Editors' Picks: Top Stories of 2012

Editor's Note: As we prepare to bid farewell to 2012, we pulled together this special issue of Slashback that features the Slashdot editors' picks for the top stories of the year. We've also included a list of the year's top Most Commented-On stories as well as the Most Viewed stories. Enjoy! Happy New Year! Don't miss a single issue of Slashback. Add slashdot@newsletters.slashdot.org to your address book.  What Can You Do About SOPA and PIPA? World of Warcraft Character Becomes Campaign Issue Curiosity Lands on Mars Doctors 'Fire' Vaccine Refusers Losing the Public Debate on Global Warming At Long Last, a Private Cargo Spaceship Takes Off MIT Fusion Researchers Answer Your Questions YouTube Identifies Birdsong as Copyrighted Music Ask Steve Wozniak Anything Felix Baumgartner's Supersonic Skydive Attempt  Linus Torvalds Answers Your Questions Implant Translates Written Words to Braille, Right on the Retina Raspberry Pi Arrives, With a School Debut In Leeds Astronaut Neil Armstrong Has Died Good, Forgotten Fantasy and Science Fiction Novels? What Can You Do About SOPA and PIPA? It's rare to get a wide variety of people to agree on anything, rarer still to get them to protest is a meaningful way, but it is the rarest of all to have an immediate effect on government and lawmaking. That's what happened here. --samzenpus Read More>> World of Warcraft Character Becomes Campaign Issue With all the pressing issues of the day, calling into question someone's character selection in a game made this story seem like something for The Onion. Imagine the fallout if it were revealed that she also played games that taught you to deal with your problems by eating "power pellets" or that you could visit amazing new worlds by jumping feet-first into old pipes. --samzenpus Read More>> Curiosity Lands on Mars  In this post, we watched live as NASA triumphed once again at one of the most difficult tasks our species has undertaken: landing a sizable vehicle on another planet. The links within the summary hold enough technological and scientific brainfood to keep you occupied for quite a while. --soulskill Read More>> Doctors 'Fire' Vaccine Refusers Vaccine effectiveness rates are not all the same and the best way to ensure public health is to have everyone fully vaccinated. When I was a kid, measles, diphtheria and whooping cough were things that my grandparents had to worry about. I'd like to keep it that way. --samzenpus Read More>> Losing the Public Debate on Global Warming This story, and the contentious discussion it spurred, highlighted the widening gulf between scientific results and the political narrative that surrounds them on certain issues. The comment section contains many insights into how information on such subjects is communicated and perceived. --soulskill Read More>> At Long Last, a Private Cargo Spaceship Takes Off People have scoffed about private space flight (or pined for it) for years; SpaceX's privately financed rocket finally taking off and successfully reaching and returning from the ISS shows that it's feasible despite the hitches. --timothy Read More>> MIT Fusion Researchers Answer Your Questions In this Q&A session, not one, but six experts on fusion research sat down and provided some amazingly detailed answers to readers' questions, and did so with our readership's above-average technical knowledge in mind. --soulskill Read More>> YouTube Identifies Birdsong as Copyrighted Music I'm not sure there is a better example of the shortcomings of an automated system and the stupidity of copyright law coming together to highlight a need for reform than this story. --samzenpus Read More>> Ask Steve Wozniak Anything This year featured a bumper crop of reader-driven interviews, including this one with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak-- who also happens to be one of our most influential readers. Woz's question and answer session kicked off our 15th anniversary month. --timothy Read More>> Felix Baumgartner's Supersonic Skydive Attempt There aren't many things you can be the first to do anymore. We've climbed the mountains, swam the seas, and we've built machines that move so fast they push the limits of the human body, but nobody had skydived from 24 miles up until Felix. --samzenpus Read More>> Linus Torvalds Answers Your Questions More than two decades after the first release of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds has maintained his position at the head of the open source movement. Slashdot readers asked Linus questions, and he responded--at length and in his blunt and entertaining style. --soulskill Read More>> Implant Translates Written Words to Braille, Right on the Retina The current version of the future still lacks flying cars (at least ones for convenient purchase), but the ways in which technology has enabled people to transcend physical limitations might be a good enough trade-off for the delay. One such breakthrough this past year was a surgical implant that takes advantage of increasing miniaturization and OCR capabilities to transmit words straight to the retina of people who cannot otherwise see well enough to read. --timothy  Read More>> Raspberry Pi Arrives, With a School Debut In Leeds After long anticipation, with various technical and bureaucratic snags along the way, it was exciting to see the arrival of the Raspberry Pi. It's inspiring to see an open source-heavy, education-centric, hackable project catch on, driven by one guy's dream and the community of people he's inspired. (The hardware itself may not be totally open source, but it's at least getting better on that front.) --timothy Read More>> Astronaut Neil Armstrong Has Died Neil Armstrong's death at 91 brought out a lot of people's admiration of Armstrong and his fellow astronauts, and for NASA's success (in the 1960s, yet!) in putting humans on the moon. Armstrong lived to see spaceflight go from science fiction to a fact of modern life. Now manned flights are commonplace. --timothy Read More>> Good, Forgotten Fantasy and Science Fiction Novels?  Our readers pooled their vast, collective knowledge of science fiction to point out a bunch of great books that don't all get the attention they deserve. If you're looking for something new to read, this thread will provide you with plenty of suggestions. --soulskill Read More>> 27 Reported Killed In Connecticut Elementary School Shooting Supreme Court: Affordable Care Act Is Constitutional Bill 'The Science Guy' Nye Says Creationism Is Not Appropriate for Children 12 Dead, 50 Injured at The Dark Knight Rises Showing In Colorado To Encourage Biking, Lose the Helmets Barack Obama Retains U.S. Presidency The Mathematics of 'Legitimate Rape' and Pregnancy Don't Worry About Global Warming, Say 16 Scientists in the WSJ Ask Slashdot: What's the Most Depressing Sci-fi You've Ever Read? In America, 46% of People Hold a Creationist View of Human Origins Adam Lanza Destroyed His Computer Before Rampage How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work Scientists Say People Aren't Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish Doctors 'Fire' Vaccine Refusers Why Desktop Linux Hasn't Taken Off Activision Blizzard Secretly Watermarking World of Warcraft Users Leaked Memo Says Apple Provides Backdoor to Governments Linus Torvalds Answers Your Questions YouTube Identifies Birdsong as Copyrighted Music Software Engineering Is a Dead-End Career, Says Bloomberg The Pirate Bay Launches Free VPN The Most Important Meeting You've Never Heard of Ask Slashdot: Why Does Wireless Gear Degrade Over Time? 350-Year-Old Newton's Puzzle Solved by 16-Year-Old Facebook Abstainers Could Be Labeled Suspicious NASA: Curiosity Has Found Plastic on Mars Ask Slashdot: What's the Best Way to Deal With Roving TSA Teams? Last Day to Tell Google to Forget You F-16 Engines Stolen From Israeli Air Base New Analyst Report Calls Agile a Scam, Says It's an Easy Out for Lazy Devs Follow Slashdot on Twitter and Facebook. To unsubscribe, click here or send an email to: unsubscribe-213087@elabs10.com To ensure delivery of this newsletter to your inbox and to enable images, please add slashdot@newsletters.slashdot.org to your e-mail address book or safe senders list. Slashdot | 594 Howard Street, Suite 300 | San Francisco, CA 94105 To view our Privacy Policy click here.