My iPad displays its WiFi signal strength in kilopascals, or you can change this in the settings to display millimeters of mercury.

The attractiveness of the opposite sex greatly increases by two to four beers.

There's no hard rule about using "were" after "if". For example, it's perfectly correct to say "If I was rude to you, I apologize" since you're talking about a situation that happened in the past. However, if you know you weren't rude and you wished to make a point, you could say "If I were rude to you, I would have insulted him too". There is a difference and using only "If I was..." loses that distinction. Perhaps the subtlety is lost on those who aren't familiar with it, however.

Wikipedia actually has a pretty good summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_subjunctive#Summary_of_forms

The problem with older systems is that sometimes the cost of power consumption exceeds the value provided. You might be better off consolidating the functionality of several older systems into a single low-power, more reliable modern system.

http://www.englishclub.com/grammar/verbs-subjunctive.htm

Why was your keyboard crying?

And when you get a ticket, you can pay the fine in "cynyr dollars" which conveniently uses Monopoly money as its currency.

Is that where they arrange pretty pictures of those running for office?

The grammatically correct meme is "If Taco were still around".

Having said that, I've no doubt violated Muphry's Law somewhere in this post.

That may be true, but you're changing the subject to fines which has no bearing on whether or not tracking should be implemented. He may not pay fines when pulled over by a police officer either, and that is not an argument for the elimination of police officers any more than it is an argument for the elimination of cameras. Either tracking via cameras is bad for 100% of the citizens (of which he is one) or it's not. Make that argument.

I have the same reaction when people tell me that Slashdot has "editors". Puh-leeze... they're just glorified mouse clickers.

If he's in a car, then his own camera system will be tracking his movements and he'll be subject to it as much as anyone else.

Frame dragging occurs at relativistic speeds. Were you thinking of the coriolis effect?

Another pet peeve: bring back the messages on the top of the home page. Unless there's some configurable setting I've missed right now I have to navigate to a story to see the Messages panel on the right.

I've moved on to Hacker News (different username, keeping them separate)... while it comes with its own idiosyncrasies, the generally discourse is far more civil. Trolls are very short-lived and memes/lame jokes are modded into oblivion. People being rude or uncivil are called out on it. I still come here once every week or two and browse various sections which interest me and which aren't generally covered there such as the Games section. Much of the content on HN is similar, but with a leaning towards development and startup culture. You still get various science and YRO types of stories though the balance is different. And there aren't journals or any user-to-user communication beyond replying to a post or taking it off-site.

Ultimately, though, Slashdot killed itself. I'm on OS X using Chrome, not a special setup by any means. Some journal entries don't even show up. I view them and there's nothing there. I have to use Chrome's "Inspect Element" feature to read them. Perhaps this was yet another broken-but-temporary CSS bug as I haven't been able to reproduce it lately. When viewing an individual thread, clicking anywhere on the page loads and expands parent comments successively. This even happens when I want to click on the link to the individual comment itself -- the links like (#1234567). I have to keep clicking until all parent comments are loaded before that link actually works to go to the comment itself.

Visiting the front page, I scroll to the bottom and I don't see a way of loading more comments to view further back. Wait, there's a little "Yesterday" flag. Okay, clicking that causes the page to go blank for five seconds before a bunch more articles are loaded. I scroll to the bottom of that, and that's it. There is a row of dots on the green footer with one dot in a tab, but what is that? Why did they break the (broken, but workable) date-based next page mechanism?