so they invented breakfast cereal for zombies..

The world has moved on, VS Code and a bajillion other bloated IDEs exist with better GUI support and programmers can afford the computing power needed to run them. Emacs should do what it does best, i.e. serve as an easy to use and fast IDE that works the same way on both CLI and GUI. It needs to go back to competing with vi/vim. It should ship from the factory with plugins to support every possible programming language and should be quick to deploy cross-platform with all necessities installed. It should be made easier to configure and should come with good defaults that work for most people. It doesn't need any more HyperText capability than being able to display the full unicode character set. People have dedicated clients for Youtube and Tetris. It's sad to see my favorite IDE become such a joke. Stop the bloat and focus on the needs of the serious programmer. Grow up, fellas.

Standards are getting alarmingly low. Weâ(TM)re posting articles about dumb TikTok reaction videos now? Whatâ(TM)s next? Cat pictures?

I've looked at Apple's biggest secrets and there really aren't any bigger secrets in there than just good engineering and good UI design.

x86 isn't going anywhere and too much manpower has been spent perfecting compilers, interpreters and OSs on it and the superscalar/ooe/pipelining below it. The cost of implementing any new ISA, even if open source, would simply be too much compared to an equivalent x86 chip and it still wouldn't perform as well. It would become another costly walled garden. A better idea would probably be to create an open-source x86 chip, i.e. open source the microcode and all the architecture below the ISA. It could be a community designed processor, a publicly available VHDL/verilog/whatever file that anyone with a silicon wafer etching machine in their backyard could print for themselves. Cheap chinese manufacturing would make the processor easily available to everyone, and it would be plug-in replaceable for intel/amd chips. It would probably make Intel and AMD both charge less for their IP and bring prices down all around.

for every single "bug-sized robots are coming" I've read over the years, I'd probably be able to make one myself now. It's a great idea but it's been in the pipeline far too long. Calling it now, in the next 3 months we're going to see another "bug-sized robots are here" story. That's about all one can say with certainty about this invention. As long as science exists, there will always be a researcher looking for funding so they can design a bug-sized robot, only to fail at the last second when they realize they can't put a practical battery on these things.

I can say the same thing about white, black, yellow, purple or green engineers. Low-quality talent comes in all colors, shapes and sizes.

I've watched every season of the new Top Gear and about half of the old ones and always dreamt of the day when Top Gear would come to my city in India. They did, but I wasn't there, and their coverage was overwhelmingly negative. Highly disappointing. The first shot of my city is a video of someone pissing on the street. That's like introducing NYC by showing a crackhead smoking openly on the subway.

Jeremy being himself was highly inconsiderate with people's lunchboxes in Mumbai, but that wasn't offensive as such and those boxes were probably just props. The thing they did with the train was slightly offensive but really not that bad. The most offensive thing was James putting a Ganesha idol on the hood of his Rolls Royce instead of on the dashboard where it's supposed to go. It's really subtle but makes a huge difference because out here people consider idols to be an embodiment of the actual deity, and you would never tie somebody to the front of your car and race it unless you were trying to torture them. Poor James: he was really trying to be as PC and respectful of the culture as possible but it failed.

As a huge fan of the trio, I don't think they're all that offensive when they intentionally make a joke about this or that culture or demographic. Their jokes (even the offensive ones) have good entertainment value and tell it like it is. They only cross the line when they do something racist or offensive inadvertently (like that car in Argentina, or the slope joke, or the n-word slip, or the Ganesha idol), and those are the instances that they need to avoid by, say, including an actual local in their production crew.

Also, Grand Tour is a shitty name for the show. I hope they go with something else.

You can't blame them for not posting something that anyone who needs it can find through the article/google, and you can't blame them for being lazy when you yourself are too lazy to post an anchor tag around that link. I miss the /. of 1999 too, but what we have now is much better than what we had a year ago.

All the examples you gave are for computer companies and it is acceptable for them to have funny/pointless names but this does not always extend to enterprises in other sciences, especially those where real physical objects and real (sometimes public) money is involved. The problem is that at the end of the day you need to be able to sell it to grumpy old men who do not have the training/mental capacity to understand the importance of the actual science and all they can see is balance sheets and the name. Say you're on a senate floor and trying to argue for more funding for this research ship. You give a well prepared 10 minute speech on how it can benefit society, only to be shot down by a simple jab at the funny name of the ship: "While Mr. XYZ wants to spend our outstretched budget on pipe dreams and Boaty McBoat, what about the poor, hungry and disrobed on our streets?". David Attenborough goes a long way in decreasing the impact of that sentence.

Research that does not have short term results is fighting an uphill battle for funding in these times because most countries that can afford to pay for such research have unbalanced budgets and are still operating in recession mode, i.e. 0% or nearly 0% interest rates. At a time like this, it is prudent to have a name for this research vessel that can be used in all contexts even if it may come at the cost of being seen as humorless or old fashioned. You can't compare a privately funded here today gone tomorrow software company with a publicly funded research juggernaut.

That said, I do look forward to a time when all those old men are dead, people are playing super smash brothers and dubstep at retirement homes, and someone has the gall to name a space rocket Dicky McDickface.

when they start holding Saudi Arabia accountable and stop sending those Toyotas and H&K G34s to ISIS. These airstrikes on empty buildings and trollings of ISIS websites are little more than PR stunts.

There is some precedent for this in India. We have what are called minibuses which are run within cities and are owned by private bus companies as opposed to the government. These buses are about half the size of a regular city bus (Mercedes Sprinter from 70 years ago), have fewer rules and regulations, and pay huge amounts of money to lobby local cops and politicians. For passengers, they can be useful sometimes because they serve the same routes as the city buses, but are more unsafe to ride in than city buses because they get crowded as fuck. In my family, no one has ever come back from a minibus unharmed. But like most people from the lower-middle-class and up, we never ride in any public transport. For drivers on the road, minibuses are a huge nuisance because they drive fast and aggressive in order to maximize their trips, don't follow traffic rules because of said lobbying. I once saw a minibus driver purposely reverse into the car behind him in stop and go traffic.

While I agree that buses should be made to go faster and avoid stopping and waiting as much, this acceleration should be done with care so as to not end up like the anarchist minibuses of India.

where are my mod points when I need them

There's no reasonable expectation of privacy on a public bus. If you say something in a bus, you're clearly ok with the other passengers hearing it, so why not the government? Same thing with video surveillance. If anything it provides security in the DC/MD/VA area where without this surveillance it would be super unsafe on the bus/train because mugging and murder is a cottage industry in PG county and other shitty areas around DC. I understand that its a systemic problem and the government (and hence everyone) is mainly responsible for the poverty in the DC area that gives rise to the crime, but I'll still tazer the fuck out of anyone who tries to steal my overpriced tablet and I'm thankful for the protection those cameras provide me.

John von Neumann is helping Islamic terrorists from his grave. Our correspondent found out that ISIS has been using von Neumann computers to propagate terrorist propaganda over the Internet. Find out more tonight at 8... In all seriousness, though, I don't think this is Slashdot's fault. They're just reporting the story as is without filtering it, under the assumption that their readers will be able to make out what's happening right from the summary itself.