least).

How about a Donkey Kong icon?
I mean, Ballmer's at the helm now. He throws chairs, not barrels, but everything else's pretty much spot on.

If someone with a supercomputer is trying to break your encryption, I would think you have bigger problems to worry about.

Yeah, like the energy bill for that supercomputer. Don't even get me started on the carbon credits you'll need to purchase...

no problem!

Actually that number comes with a big caveat since it started circulating a few weeks earlier, that even that mashable article, or the MS link it references, are carefully avoiding to shed light on. Those reported are 1.5 million handset sold "to carriers", or "by manufacturers" (which mostly sell to carriers, gosh).

For all we know, 90% of those 1.5 million might be still be unsold, sitting on shelves and warehouses and NOT in the hands of a customer. And that kind of carefully treading around the ambiguity is a giant, glowing, blinking warning sign..

Derailing this a little, but, speaking of JPEG: Given that the 2nd stage (Huffman coding) is not really the best the world has to offer, even with optimized tables, how come a simple alternative, simply plugging a better compressor (bzip2, lzma, you name it) hasn't surfaced ? we're talking double digit % improvement which can even be applied to preexisting JPEGs with no generation loss. Is the very idea of a different 2nd stage patented by the Stuffit people or what? (only thing a quick google found)

It'd be dead simple to implement (just combine existing pieces, pretty much) in cameras, browsers, viewers, servers (transparently serving this to those who declare in HTTP headers they understand it) and it'd yield a relevant saving in both storage and bandwidth (which isn't necessarily free / cheap when you consider cell links).

P.S.
In case someone reads this and decides to implement it, let me know, and make it F/OSS or Karma's gonna be a bitch.

Three Mile Island, where the complaint was that there were too many alarms going off.

Yeah, surprisingly alarms have to be neither missing nor useless (by being irrelevant, hard to understand, going off for the wrong reasons, presenting wrong scenario, not correlating causes etc etc etc).

Who'd have thunk it.