I bet you're the kind of guy that likes his email server to be called "hermes" or "isimud", instead of, you know, "mail".

A "couple decades ago" hackers chopped wood, or someone else's bugs. When "hacking" got conflated with "cracking" there were plenty of script kiddies already.

As for illiterate Hooligans manning weapons they don't understand, those have been around since cracking exists, be it of systems, or skulls (cf. Space Odyssey).

It was all goofing around, in the end, to hope for branching tubes where no Gopher would get lost. Veronica tried to help, poorly, but at least, hey, she was no Archie! Then a Mosaic of possibilities spread wide, and some cowboys tried to rein in all the cattle, Yahooing it in minuscule pens to make every stick count. That is, 'till it was clear no wall was going to dam *that* Netscaping herd, so they rather searched from a box--ExcitedLy'cos the Altavista gave them the Jeeves. But townsfolk are not so easily swayed by quick fads, so they kept fencing around their tiny pastures, trying to figure out the Keywords that would allow multi-dimensional carpeting.

Explorers came and went, carrying handy books to mark places nobody ever went on purpose. And the robots rediscovered academia: a handful of references are warmer than a Googol of matches. So the box grew referential and exponentially, but still people preferred to Stumble Upon the Wild Wide West, and corraled their most Del.icio.us recipes by hand, helping each other to stack them in the right places--and now their tiny parcel had it's own box!

It was the heyday of careful web treading, each little sliver of chaos piled up in immense haystacks witch just a pair of pitches from your ball-bearing fork.

And then, from such unfathomable heights, it all came, predictably, down. What could not be foreseen is not that no one saw it coming, but that no one saw it crash either.

The war of the box was so brief as the war of the enclosing box so all that what was left was the space in between. Some produced pretty squares that could be plastered everywhere, but as any entrepreneur knows, it's more cost effective to plaster *everyone* in the same space.

And so the new race became about herding everyone into My one Space, and in such constrained confines every Face and Book started spewing facile trivia and emotional facts, birds barking their every Pinterest and dogs Tweeting whenever they Digged their every hole, the Wide Web made a whirling of urgently unimportant fast food for thought. The Wide Web, but not the World? No. In the center of all of it, watching everything fly to pieces, the box stands, alone, proud of its monolithic certainty.

But still a few irreductibles tried to remember the golden days of yonder, to break outside the box. And failed to. So the wheel spun once more, and reinvented itself, allowing us to once more XMark the spot of the things we really Diigo, and forEver take Note... until the next spin around...

1. Dunno.
2. Diigo.
3. Dung dung dung! (profit!)

Transport? Small transactions? Way behind the times Europe.

In México, the presidency was bought with prepaid supermarket cards.

Microsoft doesn't needs to sue. _Squeezing_ is much more profitable. And if there are profits to be had, they *will* squeeze. Look at them extorting Android phone makers, squeezing almost as much juice as they are losing with their own mobile efforts, plus Xbox, plus Skype.

And if push comes to shove, unless you're the size of Samson (I mean, Goliath; no, Samsung!), you're going to crumble. How old Mono is is irrelevant; that it's always been a financial nullity, that's what matters. And as long as it remains so, it should be safe to use, sure.

Alec Baldwin did it already.

An extra head is not of much use if it's full of air. Same with muscles grown only for the "look" en vogue. There's probably a significant difference if your "third world" adventures focused in famine affected populations, but our species has survived for 200k years with more lean and mean diets, bodies and struggles.

Speaks volumes of our "civilized" "modern" selves that we have developed eating disorders unheard of during those 200k years, on one hand, and an obsessive cult of the body on the other, now that muscles don't really matter that much anymore... caring more about being a head taller, instead of, say, becoming more adept at using the head we already have.

Who cares how did we learn, what matters is how can be best done today.

I'm not too fond of the memories of long nights banging my head against the White Book--but then again, it was only a high school hobby. Still, I wish someone would've steered me towards a more friendly introduction (and language), not to programming, but to problem solving with computers, AKA Computer Science. MIT's "Introduction to Computer Science and Programming" looks like a dream come true.

1. Pirate game design ("abstract game development through cute bubbles"). Throw some antipiracy message in a special version and release it in the Bay (isn't that illegal for you? or legal for them?)
2. Make up complains by supposed pirate kiddies (probably should use worse grammar and less catchy phrases next time).
3. Spoonfeed the story until you get Slashdotted. Profit!?!?

Hard to believe a kiddie pirate (and also target audience of their game) could articulate a whole coherent paragraph, less so one full of gold PR nuggets. Also strange that you can't find the nuggets in the web other than in copies of the story.

Anonymous *is* 4Chan (there's no account system, you can write any name as you post but the default is Anonymous). Anonymous seemed to grow over 4Chan, but it's core, spirit and tactics will always belong to it. "In just for the lulz."

Correct. More specifically, he meant "you should not be searching for it in Google. Or Bing. Or DuckDuckGo. Or wherever." Things get logged everywhere, and your ISP, any intervening nodes or who knows what else could be snooping, so whether you (or Google) want it or not, you will leave a trail.

Google was probably the first major company to switch everyone to HTTPS by default, making its users much more impervious to sniffing (except local... seems WiFi won't ever be reasonably secure--and we're too lazy to drill holes in the walls anymore). But let's not allow facts and acts to get in the way of some good old fashioned out-of-context bashing.

Haha, I'm reading Slashdot and watching cat videos in my Glass during a boring meeting without anyone noticing. Try doing that with your puny handhelds!

Oh shoot, they just did... the cranial sound system works pretty good, but this could still use some form of telepathy...

It was a very long time ago, in the year two-oh-oh-oh. Humanity had just survived the Apocalypse, only to be confronted with a new one. No, not because it was the year of the Linux desktop, though that was seen as worse than the end of the world in the dark aisles of Microborg. Still, in a low level PSYOPs training facility, a group of fresh fish were dreaming past all and every doomsday, planning to create the ultimate space combat simulator, which would allow them to recruit an elite squadron to take over the world. Needless to say, the Borg didn't look at the results with good eyes, what with it being only interested in massive scale armies, so the ultimate space combat simulator was thrown down the drain... ...where it was of course picked up by the e-cophreeks, which never let a bone go by. One borg's recycle bin is another entity's best bytes, and all that. They lovingly patched up the scratches with whatever materials they had available, going as far as covering the thing in dotmeth --which they got, of course, from another trash can-- to quickly ease its pain. And so, it thrived, rooting itself in the shadows of the drain system, spawning new life forms and technologies, maintained by a hardened core of elite pilots, biding its time for the day it can finally unleash the ultimate squadron upon the world (and thanks to SpaceX and friends, that might just happen before the next Apocalypse!).

Enter Allegiance. Small but dedicated community (40-60 players in the main server most of the day), lots of teamwork, many races and tech trees give it plenty of variety, the RTS elements --perhaps inspired in Starsiege Tribes-- give it a complete new dimension, the radar system makes for very satisfactory mouse and cat encounters, games have this nice crescendo of intensity, first exploring, researching and setting the stage, then using better ships to hunt down enemy miners and cripple their economy, while defending your own, and finally launching all-out killer blows against the enemy's tech bases, with bomber runs escorted by swarms of repair scouts to buy the bomber a few more precious meters to be in firing range, the turret gunners screaming GEROOONIMO for as long as the ammo clips will last; or stealth ships coming out of nowhere and smoking a base before you can even teleport to it; or huge and clunky capital ships smashing their way through every sector, attack waves succeeding one another until one side is finally overpowered, left to limp back to their main base in their escape pods, and launch for one final, futile defense. Yes, it's old, rickety and damn hard to pick up, even if you are used to blowing up imperial destroyers in a single pass. It's also the most fun you'll ever have in space.

Just like it took Super Mario a good while to be able to fly (being able to fall without hurting yourself, that was just lazy coding mind you), online education will need some time before they realize there need not be the same constrains on a virtual classroom than on a real one. Good news is, over at Udacity they have got two feathers deadline free. I'd expect more to follow, there and at Coursera.

In the mean time, I'll make do with mushrooms and flowers.