Okay, so we make a book. The physical cost of the book (your college chemistry book) was $3.65. Once you included in the author, the editor, salesperson's salary, MY salary in IT, etc, it was $45. We sold it to the bookstores for that, then they sold it for $65. Which means that we could theoretically sell it for $42. Not a huge saving... except when you include that middleman charging $20 more.

Whoa, a college chemistry book for only $65? Mine are closer to twice that.

In other words. Plug-ins suck. Build a browser useful enough that it doesn't require plugins.

Sorry to be a fanboy, but it sounds like you're looking for Opera.

Really? I can think of many things that an average slashdotter would be better at than an average member of the public, but I don't see how having a good sense of direction would be related to liking to read technology news. I would guess that slashdot is neither much higher nor much lower on that scale than the average public.

I am saying nothing about the average slashdotter's perception of him- or herself, which is what this poll is actually about. I myself voted for "Poor" - I get disoriented after making about two turns if the roads aren't perfectly straight on a grid (and sometimes even then) and barely know my way around the city I've lived in for 20 years.

I don't know if this was on purpose, but I'm tempted to buy that Pentium I just because it costs $13.37.

Oddly enough, for 58.443 (which someone quoted below as the "accepted" value), Wolfram Alpha returns 20-22M~~58.4464210, where M is "the" Madelung constant, which, according to MathWorld, refers to the Madelung constant for NaCl.

This. It's always confused me, too.

I've been trying to learn to write italics from this website recently. Although I don't write very much, I think it's (or it can be) a beautiful form of expression.

I'm 19, by the way, and while I can write in cursive, I have to think about it, while with printing I don't, so I tend to print almost everywhere. I'm trying to get to the same point with italics.

Ah, but technically that was only "a couple" thousand, not "several" thousand, so you could easily get your $5000!

now they're in the longest que for the bar but don't want to switch because while they would get served sooner, they'd have to accept they just wasted 5minutes in that que.

Qué?

Well, it's admittedly a little more difficult than that to get yaourt installed initially, since it's not in the default repos, but it basically consists of either (a) adding a repository or (b) downloading some files and running makepkg.

I'm pretty sure he meant "factoring large semiprimes".

...unless he uses the good practice of using a different password on every site. I have saved passwords for between 75 and 100 sites, almost all different. Many of these sites I visit rarely, so when I do go to them, it's nice to be able to just hit Ctrl+Enter and be logged in instead of trying to remember or recover the password.

I thought I remembered reading about a multi-qubit quantum computer that implemented Shor's algorithm for a small input?

It appears that Wikipedia says it was 15 = 3×5. That page says they used photonic qubits - as opposed to the aluminum qubits here, I guess. Can anyone enlighten me as to why these are better, or why this is a big deal? It seems that these decay just as quickly as the photonic ones.

Nope.

From their download page (linked to in the summary), in red type,

[ Warning ]
After this firmware update your Panasonic Digital Camera cannot be operated by 3rd party batteries (non genuine Panasonic batteries).

Ford Motor Co., the only U.S. automaker not receiving emergency federal loans,