This surely is old news.

There is an old war movie (I forgot the name) in which a bunch of people get stranded after their plane crash lands in North Africa during WW2. A few of them set out to go "somewhere" in a certain given direction, but eventually stumble onto their own plane again. One of the characters (if I recall correctly, one who did not join the expedition and who possibly is the usual German bad guy) then explains that "humans tend to walk in a wide counterclockwise circle, because their right leg is slightly stronger/longer than their left." If my memory serves me right, he even adds that good soldiers are normally trained to compensate for that.

Of course that's a movie and as such not a good reference in se, but even so: someone must have expressed that theory/suspicion/fact before, as otherwise it can't be in the move script.

No, it is not the beginning. That happened many years ago, when they first started to betray their original USP feature: just a simple textbox on a white page that searched very well and did nothing else. Add to that their massive Google Analytics privacy invasions and Google landed in my hate box a long time ago. I've basically dumped them (with the exception of maps) back when DuckDuckGo was first announced. For a while, I did still fall back on Google if I DDG didn't give me what I wanted fast enough, but over time I've just completely stopped using Google for search. The thought of maybe trying them when a search doesn't do what I want fast enough doesn't even come up anymore.

And yes, I also hate that even DDG has been adding crap extra features. Whenever they do, I disable those as well.

I did have a rarely used (i.e. secondary) Google e-mail address at one point, a couple of centuries ago. However, I dropped that as well around 2012 or so and I never looked back. I don't want them auto-reading my e-mail for their own nefarious purposes.

A news aggregator should write blurbs like a news site, and not assume every reader knows what every proper noun is. Plex, an animal husbandry fanservice anime sharing company, ...

You can stare at the full moon all night if you like, because the albedo of the moon has filtered most of the light including the UV band that naturally passes through our own atmosphere. The three mile circle illuminated by a mirror would bounce a significantly higher amount of UV than the moon's albedo. If you treat the 60ft reflector as an analog to a pinhole in a pinhole camera, the circular area on the Earth surface would be a rough projection of the image of the sun.

(1) I wonder how they calculate the UV exposure for the observer on the surface within the illumination area.

(2) I wonder if you'd be able to detect places in a coherent projection where sunspots or coronal ejections are reflected through the "pinhole" effect of this arrangement.

Are you sure you didn't start out talking about Windows?

Bloated and no longer supporting the original hardware on which it was developed. Check

If people trust Google to keep them anonymous (which I wouldn't), apartment complex reviews are gonna get a lot more spicy. As it is, you only get reviews from ex-residents and morons.

That's just under fifty 3.5" floppy discs! We're back, baby!

This company's response was reported within 24hrs of the story breaking on mass media. Slashdot: stuff that mattered last week if you're lucky.

A decade ago, TheOnion touted Apple's new laptop with a scroll clickwheel instead of a keyboard.

What megalomaniacal near-trillionaire had a whole squadron of leet hackers hoovering up federal employee records just a few short months ago? I forget. It musta been somebody with pockets 30x deeper than George Soros to tunnel into those boring databases, we should launch an investigation.

Hematite is one specific type of iron oxide. Rust is a non-technical umbrella term for all iron oxides, and the typical red ones we see in daily life are formed by contact with water and are not hematite. Hematite is a dark charcoal gray and is sometimes formed as a byproduct of iron ore processing or other heat and pressure processes in the ground, where oxygen may be present but not water.

Same here. I used to spend endless time on /., even while at work, as so much of what happened over here was somehow relevant to my job anyway. Of course, I no longer do that same job, but even if I did I still wouldn't be a daily /. visitor today. Sic transit gloria mundi, I guess, but very sweet memories nonetheless.

Downloading the floppies for Linux 0.12 at work and then almost literally running home as fast as I could to get it installed is another of those beautiful memories. Especially as it actually booted and worked. :-) I sure didn't get a lot of sleep on that first night towards killing DOS on my home box.

Just relabel bookmarks as tabs and there you go.

Its already treating them as bookmarks though.. I just wish mozilla would fix smaller things like giving a site storage size limit that actually worked and didn't just ignore it and also wouldn't churn disk as much for no reason at all.

I have an old voffee mug covered with 1970s computing aphorisms. One says, "If computers ever get too powerful, organize them into a committee. That will do them in.."

Yup, one stated reason for the RAT on documents I have seen is to extend the data collection by the FDRs by maintaining power to the sensors and canbuses.