...but my wife caught a flu-like virus last year - around January of 2019 - where she lost both her sense of taste and smell. Neither have fully returned. Couldn't have been Covid, so it makes me wonder if there's some combination of symptoms from different viral strains coming into play here.

The air conditioner went out

There may be a time for tears, and a time for hugs, but that time cannot be in the workplace.

Sure.Talking about politics in the workplace will stop about the same time business stops demanding it be the center of all political discourse.

...companies like Comcast and AT&T will be excluded from this policy. Can't have the keepers of the internet fast lanes getting tetchy with their subjects.

So long, Rob, and thanks for all the time and energy you've spent creating this wonderful community. There are only a few sites on the web that I read religiously, and Slashdot will always hold a special place among the nearest and dearest. For me, Slashdot is a little like a common room in a dorm, or the living room where good friends can get together to discuss the topics that mean the most to them; a true geek salon of ideas and dreams. Its a rare thing you have created here, and you should be proud of your accomplishment. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Best of luck to you and Kathleen and the boys, and I here's to hoping we'll never stop hearing from you on this thing we call the Internet.

Current share prices via MSN:

Microsoft - $25.26

Google - $555.71

I don't get the feeling malware authors are going to be negatively affected in any way.

So... If both Murdoch and the Church of Scientology sue Slashdot for publishing that comment, will they next sue each other for implying that they are like each other?

And the sheer mass of stupid collected in that one courtroom would be enough to create a black hole.

But Darwin approved . . .

Your mind doesn't care about the laws of physics. It only cares about how it perceives them. While a splash screen will always increase the load time of any application, the user will perceive the application as being more responsive and faster to start than without the splash-feedback. To your imperfect, biological sensors and reasoning, that is all that matters.

The iPad is proving that people are willing to buy a limited device that doesn't run Windows and has set functionality. While on paper, I would personally prefer something like Android with an app store and additional functionality, I think there is a niche for a dedicated device.

How many of us have friends and family members who basically live out of their browser, and don't really use any other apps? How many of these friends and family members complain about updates, security, anti-virus, spyware, etc?

The niche market for this dedicated device might just be the majority of individual users.

Who the fuck said multiplayer only? Mass Effect 2 did this for single player. Charge $20 if you want the full single player campaign. (Pirates get it all free). They even put a sleazy used-game salesman on the Citadel who laughs about how the developers don't get a cent of his sales. But those files weren't on the disk, they were an additional 1GB (!) you had to download separately. They could have been on the disk, since they were available at launch. But they weren't. There were some single-player "DLC" packs that came free, recently, that were revealed to be on the disk already, when somebody noticed that this huge "DLC" pack was only a couple of KB. I don't remember the game, though.

> Google should instead build upon its already successful Android platform
> and provide a system that offers local applications.

Google doesn't want anyone to run local applications.

I'm still holding out for 1-way glass/mirrors that actually WORK AS EXPECTED.

An ex-gf's father, who is an architect, told me about this super-modern house in the town where he studied that was clad with one-way mirrors. However, after dark, the inside lights would turn them quite see-through. Favourite hang-out for students was by the bedroom wall, no x-ray glasses needed.

I'd like to see these tests run around 6pm, not at 3am, which is the typical time of day when a genius such as this would be performing such diabolical experiments.