Hey, being able to check the current temperature is useful too. I dress differently for my morning jogs depending on how chilly it is, which isn't always obvious from looking out the window.

It's a pretty cliche plot line. The rich guy pulls out and leaves a mess everywhere, while the girls he screwed are left begging for more.

Error - unable to find item: "hamberders you God ram plucking pizza ship"

It's a large WW2-era submarine the Germans used to run supplies to their attack subs.

It's also a slang version of "milk cow", but from careful reading of the parent post and its context, it's clearly the sub.

That will be news to all the civil engineers (and chemical engineers, and electrical engineers, and every other type of engineer who didn't specialize in mechanical.)

I first stumbled across Greg Egan's work about ten years ago via another slashdot poster... he writes really good hard science fiction.

My favorite is probably Diaspora. Things start off with a mass extinction event due to a nearby gamma ray burst. Things ramp up from there as the robotic and electronic survivors set out to explore the universe, in a bid to find other potential dangers and ensure survival. Their journey takes them on a grand exploration of the galaxy, simulated virtual universes, and parallel dimensions. Through it all, Egan throws in plenty of real math to make things interesting.

Because you can do anything you want when extrapolating from a single data point.

My first impression of AMP was "the thing that suddenly replaced usable links with garbage so broken I couldn't even scroll down to the body of the text I wanted to read."

Thankfully that has been fixed, but talk about a lousy first impression.

Have you actually calculated the amount of CO2 released per distance traveled for a car powered by gasoline, versus one powered by electricity from a coal plant? If so, I'd be genuinely interested in comparing notes. If not, please sit down and do a quick calculation before claiming electric cars "tend to be far more polluting."

Here's my (admittedly rough) calculation:

Gasoline:
Approximately 9.5 L/100km (average for 2015 model year)
times 2.31 kg CO2 emitted per L gasoline burned
= 21.9 kg CO2 per 100 km traveled

Electric:
17.9 kWh/100km (for the 70 kWh Tesla Model S)
divided by 80% wall charger efficiency (Tesla claims 95%, some users report 80%)
times 0.527 kg CO2 per kWh (EPA average, includes line losses)
= 11.8 kg CO2 per 100 km traveled

Mind you, we're unfairly penalizing the electric car here because we're counting transmission losses over the power grid, whereas we're only counting the emissions from the gasoline already in the tank. A fairer comparison would take into account the carbon involved with gasoline distribution, but that goes beyond something I can easily estimate.

I'll admit I'm not factoring in the environmental impact of battery manufacturing. (I suspect it isn't as bad as the anti-EV crowd claim, since lithium isn't a heavy metal.) Perhaps someone more informed than me can speak to the overall impact of manufacturing an electric versus gasoline car... I'd be interested in reading their insights.

Too bad... I remember using telnet to surreptitiously change the message displayed on the little LCD display on the office printer. "Error: out of white toner" "Insert coin to continue" "Help I'm stuck in a printer"... good times...

Earthquakes cause full moons!

I once made a list of the usual sites that distracted me from work, and black-holed them in my hosts file. At first I was amazed at how often I would reflexively attempt to visit one of those sites before remembering my self-imposed blockade.

Interestingly, I don't think it made much of a difference in my overall productivity. I find that creative output comes in waves... I have days of pure concentration and peak output, followed by lulls where I occupy myself with busywork. The blockade really only impacted the lulls, since I didn't do much browsing during productivity peaks anyway. If my productivity during the lulls improved, the gain too small to be significant, and it came with the cost of increased annoyance.

After a few months, I got rid of the blockade.

I wonder if the app would have done better with a name other than "Milk". Maybe it's just me, but the word evokes thoughts about spoilage instead of music.

I wonder what the advertisers think they'll gain if they manage to win this particular arms race. A wider audience of eager ad consumers?

Ad-block users aren't just people who don't like ads, they are the subset of the population who disliked ads enough to install a blocker. It's like when Microsoft changed the registry settings users had deliberately set to avoid the Win 10 "upgrade"... all they'll succeed in doing is angering those users.

Bypassing my ad-block won't turn me into a happy consumer of ads, but it will turn me away from that site.

You can't spell "idiotic" without IOT. Maybe I've gone prematurely old, but I have yet to come across an IoT feature or device that doesn't strike me as unnecessary, dangerous, or both.

At a minimum, who the hell thought the ability to remotely unlock the door was a good idea? (Yes, sure, I know you can construct some hypothetical scenario where such a thing is useful, but weigh that against risks inherent to such a feature.) I could maaaybe see "remotely lock the door" as a good feature, but the system had better be physically constructed in a way that it can only ever engage the lock.