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Dogs. Cats. Lawyers. Fish. Snakes.Tax inspectors. Turtles. Corpses. Birds. Pet rocks. Ghosts. Rabbits. Deer. Dead deer. Zombies. Ghouls. Goblins. Cowboybrian.

Multiselection

Walk
Run
Skate/blade/scoot/etc
Pedal bike
Motorbike / Trike / Quad
Car
Truck
Bus
Train
Cowboybrian piggyback rides

This one looks like it's popular. I'm not a gamer - can someone fill in the blanks for me? We can run it this week.

Time. I WILL outlive you.
Wit. Sharper than the sword.
Sword. You know why.
Humour. Like yo momma
Custard cream pie. Classic.
Martial arts. Heeeya!
Marital arts. *whiplash*
Physical object. Describe below.
Insult fighting. You fight like a cow
Cowboybrian. Destoyer of all ants and other tiny insects, including you!

List em in the comments! Yeehaw!

13? 14? .. 20? 21? Virgin and proud of it. Cowboybrian will do me when we marry.

I was going to chide you for leaving out 1984. Then I reread. This is a poll for what the future may be, not what the present is like. (or getting there fast! It is a novel for entertainment not a basis for your corptasic dreams. Looking at you here America)

-Fahrenheit 451
-The Jetsons
-Lost in Space
-The Omega Man
-The Terminator Universe
-I, Robot
-Futurama
-Star Trek

first!

Question - is this your own research, or cut and paste from other sites?

It's my own summary of the state of equipment and the industry... I would have linked my sources if I was copying anything from anyone. But like my first flood of submissions, this is just a copy/paste of what I wrote-up on SoylentNews a while ago. And that was actually from my journal on /. years early, but was massively updated in the move to SN, to account for new equipment on the market, other equipment disappearing, and more.

I used to be a huge shortwave radio buff but now despite big investments in antennas, there's not much out there on the shortwaves. How is the trend going the other way in OTA television?

Shortwave, and radio more generally, is a format in decline (I'm very sorry to say), thanks largely to TV, so they're struggling for content. An interesting development is some news radio stations (CBS) playing the audio portion of TV newscasts... In addition, the growth of podcasting would seem to offer lots of fresh and cheap content ripe for syndication, but I haven't seen that happening. I consider PRI.org the best radio content out there, but they don't have many AM/FM radio stations airing their content, and certainly no shortwave stations: http://www2.pri.org/ProgramStationLocator/ProgramLocator.aspx

But I digress... video isn't going anywhere, and most original content comes from the big 4 broadcasters. And content on cable networks eventually gets syndicated on OTA channels, anyhow. In fact the switch to highdef has been driving demand for more content, combined with technology like digital cameras and CGI making it far cheaper to produce, there's ever-more and more of it coming out, not less. Industry reporters are calling today the "golden age of TV," with more big celebrities moving to the small-screen, more epic mini-series style shows coming after the success of The Sopranos, as well as technology (eg. DVRs, DVDs and Streaming allowing "binge watching") pulling-in larger and dedicated audiences. Sure, there's a flood of "reality TV," "CSI" spin-offs, and horrible sitcoms, but consider the astronomical success of: Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Downton Abbey, House of Cards, Walking Dead, Homeland, The Blacklist, Scandal, Agents of SHIELD, etc. etc. There's a huge amount of big-budget content on the small screen right now. And even where it's on cable networks, much gets syndicated to OTA a few seasons later.

It's just a question of distribution, and OTA is by-far the most inexpensive for the viewer. Cable had an advantage with the poor picture quality of analog broadcasts, and its ability to carry more channels, but HDTV reversed things, and digital OTA provides you the best picture available. The ability for broadcasters to multiplex multiple sub-channels means OTA offers much more content than before, further reducing the need/demand for cable. DVRs (and cheap DVDs) additionally eliminated the need for all those cable channels that mostly just syndicated broadcast TV shows, all for far less than the $70/month cost of cable... $800/year could be an awful lot of DVD rentals or purchases.

In addition, Netflix/Hulu/YouTube/etc., are making their presence known. People wanted cheaper and "ala cart" cable for a long time. Now they can get their favorite shows on-demand for ~$8/month over the internet, and that mode of distribution compliments OTA antenna TV viewing quite nicely. Streaming fills-in the occasional viewing of what people might be missing from OTA, but being weighing heavy on their internet pipes, being late/slow to get the latest content, missing local news and sports entirely, and more, so OTA antennas are able to perfectly fill-in the gaps in streaming, without the astronomical cost of cable.

No, I "have something against people who" are prejudiced, self-righteous and feel the need to lob insults at others. It only just happens to be coming from an atheist this time around.

Guys named Scott?

This is an awesome story (great pictures, too!). Solar power seems to be worth it, depending on where you are located, I guess.

Wow, between this and Bryan's thing on electrical generation, you may have scared off every other potential journaller, who is now home quivering in fear their own contributions will be inadequate ;)

Question - is this your own research, or cut and paste from other sites? It seems like it's your own work, which is extremely impressive!

Second question - I used to be a huge shortwave radio buff but now despite big investments in antennas, there's not much out there on the shortwaves. How is the trend going the other way in OTA television? I'd have thought for sure the content wouldn't be out there. You're making me think/realize that's not true! Is it mostly foreign content?

What would you spend a billion on if:

1. You had to use it all on a single thing; a science or technology or engineering improvement not directly benefiting yourself, family members, etc. any more than any other random bystander.
2. The billion has to be enough to either make or break it, i.e. either the aims are realized or they are proven not to be viable for the near future.
3. The choice with the combined highest likelihood of success and most benefit gets the billion, i.e. a smaller likelihood of success can be outweighed by massive benefits or smaller benefits can be outweighed by near certain likelihood of success.

No, I don't have a billion :( but somebody must have xD
Considering the amount of money flowing around some country or individual (or one billion people contributing) could easily make it into an annual award.

I don't know what the list of choices should be (or how the debate will turn out) but I'd like to suggest Focus Fusion/Lawrenceville Plasma Physics as an alternative.

If you game do you... point and click RPG, MUD, FPS, MMORPG, Console (xbox, wii, playstation etc), cards (magic TG, classic card games, etc), action RPG (diablo, etc), platformer, beat em up (Mortal Kombat etc)

Ahh the memories

justtryingtofitin:)

Please :)

I stand corrected... They eventually rejected the story.

I think you accidentally line breaks

Including, of course, The Wand of Gamelon

Agreed, totally agreed. It's like the dev team has been invaded by aliens who have brought a totally different set of coding values with them, like "opacity isn't a problem" and "we love single points of failure."

I don't get it either.

That stops them from getting in, but doesn't stop them from flooding your system (and your logs) with hundreds of tries per second, right?

I'm glad there are no intruders in my apartment, but I'm also tired of them banging on the door. I need a system that paints a big "F U" on the front door and electrifies the doorknob, front walk, and maybe parts of the sidewalk :)

No really, for my front door. Although its parallel in code for my VPS would be nice, too :)

Unless it has a really useful feature or two, I'll probably keep the site on Ubuntu Trusty (a LTS release.)

A bad feeling indeed. This cursed trend of "designers" making every feature hidden and nearly unavailable has got to stop. It's as if the standard system interface for everything has become a single button reading "Click Here, Citizen". It's despicable.

The thing that really worries me is that KDE people are responsible for OwnCloud, and OwnCloud is a TERRIBLY written piece of software, barely functional, slow, and buggy as a roach motel, at least historically.

Yeah, and I'm quibbling now, but the thing is Bryan was trying to count the electrocar savings towards his solar payback. Can't count it twice. :-)

I think most EV buyers are willing to admit it's no slam dunk purely economically. Bryan did so below.

Look I'm still kind of a Linux/BSD noob, but their first link to the Systemd bugtracker is kind of compelling, no?

The single most important system management tool, basic logging, is turned binary, and SystemD developers' official response to log corruption and complete unreadability is literally "ignore it"??

This is okay with all the distros? What the frak is going on out there?

Don't forget a I am legally blind you insensitive clod option

So many options to fuel a coding session

My tablet is an iFive. Similar to Samsung tablets for half the price.

but I can't. So I won't.

It's time for the Perlers to do the same thing. Instead of extended Perl 5 for decades, it's time for Perl 7. Perl 6 is a failure, and always will be. The sooner the Perl community admits this, the sooner Perl can move into the future.

Will Pipedot be upgrading to PHP 7?

An OYO (a variant of this).

I disable password authentication entirely in favor of SSH keys. I believe that this is now the default in Ubuntu (since Trusty.) From the Ubuntu wiki:

To be as hard to guess as a normal SSH key, a password would have to contain 634 random letters and numbers.

systemd == systematic invasion. The other init systems were held to ransom because systemd kidnapped udev. This is a sane 'enough is enough' development to stop further encroachment.

Meh FreeBSD for the win

Tick all which applyWaterfallJADRADAgile ScrumCowboyFeature driven developmentDesign for testSpiralWheel and spokeRUPXP

State in comments the contexteg Apple IIe MS-DOSWindows 3Windows 95Linux varientBSD varientiMacMacUnixVaxWindows 2000/NTWindows XPWindows 7/8

As a Trisquel user for something like 4 years now I'd like to fill in some details.

Actually nouveau is doing pretty good. Having said that if you have a very new Nvidia card then you might be out of luck.

ATI/AMD card is a far worse situation, no 3D or other hardware acceleration at all and the newest cards don't work at all.

Intel GPU is smooth sailing all the way because they have free stack.

Considering the criticism of systemd I am surprised I haven't heard of something like this earlier.

Checking it out.

• FOSS Zealots
• Atheists
• Agnostics
• Christians
• Lions
• Romans
• Muslims
• Pipedot staffers
• Other religion(please specify in comments)
• The Scotts
• Victorian Gentlemen

and you can obviously flip it on the next poll day to ascertain the least trusted groups.

Hmm, i get the impression that you may have something against people who identify as atheist, that's unfortunate, and not terribly christian of you, but i'll forgive you.

Faith in the existence of a god is key to christianity, the fact that there is no evidence to base one's belief in god upon, makes it an odd belief to hold, for a rational human being. Of course humans aren't rational, and religion is probably a great coping strategy for keeping a self-aware ape sane, but that doesn't mean we have to accept it as a positive influence on science reporting.

Remember, guys, don't feed the trolls.

I'm not aware of any religion which requires "unquestioning belief". It's common for the religious to examine their beliefs, and sometimes to struggle with faith.

I guess we could say atheism requires an unhealthy excess of skepticism, ego and self-confidence, and a complete lack of humility.

That's not to say that atheists can't be perfectly good scientists, but a certain mistrust until they've proven themselves isn't actually entirely unreasonable.

These posts all appear to be in response to various crucifixions, so i'm not sure i was far wrong. Yes, of course dismissing a christian for being christian is just as, erm, well, almost as bad as dismissing an atheist for... wait, no, christianity requires an unquestioning belief in mythical beings, that's not a great baseline for a scientific mindset, sorry. That's not to say that christians can't be perfectly good scientists, but a certain mistrust until they've proven themselves isn't actually entirely unreasonable, i tend to be sceptical about untested things(and not in a "well you can't test the big bang /theory/" way).
The thing that tipped me off, to the fact that it was a christian publication was some nonsense related to cheerleaders praying and a quiz inviting me to discover whether i'm smarter than an atheist, great stuff, guys.

In the interests of openness, i'm an atheist, are any of the pipedot staff committed christians?

• Mobile computing absorbing the next generation of nerds, prompting switch from hobbyist devs producing open source, often collaboratively, for free, to producing fiercely commercial software, designed to drive ad revenue and a marketplace for google, for peanuts.
• Secureboot
• Windows 7 actually being a fairly likeable OS
• Ageing nerds giving up and buying macs and iDevices.
• Netflix and the death of principled geeks("OMG PONIES, NETFLIX COMIGN TO LINUX", "erm, guys, it relies on google shoehorning binary only DRM support into HTML5, this is horrible", "BUT PONIES!!!1, TAKE MY MONEY ALREADY!!!")
• Android(see 1)
• CowboyNeal's undercover mission to sabotage Ubuntu just as it was becoming a sane desktop and gaining popularity
• I don't like change, this is all very sad, why did slashdot have to die(it appears to be full of dudebro scum and angry misogynists, it may as well be dead at this point)?
• Software as a service, web 2.0, etc.

I realise these aren't exactly viable poll options, and could be in large part bollocks, on top of that.

Condemning a person or organization for identifying as Christian, is just as bad as condemning them for identify as atheist... CSMonitor is actually one of the most reputable sources of news out there.

Here are some +5 comments about CSMonitor on /.

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4075989&cid=44533929

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4075989&cid=44533281

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4075989&cid=44533567

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=188407&cid=15530463

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=188407&cid=15530813

I had a wtf moment when i discovered i was on a site entitled Christian Science Monitor, thanks for linking to somewhere a little more reputable, or at least less unsettling. Does christianity come up regularly around here, i imagine an article like this would have been crucified back on /.