"You wouldn't find people from the early days of the smartphone saying that they'd abandoned their BlackBerry, Treo or Windows Mobile or Symbian phone."

I absolutely abandoned my early Palm, I could only afford it because the guy was selling it for a loss after he too abandoned it, it ran through batteries like crazy, had limited utility, and frankly a paper notepad was vastly more useful than "Graffiti" It's a very strange assertion because we don't have the metrics of these early devices, they weren't connected like today, again a testament to their limited utility.

I admit after I tasted early android I never looked back, but today's era of wearable tech is much more comparable to 2002's Treo, sitting in a desk somewhere, likely discharged, clunky input, poor display, lacking utility, and shown to people as a novelty. Give it a few years and a few false starts before we claim it "dead".

Some desktop PCs have 8! (Quad core with HT)

A good server will be past 48 in no time. Especially with the kind of high end computing that Linux is often used for.

If it is any consolation this straw is the one that broke the RSS feed's back.

I have unsubscribe from Slashdot today due to the trend typified in your article VS the one published. (No this is not a new trend, but I'm fed up and finished with it.) See you on Reddit's Science/Linux/Everything else

Of which a University has been repeatedly shown to be public space in numerous free speech and other court battles in nearly every jurisdiction.

Also the FCC is clearly very interested in cell phone jamming, while this article does not say anything about fines to the business owners, only the jamming sellers, I think if a bunch of feds show up in your classroom and going through your receipts you might have other worries.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/texas-beauty-schools-cell-phone-jammer-leads-to-25k-fine.ars

"It just doesn't make much sense that the FBI can use this equipment, but that the local and state governments, which the Homeland Security Act has acknowledged as being an important part of combating terrorism, cannot," said Howard Melamed, chief executive of CellAntenna. "We give local police guns and other equipment to protect the public, but we can't trust them with cellular-jamming equipment? It doesn't make sense."

"Whereas the FCC prohibits the sale of radio frequency and cellular jammers to state and local police departments, the Homeland Security Act consistently and repeatedly directs the Department of Homeland Security to take whatever measures are necessary to empower local law enforcement agencies and first responders in the fight against global terrorism."

It looks like those wavers you speak of are only semi-obtainable if you are a local swat team looking to do a drug, bomb, or terrorist, bust or some sort. the waivers are certainly NOT IN ANY FUCKING WAY for professors to block their students in a public venue and are ONE HUNDRED FUCKING PERCENT ILLEGAL in that utility.

Jesus, you trust wikipedia without checking the sources they cite halfheartedly?

Yup, and that exclusive database in question is the "Promising Potential Recruits" files, expect a job offer in the mail shortly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA#LSD

I had 2GB+ of steam game updates in the past 3 days.

My last two years of logs report my home has a very stable 80gig down, 7 gig up per month habit (No torrenting)

Jesus aborts the baby Hitler/Antichrists. Turns out there are a lot of them, and if you miss just one or two in an entire century he never hears the end of it.

6 months of 100 user's squid logs to grep, 1e100 turns up nothing other than the image on this story's link, it can't be http.

We use Google for everything including our site wide mail, advertising, website Analytics, and even our DNS and Chrome is the default browser at a lot of locations, then we have the android handsets... (The owners have daughters working at Google, but hey, we aren't a Microsoft shop, and their daughters already sold them on the value of Linux for everything else, so my life is easy.)

Slashdot really has stayed still while the internet changed and matured around it, other than the absence of some memes and Y2K stories the slashdot of '99 looks much like today. (For better or worse) ...

We are the tech Luddites!

And yes "Slashdotting" is such and incredibly dated and egocentric word dating back to when our population was something to be impressed with, that day has long since passed, the few times we do "slashdot" a real server everyone gets all giddy, and I just don't have the heart to tell them that it was fine when it hit our front-page, but it just hit the front of reddit and digg.

(If you don't recall what it looked like, this is what ten years of progress on a cutting edge geek/tech site looks like http://web.archive.org/web/19991013054427/http://slashdot.org/ )

I hate iodized salt, If I need my Iodine I don't want it ruining all my carefully prepared fresh meals with a chemical taste.

(If you have never used sea salt you will find that most of the flavor we associate with "Saltiness" (The "Blah-yuck" licking the roof of your mouth) is actually iodine.)

Where can I get my iodine?

For instance, on the very rare occasions I go to a place like olive garden for lunch what are my bread (Salt&butter-sticks) sticks covered in? Do I get any iodine elsewhere?

Absolutely.

Slashdot loves this topic, people with shitty speakers, crappy equipment, tone deaf, and with no musical background, likely almost never going to hear a real live orchestra in their life loves anything that puts the audiophiles back in their places.

I used to be in the following camp, I cleaned out the earwax, now I go to orchestras and hear what I'm missing, it only took a 70 dollar investment in some Grado headphones to listen to stuff and go... This sounds really bad, it sounds really weird... (You can't see bitrates on mp3 players, so when I went home I discovered why all my Beatles sounded awful, 128kbps while most everything else is 192 or higher. I could also hear stuff I ripped back in the late ninties with compression artificats ripped at 320, just from advances in technology, the software has improved so much as well

128 to 320kbps doesn't make the vocals or big pounding bass sound better, it makes all the little background sounds and notes become something other than fuzz, it makes the vibrato sharp and crisp, it allows you to distinguish every background vocalist individualy instead of one merged unison. The 'unimportant' bits return.

1/3rd can't tell audio bitrates, *Gasp, Shock* and Half the US population doesn't believe in evolution. The majority of Americans eat predominantly con-agra and kraft chemicals for breakfast lunch and dinner and haven't tasted a fresh vegetable in years and see no problem with it. So this is proof bitrates are garbage? Hell look at the Musical Tastes of the majority of people... Of course you can't hear a difference. Just because mainstream NFL halftime hip-hop and crap-soulless-corp-rock sells better than classical music doesn't make it better music or make me value their opinion.

Hell, lets do a study, 1/3rd of people likely can't tell the difference between IE6 and recent anything else, does that mean browsers are crap? Of course not.

Audiophiles win this round, just because most people have become deaf and numb to quality doesn't mean I have to. This applies to food, knowledge, media, sweeteners, music, video, furniture, computers, operating systems, etc.

You clearly have no idea what kind of people are going to be watching this like a hawk.

Old home bound busybodies with nothing to do focusing particularly on calling the cops on the hippie degenerates and their maryjawana cigarettes and their long hair commie music while keeping a stern eye on any 'Negros' and the darned hooligans in their communities.

People with lives and more sensible moral character will be out doing better things than watching CCTV cameras and tattling on their peers, while major crimes with victims will likely already be reported, minor crimes are really all this has the potential to unearth.

Sadly from my experience with others who I encouraged to read the book, most people find the lower level of the book unsatisfying and confusing. (Deliberately so however) I don't think Douglas Adams fully blossoms until you read it twice, And I know few people who really 'got' his work, that didn't upon finishing the book start it all over again right away.

And no I didn't say people who do less critical thinking are stupider, often they are straight A college bound students.

They gloss pages, look for testable components of books, spark notes the rest, and move on to the next piece of homework in their overwhelming course loads.

Some books are meant to be consumed like a meal, then you move on, other books are meant to unfold in your mind. I think in high school many students, especially many college bound ones are still in the consume it, test it, and forget it mentality, and very few high school English teachers do much to break them of this habit which they will hopefully lose in college once they get exposed to the likes of the authors you mentioned and more, However even in high school units on Existentialism the lessons are surprisingly shallow.

Sadly the creative abstract parts of the brain needed most are the ones that Atrophy from complete disuse sometime after second grade.

Hopefully this OP teacher can use this excellent subject mater to get kids think critically again, particularly the best and brightest, its sad when you see kids running through motions just to maintain a 4.0 for a certain college, wasting a part of their life they should be free to develop.

Adams changed my world view in High-School. Fostered my fascination with Evolution and converted me from agnostic to strong atheism and made me analyze the world in new and interesting ways, His insight is perfect for (some) high school kids to read.

Sadly his humor is largely lost on kids who don't do much critical thinking, I have seen people gloss right over some of the absolute funniest lines in the books without stopping for a second. Many people look for humor in the events of a book, not the words of the book. Douglas' funniest bits were sneaked into very minor bits of exposition, not critical plot points. "The spaceships hung in the air just like bricks don't." The rest of his humor comes from knowing the proper way to deliver his lines, largely requiring at least some exposure to Monty python or other British comedy to know how to read 'Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.' Read the wrong way the humor is lost.