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http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/09/17/fashion/17vows.600.jpg Adam Berger and Stephen Frank By KATHRYN SHATTUCK THEY had been close friends for years, first at college and later in New York, but now Adam Berger was baring his soul to Stephen Frank. “I have news: I don’t play on your team,” he said, adapting the line from “Seinfeld.” They had gotten to know each other as freshmen at Harvard. As college progressed, they became best friends, dated women and ultimately became suite mates. They bickered, they quibbled, they finished each other’s sentences practically before the one speaking knew what he was actually going to say. So much...

World of Warcraft is what's called an MMORPG - a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game, for you non-geeks - and like all computer games, it has its share of goobers who take the game way too seriously. This video makes fun of said goobers. Watch it at your peril - both because it contains profanity, and because if you know anyone like this, your face will hurt from laughing.

Have fun! I'm just a low-ranked nerd.

On the O'Reilly Factor just now, Schumer is spinning his crap and hilariously just called Justice Alito "slightly nerdy". I know this isn't newsworthy, but there's hypocrisy and then there's hypocrisy.

The world is moving into a new age of numbers. Partnerships between mathematicians and computer scientists are bulling into whole new domains of business and imposing the efficiencies of math. This has happened before. In past decades, the marriage of higher math and computer modeling transformed science and engineering. Quants turned finance upside down a generation ago. And data miners plucked useful nuggets from vast consumer and business databases. But just look at where the mathematicians are now. They're helping to map out advertising campaigns, they're changing the nature of research in newsrooms and in biology labs, and they're enabling...

Feature A Guy Named Craig How a schlumpy IBM refugee found you your apartment, your boyfriend, your new couch, your afternoon sex partner—and now finds himself killing your newspaper. By Philip Weiss Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, in his San Francisco apartment.(Photo credit: Robyn Twomey) The Exploder of Journalism and I have an appointment at noon at a café near the Haight in San Francisco, and he’s right on time in the Kangol hat. To be honest, he’s not much to look at: short and balding, with a little smile and round cheeks with bright-pink patches of color. Modish...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- A team of researchers at Central Missouri State University has discovered the largest known prime number, university officials said Tuesday. The researchers, led by associate dean Steven Boone and mathematics professor Curtis Cooper, are affiliated with a worldwide computing project that uses volunteers to run software that searches for an elusive set of numbers called Mersenne primes. A prime number is a positive number that is only divisible by itself and one: 2, 3, 5, 7 and so on. Mersenne primes are a special category, expressed as 2 to the "p" power minus 1, where "p"...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Researchers at a Missouri university have identified the largest known prime number, officials said Tuesday. The team at Central Missouri State University, led by associate dean Steven Boone and mathematics professor Curtis Cooper, found it in mid-December after programming 700 computers years ago. A prime number is a positive number divisible by only itself and 1 — 2, 3, 5, 7 and so on. The number that the team found is 9.1 million digits long. It is a Mersenne prime known as M30402457 — that's 2 to the 30,402,457th power minus 1. Mersenne primes are a...

Note to thread police: I am posting this in Chat. I am trying to find a way to modify the priority of a program/process that I have running as a Windows service on Windows 2000 Server. I have tried the right-click from the task manager method with no luck (access denied.) I need the priority setting to be static so I don't have to reset it every time I reboot. Some of the most knowledgable IT people I know are on FR, so that is why I am asking here.

DELAWARE, Ohio (August 30) — The star of the cult hit Napoleon Dynamite said making the film gave him the chance to "celebrate the nerd within me." Jon Heder, who plays the film's curly haired, awkward namesake, appeared with Aaron Ruell, who plays Napoleon's older brother Kip, at Ohio Wesleyan University north of Columbus Sunday. They said they could relate to the movie, which follows Idaho outcasts trying to find their place in the world. "We created Kip and Napoleon from ourselves and from people we knew and experiences we had," said Heder, 27. "It was fun to celebrate the...

A geek, by definition, is "any person considered to be different from others in a negative or bizarre way, as a teenager seen as being awkward, tall, gangling, stupid, brainy or antisocial." But really, haven't all of us felt that way at one time or another? Well, a little-known holiday is coming up this Wednesday -- "Celebrate Your Geekness" day -- and I think it's high time the geeks of the world unite in celebrating their individuality! Who says it is bad to be different? Just think of all the things we would be missing out on without the geeks...

In honor of today's premiere, here is Triumph the Insult Dog hammering people in line for the opening of Attack of the Clones. One of the funniest things I have ever seen on TV. Triumph

Ask George Lucas about his hopes for the closing instalment of Star Wars, Revenge of the Sith, and he replies that he expects it to fail. In an interview with TIME magazine, Lucas says that like everyone who makes movies, he is "always convinced the next one will be a flop". "So right now I’m thinking it probably won’t make any money and will be considered a failure." But in spite of his fears, he concedes he is very satisfied with the final product. "I think it turned out as well as I could have hoped, and at the same...

Seven weeks before its release, ``Star Wars'' fanatics started lining up outside Grauman's Chinese Theater for the sixth installment of the popular George Lucas movie series. The vigil began Saturday. But there's a problem: ``Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith'' won't be showing at the Hollywood landmark when the movie is released May 19. The studio, 20th Century Fox, opted instead to open the film a mile away at the ArcLight theater.

Decades ago, it was physicist Enrico Fermi who pondered the issue of extraterrestrial civilizations with fellow theorists over lunch, generating the famous quip: "Where are they?" That question later became central to debates about the cosmological census count of other star folk and possible extraterrestrial (ET) visitors from afar. Fermi’s brooding on the topic was later labeled "Fermi’s paradox". It is a well-traveled tale from the 1950’s when the scientist broached the subject in discussions with colleagues in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Thoughts regarding the probability of earthlike planets, the rise of highly advanced civilizations "out there", and interstellar travel...

With the US Presidential Election coming up, we've had a lot of story submissions that we would like to post, but they don't fit very well on the Slashdot main page. To address this, we'll be running special political coverage between now and the election in our new Politics subsection of Slashdot. Please submit stories directly to the section for consideration. As with all sections on Slashdot, there will be stories available within that section that don't get posted to the main page, so please visit the section if you are interested in more coverage. We'll do our best to...

When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards." We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being...

<p>We're glad to see, given all the talk this week about gay "marriages," that real men are back in Washington.</p> <p>The September 2003 issue of the American Enterprise is all about men; the return of the manly politician, how Democrat and Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill are different breeds, what women want from men, manly art, the hunting male, why maleness is back in fashion, how feminism has undermined masculinity and what President Bush, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Dick Cheney all have in common.</p>

<p>"Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" will be released on July 2, shortly after "The Hulk," which hits theaters on Friday.</p> <p>In a just world, the movies would be judged not by gross receipts but by the strength of their characters. Literally.</p>

Nobody Knows Details On Michael Moore’s New Film!! Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab. Michael Moore is fearless. If I was pissing people off with the same power and resources as he is right this moment, then I’d be worried sick about what might happen. Not him, though.