"But I do miss getting a working machine less than 1 second after turning on the on switch."

That's totally not how I remember it. I had an Atari 130XE, On top of getting the system booted, which was long enough for me to use the washroom and get a snack, I started my first program in BASIC when I was 7 and it took me over a year to finish. All it was was an elephant standing on a ball with some beeping noises. The ball moved back and forth a bit and every ten seconds or so a speech balloon would appear and the elephant would go "Cha-Cha-Cha". I think most of it, but not all, came from one of those monthly programing magazines. I showed it to my Dad and he dashed all my dreams of becoming a poet, something about wasting talent and I was going to work with computers... Wish I'd become a poet. I like computers, but to be honest they, or the people that use them anyway, drain the life right out of me.

I have to say I already see them diverging. SN, IMHO, is much more general news it includes a lot of politics and general interest articles. |. is definitely more tech focused, and I like it that way. Problem being, there isn't really much opinion involved with straight up tech news so there's not really all that much to say about it. The few pieces I see on |. that do have some opinion involved are also posted to SN, which has a lot more off the deep end people to argue with... http://xkcd.com/386/

I noticed it because I read both after about the third article I started noticing the comments on the stories were also the same. I kind of like the idea that if I wanted to make my own personal news aggregate I could have it point to different sites, but it's probably not a great idea... I don't remember reading the experiment was going to take place, sorry if it was noted somewhere, it would probably be prudent to make it well known if something like that is going to take place in the future and not before hand you have the proper permissions.

You're right of course, but you're only as secure as the weakest link in the chain. If MS has back doors in their OS it doesn't matter how secure your online habits are, honestly it's like putting a band-aid on the end of a hacked off limb. I myself am willing to admit I'm a little jealous that Windows seems to get all the goodies first.

Not the AC above, but it was a couple weeks ago, maybe last week. There was a story about the FBI using JavaScript enabled "malware" of sorts in a child pornography sting. My understanding is they "acquired" a server of a well known distributor and kept it running for a year. The server was setup to distribute code through TOR to people that had scripts enabled, which allowed the FBI to track people over the TOR network. Anyone competent would have been surfing with scripts disabled so TOR itself wasn't cracked, it was just how people were using it that made it appear that way.

I haven't really been a MS fan for quite sometime, but I like this guy. In my opinion he's making all the right choices, stick with what you do best rather than branch out and neglect your best qualities. The surface and trying to turn windows into a toy mobile OS was a huge mistake. Get rid of the Metro interface and get it back to productivity focused rather than focused on entertainment and turning office workers into advertising targets. My office pays huge gobs of money every year for MS support ON DESKTOPS we don't need a tablet OS crammed down our throats making everyone less productive.

Here's hoping Windows 9 is better. Our higher-ups have said we will not be using windows 8 and are already starting to let people in my office switch to Linux, which is great for me and my team. But, I'm not looking forward to having to running around the building explain to people, that only know how download software from unknown sources on the web and click an icon on the desktop, why the IAmAVirus.exe they just got doesn't work on their stupid box.

As a Java programmer all I can say is we'll have to take a wait and see approach. Oracle is really trying hard to split Java into a paid for enterprise version and a crap free version that will do less than 50% of the paid version. When that starts happening I think up-and-coming developers will move to free full featured languages like python. Soon finding a Java developer will be as easy as finding a COBOL developer, which I also am.

Totally agree with this. I don't expect it won't be long before /. gets the axe too, which is why I've moved over here and to soylent. /. is pretty much just a shill posting site now, "I've used windows 8 for 10 years and it's so easy to use my unborn child is creating super HD video of THEIR OWN BIRTH with it!!!!11!!1!1111"

Also agree with the souceforge comment. I used SF for a few different projects and to find some really great software, but now it's just a big ad fest, and a deceptive one at that. I've moved over to Github, and Git is really good. I use both SVN and Git for development, each has it's place. I find Git is much better for collaborative projects with large teams where as SVN is really good for individual or small team development.

But I digress, that's what happens when community site get sold to corporate interest. Dice paid a lot of money for the brand /. had built up because they wanted to monitorize it, which means exploiting the community.

The guy is both crazy and awesome, love the energy. I'd probably be acting the same way if I had pneumatic claws I could run around just cutting stuff up with.

Wish I could assign you more than one category for moderation. It's completely true. I would have included laptops in the desktop category, although they're mobile, it's not like I can, or at least not like I would, whip out mine on the bus to check Facebook like I do with my phone. Also with a mouse and keyboard they're just as versatile as a desktop and they can be as powerful. I use mine for modeling in Blender3D.

Nice, I especially like the blockquote.

I hate typing blockquote

Pretty nifty.

Is this a from scratch solution or are you borrowing code from somewhere else?

Totally have to agree with you.

This could be great for the NFL *if* Sam gets along well in his career. If he hits any roadblocks or anyone mistreats him, because he's gay or not, it'll boil down to he's gay. I don't want to discount that there are going to be bigots and dickheads who will harass him because he's gay, but really it's not going to matter if that's the real reason or not.

By drafting him the Rams may have delayed people screaming the NFL is discriminatory, for now, but there's no doubt the first time Sam fails to preform or talks about his difficulties adjusting there's going to be ten times the commotion. That said, hopefully I'm wrong and we can take this as an all round victory.

I have to mostly agree with you on this. I have a Samsung Smart TV in my recroom, I love it, it's great with Netflix built in along with plex and other media server functionality built in. The thing that sucks the most about it though is when you're searching for something, you can't just type in what you want. You have to use the crappy remote to pick letters to spell things, which takes forever and is pron to errors. I've also had issues with my smart tv crashing and having to be unplugged to restart it.

On the other hand I have an older flat screen TV in my bedroom with an Ubuntu laptop in the closet and HDMI cable running through the wall to the TV and a wireless keyboard and mouse on my night stand. It pretty much does just as much as my Smart TV, with the added convenience of being able to play video games and use the keyboard for typing. My wife's laptop is coming up for renewal in the next year so my next TV will likely be a "dumb" TV and I'll setup her old laptop as the media center for the recroom TV. Now if I only had money for a large enough "dumb" TV. The largest disadvantage to this setup, maybe a bonus, is between my wife and I, I'm the only one who seems capable of controlling a laptop driven TV.

Taking a picture without having to reach for a camera or phone?

Very useful for a parent with a two year old that won't stand still for more than a minute. It takes me forever to get my phone out, unlocked and in camera mode when my daughter is doing something cute or is in one of those, "I'm smiling now, but in 30 seconds I'm going to have a melt down", moods.

recording a video and taking pictures would also be useful if you or someone else is being mugged/attacked, or someone merges into you on the highway, gives you the finger and drives off leaving you with a $2500 repair bill because you were somehow in their way, or if you see someone being abused by the police, or impromptu bird watching. Lots of applications for cameras, but from what I've read about the battery life of Glass you'd be hard pressed to get more than a three minute video so it's not like you can just walk around recording everything. You also still have to talk or gesture to take a photo with it and there is a light to indicate it's recording.

The problem is people aren't doing any research and just assuming the device is recording nonstop. Then giving a knee jerk, "I'm a punch you in the face", attitude without thinking about the many relevant useful reasons to use the device, that really shouldn't concern anyone else anyway. At least no more so than a person walking around with a cell phone in their hand. I'd be on the victims side pretty quick if I was at the mall and someone just out of nowhere ran up and punched some kid holding a phone. *We* don't get to decided what other people are allowed to do in a public space and run around punching people when we don't like what they're doing... that's up to law enforcement.

On the contrary, Google glass has a whole host of accessibility uses.

Think of someone who's hearing impaired. Google glass can easily be used to write captions for them so they no longer have to try and read the lips of someone who won't look at them, or if someone behind them is yelling at them for some reason. They can go to a movie and have captions for the movie displayed on the device rather than having to ware the stupid mirror glasses that see the caption device at the back of the theater, only available for some theaters and only for some movies.

Like wise the device can be used for someone who's visually impaired by describing important surrounding events, maybe like when a blind person approaches a stoplight or intersection, it can tell them if it's safe to cross or if they should stop. OCR can be used to read signs and describe the text to someone who can't read it.

There's a whole host of things this device *could* be used for, even in a non-accessibility sense. Unfortunately a few of vocal people are so concerned that someone might be filming them *in a public place* they'll probably have the device killed before it can even be used for anything to improve the vast majority of lives.

Awesome Job Bryan. It's always great when people give back to the community.

If I could give you more than one mod point for that comment I would. I couldn't agree more.

The one thing that Google's doing that's really getting under my skin is asking for my cell number. Drives me up the wall every time I log in to G-mail it was the number so if I ever get locked out of my account they can send me a text. Good in principal, but I don't trust anyone outside my immediate friends with my cell number. The last thing I want is to start getting telemarketer calls while I'm at work like the lady in the cubical next to me does. I'm sure Google would be responsible, but I'm still not going to take the chance, after all telemarketers are the reason I got rid of my land line in the first place. I'm so sick of "You've won a cruise for TWO!!" and "Hi, this is RBC calling to see if you'd like a credit card that has no limit!", especially right in the middle of dinner or right after I put my two year old to bed.

Not that I approve, but the reason I believe they linked YouTube and G+ was specifically because of the YouTube comments. Hasn't seemed to change anything, but I seem to remember reading they were hoping that if people had to use an account linked to them personally rather than anonymous posting they'd think a little harder about leaving troll comments. Too bad the generation that's leaving the majority of troll comments on YouTube is a generation that doesn't care about privacy anyway so they don't care that in 20 years they'll have a ton of public postings that any employer will fined in 5 minutes that shows what kind of person they really are.

Ultimately I see this as a good thing, I think the editor note is hinting in the right direction. Yes a catastrophic bug was found in an open source project, that's bad, but had this not been open source how long would this bug have persisted. The only reason it was found was because someone was doing a third party audit on the code, which couldn't have been done had it not been open.

I'm not above believing the OSS community has gotten a little lazy, hopefully devs in other projects will be more diligent and proactive. I think we'll all be better off because of this discovery.

the company has successfully tricked parents into thinking that through marketing.
As a parent of a two and a half year old girl I see this all the time. When I go to buy toys for my daughter I refuse to buy anything in pink, purple or pastel. The fact is though companies aren't tricking the children, they're tricking parents into thinking there is such a thing as boy vs. girl toys.

I once read a comment from a mother about how she couldn't find a kite for her daughter that didn't have some male superhero on it and she loudly complained in the store "I guess girls aren't supposed to fly kites" to which she got a standing ovation in the comment thread. I replied to her that she shouldn't be getting praise for such a stupid comment. She totally missed and awesome opportunity to spend quality time with her daughter, *build* a kite with her and teach her something about engineering and being independent and innovative. A kite is like one of the easiest things to build with a kid, I've never bought a kite before and always built them with my Dad, and I plan on building them with my daughter.

I hate to end up on a sexist rant here, but <sexistRant> I'm very much of the opinion *women* in particular are to blame for the sad state of affairs for toys. In my own family females are the ones to blame for this problem. Against my very specific instructions my sisters (one older, one younger), my mother, my step mother, my mother in-law, aunts and female cousins are the ones insisting on giving her my little ponies, barbies, kitchen sets, tea sets, babies and cutesy stuffed animals to play with. The men in my family contribute to her RESP (which is what I specifically asked people to do), or give her mega blocks, puzzles and learning games.

I've also pulled my daughter out of a couple day cares after witnessing them taking "boy" toys away from her and forcing her to play with baby dolls. If she wants to play with a baby doll instead of a tonka truck fine, but don't take the trucks away from her if she's enjoying them. And who do you think are the primary care givers at day cares? Women

I'm not saying all women are to blame for this, but certainly the ones I personally know are guilty of giving crappy "girl" toys to my daughter then turning around to complain about how girls lack the skills to be engineers because of the toys they *have* to play with, despite me protesting the kinds of toys they keep giving her. My wife is about the only women I know who doesn't fall into this trap, and I suspect it's because she knows if she did I'd disown her, or at the very least she'd have to listen to me complain about it more than I already do. </sexistRant>

You can't trust reviews. In this age too many companies hire PR firms to go around either spamming the competition or to write ridiculous, "Toy was awesome, flew my son to Mars where he got his electrical engineering degree at the age of 4 and came back to cure cancer!!!"

Unfortunately the only way to go about it is to buy it and find out for yourself or talk to someone you personally know who has it.

I like it. Very clean looking, I think it also gives this site an identity of it's own.

Actually an overly feminist friend of mine posted a story on my facebook page about how we need to stop telling our boys to "man up". Reading the article was like driving screwdrivers into my eye sockets. The whole premise was we use things like "your such a girl" as an insult thus we're implying that women are weak and a suitable insult, but instead of saying we should expect our girls to be more emotionally stable, intelligent, hard working and strong we should expect our boys to be more like our girls. That's to say we should let our boys to be emotionally vulnerable, tell them it's ok to fail and *require* someone else to help them.

Why The Men's Rights Movement Is Garbage

I'm really not ok with that. I don't understand why instead of expecting *more* from our girls we should be expecting *less* from our boys.

That's pretty much the same thing. If he touches them, even if it was just to block or restrain them, he's fighting a girl. If he runs away he's a wimp for not standing his ground. I don't know with all the gender equality if it's more acceptable in the younger generation for a boy to fight a girl than it was for my generation, but I remember a fight in junior high where I ran from a girl and was deemed a coward. It would have been an easy win for me, but I was *always* taught not to fight people smaller than me or girls. Personally I think what this boy did was right, he stood his ground and took the beating, which after seeing the video wasn't that bad. Just not fighting back was the best thing he could have done. Had they pulled a weapon on him, which I've seen happen, he'd be well within his rights to beat them to a pulp.

I live on a street behind a high school and see this exact same thing, and much worse, happen at least once a year. I have a security camera pointing to the end of my driveway because my trash had been vandalized so many times. The camera usually shows it being vandalized because someone's being pushed into it and the bags are used as projectiles.

I've seen fights between individual boys, groups of boys on one boy, individual girls, groups of girls on one other girl and, more rarely, groups of girls on one boy. When that happens it's usually a guy hanging around with his friends, smoking, playing hacky-sack, etc... and group of girls surround him, while the other guys just look on. Most of the time the guy does fights back and the fight takes less than a minute. It's almost like young girls have forgotten that boys have a physical advantage, by high school age. Maybe they're counting on that as some kind of a devious plot to get a couple bruise and have him suspended/expelled/arrested.

In some respects it funny to watch a bunch of thug girls think they can take on a boy and act tough until he starts swinging back, then they drop like flies and bawl their heads off. Unfortunately it's never funny to see the results of a serious fight. I have see a girl really badly beaten after pulled a knife on a boy. He spent a good ten minutes just kicking her in the head after she was knocked to the ground. I have a pretty good working relationship with the school administration because of the garbage issue and frequently hand over videos to them when a fight's gone too far.

I think you had good input, and I enjoyed reading your contribution. I was just trying to present an alternative view to the conclusion using the same reasoning.

You presented "anecdotal evidence", which you acknowledged as "anecdotal evidence", that vaping helped you quit and claimed you didn't understand how a study could find the opposite "I have no idea how the researchers can come up with this conclusion."

I presented "anecdotal evidence", as a way to encourage discussion, showing that vaping and smoking aren't mutually exclusive and in fact people can do both, thus supporting the study findings. In doing so I've forced you to read the same/similar thing more than once and challenged your myopic view. I apologize for being offensive.

Also mom isn't the only smoker I know, but she's the only vaper I know. I'm sure I shouldn't reiterate that vaping isn't a big thing here in Canada yet, at least not in my part of the country.

I'm certainly not going to mod that off topic.

anecdotal evidence

My mom still smokes even though she's also a vapor. That sounds really weird reading it back.

Anyway, she vaps when she's in a place that doesn't allow smoking. I don't know why or what makes her think, "Hey, no smoking here, well vaping will be perfectly ok then.", but that's what she does.

Fist time she pulled out her e-cig in my house I asked her to smoke outside and she gave me the "it's healthier" spiel, but couldn't cite any studies and, with a quick Google, I couldn't find anything compelling one way or the other, so I asked her again to do it outside. I have a two year old and a responsibility to do what I can for her health and safety. Yeah, yeah, "think of the children" and all that crap, but I'm not going to tell anyone they can't vap, just do it in a well ventilated area, preferably outside and not in my face. I finally managed to quit smoking something like eight years ago, I don't need any incentive to pick it back up or anything else that's going to cost me money I might as well be throwing in a fire place.

I'm really not looking forward to the day when I walk in to a Tim Hortons and smokers have realized "no smoking" doesn't mean "no vaping" and there's going to be fifty people sitting around blowing who knows what into the air. We all share the air weather we want to or not, don't make your habit someone elses'.

"Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe. (totally making that my sig now)

nicotine (not detectable in an 8m^3 room)

That could very well depend on the number of people vaping in the area. As I said any amount, detectable or not, is essentially forcing others in the area to participate.

My mom is a rude person, part of the reason I can't stand to be around her and why I moved back to Canada while she stayed in the states, but the point wasn't to say all smokers are rude people. The point was to say vaping is a new thing, people don't understand it yet and justifiably might not want to be exposed to it, but if people are vaping in public spaces they're exposing people to it whether they want to be or not. I feel the same way about perfume. I can't tell you the number of times I've had to get off a bus or leave a room early because someone (not exclusively women) bathed in some cheap ode 'a la toilette and is stinking up the space so bad the people around them are passing out from lack of oxygen.

As far as the article you cited, I do appreciate that, I have to take it with a grain of salt, for a couple of reasons. 1) How many studies did the tobacco industry fund to prove cigarettes were safe? They made a lot of very ridiculous claims that we now know were false. 2) I tried to traced the article back to the study, in the process I found out that Dr. Robertson the author retired in 1951, that's a long time ago, the study was published in 1947 . I'm not saying the study was invalid, but we know a lot more now than we did then and have a lot more standard practices and regulations in place than we did back then involving studies.

Maybe assertion two invalidates my assertion one because the study is so old that it couldn't have been funded by "the vaping industry", but it doesn't mean "the vaping industry" couldn't be using a faulty study to prop up or exaggerate their claims, as the tobacco industry has in the past.

We know proylene glycol is safe for *ingestion*. Water is safe for *ingestion* too, but get too much in your lungs and you drown. I don't want to make the claim one way or the other that proylene glycol, or other ingredients, are harmful or not, I just want to point out if someone doesn't want themselves to be exposed to it, then we should be respecting that. I'm in my thirties and only once have ever been in the presents of a smoke machine, my mother the chain smoker aside (BA DA CHING!!). They're great for theatrical effect, but I certainly wouldn't want one in the cubical on either side of me going all day at work, as it use to be with cigarettes if you're old enough to remember when they were still allowed on airplanes and in restaurants. I remember when I was eight and it was common to walk into a restaurant so full of blue smoke you couldn't even see where you were going, and sitting on the ten hour flight from Nova Scotia to England beside a smoker, who burned me with ashes, when I was nine.

As a side note, did you know toothpaste is actually not safe for ingestion? Florid is good for helping to strengthen the enamel on teeth, but is actually toxic in a large enough dose.

I'm a soynut. I was an early adopter for both sites and tried to help with Soylent when they started, but I couldn't get slashcode working because of the outdated mod_perl extension and gave up after a few days. I advocated scrapping slashcode and starting from scratch, but NCommander got it working and it was decided that they have it working so they'd just replace it a little at a time.

|. has a much nicer interface, way cleaner and easier to look at and way more stable. Slashcode is a mess, both code wise and the UI, they're doing a good job keeping it running for now, but I figure in the long run everyone will move over here as things over there start breaking down and they realize they just can't fix slashcode.

Soylent was the hare, Pipedot is the tortoise.

Over all I agree with that. My mom and stepfather were both chain smokers when I was growing up, I picked it up when I was 14 and smoked until I was 25-26. I tried to quit a number of times, but it was really hard when every time someone walked by me I wanted to beat them to a pulp and take their cigs. I finally quit something like 8 years ago now. Where I live there's now a lot of regulations about where you can and can't smoke, and it's awesome.

There's the occasional time where I'm walking into a restaurant and I walk by a few people puffing up, where they shouldn't be, or I'm waiting for a bus and can't stand inside the shelter on a rainy day because a smoker needs to stay dry and smoke, where they shouldn't be. Overall it's a hugely positive move, it's much easier for people to quit and fewer and fewer people smell like, as you say, ashtrays, when you're forced into a crowded space like a bus or elevator with them, making it much easier to avoid situations where I get extremely strong cravings for a cigarette because I smell them on someone.

Modern vape equipment is not only much healthier than traditional tobacco

I'd rather not read that ever again. To say it's healthier is misleading. Although it's less harmful, there are no health benefits from vaping. Nicotine isn't good for you and lungs aren't designed to filter out propylene glycol (most common ingredient) along with a lot of other things that can be contained in a vapor, so you can't say vaping is healthier. My mom tried to use the "vaping is healthier" argument with me to convince me it was ok for her to do it in my house while she was visiting. I have a 2 year old, and I don't trust my mom, so of course I looked it up. The correct phrase is "Modern vape equipment is not as harmful as traditional tobacco products, but we still don't know how harmful it is".

I live in a province in Canada where fairly recently, within the last five years, smoking has pretty much been ban in every public space. As an ex-smoker, I often joke I could still smoke on the yellow line in the middle of the road if I wanted to take it back up, but honestly we're all a lot better off. It was much easier to quit smoking when I finally didn't have at least ten people crowed around me blowing smoke in my face everywhere I went. Looking back, the most horrible thing about smoking is you force those around you to smoke as well. I was probably one of those people blowing smoke in someone's face and was the reason they found quitting so hard. It was very inconsiderate. What's more inconsiderate is although smoking is pretty much ban here, people still light up in places they aren't allowed to. Like open bus shelters or standing next to doors. So to walk into or out of the hospital, stores, restaurants or other buildings you're basically forced to walk through a thick fog of cigarette smoke.

My mom, who was visiting from the states, was the first person I've known to use an e-cig. She tried to light up in several places she knew she wouldn't get away with. We went out for sushi and she tried it, after I went to the washroom, then got in an argument with the waitress in front of my wife and two year old over being asked not to do it in the restaurant. I came back from the washroom to see my mom practically making out with a very offended waitress while trying to blow vapor into her face. I had to apologize and pay the waitress off, more than dinner cost, to not call the cops. The point of the story is to me the "it's healthier" argument sounded like, "Oh this unknown substance isn't dangerous, here let me spit it all over your face so you can see it's alright. Gee, I hope you don't have any allergies..."

Vaping isn't popular here yet, but as a kid from the 80's I still remember what it was like to go to a restaurant or fly on a plane with people smoking. It's much nicer now with all the anti-sent and no smoking policies we have and I can actually breath the air without being assaulted by something someone else wants to force on the people around them. I'm not looking forward to walking into a room filled with people vaping, who don't know if it's harmful or not, puffing god knows what all over the place. As far as I'm concerned, if you're consuming nicotine (not inherently harmful on it's own, but highly addictive) or any other potentially dangerous substance (propylene glyco) and any amount of that is being puffed into the public space for others to inhale, then you're violating other peoples rights to not consume additive/dangerous substances.

I'm glad people are moving away from cigarettes and have no problem with vaping instead as long as you're not forcing people around you to unwillingly participate.

I would still like to see a notification if/when someone replies to one of my comments, but otherwise I agree. I think this is a great replacement for slashcode, which is a horrible monster, all we're missing here is the community.

It would be nice if Bryan would put his efforts up on Github and allow some collaboration, but it's his baby and I can't blame him if he wants to keep it to himself.

I meant to ask yesterday on Soylent, but if a system is infected is there a known solution? I haven't tested my machines at home yet and I can't really see how they might be infected, but other than just formatting them, which I might do anyway because I enjoy it, is there a way to clean infections off.

I suppose I could just Google it, but fostering discussion and all that.

Yeah, I had the HTC Desire Z with the flip-out keyboard and thought it was the greatest thing. Then when I was thinking of getting my next phone, 3 years after that, there were no more physical keyboards for Android phones, only touch screen. I was worried until I stumbled on the Note II with the stylus. It can be a bit quirky because I have pretty messy handwriting, but 90% of the time it works great and it's light years better than typing on a touch, which is still an option on the Note II. I hope there's something with a stylus available in two years when I'll be looking for my next phone.

I have a Note II, I was able to create a shortcut to my wife on my home screen so it's just unlock phone, click shortcut, click call. Not trying to talk you out of BB or anything, BB makes some great phones, just wanted to give you the heads up in case you didn't realize you could create a shortcut to a contact.

I'm a big fan of the stylus for my Note II. Writing text messages by hand beats typing on tiny keyboards for me any day, but if I didn't have the stylus definitely a physical keyboard is better than a touch screen keyboard.

Impressive specs, but I wouldn't touch a windows phone with a 10' pole. I give it another year and MS will be backing down and anyone holding one of those will be left in the cold wondering what to do with it. Even if they support Android apps, why wouldn't I just get a frigging Android to support Android apps! It's a losing strategy because it's not like Android phones are in short supply.

MS really screwed themselves when they had win phone 7 and dropped everyone that had already bought into their product when win 8 came out. How do you know they won't do the same when Windows 9 comes out next year? We all know it's coming, and we all know it'll be a complete back peddle on Windows 8.

Same here in Canada, eh. No problems with our health system. Get a little card when you're born, show it off if you ever need to visit a doctor or hospital. Of course you can get insurance if you want extra stuff covered like say rare diseases, or brand name drugs. Generic drugs are normally covered under the national health plan, but most brand name drugs are covered if there's no generic equivalent.

We're not in danger of losing our health care, although King Harper has mentioned creating a two teared system a couple of times. One side is public and is basically what we have now, the other side is private and anyone with money can basically jump the line and get extra care. There are good and bad points to that in theory. For example, you'd take a lot of people out of the public system, which could shorten wait times for things like hip replacements, but we all know how that would really play out. The rich would get first dibs on the best doctors, facilities and equipment. Organs would go to the private system first, because they pay more for them and anyone without money would almost certainly be without hope for anything above a paper cut.

I imagine it wouldn't be too long before we end up in a system like they have in the US, where if you don't have insurance above the standard health card you probably wouldn't be treated.

How about notifications that someone has responded to one of your comments?

Same here. I started my Com. Sci. program with nearly 400 (not all in one class of course). My university actually reserved, still does, seats for women in the program, which is a huge point of contention because they have a hard time filling them and most of the women who do join, didn't have the grades to be there in the first place and drop out after the first semester.

There were only three women, started with over a hundred, in my graduating class of 70. I'm good friends with one who went on to work for IBM Canada. Of the other two, one's a stay at home Mom, which is still admirable, but you don't need a degree to do it. And I haven't spoken to the other, but I hear through mutual friends she's apparently a hostess for a high end restaurant doing very well for herself. We all graduated at a bad time economically, after 9/11, so I kind of wonder how the rest of my class made out. I'm only still in contact with six, but we're all doing well at jobs in our field.

I'm with you, I think they actually ported their titles to OpenGL.

My impression is Valve is working hard to get other titles, eventually all of them, ported to Linux so they'll eventually work on their SteamOS. So the Translation Layer may just be a step to make it easier for publishers who might be willing to put a couple weeks, maybe a month or two, into development in order to gain a few thousand extra sales.

I've already spent way too much money on Steam games for my Ubuntu laptop, which I bought to do work on. Valve needs to stop before I go broke. That's a joke by the way.

The preview and post buttons seem to be broken for me at the moment. I'm just getting an "error invalid value". Apparently the ampersand sign for (amp)lt; to get the less than sign is causing the issue.

All I can say is that, from a user's point of view, the site was better under John.

I disagree. John had Business in mind, which I have no issue with, but it's not what the community wanted and ultimately would end in the community being treated as consumers to advertise to (as was the case with the other site that shall not be named). So on one hand he was toting the site as being "for the community", but then wanting to turn it into a profitable business venture on the other hand. I think the site is in much better hands with NCommander who was actually the one that got the slashcode working, and probably one of the very few people involved that will be able to maintain, update and add enhancements to it. The best people to run the site are the ones whos ideas and views align with the community not the people that want to make money at the communities expense.

I did read NCommanders post and it didn't come of as vindictive to me. To me it was him stating what happened and his reasoning for doing what he was doing. He's a technical person and as such his post lacked the political bullshit and dancing around you'd expect from a non-technical person, which is how I prefer my info. Give me the facts and relevant information and let me decide what's relevant. There were IRC logs and form posts to back up everything he said as factual. If you're trying to foster a community orientated site and you expect the community to be actively involved then you have to make sure the community has the information required to form opinions and make decisions.

But, again I do feel bad for John and appreciate his efforts. He did a decent job ad-hock organizing us in order to get something up and running and I think he does diverse to get something for his efforts.

The drama is because of the previous owner. He made poor technology choices, then got into it with the tech guy *HE* brought on board to get slashcode working. Then when the volunteers *HE* appointed revolted due to his lax management and poor communications he "resigned". Then he turned around and gave the site seven days to pay him $2000, double what he stated it cost him to start the project.

So a couple of points of clarification, I think he deserves the $2000 he was asking for. He took the imitative to get things rolling and risked $1000 of his own money. IMHO he made it very clear he was looking for a payout from the site right from the beginning. That being said I don't think it's fair to pin the drama on the current sites management (NCommander). The site is trying to be as transparent as possible to the community, which is something that can't be done without airing dirty laundry. I'm confident things are going to work out over there, at the very worst Soylent will have to pick a new name and get a new domain.

Based on how quickly this story was posted to |. it looks like there are some people looking for Soylent to fail. I was reading the site before noon my time, and came back from a meeting around two and it was working fine, I didn't even see the outage. So sometime in a two hour period this story popped up on |. like it was the end of Soylent.

How did the saying go? "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." - Mark Twain

BluRay was still better than the alternative, HD DVD from Microsoft. At least BluRay was a collaborative effort by a bunch of groups rather than MS just owning the whole thing.

I like that idea, we had a discussion about that somewhere in the last couple of days.

The moderate button for SN is starting to grow on me. It actually does work really well on my phone too, which is nice. I found out can read a whole page of comments and chose options, then when I've spent my points I click the moderate button to apply them all at once. I like the idea of an undo button though. Maybe I've moderated something, but after a screen refresh I see something else that's more deserving of the points. Or maybe I'm just on the line about something and decide to go Insightful instead of Informative.

It's very "Agile", LOL. Sorry, my boss is always throwing that one out there and this is probably the only time I've seen it actually used in the sense he intends it.

That is very true. I've never moderated on my phone so I hadn't thought about that.

The |. creator frequents the SN IRC channel, I remember him saying it was PHP, the JavaScript and CSS I got from a view source.

JavaScript can be ok to use, but I find people try to use to to make flashy things happen for site critical functions, which means if you have JS turned off, or if you use a screen reader, everything is broken. Moderation can be done without JS. It is on SN, but admittedly it doesn't function as well as it does on /., I like how /. automatically deducts the mod points as soon as you chose an option from the drop down rather than having to click the "moderate" button on SN and having the whole page refresh.

I agree with the /. beta thing, they could have done a lot better.