Looking at a still photo of the XBox One screen just made me realize... it finally dawned on me where Microsoft got the idea for the start screen tiles on XBox and Windows 8.

It's the Wii. All they've done is let you have some of the boxes be bigger than the others - but it's basically the Wii's interface that Nintendo released in 2006.

Even the ads. The Wii used the boxes for the Shop to advertise stuff you could buy.

I'm a mohel you insensitive clod!

Better yet, figure out a way to send targeted individuals subliminal messages - then all you need to do is sit down next to attractive women...

One thing the article talks about is the various alert levels assigned to objects in that "pizza box" possessing a non-zero probability of collision with the ISS.

Yellow: greater than 1 in 100,000
Red: greater than 1 in 10,000
Brown: greater than 1 in 2

Crap - BUSTED!

m -- oh there it is! I was looking all over for that.

Jay-Z's app wasn't hacked at all. The story states that McAfee (the antivirus company, not the insane founder of that company) "found" an app that purports to be Jay-Z's app but does these things. It doesn't say where they found the app, nor if anyone has even been affected by this at all - it mainly seems to be a weird "Hey can we turn this whole Snowden story into a way to get our company so e attention" thing.

We rail about the Slashdot editors all the time; but come on. Shouldn't you guys at least make sure the title isn't out and out WRONG?

It makes it easier for you to recognize jokes than the default hosts file does.

It is quite funny how some people, such as the guy you're responding to, honestly seem to believe if they just wish something hard enough it'll become the truth. There also seems to be a Wikiality component involved.

I know, that sounds like the lead-in to a joke - but not this time.

In the US, anyway, Congress established quite some time ago that companies had more rights to our personal information than most of us would want them to have. So it's not surprising when we find out the NSA (or whoever) has carte blanche to our information - and also that Congress doesn't grok why we get upset about it.

Europeans ostensibly have much stronger protections in this regard; but it seems to me there's a lot of "wink, wink, nudge nudge" going on over there, and those "protections" are mainly in place so their officials can posture indignantly whenever news like this comes out. In practice I don't think there's much of a difference on either side of the Atlantic.

So what's the big deal about yet another large entity slurping our personal information? Whether they're public or private - according to the folks elected to represent us, we shouldn't be upset about it...

I realize my opinion on this isn't shared by everyone, but I have a strong suspicion ALL of the new consoles are going to have disappointing sales because gaming has largely moved on (hard-core gamers to PCs, casual gamers to Android/iOS phones and iPads). But, now, if XBox One doesn't do well, it will be seen as Ballmer's fault by many people - even if he had little to do with this particular failure.

Basically we keep looking for "green" alternatives that don't require us to be even slightly inconvenienced or to change our lifestyles at all - and it's probably not possible.

She could do what my mom did - decide to switch to a Mac.

Bug report: On my Slashdot phone, I will often receive a duplicate phone call a couple days after I receive the first one.

That's one of the most ludicrous statements I've seen on Slashdot in a long time - and that's saying something.