Another difference is that 50,000,000 people won't pay to watch eSports on any given weekend but they will for football and basketball etc.

On the subject of April Fools, does anyone else miss the days when /. had an awesome page of nothing but April Fools articles for the day?

From TFA: "Now, after years of obscurity, Fallen Astronaut is making an unexpected comeback. Four decades after van Hoeydonck’s private meeting with the Smithsonian’s director, the Smithsonian invited the artist and his most famous sculpture out into the public for an absurdly belated lecture on Dec. 12 at the National Air and Space Museum"

the AN/FSQ-7 had two parallel systems, so that one could be working while the other was down for tube replacement. One site I read stated that it had around 99% up time. Each system would also cycle the voltage slightly as it was ready for it's shift, to force premature failure in tubes that were on the borderline.

it gets even better. In the linked article it explains that Paunch sells ads that appear in the control panels for all the renters, so not only does he get income from renting the system, he he also gets the income from that ads that are popping up in your system after you rent it from him!

I'm certainly not an expert on this, but TFA says they "rent" the kit, and in a linked article it mentions administrative user panels for the people who rent the product, so it sounds as if you don't actually buy the code, but rather rent access to a system that lets you acquire and manipulate your botnet.

The case that was in the news recently about a woman who had to change her name because she was so ashamed of the pics her ex posted is a case in point here. A bit of investigation found out that the pics were selfies, of her doing things such as anal insertions. So yeah, it's hard to see how she didn't consent when she put something up her butt while naked, took the pics, and send them along to the guy.

If your first statement is true, it's hard to see why the second one would matter.

different phones have lockouts, and delays for new guesses based on wrong guesses. TFA mentions the delays, but not the data wipes. The whole thing seems a bit silly. There are easier ways to hack into most phones than brute forcing the pin with a robot.

Speaking as someone who has actually moved personal items from the northern to the southern hemisphere, depending on where you go, the single biggest threat to you property may well be theft. It can happen anywhere along the route and no one will be willing to say they received the goods intact.

Sounds like a Kindle to me ;-)

Or that wonderful scene in Annie Hall when they are in the queue at the theatre, the loudmouth ass in front of them is spouting off about his knowledge of Marshall McLuhan, and Woody Allen brings out Marshall McLuhan in person to refute the ass.

I see, you think you are cute, but you misunderstand the point of double blind. The point of doing double blind is if there is a possibility that the clinician might know which drug is the test and which is the placebo and then if that knowledge could have even an unintended effect on the subject during the course of the treatment. Since the surgical patient is usually unconscious this can't happen, but if a person were being extremely careful they could have one physician interact with the patient while they were awake (before and after the surgery) and have a separate doctor do the actually surgery (or not) but lie to the "awake" doctors so they always thought the surgery was done. You are probably right that no one has been confused enough to do something like this, for ethical reasons if nothing else, but in addition to not understanding when double blinds are appropriate, you also fail to understand a ruptured appendix. Roughly speaking, the mortality rate from having the surgery is about 1 in 1,000,000 while having no surgery after the appendix ruptures is almost a death sentence. Which pretty much makes your cuteness irrelevant.

I have to call BS on this one. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but from what you said, it sounds like that you are claiming something like: Take two people each with an acute appendix. For one, do an appendectomy, for the other, put him out, wake him up, and tell him he had an appendectomy. And the surgery is no more effective than lying to the guy. Sorry, but there is no way in hell that can be true.

except that I don't want WA to know my FB login and pswd. That's what it kept asking for, even after I logged in to my (mostly bogus) FB account and gave it permissions. Smells fishy to me.