Yet, that was the spec the GP was trying to write to: a single PDF needing to render both Chinese and Japanese, each in their own font, yet with no language tagging on any of the text. I give him credit for trying to meet the requirements, but they were crap requirements.

There was seriously a Google ad on this page for the "Power Innovator Device" (I won't link to it), which the inventor emphatically explains is NOT FREE ENERGY, but will reduce your electricity bills by at least 80%. (spoiler: it's inductive coupling with a pancake coil).

I played Cities: Skylines for a while. Some parts are cool, like setting transit routes, setting different policies for neighborhoods, or controlling downstream pollution. But it wasn't fun in the long-term, because:

1. 1) It's not challenging. Once you make it past about 10,000 people you rake in more money than you know what to do with
2. 2) City development isn't realistic. Real cities of 20,000 people don't have a network of subways and high-rise neighborhoods. Unlike real cities, sprawling cul-de-sacs are low-value because they tend to be farther from police and fire service.
3. 3) Grade schools and high schools aren't optional in real life. In Skylines, Putting in a grade school and high school raises the education level of citizens, which means they are too overqualified for industrial work. So industry basically only desires employees who didn't graduate from grade school??
4. 4) People are dumb with respect to jobs. A group of university graduates will travel to the next town to do uneducated farm labor, and it makes the farm sad but apparently the employees are fine with it

I'm glad there is competition and innovation in the simulation realm, but I didn't have the free time to play Skylines a lot.

The part where the submitter wrote that it's only 40k words. Is there a valid reason for putting "only" in that sentence? I would love to hear it.

Ignoring the bizarre analogy in your second paragraph, are you really saying that the only important thing in winning at football is "to score more points"? You disagreed with the parent. Do you disagree that "while technically true, it doesn't help anybody"?

"... the authors concluded that there was no clear evidence of a beneficial effect of supplements on all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, or cancer."

No effect on mortality is very far from "no effect on health". Vitamins may in fact be useful for some aspects of health or quality of life that aren't correlated to mortality, but their research does not address that. They really tried to oversell the importance of their research by calling it "Enough Is Enough: Stop Wasting Money on Vitamin and Mineral Supplements". And of course the media lapped that headline right up, the same way they blindly reported that Oreos are more addictive than cocaine.

...Or every news site regurgitating the sound bite that "the same chemical in yoga mats is in Subway sandwiches" (which is actually in most bread, and it's hard to find bread without it). What the heck, this is also from foodbabe? Ugh, I just went to her website and I feel gross.

Now I understand why browsing the web became impossible on my cellphone in 2014. Displaying a page is no longer about html + css. Now it's a stub page which needs a dozen more ajax calls before anything gets displayed. And good luck reading the article through the tangled mess if one of them doesn't get loaded. Oh well, it's just the current phase in the 10-year thin client sucks/thick client sucks cyclic history repeating itself.

Black Friday '14: E-commerce Pages Far Slower Than They Were in 2013 - Slashdot

She really don't like it (rock the casbah, rock the casbah)
Fundamental retardation! (rock the casbah, rock the casbah)

I still have no idea what the second line is supposed to be. But I'd rather leave it as a lifelong puzzle than to cheat and look up the lyrics.

Oh my God! Ebola hysteria is imfecting other Slashdot threads! Why are they telling us it's so hard to spread! The only sensible solution is to prevent people from posting in other discussions after being in the daily Ebola discussion thread! Shame on the Slashdot administrators for not implementing such a trivial solution that would be guaranteed to stop the spread of Ebola hysteria to unrelated discussions!

*After* their PhD, of course they know their job prospects. But as bright-eyed undergrads choosing advanced science as a career, students tend not to worry that far down the road. In theory, as students are told, you should "do what you love" and not just choose a career based solely on how much money you can make from it. It's only near the end of their PhD program that they start to realize that their assumptions of a cushy tenure-track job might not be all they imagined. Could this have been avoided before investing four years of their life toward something that may be a dead end? Who could have told them?

• Their research advisor? A career academic with limit awareness of the job market
• University Admissions? Their mission of being a "world-class" university relies on the sheer number of PhD candidates they can attract. It would be malpractice to do anything to discourage you
• The industry? The larger and more desparate the labor pool is, the better it is for them
• The media? Sure, they just did in TFA. Other than discovering something that has existed for 20 years, at least it's helpful.

This exact situation has been in existence since the early 90's when I was a grad student. It was possibly even worse. Around 1993 there were stories of 400 qualified PhDs applying for non-tenure lecture positions at community colleges. At that time, post-docs were basically a holding pattern, waiting for the chance at a job. It was made worse by a political attitude at the time that we needed STEM researchers to compete in the global economy, so the atmosphere was to go into a PhD program in pure science, and assume there will be a job at the end of it. If you got a Master's you were seen as a quitter and a failure, even though you ended up being much more marketable by avoiding overqualification.

I guess the Boston Globe forgot to interview anyone except current post-docs.

That sums up my impression of the state of airports that have adopted the machines wholesale. The machines are just scattered around, and there is no clear "line" to either check your bags or speak to a human. You just need to trace the ropes to find a gap, and hope that the line you started is the place where the lone counter person is looking for the next person to serve. If it's especially busy, there may be two people at the counter, but anyone else on staff will be wandering around to help people with machines (basically just pushing the buttons for them) or actively discouraging people from waiting on line instead of starting with the machines.

But the machines aren't flawless. I've never been able to get through the check-in for an international flight with an entire family. I make it through the initial steps of identifying myself and the flight, but when it comes to scanning the passports it will randomly reject one of them. It's likely because one of the family has a foreign passport. If that's the issue, why can't they just tell those cases to go directly to the counter? Three attempts at this is 10 minutes wasted (including for the staff watching over my shoulder telling me to try it again) that I could have spent waiting in line.

The problem isn't with the software, it's with a lack of care for the customer experience. It's as if the airline management never use an airport to realize ways in which the system is inefficient, confusing, or unpleasant. That's what think is the real reason for designing an avatar kiosk: throw money at software developers to magically solve the problem instead of understanding or addressing the real issues.

This is why murder in games as a measure of sociopathy is a red herring. The real crazies are the griefers, the ones who gain enjoyment, with no other tangible benefit, from knowing they are doing harm to real people in the form of wasted time or belittling. It's hardly limited to gaming. Look at Wikipedia. Sometimes people vandalize because they have a petty axe to grind, but other vandalism is just totally pointless, like replacing entire paragraphs with the word "penis". I would even consider some graffiti, like the Chinese teenager writing "Ding Jinhao was here" at the Luxor Temple, to be sociopathic.

Or pick the name of someone who was involved in secret IT contracts with the US government, who changed his name, and who is now paranoid about privacy.