Slashdot Comments We Liked

Who sells what?

2011-11-09T07:07:00.001-08:00

CurtHagenlocher 10 minutes ago | link

Apple sells hardware. Microsoft sells software. IBM sells services. Google and Facebook sell advertising. Amazon sells everything.

Patio11 on a college education

2011-11-08T12:02:00.001-08:00

patio11 607 days ago | link | parent | flag

Even if you think university will teach you absolutely nothing, you've got a one-time offer from society that we're going to subsidize anything you do for the next four years and not have any expectation that you'll work for a living during that time. This offer is essentially only good once. Take it.

That said, you can learn an awful lot from school. You say it is tedious -- that suggests to me you're underchallenged. Have you tried learning a foreign language yet? Like, really learning a foreign language, rather than learning to say "Yo quiero una cerveza" like I assume your high school Spanish has taught you? It is incredibly rewarding, in all possible senses of the term rewarding, and you'll never get a better opportunity than the next four years. (Dedicated instructors, plenty of time not occupied by the demands of job and family, social push to complete studies, possibility of study abroad bankrolled by someone else and unrestricted by visa concerns, etc etc etc...)

You can also learn quite a bit about programming during college, even if actually doing it is a much better teacher. (Although, again, we're subsidizing all your activities for four years -- you show up for 3 hours of classes 5 days a week, the rest of the time is yours, program as much as you want to program.)

Incidentally, I hate to sound like An Official Adult, but just trust me on this one: the job market for young Americans sucks right now, and you absolutely do not want to be facing it without a degree. Degrees are not just for boring megacorps coding Blub: even cool companies which code Lisp look for people who can carry tasks to completion, and not possessing a degree when we hand them out like candy on Halloween suggests "I am insufficiently motivated to do clearly beneficial things when they require non-trivial amounts of actual work. Please employ me -- you will find me excellent at everything you assign me to do, provided none of it is actual work."

Metaphors suck

2011-11-08T11:59:00.001-08:00

jerf 3 hours ago | link

Never use metaphors for online issues. They simply don't apply, the online world has far too many differences from the physical world for them to ever work. It isn't like "leaving books around a library", it is like "digital online content was accidentally priced for free when it shouldn't have been and some people downloaded them". This isn't such a complicated situation that we need metaphors to navigate the morass, not that they ever help anyhow since it inevitably causes people to get distracted by arguing over which inapplicable metaphor is more accurate instead of simply addressing the question at hand.

What really matter here is the breach of contract. The contract specified when Amazon can drop the price, that condition was not met, they dropped the price. Apologies or blaming computers are not what is called for here.

Eat that, homeopathy!

2011-02-05T04:23:00.001-08:00

43 points by uvdiv 13 hours ago | link

>BTW: you to know that Western medicine is not the only medicine in the world.There is only one class of medicine in the world, and is scientific. Your attempt to frame science-based medicine as a racial or cultural property ("Western") lies at the root of your reasoning fallacies: you reinterpret comparison between industrialized and tribal humans as cultural/racial, regardless of whether race or culture has anything to do with it. The superiority of empirical medicine is not cultural hegemony. The life-saving knowledge of microbe theory and hygiene is not a religious belief that be can relativized with shamanist "healing."

Why China Sucks

2010-10-11T08:11:00.000-07:00

They have already crossed that line (Score:4, Interesting)

by MasaMuneCyrus (779918) Alter Relationship on 4:29 Monday 11 October 2010 (#33855036)

Between the Liu Xiaobo, his wife, and the Nobel issues, its increasingly aggressive stance in US military talks, its now clearly-visible use of de facto economic sanctions (let alone their petty sanctions, like canceling concerts and tourism) to solve political issues (e.g., Senkakus; coming up next will be the South China Sea), its claim of the entire South China Sea as a "core interest", its generals violent, angry, disrespectful rants to US diplomats and US military generals during talks, its ambassadors literally screaming at US ambassador about Taiwan arms sales (as if they're anything new?), its siding with North Korea in the Cheonan sub incident, its often-siding with Iran even as Russia goes against Iran, its harassment of all regional neighbors (Japan, India, and all of ASEAN... find one country near China that doesn't border issues with China, more often than not severe border issues), its very "coincidental" purchase of tons of Japanese bonds just as Japan was trying to weaken the yen, its reactor sales to Pakistan, its excessively predatory trade practices (you're a high-tech company that wants to do business in China? You'd better be willing to give domestic Chinese companies your technology), its industrial espionage (Everyone spies on everyone, but the CIA does not spy on Japan and give Ford technology secrets. China doesn't have this moral dilemma, however), its threatening maneuvers, war games, and military actions against regional powers (especially US, South Korea, and Japan), its dishonest military practices (this seems like a weird thing to say, but China literally has fleets militarized civilian fishing boats [strategycenter.net] so that it can claim that innocent citizens are being targeted if there is an armed conflict. I'm pretty sure the Western Powers don't do this. This is another reason Tokyo takes the fishing inside of its borders so seriously.)... Between all of these issues and so many more, China has already crossed the tipping point.

- The government of Japan is using all of its spare budget for this year to invest in rare earth metal mines in Mongolia and abroad while Japanese companies are pumping R&D money into negating the need for rare earth metals at all. The United States is also pushing to restart its rare earth mining operations.

- The Japanese Self Defense Forces has asked for a budget to study the possibility of setting up a permanent base on Yonakuni island -- an island 100 km from Taiwan. And, of course, where there are Japanese forces, there are inevitably US forces.

- The Japanese and US military are staging some war games to simulate a hostile Chinese military takeover of the Senkaku Islands so that they can prepare strategies to take the islands back by force.

- ASEAN has de facto agreed to begin setting up a bloc to contain and push back against increasingly aggressive and greedy Chinese hegemony and demands in the region. They are also asking the US to come back into this and re-assert its power in Asia. This has led to some very unusual alliances (US-Vietnam military alliance? wtf?). Because of China's aggressiveness, quite literally every rising or current Asian country (except China, of course), is gravitating back towards the US geopolitical sphere of influence.

- The Taiwanese public can only handle so much of their national image and sovereignty eroded and humiliated before they expect China to actually do something (like remove the 1500+ missiles aimed at their homes), and that tipping point is rapidly approaching (President Ma's popularity is tanking like Bush's was).

- The US is being increasingly aggressive against the Chinese yuan and their many, many, many other predatory and unfair trading practices (though to be fair to China on this one, the US's demands of an immediate yuan revaluing of +25% would be insanely destabilizing; I assume the US just set the bar high to give room to bargain downwards).

- India-China relations are degrading quite a lot, and unlike China, most all of the world superpowers have great relations with India, and India with them. In a spat between India and China, most will side with India.

Modern China has betrayed the advice of its own influential Deng Xiaoping that it should seek to engage the world peacefully, calmly, and with respect, as that's the way to get business deals in your favor and gain true political power. Some people shrug the recent Asian developments off and say that China is being increasingly aggressive because nobody wants to look weak with the upcoming party elections in 2012, but the fact is that China's actions have already caused irreparable damage to its image; damage that has undone decades of efforts by patient Chinese politicians and diplomats. Things don't change overnight, but the whole world is slowly turning against China. This is not the world teaming up to contain China; China is containing itself. Its 30 years of "smile diplomacy" and "panda diplomacy" image have been almost completely eradicated by all but the most optimistic and naive of countries. Now that China has amassed sufficient hard power, it attempts to wield that hard power over other countries; the rest of the world now sees the kind of leader that China will become, and they do not like it.

I would totally watch this!

2010-07-28T00:15:00.001-07:00

Re:Close one (Score:3, Funny)

by BJ_Covert_Action (1499847) Alter Relationship on 3:14 Wednesday 28 July 2010 (#33051104) Homepage

Who says they aren't? But that will come in another press announcement that will also include the information that the sequel is going to be produced by Michael Bay. Only this time, instead of an ice berg sinking the Titanic, it will be an experimental submarine with tactical nuke torpedoes! And instead of Leo Di Caprio falling in love, we will be treated to a lead role as performed by Bruce Willis! And instead of falling in love with a rich girl, he will uncover a secret plot where the captain plans to steal the ship and turn it over to the Russians to cement their naval dominance of the Black Sea. Of course, Bruce will only be able to challenge the captain, as played by Kevin Spacey, with the aid of his lithe but sassy sidekick Lucy Liu! The whole thing will be so epic that the only way Bruce and Lucy can escape is on the back of sharks with friggin' laser beams attached to their foreheads. Avatar look out! Titanic in 3-D is making a run at your box office records!

This is how shit happens

2010-06-01T02:26:00.000-07:00

Re:Duh (Score:5, Funny)

by QRDeNameland (873957) Alter Relationship on 1:40 Monday 31 May 2010 (#32399694)

Oh, like this.
First of all, the sections of pipe are joined mechanically, and sealed with O-rings. The O-rings are specified for shallow water pressures (and temperatures), and rather than use adequate deep water parts, the shallow water parts were continued to avoid mandatory Federal oversight and testing.
On top of that, deadlines for completion were already tight, as no schedule variability was provided for unforeseen events, such as severe weather, that might hamper drilling and well conversion efforts. The conversion from an exploratory/research structure into a production well was a hard deadline, and pressure was on internally from the otherwise stagnant middle managers clamoring for achievement. There was no room for failure with a project named Deepwater Horizon.
As engineers' warnings flowed up the chain of command, the wording changed from "grave concern" to "concern" to "noted comment" to eventually "thumbs up!". Inter-hierarchical presentations followed a strict time schedule, so power point mentality and "no bad news up" reigned.
/satire

That reminds me of this old classic:

In the beginning was the Plan.
And then came the Assumptions.
And the Assumptions were without form.
And the Plan was without substance.
And darkness was upon the face of the workers.
And they spoke among themselves, saying, "It is a crock of shit, and it stinks."
And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said, "It is a pail of dung, and we can't live with the smell."
And the Supervisors went unto their Managers, saying "It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, such that none may abide by it."
And the Managers went unto their Directors, saying "It is a vessel of fertilizer and none may abide its strength."
And the Directors spoke among themselves, saying to one another, "It contains that which aids plant growth, and it is very strong."
And the Directors went to the Vice Presidents, saying unto them, "It promotes growth, and it is very powerful."
And the Vice Presidents went to the President, saying unto him, "This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor of the company with powerful effects."
And the President looked upon the Plan and saw that it was good.
And the Plan became Policy.
And that is how shit happens.

Put THAT on Longbets.org

2010-05-24T02:26:00.000-07:00

Future Slashdot Story on 5/23/2510 (Score:5, Funny)

by webbiedave (1631473) Alter Relationship on 1:47 Monday 24 May 2010 (#32316582)

Church Admits Touching Children and Covering it Up Not Such a Good Idea.

Pope John Paul George Ringo the Third officially stated via the openly gay pontiff's Jupiter-hosted website [www.catholic.popestuff2], "We've had a little time to think about it and we finally understand that whole uproar or whatever. Hey like the third testament says in Bieber 10:15 'Whatever you want shawty I'll give it to ya'."

He went on to say, "Here's some water! Hope that makes up for it."

Editor's Note: Catholicism was a dominant religion centuries ago in which old men in funny hats told others what to do.

Editor's Editor's Note: Religion was a wide-held belief that ideas found in stories millenniums old should be used to rule our lives. Not kidding.

(article translated from Chinese via Skybot Vacuum Cleaner with Babel Attachment)

As a former pirate...

2010-03-29T04:38:00.000-07:00

Hmm... (Score:5, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on 22:31 Sunday 28 March 2010 (#31648272)

As a former "pirate" I do not think this will work. Most "pirates" just want free stuff.. they do not have any problems with movie/software/music industry! They just have gotten used to getting everything for free and see no reason to pay if it is available for free.

Now I do not download stuff anymore but I also do not buy it either. Most of that stuff just isn't worth the price being asked for IMHO.

Everyone still riding the freeloading bandwagon - try 'quitting' - you'll realize most of that stuff you never need or can live by without just fine.

How The Healthcare Reform Bill Was Passed - An Analysis

2010-03-24T00:51:00.000-07:00

Re:Pro / cons (Score:5, Funny)

by Mr Thinly Sliced (73041) Alter Relationship on 17:54 Monday 22 March 2010 (#31565522) Homepage Journal

From the U.S. population point of view - there are very few people that seem to be against reform.

This bill in particular has basically been a power play between the two big parties if I understand correctly.

It didn't really pan out brilliantly for either side - the Republicans get egg on their face because the other side got their bill through anyway, whilst the Democrats didn't really get the thing they wanted because they watered down their original bill to try and get Republican support.

The lead up to why this silly thing got pushed through can basically be summarised as follows (stolen from Digg - it's a great summation):

Democrats: "We need health care reform"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! Give us a majority and we'll do it better"
Democrats: "Done, you have majority of both houses"

12 years later, health care is irrefutably worse in every respect for every single person in the United States

Democrats: "We need health care reform"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! Americans are tired of partisan politics!"
Democrats: "OK, let's compromise"
Republicans: "OK, get rid of half your ideas"
Democrats: "Done"
Republicans: "Too liberal, get rid of half your ideas"
Democrats: "Done"
Republicans: "Too liberal, get rid of half your ideas"
Democrats: "Done"
Republicans: "Too liberal, get rid of half your ideas"
Democrats: "Done"
Republicans: "Too liberal, get rid of half your ideas"
Democrats: "Done. Time to end debate"
Republicans: "Too liberal, we need more debate, we will filibuster to prevent you from voting"
Democrats: "OK, we'll vote--sorry guys, debate is ended. It's time to vote on the bill"
Republicans: "Too liberal, we vote no"
Democrats: "OK, it passed anyway--sorry guys."

One month later

Republicans: "Wait--wait, OK, we have less of a minority now so we can filibuster forever."
Democrats: "Sorry, the bill already passed, we need it to pass the House now"
Republicans: "But we have enough to filibuster"
Democrats: "Sorry, the bill already passed, we need it to pass the House now"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! You haven't listened to our ideas! You've shut us out of this whole process!"
Democrats: "Sorry, show us your proposal"
Republicans: "Smaller government"
Democrats: "That's not very specific"
Republicans: "OK, here's our detailed proposal--It's our common-sense ideas we spent 12 years not enacting"
Democrats: "OK, we'll add a bunch more of your ideas"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! You included all these back-room deals"
Democrats: "OK, we'll get rid of the back-room deals"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! You're using obscure procedural tricks to eliminate the back-room deals!"
Democrats: "No, we're using reconciliation, which both parties have used dozens of times for much larger bills"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! You're pressuring Congressmen to vote for your bill! Scandal!"
Democrats: "It's called 'whipping', it's been done since 1789"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! Can't you see the American people don't want this?"
Democrats: "This bill is mildly unpopular (40-50%), doing nothing (your proposal) is extraordinarily unpopular (4-6%)"
Republicans: "We need to start over! We need to start over!"
Democrats: "We should really consider voting--"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! Start over! Clean slate! Common-sense! America!"
Democrats: "OK, suit yourselves, here it comes"

The Mystery of Apple; unveiled!

2010-03-09T22:00:00.000-08:00

Re:You get what you pay for? (Score:5, Funny)

by Anonymous Coward on 12:08 Tuesday 09 March 2010 (#31410594)

A giant customized Starbucks in Cupertino California where lattes and no soy skim macchiatos are given out free to all employees. The background music involves a playlist of Nora Jones, David Matthews, John Mayer, and Bono on loop from an Ipod docked somewhere in the Apple/Starbucks facility. Hours are long but morale is surprising high as developers, hardware and software, are given 30 minute breaks to masturbate to the new itunes interface.

All developers sit at cafe type tables with a Mac Book Pro while their lord and master Steve Jobs stands deskless in his predictable attire of a turtleneck and jeans. In fact, this is the preferred (mandatory) dress code at Apple. Jobs walks around to each and every department, separated by latte and vegan preferences, and checks on the performance and efficiency of his developers. At any given point in the day one may see Mr Jobs yelling at a programmer for not implementing a button in the perfect shade of corn flower blue (#6495ED) and immediately sends him to the apple punitive chamber, consisting of a HP Compaq running Vista Basic.

There are 2 software development departments and 2 hardware development sections in Apple. For software there is the Apple core team, Apple Open Source team. In hardware there is the Apple systems and management team and the iDevice team. Since the OSX kernel consists of a BSD darwin kernel there is no real need for low level programmers and as such the entirety of the Apple core team consists of UI designers and photoshop junkies. All software churned out from the core team is designed in a program strikingly similar to Visual Studio's form designer but with Cocoa Objective C generated instead. The 16 hour day (Jobs demands 16 hour days since he himself never sleeps) of a core dev involves lining up the right shade of chrome with the latest photoshopped graphite button and maintaining the correct color scheme, not an easy job at all.

The Apple open source team involves a little bit more coding, which is mandated to be done in TextEdit or the option of a $80 third party mac text editor. The Apple open source team doesn't actually create much code but searches the internet for interesting BSD licensed software and modifies it as it's own through obfuscation and conversion to objective C. Many of the items a mac user sees comes from the open source world stamped by apple such as the ability to play music taken from 67 different originally linux based players, CD burning, and the overall ability to click a mouse. Apple's legal department has no qualms about this practice and has assured many that since most of the code is BSD and if any is GPLed many Linux hippies should be grateful that Apple fostered WebKit by using KHTML and adding some Gecko bloat. Perhaps one of the most important items that the open source team has done to date is use parts of the FreeBSD to keep the kernel up to date.

There's not much to say about the Apple systems and management team. I suppose they can be classified in to desktop and laptop systems. Because hardware work is beneath Apple in general and thought of being only worthy of Windows Users and as such can be found working on these beauties in the starbucks bathroom. Desktops are currently made by buying dell machines and putting them in Lian Li cases, where the majority of the costs goes to buying titanium Apple emblems to paste on the sides. Laptops consists of the rebranding of only the most silver and black Sony Viaos but talk has been going around about rebranding Asus EeePCs for a new Apple netbook but you didn't hear that from me, for fear of my life.

The iDevice team's job is to develop for the ipod, iphone, itouch, and many other portable electronics apple may release in the future. Their jobs are very interconnected with the open source team as well as the core dev team. Using firmware from random samsung devices and giving it an OSX skin the ipod stands as a shining example that infringement only applies to greasy file sharers and that the music player remains the best in market. The 16-24 hour day of an iDevice dev consists of partly implementing Zune security flaws and creating new novel ways to make the click wheel sounds, while a majority of the time is spend just playing with (read testing) products future and past.

And there you have it, the mystery of Apple unveiled. Also on a side note to those who are worried about Job's health. He is fine but is trying a new diet consisting of Soy Nuts and Anger.

Tapping human nature as DRM

2010-03-05T00:28:00.001-08:00

Human deterrent (Score:5, Interesting)

by redkazuo (977330) Alter Relationship on 9:24 Friday 05 March 2010 (#31366916)

How about this DRM:

1. Ubisoft creates a reasonably simple (read cheap) traditional DRM;
2. Ubisoft promises to donate five thousand dollars to cancer research for each day the game goes without being cracked, for a year.

I think they'd have better chances that way. Don't you?

C dem jokes

2010-02-25T23:23:00.000-08:00

Re:if everyone ignored the quacks... (Score:5, Funny)

by Thud457 (234763) Alter Relationship on 3:29 Thursday 25 February 2010 (#31265312) Homepage Journal

Dude... "arg"? What kind of pirate says "arg"?

obviously a C-faring pirate!

What. The. Duck.

2010-02-25T23:19:00.000-08:00

Re:if everyone ignored the quacks... (Score:4, Funny)

by Sponge Bath (413667) Alter Relationship on 2:55 Thursday 25 February 2010 (#31264804)

Yes, ignoring the quacks with influence is just ducking the issue.

Re:if everyone ignored the quacks... (Score:4, Funny)

by Em Emalb (452530) Alter Relationship <ememalb.gmail@com> on 2:57 Thursday 25 February 2010 (#31264828) Homepage Journal

that's a good way to run afowl of the law.

Re:if everyone ignored the quacks... (Score:4, Funny)

by socceroos (1374367) Alter Relationship on 3:21 Thursday 25 February 2010 (#31265176)

Parent is right, then you're either thrown in jail or slapped with a hefty bill.

Re:if everyone ignored the quacks... (Score:4, Funny)

by socceroos (1374367) Alter Relationship on 3:22 Thursday 25 February 2010 (#31265192)

The question then is: waddle we do about it?

Re:if everyone ignored the quacks... (Score:3, Funny)

by Binestar (28861) writes: Alter Relationship on 3:33 Thursday 25 February 2010 (#31265364) Homepage

Meh, I say just flock them all.
--
Re:if everyone ignored the quacks... (Score:3, Funny)

by dwiget001 (1073738) writes: Alter Relationship on 4:07 Thursday 25 February 2010 (#31265874)

After I searched the web, I crawled back into my nest and slept.
I was hoping that I would hatch an idea that would take wing and solve this problem.
But I just ended up with egg on my face.
Re:if everyone ignored the quacks... (Score:5, Funny)

by Blue Stone (582566) writes: Alter Relationship on 4:23 Thursday 25 February 2010 (#31266038) Homepage Journal

Make an eggsample of them?
--
finally, this is on topic, sort of (Score:4, Funny)

by commodoresloat (172735) * writes: Alter Relationship on 5:08 Thursday 25 February 2010 (#31266522)

Boobies!
Re:if everyone ignored the quacks... (Score:3, Funny)

by BancBoy (578080) writes: Alter Relationship on 3:36 Thursday 25 February 2010 (#31265416)

Enough of this canard!
Re:if everyone ignored the quacks... (Score:5, Funny)

by Gabrosin (1688194) writes: Alter Relationship on 3:38 Thursday 25 February 2010 (#31265454)

That's a very mallardramatic thing to say.
Re:if everyone ignored the quacks... (Score:5, Funny)

by Darinbob (1142669) writes: Alter Relationship on 4:11 Thursday 25 February 2010 (#31265918)

I don't like the tern this thread has taken.

Daffynitions

2010-02-16T00:37:00.000-08:00

Re:Yeah, and Blackwater is now called Xe. (Score:3, Insightful)

by wizardforce (1005805) Alter Relationship on 0:34 Tuesday 16 February 2010 (#31147060) Journal

Phone book (n): A giant slab of shredded tree that can be used to prop open the basement door.

What have we come to?

2010-02-16T00:35:00.001-08:00

Re:But the problem is (Score:5, Insightful)

by Jeng (926980) Alter Relationship on 1:48 Tuesday 16 February 2010 (#31147958)

Definition of safe while I was growing up was making sure none of the scrapes and cuts got infected.

Definition of safe now days is to not get any cuts or scrapes.

Economics of Stand-offs

2010-02-08T03:37:00.001-08:00

Having relatives in law enforcement (Score:3, Interesting)

by gillbates (106458) Alter Relationship on 8:39 Friday 05 February 2010 (#31030478) Homepage Journal

I have cop relatives. On more than one occasion, I've heard said that police are trained not to draw their weapon unless they intend to use it.

And when you think about it, it makes little sense for an officer to draw a gun and make an armed criminal *more* nervous. That is, unless he intends to put a bullet in the criminal.

Think about the typical cop-criminal standoff in the movies. Both point their guns at the other, but no one fires. Why?

The cop can't arbitrarily shoot someone, so he can't fire until fired upon (*according to cop-movie semantics.)
The criminal doesn't want to get shot by the cop. But since the cop hasn't fired yet, the criminal (who is pre-disposed to shoot cops) can now take more time to aim and get a shot that will most likely be lethal instantaneously.
Having both drawn their weapons, the cop cannot de-escalate the situation without the criminal's consent; the cop is betting the criminal will somehow be more easily persuaded to relinquish his weapon with a gun pointed at him.
The criminal now holds all the cards. The cop - by not firing - has signaled to the criminal that he can take his time, aim well, and squeeze off the opening round.
The police officer will not even hear the criminal's weapon fire before being struck by the bullet.

In short, a cop gains no tactical or situational advantage by drawing his weapon but not firing. In real life, the movie standoff doesn't end with the criminal laying down his gun; it usually ends up much worse.

iGross

2010-01-27T22:07:00.001-08:00

Watching the presentation live... (Score:5, Funny)

by Hamster Lover (558288) * Alter Relationship on 0:30 Thursday 28 January 2010 (#30921488) Journal

Watching the announcement live I was struck with just how absorbent the crowd was regarding iPad presentation. It's like this product has wings. I wonder how well the iPad will handle those heavy work flow days.

China is just a really big Cuba

2010-01-20T03:25:00.000-08:00

Cuba vs China (Score:4, Insightful)

by copponex (13876) Alter Relationship on 5:04 Wednesday 20 January 2010 (#30826392) Homepage

Cuba is small and within our sphere of influence. Therefore, it can be abused as much as we like, maligned, embargoed, scapegoated, and even invaded. After we tried to turn it into a puppet state, the local population revolted and threw us out. It continues to remain a symbol of successful resistance to American control. (Critics will point to it's economic failures, which have almost everything to do with the results of our desire to crush it.)

The West tried to the same intervention in China, and the result was the Boxer Rebellion. If China were smaller and closer to the United States, there would be no difference in the way they are treated. Now China has money and a manufacturing sector, so they are "worthy" of being dealt with. So much so that even the hardline nationalists don't dare to insult China and publicly restate their support of a "One China" policy, so when Beijing absorbs Taiwan, America will be able to save some face.

Decades later we are still somehow surprised by the ferocity of indigenous revolt to foreign rule. Though we can turn to romance when it's our ancestors who are doing the revolting. [wikipedia.org]

Twas hard the woeful words to frame
To break the ties that bound us
But harder still to bear the shame
Of foreign chains around us
And so I said, "The mountain glen
I'll seek at morning early
And join the bold United Men
While soft winds shake the barley"

News you can use - good to know

2010-01-13T06:26:00.000-08:00

Read article without subscribing (Score:3, Informative)

by amaiman (103647) Alter Relationship on 17:36 Tuesday 12 January 2010 (#30735518) Homepage

You can read the full WSJ article without subscribing by using the "Email" link at the bottom of the preview. The link you'll get in your mailbox will lead to the full article (this works for all WSJ "subscriber only" articles.)

Social commentary

2009-12-17T01:13:00.000-08:00

Re:My god. (Score:5, Insightful)

by girlintraining (1395911) Alter Relationship on 0:59 Thursday 17 December 2009 (#30462062)

What the fuck is it that you american's live in such state of paranoia?

Relentless public announcements that we should accept our neighbor and be considerate of each other's differences. It's to the point now where people can't even make self-deprecating comments about their own race or sex without being fired for being racist or sexist. Jokes have become illegal. We've made negative feelings essentially taboo -- you can't express anger, dissatisfaction, or anything but sunshine and kittens.

The laws of thermodynamics also loosely apply to social problems: In this case, the rate at which negative emotions are created hasn't changed, but the available space they exist within has been constrained. This has led to a rise in pressure and temperature. Naturally, leaks develop, which result in high pressure discharges into the relative vaccum of positive emotions, which are suspiciously absent right now due to an economic turndown, a lack of socialization amongst our peers (due to the constant fear of them), and so yeah...

We've made it illegal to cry tears, and so... some have started to cry bullets. I'm sorry to say, America -- but life is shit. We need to square with that and be honest. A few more fuck you's and honest brawls between people would do us all a lot of good. Yes, I'm advocating violence here -- because a few punches in the face is a lot easier to get over than a few bullets in the back.

Rupert 'The Dominator' Murdoch

2009-12-10T00:20:00.000-08:00

Wow (Score:4, Funny)

by Quiet_Desperation (858215) Alter Relationship on 5:58 Thursday 10 December 2009 (#30383302)

instead of the gray inked Kindle's energy conscious display.

"None of that namby pamby green shit for us," shouted Rupert 'The Dominator' Murdoch. "Our reader will run on leaded gasoline fuel cells, arsenic paste and mercury vapor canisters!" When asked about the environmental impact of such a device, Murdoch ripped out the reporter's heart and ate it in a single bite.

"Argh!" said Murdoch, and brought the press conference to a close by pissing on the press corps and killing fifty puppies.

OMGWTFBBQ?!

2009-11-27T06:05:00.000-08:00

New Silverlight features have Windows bias? (Score:4, Funny)

by Anonymous Coward on 5:35 Saturday 21 November 2009 (#30179910)

Pope discovered to be Catholic

Bears recorded shitting in woods.

US govt is roxx0r!1one!eleven

2009-11-20T05:19:00.000-08:00

Re:Just another great goverment run program... (Score:3, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward on 2:11 Friday 20 November 2009 (#30162864)

Yea, these are the guys (the feds) I want building cars, taking over health care...thanks god they are not building the planes. I'm just trying to think one government run organization that works as well as any private one. Any idea?

This morning I was woken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US Dept of Energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the national weather service of the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built and launched by the national aeronautics and space administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US Dept. of Agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the food and drug administration.

At the appropriate time as regulated by the US congress and kept accurate by the national institute of standards and technology and the US naval observatory, I get into my national highway traffic safety administration approved automobile and set out to work on roads built by the local, state and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality determined by the environmental protection agency, using legal tender issued by the federal reserve bank. On the way out the door, I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US postal service and drop the kids off at the public school.

After work, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to a house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and the fire marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all it's valuables thanks to the local police department.

I then log onto the internet which was developed by the defense advanced research projects administration and post on freerepublic.com and fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right.

The nuances of international trade

2009-11-18T01:22:00.001-08:00

Re:It's good to be owed money! (Score:5, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward on 5:49 Monday 16 November 2009 (#30110460)

Actually, that's not at all how international trade works. It's more akin to:

1. An American company wishes to buy shitty goods manufactured in China.
2. The American company buys renminbi using American dollars.
3. The American company spends the renminbi to buy the shitty Chinese goods.
4. The Chinese send to America the shitty goods that come broken, or end up breaking soon after.
5. The Chinese have both the dollars and the renminbi, and all the Americans got was some shitty, poorly-manufactured plastic toys.
6. The Chinese use those American dollars, as they still have perceived value in some areas of the world, to buy land, factories, natural resources and other property in Africa.
7. The Americans still just have shitty plastic toys and the Africans have near-worthless currency, but the Chinese have African land, factories, gold, oil, coal, and even people under their control now.

The Americans lost. The Africans lost. The Chinese won.

Poker and the economy

2009-11-10T07:08:00.000-08:00

Its easy! (Score:5, Funny)

by Monkeedude1212 (1560403) Alter Relationship on 3:53 Tuesday 10 November 2009 (#30039306)

Meaning if you can generalize the solution to poker, you have the ability to discover the Nash equilibrium of the economy

The general solution to poker is to end the game with everyone elses money to make yourself richer. Some people have already applied this strategy to the economy.

Only works with real money (Score:4, Insightful)

by Chemisor (97276) Alter Relationship on 4:17 Tuesday 10 November 2009 (#30039574) Journal

Once you factor debt and fractional reserves into the picture, the game changes quite a bit. The current crisis is that the players bet WAY more than they had, and they are all afraid to call, since they secretly know that EVERYBODY is bluffing. So the game (and the stock market) keeps going up as the players trying to outbluff each other with "I'll see your billion and raise you three more". And it will keep going up until somebody has to actually put something of value in the pot.

Cloud clothing!

2009-11-03T01:14:00.000-08:00

Re:Buzzwords, because thinking is hard (Score:4, Funny)

by megamerican (1073936) Alter Relationship on 2:21 Tuesday 03 November 2009 (#29954808)

"No officer, I'm not naked. I'm a trend setter in cloud clothing. That man over there is wearing pants for me. Honest."

There you go, Mr. Murdoch

2009-10-29T01:55:00.000-07:00

Re:Evolve or die..... (Score:5, Insightful)

by jmorris42 (1458) * Alter Relationship <jmorris@@@beau...org> on 6:28 Thursday 29 October 2009 (#29905043) Homepage

> The problem is, newspapers isn't being replaced by anything superior.

No you, like almost everyone in the legacy media, miss the root of the problem. The overhead of dead tree distribution is a problem for newspapers. But it isn't THE problem. Otherwise the other parts of the legacy media such as the big three network newscasts wouldn't be suffering the same decline. Hollywood is having trouble selling both movie tickets and DVDs, the music industry is declining. Network television has been in decline for decades. The Internet isn't the problem. It's the content, stupid!

People are dropping newspaper subscriptions because there is nothing in them anymore that can't be read online. If you think there is journalism in a newspaper these days it is because you haven't picked one up lately and actually read it. It's all opinion posing as news, press releases reprinted as gospel, rumors and gossip and what doesn't fit into one of above categories it is probably inaccurate anyway. And that damnation is even before bringing up the political bias that has become so blatant the blind can now see it. But even worse than the lies, distortions and faked news is what they leave out of the news because it doesn't fit their prefab storylines

Thought experiment. Most reading here are tech types. Read a legacy media story about a tech issue and note how many inacuracies you can spot. It isn't just tech, it is your ability to spot errors in that field that is greater. The error rate in every other section is as great or greater. If you asked a doctor about medical coverage he would give you just as many horror stories. Mass media always had the problem of trying to dumb down stories for a mass audience, but years of budget slashing and general decline in overall education means it is now semi-literate reporters reporting for morons.

Now go read a couple stories from a major source, say the NYT or CNN. Note how many basic grammar errors you find, assuming you yourself are clueful enough to do this. They SAY the reason to trust the MSM over bloggers in their underwear is they have vetting, fact checking and editors. Jason Blair puts paid to vetting, the test above should remove all doubt as to fact checking and if there are still real editors in the newsroom how do so many basic spelling and grammar errors make it into print? If they aren't even bothering to proofread the damned copy are we to believe they are calling back all the sources and checking the quotes and going to authoritative sources to confirm every fact and figure in a story? And unlike most bloggers, they don't even bother running a correction unless someone important makes a fuss or threatens legal action.

And it isn't the Internet or piracy that is killing Hollywood, it is the fact that have been pumping out crap for years.

Pay for Hulu? Bollocks to that!

2009-10-26T05:19:00.001-07:00

Let me get this straight... (Score:3, Insightful)

by mikep554 (787194) Alter Relationship on 11:37 Saturday 24 October 2009 (#29854563)

Broadcast networks have existed for more than fifty years on a model that had massive overhead but was free to any user within range of the signal. Now, there is a way they can provide their same product via the internet with massively lower overhead, but they can't figure out how to make money like they used to? Or even make money at all? Did these guys all go to the school with an MBA program that taught them to find a stable company that looks like it would run on autopilot, and just cash the checks as long as the good times last?

HN: Impact of sales tax on the poor

2009-10-23T01:29:00.000-07:00

2 points by patio11 6 hours ago | link | parent

Sales taxes on anything -- luxury or not -- are regressive taxes on the poor, because the poor spend a higher portion of their income on consumption than the non-poor do.

For example, let's say we have a uniform sales tax of 5%. A poor person with an income of $20k will spend almost all of that $20k during the year, paying 5% of her salary in taxes. (She might even borrow money and spend more than her income, meaning relative to her income the rate increases to more than 5%.)

Say for the sake of argument unpoor me makes $40k and I spend $30k, saving the remaining $10k. I pay $1.5k in taxes, more in absolute terms but less as a percentage of income (3.75%), which is the definition of a regressive tax.

There are other ways sales taxes tend to favor the unpoor. For example, a poor person will typically buy almost all goods locally and thus be subject to tax on all of them. This is not necessarily true of non-poor people -- more than half of my monthly purchases are tax-exempt because of where I make the purchase. (For example, when I buy software from American companies, neither Japan nor my locality nor most US states tax me.)

There are tweaks you can make to sales taxes which make them marginally "fairer" to the poor: exempting food and clothing, for example, which the poor tend to spend more on as a percentage of income than the rich. However, these tweaks get very complicated very fast (a lot of governments actually have a policy which sounds like "Exempting food sales but taxing prepared food sold for immediate consumption unless it is take-out except taxing hot take-out." I wish I was joking. My sympathies in advance to anyone who writes POS software for French bistros.) These exemptions also tend to cost the state a lot of money, because non-poor people spend lots of money on food, clothing, etc.

Anyhow, long story short: sales taxes are, and must always be, a regressive tax on the poor.

Windows, OS X and Linux girlfriends

2009-10-23T00:45:00.000-07:00

Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!" (Score:5, Funny)

by tenzig_112 (213387) Alter Relationship on 20:26 Thursday 22 October 2009 (#29835259) Homepage

I get the impression that the Windows 7 launch is a lot like seeing an old girlfriend suddenly show up on your doorstep wanting to get back together. She's had some work done, apparently: stomach stapling to take off some of the weight, breast augmentation, and a radical nosejob to make her look as much like your current girlfriend as medical science will allow.

She's pretty, of course, almost too pretty. She still wears far too much makeup and carries that desperate look in her eyes. The fragrant haze around her is the perfume she overuses to mask the scent of failure.

But standing there in that low-cut top, you'd almost forget for a moment what a psycho she was- how she used to shut down in the middle of a date and forget everything you were talking about and how she was only happy when you were buying her things. You'd almost forget about carrying around her legacy baggage or those nights when, for seemingly no reason at all, she would simply stop speaking to you and when you asked what was wrong she'd just spit a string of hex code at you and expect you to figure it out.

You complained about her for years before finally deciding to get rid of her, and here she is again. Though, somehow she seems like a completely different person now.

"I'm up here," she says when she catches you staring at her chest.

Tempted though you may be, you know that over time she'll get bored and slow down on you just like she always does. And then you'll be right back where you started: trapped. She keeps you by convincing you that you don't have a choice. You're just not smart enough for one option or rich enough to afford the other.

"But I'm different now," she says, batting her eyes innocently. "I've changed."

Indeed she has. Apparently, she's really into Cabala now or something like that. It's helped her discover loads of untapped potential in herself. But it also means that you'll have to buy all new furniture to fit with her understanding of feng shui. That's not the only change she has in store for you. The minute you let her move in, she'll have a new alarm system put in that succeeds only in preventing your friends from coming over on poker night.

She doesn't love you, but she doesn't hate you, either. The truth is that she couldn't care less one way or the other. She's here because she doesn't want to be alone. Like all human beings, especially those well past their prime, she wants to feel wanted and, after a string of lost jobs and bad investments, she needs a place to stay.

But all in all, she's OK. She's a seven. She'll do, I guess.

Reply to This

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!" (Score:3, Funny)
by vulgrin (70725) Alter Relationship on 22:51 Thursday 22 October 2009 (#29837309) Homepage Journal
Lets continue the analogy:
Your OSX Girlfriend shows up on your doorstep telling you to buy her a new Snow Leopard coat. Oh, and you are going to need to get her some updated pants and shoes too to match. Of course, she won't step inside your door until you've gone and bought one of those new Apple brand "iMansions" that, really, is just the same as the Intel Houses that everyone has, but comes with fancy aluminum siding and costs twice as much. You could TRY to put aluminum siding on any old Intel house, but you hear those contractors are getting sued out of business.
So, you finally get the new mansion and invite her in and you realize that she's really just like every other girl you've been with. But, all your friends like her, so you might as well go along with it. She's arty, but very serious too, and won't play any games with you. After a while, after buying her all her iAccessories you realize you really aren't getting any more out of her than your other girlfriends.
But your Linux girlfriend, she is awesome. She'll do whatever you want, whenever you want, rarely complains and will stay in pretty much any house or mobile home you have. Sadly, she's also a robot who gets delivered to your house in a box, and you have to assemble her up the way you want. You have to turn to your friends and the internet to find out why the heck she won't talk with you, or why her feet are on backwards. She's very secure in your relationship, so much that she won't do anything unless you really PROVE you are her boyfriend. She plays a few games, but you're getting sick of chess, solitaire and downhill sledding penguins. And then every few weeks you have to shut her down to replace her heart and lungs. You are so damn tired keeping her running and happy all the time who has time for sex?
To top it off, everyone has seen her naked. She's put it all over the Internet for everyone to see and fiddle with her naughty bits. She claims it makes her a better woman, but since you have to keep patching her up, you aren't so sure. What's worse, she keeps comparing you to some guy she met in Finland and talks about how much he "got inside her."

Learn something

2009-10-21T22:45:00.000-07:00

Dead DRM remote-authorization services. (Score:5, Informative)

by Animats (122034)on Wednesday October 21, @04:11PM (#29827949) Homepage

If you bought into any of these, you're a sucker. They don't work any more.

Divx (1998-2001). [cnet.com] "Disposable" DVDs tied to a remote authorization system. Promoted by Circuit City and Thompson. Content now unplayable.
WalMart Music (2007-2008) [itwire.com] Downloadable music tied to an authorization server. Content now unplayable.
PlaysForSure (2004-2008) [wired.com] Microsoft system. Downloadable music tied to an authorization server. Content from AOL MusicNow (closed), Musicmatch Jukebox (closed), Yahoo! Music Unlimited (closed), Spiralfrog (closed), MTV URGE (closed), MSN Music (closed), Musicmatch Jukebox (closed), Ruckus Network (closed) now generally unplayable, although exit strategies exist. Authorization servers were to be shut down August 31, 2008, but were kept up after that date.

Next, Disney.

Reality bites

2009-10-08T03:00:00.000-07:00

A reflection on the speaker (Score:5, Insightful)

by BenEnglishAtHome (449670)on Wednesday October 07, @09:29AM (#29668969)

So Lee Bradley says:

...mainstream video games, even those seemingly void of political statement, are implicitly political.

OK. I understand that people feel that way. But the people that feel that "the way things are" is pretty much always "implicitly political" are the people who find political meaning in Every. Fucking. Thing.

To some people, the color of shirt you put on in the morning is political. The toothpaste you use is political. Everything is political because somewhere, somehow, sometime during the creation of that thing or state of being some person or entity involved had some political leaning that in some subtle way influenced the way they contributed to the process.

People who think like this believe the way I take a dump is political. (Seriously - find somebody who's gone off-grid and uses a composting toilet. Ask them about it. They'd have you believe that the way you urinate and defecate is a political statement.)

I don't buy it.

"Politics is a component of everything" may be true but it's also meaningless. Any statement so broad is meaningless because it has no real, practical impact on anything.

Folks who think like this need to take a big dose of practical pills. There's a political slant to every issue but that doesn't mean it's worthy of note. I suspect games change based on technology and human desires. We want distraction. We want to interact with others. Technology now enables that and some people have figured out how to make a buck meeting those needs by putting out games with a heightened co-op element. Big frikkin deal. Unless you can't win a game without calling your congressmen and demanding action on a bill currently before the House (or some such other real-world, practical political action) then a game isn't political.

It's just a game.

Economics of opinions

2009-09-11T02:20:00.001-07:00

Re:$1.40 per tweet (maximum) (Score:5, Funny)

by value_added (719364) Alter Relationship on 21:30 Thursday 10 September 2009 (#29379619)

Damn inflation, I remember when you used to be able to give an opinion for 2 cents!

I take it you've never studied economics. Instead of boring you with lots of technical terminology and theory, I'll restrict my comments to real world transactions and use commonly understood terms.

In the marketplace of ideas, opinions typically come in two forms. The first is worth 5 cents (as in "Not worth a plug nickel"), and the latter is a premium product valued at 10 cents ("I wish I had a dime for every time ..."). And like in all markets, there are "wholesale" prices and "retail" prices. Those numbers represent the retail prices.

When exchanging goods or services, there is an underlying cost for each transaction that must be bourne by one or more of the participants. The difference between 10 cents and your two cent idea is, of course eight cents. This is the "markup" or "overhead".

Put simply, when you manufacture your idea, its wholesale price is two cents, but is sold in the marketplace at either 5 or 10 cents. Small amounts, to be sure, but that doesn't prevent entrepreneurial resellers from making much more, or for those with sufficient legal resources, from securing a patent and making millions!

My idea (for this post) was similarly worth two cents. That's not to say, however, that in the marketplace of ideas known as Slashdot, the laws of supply and demand don't apply. That means that there's high probability it will end up being worth zero cents. Or to use the English formative of Latin origin, nonsense.

+5, Insightful!

2009-08-31T03:09:00.000-07:00

Re:Threatening plurality? (Score:3, Insightful)

by Dreadneck (982170) Alter Relationship on 3:26 Sunday 30 August 2009 (#29246911)

Each day I find it harder to see the line between 'business' and 'racketeering'

It's easy to remember - 'business' is government approved.

Amen, brother.

2009-08-31T01:02:00.000-07:00

Re:Liar. (Score:4, Insightful)

by purpledinoz (573045) Alter Relationship on 20:37 Friday 28 August 2009 (#29231175)

lolwut? I c wut shee did thar. Were all loosing r minds, u no?

I really hate people who type in this manner. It saves almost no time, so what's the point in purposely making the spelling error? What does it prove? That you're some sort of Internet badass? I don't think so, it makes that person look like a complete moron. One time, I ran into a message board where the whole thread was like this, my head almost exploded.

Why indeed..

2009-08-11T10:56:00.000-07:00

Re:Ideally... (Score:5, Insightful)

by squizzar (1031726) Alter Relationship on 17:11 Tuesday 11 August 2009 (#29021605)

Why are we _supposed_ to care about other species? Surely that we do in any way is just a trait of humanity. We could be like viruses, causing disease and death with no other intent than to reproduce. We could be the ultimate disease, destroying everything in our own self interest if that was our innate desire. The whole concept that we should care about other species or our impact on our environment is entirely of our own creation. To ascribe it to some higher goal is still to ascribe it to some higher human goal. To act like the reasons for preserving the environment and life on this planet are anything other than selfish is misguided. We want to preserve life on the earth for our own self interests: because we depend on it (and because we think it is cute). We want to preserve the environment because we depend on it (and because we think it is pretty). These are the only reasons to protect the world that make sense: because we want to protect ourselves and our children. This is a desire that has kept us going throughout millenia.

Not everyone has the same balance of these desires, and hence not everyone is as concerned about protecting the environment as they are about having shiny toys. They may like the taste of fishes a bit more than seeing them swim. This leads to some inevitable conflict, and the large debates, and a lot of hair pulling from the people who have strong opinions (probably because of strong desires) on each side who find it unbelievable that everyone doesn't prioritise things in the same way they do.

The attitude that we have some 'higher purpose' or that everything else is somehow more sacred than us is a strange to me. It's like people feel guilty about their own existence. I think that is has some of the same overtones of religion - that you are imperfect, you are inferior, you are sinful and therefore you should feel bad, and worship this, and promise not to do this list of things, promise to do this other list of things. The original sin becomes the carbon footprint. The objects of worship are trees and rocks and animals. You should forgo warmth and meat and convenience because they are an affront to your belief. And if you really get upset you should forget all respect for your fellow men and go and cause destruction in the name of your beliefs. Like all religions there are great benefits for many involved. And there is also the way it is used to control people, and to justify actions against fellow human beings, and often against everything you claim to stand for. The attitude of 'humans are the nastiest bunch of bastards on the planet, we should hate ourselves' is the first step of the crazy thinking towards things starting to get blown up (and peoples grandparents being exhumed). Destroy the infidel, for he does not share our beliefs as we are told to believe them.

Back to the original point though - humans are just one more example of life. Another species. Another part of the universe. We are not here for some higher purpose. We exist, like all life, simply to exist. That we are conscious of this, that we can analyse it in this way makes us one the most fascinating creatures on the planet. But we are what we are, and if we fuck it up and destroy ourselves, we will know who to blame. It would be a great shame, but you're not going to get me to start hating myself because I accept my own and others fallibility. We may be able to achieve much more, but we may not. What will be will be, so live your life because you can, simply live, that is all.

Neal Stephenson on taking orders (military, not luncheon)

2009-08-06T02:03:00.000-07:00

Re:You can shoot people, son, but don't blog! (Score:5, Interesting)

by laejoh (648921) Alter Relationship on 0:01 Thursday 06 August 2009 (#28961009)

Neal Stephenson puts it like this:

This "sir, yes sir" business, which would probably sound like horseshit to any civilian in his right mind, makes sense to Shaftoe and to the officers in a deep and important way. Like a lot of others, Shaftoe had trouble with military etiquette at first. He soaked up quite a bit of it growing up in a military family, but living the life was a different matter. Having now experienced all the phases of military existence except for the terminal ones (violent death, court-martial, retirement), he has come to understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process. The extreme formality with which he addresses these officers carries an important subtext: your problem, sir, is deciding what you want me to do, and my problem, sir, is doing it. My gung-ho posture says that once you give the order I'm not going to bother you with any of the details-and your half of the bargain is you had better stay on your side of the line, sir, and not bother me with any of the chickenshit politics that you have to deal with for a living. The implied responsibility placed upon the officer's shoulders by the subordinate's unhesitating willingness to follow orders is a withering burden to any officer with half a brain, and Shaftoe has more than once seen seasoned noncoms reduce green lieutenants to quivering blobs simply by standing before them and agreeing, cheerfully, to carry out their orders.

And a notable response to previous post

2009-08-06T01:35:00.001-07:00

Mod: +6 (Score:3, Insightful)

by tygerstripes (832644) Alter Relationship on 16:57 Wednesday 05 August 2009 (#28954711)

Very, very good advice.

I'm not sure I entirely agree with the last paragraph, provided the first paragraph is properly observed: if you have a history of open honesty (and mutual respect) then there are no hard barriers on behaviour in public - you will both know intuitively what is unacceptable/hurtful/undermining behaviour. Saying that, it's vital to have that well-established foundation of trust and respect before relaxing the rules.

I would add one important piece of advice though: Remember That You Will Both Screw Up. In any close relationship, you will inevitably end up hurting one another from time to time; sometimes in everyday little ways, sometimes in almighty one-off fuck-ups. Patience and forgiveness from both parties are the only medicine for such ills, and when applied liberally and sincerely, the relationship will often be stronger after the fuck-up than before.

Marriage advice from Slashdot!

2009-08-06T01:27:00.000-07:00

Honestly: be honest, and stick together as a team (Score:5, Insightful)

by FreeUser (11483) Alter Relationship on 15:03 Wednesday 05 August 2009 (#28953881) Homepage

Intelligent people do not need the kind of rubberstamp advice you find in self-help books. As long you remain honest, open and calm, you are very well off. Not doing stupid thing like playing WoW (ATTN! compare to watching football with you buddies and sipping beer) through your anniversary helps, too.

I can't second this enough. In the 4.5 years I've been married, the ONLY time we ever ran into any real trouble was when I tried to "manage" information. The excuse you'll typically tell yourself if tempted to do this is that it's to "spare her feelings", "you couldn't cope with it then", or "spare us an unnecessary fight". Those are excuses...the real reason is you don't want to deal with her reaction and the fallout. Don't give in to that temptation. Be honest, and demand honesty from your partner. That, and a good dose of compatabiltiy and love, will take you through just about anything).

The other underlying principle I'd add is: take the attitude that you're a team, and its you against the world--not necessarily in a combative sense, but in a "we stick together" and an economic (perhaps competative) sense. If you do these two things, you'll do well, and weather just about any storm.

There are other obvious guidelines, like not tearing each other down to your friends (even joking about the ball-and-chain will propogate memes that undermine what you have, so don't do it), not engaging in activity that can result in relationship-destroying behavior that you'll regret--like drunken "boy's nights out" in nightclubs or pick-up joints, or my personal favorite: these idiotic bachelor parties/stag dos that people go on right before they tie the knot (talk about laying the groundwork for a divorce before you're even married) ... but these are all common sense things that are directly derived from the two basic principles above: be absolutely honest with each other even when (or more precisely, especially when) it is difficult, and stick together as a team against the inevitable external pressures that the rest of the world will exert (in whatever form it takes, be it economic, cultural, external tempation, vicious inlaws, jealous exes, or whatever).

Why pot?

2009-08-05T01:42:00.000-07:00

Re:Legalization (Score:5, Insightful)

by aaandre (526056) Alter Relationship on 0:08 Wednesday 05 August 2009 (#28945275)

Stating the obvious reasons for criminalization.

- "War on drugs" is very very profitable.
- "War on drugs" gets every parent's vote.
- Politicians are not interested in anything that will make them less electable, especially by moms and old ladies.
- Decades-long framing of the idea of illegal drug use as criminal and bad.
- Decades-long framing of the idea that if a politician changes their mind, they are/were stupid or unreliable, contrary to the fact that changing one's mind is usually a sign of evolving worldview. Politicians are terrified of "flip-flopping."
- Politicians do not serve the people who elected them but money.
- Often people who use mind altering substances have more open minds. Open minds see through the BS of political systems and oppression. It is very convenient to have a quick, easy way of condemning and removing open minds from the fabric of society and the Holy Inquisition is out of fashion.

I am sure you can add more.

Pro-choice and anti-choice battle is a great example of how politics works. We are given an issue that polarizes and divides us and focuses our energy on fighting each other and not the oppressive system that enslaves us. If you look at that issue you'll see that the reality is we can not stop women from attempting abortion in one way or another. It is not possible. This is not the real issue. A culture where money is more important than human beings, lack of support for and negative attitude towards single parents, the necessity to work endless hours and live disconnected from one's children, the monetization of human health and life, are all major contributers to the issue. Dealing with these would change the numbers but would require many, many of us to change the way we think and act, and namely to start actually caring for each other.

Stone age branding?

2009-08-04T03:22:00.001-07:00

Are there two more low-tech words (Score:3, Funny)

by 93,000 (150453) Alter Relationship on 20:46 Monday 03 August 2009 (#28927817)

than 'radio' and 'shack'? Telegraph hut? Gramophone igloo? Victrola shed? . . .

Now that's balanced..

2009-07-30T13:05:00.001-07:00

Re:How many times do we have to hear about DRM?? (Score:5, Funny)

by countSudoku() (1047544) Alter Relationship on 23:39 Thursday 30 July 2009 (#28885237) Homepage

Or borrow it from your friends, then rip and enjoy, then give it to your other friends. I just share all my content now and barely purchase anything. Never used P2P either. Just sneakernet. Gotta love those cheap 1TB drives! Eat me MPAA, I give away movies and you can't stop shit. Sue me! I'm a fucking pirate. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I'm still here, and I'm still giving away movies, assholes. 80GB of MP3s and 100+ iPod ready movies and counting... my friends disks are so fucking full!!1! What's a Blue Rae?

Torvalds vs. Cox - the rundown

2009-07-30T03:29:00.000-07:00

Re:Could anyone shed some light... (Score:5, Informative)

by cryptoluddite (658517) Alter Relationship on 4:22 Thursday 30 July 2009 (#28875027)

The details are that TTYs in general on any *nix are a huge mess with lots of complicated interactions and weird historical behavior that doesn't make sense. The linux tty stack for a long time was a huge clusterfuck. Now thanks to Alan it's just a normal clusterfuck. That's the context for this incident, which basically happened like this...

Some dudes: there's a bug in the ttys
Alan: ok lets fix it
Some dudes: here's a patch
Alan: that patch breaks a dozen other things
Some dudes, Alan reject a bunch of solutions
Alan: we can fix it with a hack, but it breaks emacs. Emacs is relying on unspecified behavior, so it can go suck an egg.
Linus: well it SHOULD (sic) work like this, and emacs is too holy to break. This problem is easy, are you a retard?
Alan: look we can hack it and break emacs, or do a huge rewrite
Linus: hacks suck, linux should be awesome in every way. Also, your code smells
Alan: it's going to take forever to get this right
Linus: then revert the patch that introduced the bug
Alan: that patch was applied years ago and removing it would break a dozen other things. You didn't think I'd think of that? Who's the tty maintainer anyway, jackass?!
Linus: I don't like your attitude
Alan: Then fuck off I quit!
Linus: Oh yeah did I mention your code smells?
Linus: and let me quote you something you said earlier, so I can show what a bad attitude you have.

The TTY and serial line code is basically a huge Rube Goldberg machine and Linus was telling Alan to tweak something somewhere in the middle of this huge contraption. Having followed the TTY code a fair bit, I totally side with Alan on this. It's a miracle that it even works, and not something you can just stick your head in and give advice about how to fix. Also, if Linus is so concerned about proper behavior for user space programs maybe he should take a look at ioctl... because it's completely screwed up in linux.

Good advice to live by

2009-07-27T00:22:00.000-07:00

S.O.P. (Score:3, Insightful)

by meerling (1487879) Alter Relationship on 0:10 Monday 27 July 2009 (#28828581)

With anything that has been marketed/hyped, never rely on the initial numbers.
Ignore the first month of a search engine, and the first week of a new movie.
After the curious and easily manipulated are out of the way, you can get a real result.

Too much information

2009-07-25T22:50:00.001-07:00

Re:In other related news... (Score:3, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on 19:52 Saturday 25 July 2009 (#28818357)

Men have nipple because all foetuses are female until 12 weeks. If sufficient testosterone is given at this time the foetus develops as male.

Foresight

2009-07-23T06:35:00.000-07:00

Re:It's a cop-out (Score:3, Insightful)

by Sj0 (472011) Alter Relationship on 9:33 Sunday 27 November 2005 (#14122023) Homepage Journal

The current negative savings rates in the US, propped up by incredible debt levels made worse by low interest rates and the housing bubble (allowing people who can't really afford it to have millions in cheap debt), could possibly spell the beginning of an economic holocaust the likes of which the US has never seen.

Large scale societal dynamics are the things which shape history, not so much the politics of the day. Politics in a vacuum looks very impressive, but you look closer, and you'll often find that it is a mirror which reflects what's actually happening in the world.

Hil.ario.us

2009-07-14T04:40:00.000-07:00

Flippsonomy ossifragged in fragglemat.wtf.com (Score:4, Funny)

by Qbertino (265505) Alter Relationship on 19:47 Tuesday 04 January 2005 (#11253077)

Lots if discussion going on about fragglemat. Toxic taxidermists tipptoe on people creating their own. As seen in Flippsonomatic De.li.ri.um.
Flicker, flicker, *wink* *wink*. ITVTVTT-TV WTF?
Future Now makes a point in being later than yesterday. No synonyms controll mac for macintoshes. Herarchy one-word-tagged content-types.
Jojo-Joohohoho - The Blog! Notesdiscussion What-about-what?
Mobsinjection? Folksoflippsonomy-Calegari?
Taggletaggle (the federated social one)?
Wonder, wonder, google, google.
Makes me lazy, makes me hazy.
Tag! You are it.

Chaaange? Not!

2009-05-18T02:40:00.000-07:00

Re:Lawyers Against Government Transparency? No Way (Score:4, Informative)

by shma (863063) on 5:15 Monday 18 May 2009 (#27989771)

Finally, news where I can actually stand up proudly and say take a page from the United States on this one, Canada [whitehouse.gov]:

Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing. Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public feedback to identify information of greatest use to the public.

That's Obama talking, right?

Obama blocks release of torture photos [radionetherlands.nl]

Obama administration invokes 'state secrets' claim to defend Bush's wiretapping program. [thinkprogress.org]

Obama administration threatens Britain to keep torture evidence concealed [salon.com]

I certainly hope Obama follows through.

You have your answer.

Tech Consult Focus

2009-05-10T12:03:00.001-07:00

Re:It's not an alternative to BigTable (Score:4, Interesting)

by martin-boundary (547041) on 9:53 Sunday 10 May 2009 (#27893975)

Open sourcing anything software-related is a bad idea for Microsoft, unlike Google. Google are in the search/advertising business, not the software business. Their "crown jewels" are the databases they've collected about everything. Microsoft are in the sofware business. Their "crown jewels" are the source code for their products.

You'll note that Google aren't opening up their crown jewels: you can't just download their raw web page index and do your own thing with it. Since they're not in the software business, they can afford to give away or open their software tools. Since Microsoft are in the software business, that hurts them.

Now there's an interesting symmetry here. Being (primarily) in the software business should mean that actual content and databases isn't too important for Microsoft. If they wanted to hurt Google, they would open up their raw msnsearch indexes and other useful content databases. That would hurt Google, because people could download massive competing data collections and create their own competing search engines without the huge resource investment in crawler farms etc.

Woah! Way cool!

2009-05-10T11:46:00.000-07:00

Enron (Score:3, Interesting)

by Anna Merikin (529843) on 21:15 Sunday 10 May 2009 (#27897059) Journal

was busted by auditors who found the books were "cooked" by applying the law of first numbers described in the /. blurb and TFA. The independent auditors found the first figures were randomly distributed instead of following Benford's law with the number 1 the most plentiful and nine the least -- therefore, the entries were fraudulent.

Benford's law knocked my out at the time; I thought of how many bogus figures I had entered in my expense accounts over the years....

E = mc², dawg!

2009-03-13T12:29:00.000-07:00

Re:Surprise. (Score:5, Funny)

by flyingsquid (813711) on 20:37 Friday 13 March 2009 (#27180833)

Well, at least pimps, hos and playas are merely indifferent to science. They don't actively work to discredit it, suppress it or redefine it as something else.

Yo man, why you down on us playas and our science skills? We gotta use some mad science skills to get the honeys. For instance ya gotta know the correlation coefficient that describes the relationship between yo bling and yo hos, to maximize the amount of hos per dollar of bling. And is the relationship between those sweet rims on yo pimped out ride, and gettin the honeys best modeled by a linear or logistic model? Mendelian genetics is important to know so you can figure out whether a girl's sister gonna be hot. We playas all about the science.

Nice story... almost!

2009-02-06T02:30:00.000-08:00

Re:Yeah, I know... (Score:5, Interesting)

by Anthony_Cargile (1336739) on 8:59 Wednesday 04 February 2009 (#26720761) Homepage

I feel this is a good time to discuss my signature.

Years ago, when MS-DOS was just entering version 5, I worked for Micro(-)soft, and I was on the shell team. One little optimization could be made to the PAUSE function, I thought, so I added it in, and even when I told my manager of the patch, he said surely a promotion would soon ensue, and Dave Cutler might even consider me for this project called "Windows NT"!

So everyone approved, and the patch was added. It was written in assembly language, by the way. So the patch was added, and soon the final build of MS-DOS 6 shipped. However, soon we started getting calls from users saying their batch files crashed DOS, and a thorough code inspection went under way. While inspecting the last couple of patches, many bugs were found, some even I fixed, and we were sure MS-DOS 6.21 was the final solution.

How wrong were we! The test batch files still crashed the OS, and upon further inspection, it was found that the PAUSE() function would crash just after printing the characters to the screen. They inspected my patch, found an erroneous jz mnemonic (despite our getch setting the eax [return] register to a non-zero ASCII character).

The log showed it was my patch, and I was soon speedily fired before the compilation of MS-DOS 6.22, which corrected the PAUSE function I messed up so bad. I have since regretted that function every day of my life, and I put it in my .sig as just a reminder of that horrible incident. So, think not of my signature as a juvenile C joke intended to frustrate an experienced DOS user, but instead the C port of the subroutine patch that costed me a Microsoft job at the time when, as a company, they were just about to reach their peak. Layoffs are not funny, even if caused by such a humorous-at-first-glance patch.

Never forget, slashdot, never forget.

--
void PAUSE(){ printf("\nPress any key to continue. . ."); while(1) getch(); }

*********
BUT WAIT!!!!!
*********

Re:My Ambition (Score:4, Interesting)

by Anthony_Cargile (1336739) on 7:55 Tuesday 06 January 2009 (#26338469) Homepage

I get sick of explaining this, but the sig (which could not completely fit because of /.) is supposed to infinitely loop like that. I'm fully aware that getch() is only found in DOS's conio.h (and the ncurses lib), but even The C Programming Language references it, without providing the code for it (or even a header inclusion, for that matter). The full code snippet (forgive me, mods) is this:

void PAUSE(){ printf("\nPress any key to continue. . ."); while(1) getch(); } // enforce the 'any' key

And this was used in an old app I wrote (a long time ago) - a fake COMMAND.COM/cmd.exe used to prank anyone who used it religiously, mainly a teacher I had that pinged something every about five minutes.

Now can we move on? (And if thats you, peter, then you obviously are new here).

--
void PAUSE(){ printf("\nPress any key to continue. . ."); while(1) getch(); }

*********
BUSTED!!!
*********

I defy you!

2009-01-28T01:09:00.000-08:00

Re:Waiting.. (Score:4, Funny)

by Tablizer (95088) on 12:51 Tuesday 27 January 2009 (#26618771) Homepage Journal

The patent seems like it might be pretty broad, but it seems to basically cover touch 'gestures'.

Hey Apple, patent THIS gesture:

,,|,,

That's RELIGION!

2009-01-18T03:13:00.000-08:00

Re:to educate the public (Score:5, Insightful)

by causality (777677) on 0:19 Sunday 18 January 2009 (#26498829)

since the professed aim of the litigations was to 'educate' the public?"

Well, sure, but not to educate the public *too* much.

So often the message sent is, "you're educated if you agree with me." Truth does not mean very much to people like this. In fact truth, or at least the love of truth and the entire truth not for any agenda but for its own sake, was the first thing they had to sacrifice to become as sold to their own system as they are. The thing that (I believe) is often forgotten is that once people are compromised in this fashion, for any reason, they become "true believers" in whatever it was that compromised them and they give their allegiance to it. Most people are not entirely 100% themselves and are compromised in some way by ideas that did not come from a careful evaluation of available options. This is where the abuses and the underhanded maneuvers come from. That is, they come not from people who know they are doing something wrong and do not care, but from people who have an endless supply of rationalizations that they themselves believe.

ZipperPlameNippleZune

2008-12-07T19:47:00.000-08:00

Watergate is a God Damned Hotel You Turds (Score:5, Insightful)

by Spasmodeus (940657) on 16:30 Sunday 07 December 2008 (#26019021)

I have this fantasy in which I am kind of superhero who travels the country tracking down hack reporters who slap the "gate" suffix on anything vaguely resembling a scandal, then jabbing them with a cattle prod until I'm satisfied justice has been served.

Nerdhood

2008-11-06T21:19:00.000-08:00

Re:Guerrilla Marketing (Score:5, Insightful)

by Red Flayer (890720) on 2:13 Friday 07 November 2008 (#25666183) Journal

Why is it news for nerds? The same reason you found it fascinating.

Guy observes something odd related to his field of work.

Guy notices more oddities, all related.

Guy gets an itch to figure out what is going on, and scratches the itch.

Guy keeps on scratching until he's completely satisfied.

Seriously, what nerd hasn't done the same thing in their particular field of interest? Whether it's the grepping to find instances of an odd item in your logs, or statistical analysis to compare voting records by state to federal balance of payment figures, or figuring out how to make the pelvic actuators on your girl robot work properly, one thing all nerds have in common is sleuthing.

Nerdhood, to me, is defined by inquisitiveness and a strong dedication to finding answers and increasing our knowledge. So yes, it's news for nerds, since we can all relate to the author's search for truth.

I'd wear that

2008-11-06T09:40:00.000-08:00

Seen on a friend's T-Shirt (Score:5, Funny)

by Nicros (531081) on 2:41 Thursday 06 November 2008 (#25649507)

chmod a+x /bin/laden

Battles are won in the mind, eh?

2008-11-06T09:04:00.000-08:00

Combat Telepathy Problems..... (Score:3, Funny)

by IHC Navistar (967161) on 12:30 Thursday 06 November 2008 (#25657575)

Soldier 1: :::Enemy behind the wall on the left by the palm tree.:::

Soldier 2: :::Enemy behind the wall on the left by the palm tree.:::

Soldier 3: :::Enemy behind the wall on the left by the palm tree.:::

Soldier 4: :::Enemy behind the wall on the left by the palm tree. Hey, wait a minute! That reminds me, the mailman and my wife were pretty friendly last time I was home...:::

Soldier 5: :::Enemy behing the wall on the left by the palm tree:::

Soldiers 1, 2, 3: :::WTF?! Enemy behind the wall on the left by the palm tree!:::

Soldier 5: :::I'll bet he's got a package for her!:::

Soldier 4: :::What's THAT supposed to mean?:::

Soldier 6: :::Dude, your wife's bangin the mailman!:::

Soldier 5: :::HE'S GOT AN RPG!!!:::

Soldier 4: :::Dude, that's not funny!:::

Soldier 5: :::NO! THE GUY BEHIND TH-.....

Fwishhhh! BOOOOOM!

Soldiers 1, 2, 3, 4, 6: :::Oh... *That* guy.....:::

It's a train. No, it's a bullet. Neither, it's Windows 3.1!

2008-11-05T11:24:00.000-08:00

Oh yeah (Score:5, Funny)

by Anonymous Coward on 11:28 Wednesday 05 November 2008 (#25637023)

They are all nice to you when you retire. "Have fun on the beach," they say. Then one day, when you are relaxing in your hammock enjoying your time off maybe sipping a gin and tonic, the phone rings. "It's Linus and the Mac fag," they say, "They're back." "No way, I'm out of the game," you say. Then Windows ME bangs on your door, his back riddled with bullet holes, you know now and then that the computing world needs you. Up in the attic, you grab a handful of floppies and your trusty 2400 baud modem. "Fuck it," you mutter.

All hail St. Ignucius!

2008-11-05T07:44:00.000-08:00

"Stallman is hard to deal with" (Score:3, Insightful)

by br00tus (528477) on 19:49 Tuesday 04 November 2008 (#25625265)

For years we here how hard Stallman is to deal with, supposedly. How it is all about him and he is egotistical etc.

Wikipedia is the crown jewel of GFDL. But - GFDL was really originally written to deal with technical documentation to accompany GPL software, not to deal with content on wikis etc. But it seemed like a good license when Wikipedia started so they used it. There is also a lot of Creative Commons content out there that Wikipedia wants to work with, and the GFDL provisions made working everything together difficult.

So what does Stallman do? He magnaminously allows the crown jewel of using GFDL to move towards the CC world, if Wikipedia wants. Can we imagine Microsoft, or SCO or proprietary licensed software companies doing this? No. And it is helping the digital commons community, although from now on Stallman and the FSF will not being getting kudos for the license for Wikipedia content from now on, because Stallman was so gracious about it.

There is a difference between holding to your principles, and being stubborn just for the sake of ego or whatever. Stallman has always held to his principles regarding freedom. But here is an example of him working with others, and being flexible, to help the greater cause of the digital commons. I have to read for years about how inflexible Stallman supposedly is, here is an example to the contrary. Because Stallman is flexible, he is only inflexible about his principles and about freedom.

Can this be?

2008-10-22T20:55:00.000-07:00

Could he be the oldest Indian Slashdotter? In terms of UID, at least...

That's comforting

2008-10-16T02:10:00.000-07:00

Re:Thanks, I'll pass on that flight... (Score:3, Interesting)

by tomRakewell (412572) on 19:15 Wednesday 15 October 2008 (#25381781)

In an airplane, the time between when I realize that things are not as they should be and the time when I won't be thinking anymore could be measured in minutes. That is a pretty chilling thought for me...

Don't worry! Most of the time, you never know what hit you in an airplane catastrophe. If the aircraft breaks up at 35,000 feet (as a result of a mid-air collision, fuel tank explosion, terrorist attack, etc.), you're none the wiser. You'll probably be killed by flying debris within a second, and if you survive the break-up, you'll have the oxygen boil out of your blood a few seconds after that.

Much more frequently, you'll hit a mountain while flying in zero visibility. Zero seconds to worry.

A large portion of accidents occur when the plane lands. Tail or wing strike, skidding off the runway, etc. These calamities are likely to occur even more rapidly than a car crash. You probably won't be able to complete the sentence "Oh shi----!"

Or maybe your plane is overweight and can't get enough power to take-off properly. In this case, you've got 20 seconds max to contemplate your fate. And it will probably take you 10 seconds realize that it is really happening. "Why is it taking so long to take off? Is the plane really flipping upside down? Is this REALLY happening?? Oh, oh, yes, it is..."

Being in a plane that plummets to the ground for a minute or two isn't that likely. When seated on your flight, you should really be aware that your life could be snuffed out without warning at any minute.

Systemic failure

2008-10-09T21:24:00.000-07:00

Gee, I wonder why the system is failing (Score:5, Insightful)

by SmallFurryCreature (593017) on 23:00 Wednesday 08 October 2008 (#25302223) Journal

Gosh, why is the system failing. What could possible have happened to the US and democracy in general. Could there be some clue. Maybe something in your post. Geez, lets see.

Personally I forgot it happened

The powers that be thank you, dear consumer with the attention span of a kitten in a chicken plucking factory.

That's not just the USA..

2008-10-01T01:28:00.000-07:00

Dear Constituent (a letter from your government) (Score:5, Insightful)

by mfh (56) on 2:20 Wednesday 01 October 2008 (#25209573) Homepage Journal

Dear Constituent,

We know you are a human being, or at least you believe that matters to us, but sadly, our mailboxes are too small and cannot possibly handle the number of emails you people wish to send. We lose them anyway and we never read them so why bother. Also, when we built the mailboxes, we only anticipated hearing from 0.001% of our constituents, not this whopping 1.02% contact ratio we're experiencing!

We have assessed the situation and believe that you fall under one of the following categories:

1. You are whining about something that we did to hurt your feelings. 2. You want us to do something. 3. You have a complaint.

Here are some generic responses to help you cope:

Category #1: (You are whining about something that hurt your feelings.) Sorry. Vote for me in 2008!

Category #2: (You want us to do something.) We are already doing everything we can. KTHXBYE. Vote for me in 2008!

Category #3: (You have a complaint.) GTFO. Canada is that way -------> Vote for me in 2008!

Therefore, while we will gladly take your taxes from you, we have some bad news. We can't hear you. La la la la la la la la what? can't hear you! la la la la la...

No no... that's all you have to say.

Besides, we'll do whatever we want to anyway.

Vote for me in 2008!

Kind Regards, Your Douchebag Government

Amen, brotha!

2008-09-29T23:03:00.000-07:00

Re:passionless technician (Score:4, Interesting)

by 4D6963 (933028) on 1:43 Monday 29 September 2008 (#25186729) Homepage Journal

I don't mean to sound like a hippie, but I'd blame it as a side effect of consumerism. What I mean by that is that as an effect of consumerism, people's goal in life is to become rich, rather than have a great career or reach any other sort of goal. Personal achievements are replaced by monetary and material gain, and what you have supersedes what you do or who you are. You are only as successful a person as how much money you make. People would do the dumbest job in the world if it paid well.

I think it has to do with the fact that people genuinely believe that their goal in life is to become rich, have fun, good sex, then a wife, kids, all of which are supposed to make you a happy and accomplished man, or so they think. The Los Angeles mentality prevails, satisfy your basest instincts, make money, use it as a leverage to satisfy your basest instincts more, produce offsprings, die.

In this context, genuinely caring about anything else makes you a "nerd" or "geek", which, seen under that angle, is actually a great thing to be. It's just a shame that our culture raises people to produce as much wealth as possible and nothing else. Actually I'm pretty sure you can interpret the movie Matrix as a critique of consumerism, in which people, being in the movie used as batteries, are in our real life money-making "batteries".

Amen to that!

2008-09-16T02:31:00.001-07:00

The age-old struggle (Score:3, Insightful)

by yorkshiredale (1148021) on 11:13 Tuesday 16 September 2008 (#25021725)

The business guys want it fast, cheap, first.

Engineering want it correct, perfect, however long it takes.

There's the struggle.

Any good business needs to strike a balance between the two. The tension is inevitable, and healthy.

Would bin Laden's underlings call him the 'Big O'?

2008-09-15T05:43:00.000-07:00

Some of the Messages (Score:3, Funny)

by GaryPatterson (852699) on 12:33 Monday 15 September 2008 (#25006203)

16 Jan 2004, 8:58am
Tim,
Can you bring some milk and bread over please?
Thanks,
O

18 Jan 2004, 5:24pm
What happened? I'm starving out here you know! I can't just pop down to the shop for supplies, it's a freaking desert out there!

22 Jan 2004, 3:42pm
Tim,
Are you mad at me? Is that why you're not talking? I'm sorry I was angry in my last email.
Just drop by, we'll talk and drink coffee. You'll need to bring the coffee though. And some milk and bread. Maybe honey too. I like honey.
O

28 Jan 2004, 5:30pm
Bob,
Can you check up on Tim for me? It's like he's frozen me out or something. I just want to know everything's okay.
Also, can you send me a few bottles of milk and some loaves of bread. Maybe honey and jam too. Oh, and coffee! Not that I need to stay awake out here. You never think you're bored until you're stuck in a cave in the wilderness. Luckily I've got ADSL here.
Thanks, and say "Hi" to Mary and the kids for me,
O

29 Jan 2004, 12:37pm
O,
I think Tim's gone. Looks like he left in a hurry. Typical of his type - I told you about him, you'll remember. Anyway, I'll get Chuck to drop over some supplies in the next day or so.
Look after yourself,
Bob

29 Jan 2004, 3:52pm
Damn it! I thought Tim was different. I thought he had commitment, you know? What happened to people who could take the long view?
Anyway, thanks for getting chuck to drop the food over. I appreciate it - there'll be an extra virgin for you in the afterlife!
Can you remind Chuck to bring a can opener? I don't want to have to shoot these ones open. Those soldiers nearly heard me last time.
Thanks again,
O

Why NOT to use IE 8

2008-09-15T03:36:00.001-07:00

Danger Signs (Score:5, Funny)

by StefanJ (88986) on 9:58 Monday 15 September 2008 (#25005293) Homepage Journal

1) After installing IE8, webcam tracks your movements around the room.

2) Strange giggling from PC speakers when you Agree to the EULA.

3) When you start Spybot Search & Destroy you get a phone call from someone sounding an awful lot like Jerry Seinfeld threatening your pets.

4) Paperclip is back, and now its mad.

5) The next time you hear the phrase "actually pretty innocuous" is in President Palin's speech about what happens in Loyal Citizens' Youth Brigade moral rectification camps.

6) You printer puts job sheets at the beginning of each document. Job sheets with coupons for Brawndo.

7) Activity gadget in upper right hand corner of browser is a Total Information Awareness icon.

8) Entering URL for Chrome download page redirects to gay furry bondage snuff porn site.

9) After refusing to upgrade to IE8 you wake up to find the Firefox's severed head on your bed.

10) Ghost of grandmother appears to you in dream, begging you to install Ubuntu. Which is just plain weird because she was a Slackware fan!

Firefox EULA - simplified

2008-09-15T00:10:00.000-07:00

EULA summary (Score:3, Informative)

by Restil (31903) on 4:05 Monday 15 September 2008 (#25002323) Homepage

1. We're letting you use the software. Have fun.
2. If you don't want to use the software, don't.
3. We need to protect our trademarks, so if you change something and redistribute it, don't call it Mozilla or Firefox.
4. No warranty, get over it.
5. We're not responsible for anything that goes wrong. This actually is just a paraphrase of section 4, and like section 4, we've stated it in ALL CAPS, so you'll be sure to pay attention to it.
6. There might be laws about sending this software out of the country. Try to obey them.
7. If you're using this in a US government environment, there are certainly many laws that will regulate its use. Please pay attention to them.
8. We're doing it the California way, the UN will not be involved (thank goodness), this agreement is written in English, you can give this (unmodified) license and product to someone else, and we won't mind.

There. The important parts.

It's a Math, Math World

2008-08-31T22:21:00.000-07:00

from Straight Dope (Score:5, Funny)

by mbius (890083) on 4:43 Sunday 31 August 2008 (#24814165) Journal

The following examples may help to clarify the difference between the new and old math.

1960: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of this price. What is his profit?

1970 (Traditional math): A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80. What is his profit?

1975 (New Math): A logger exchanges a set L of lumber for a set M of money. The cardinality of set M is 100 and each element is worth $1.

(a) make 100 dots representing the elements of the set M

(b) The set C representing costs of production contains 20 fewer points than set M. Represent the set C as a subset of the set M.

(c) What is the cardinality of the set P of profits?

1990 (Dumbed-down math): A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80 and his profit is $20. Underline the number 20.

1997 (Whole Math): By cutting down a forest full of beautiful trees, a logger makes $20.

(a) What do you think of this way of making money?

(b) How did the forest birds and squirrels feel?

(c) Draw a picture of the forest as you'd like it to look.

Ah, Ruby-us!

2008-08-31T22:16:00.000-07:00

Re:Major players? (Score:3, Funny)

by coryking (104614) * on 5:43 Saturday 30 August 2008 (#24804219) Homepage Journal

but in the Ruby world they are not

Of course they aren't. Ruby is for fashion programmers with iMacs, iTunes and iPhones. Ruby is for programmers who moonlight as bar tenders. Ruby is for companies with numbers in their name. Ruby is for minimalists who eschew corporate wisdom. Ruby is for those who use words like eschew.

Ruby is hip. It is edgy. If you went into a bar and said "I use Ruby", you would get first game on the pool table. If you use Ruby, people call you by your initials, not your name.

You dont use Ruby to just get work done. No sir. You use Ruby to make a statement about who you are.

CF, DT, DHH and M himself are all cool beyond belief. They are the superstar hipsters of our modern programming world. C programmers, Java programmers and .NET programmers could never be as cool as DHH--not even on the best day of their lives.

Go home you Microsoft Player. Go home you inbred C programmers and Billy-Joe-PHP'ers. You are the rednecks of the computing world. You are the fly-over programming languages that keep us busy wondering who uses your language as we our active records fly over your heads.

Most helpful!

2008-08-27T21:39:00.001-07:00

Thanks, Slashdot! (Score:4, Funny)

by eln (21727) on 23:36 Tuesday 26 August 2008 (#24753993)

I'm very glad that Slashdot finally added the ability to include informative pictures with their stories. For too long, I've seen news stories about cows and wondered to myself, "What exactly is a cow? What does one look like?" Now, thanks to this excellent feature, I no longer have to suffer the embarrassment of cow ignorance.

Thank you Slashdot!

Scary stuff

2008-08-22T21:32:00.000-07:00

Fascist America, in 10 easy steps (Score:5, Interesting)

by jawtheshark (198669) * <slashdot@j a w t h e s h a r k .com> on 3:12 Saturday 23 August 2008 (#24712403) Homepage Journal

Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

My history teacher pointed those out in 1997 and he wasn't thinking of the USA back then. I thought: come on, it can't be that easy! However, seeing what happens in the USA, I humbly have to retract that opinion.

Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy: 9/11 Terrorists, enemy combatants and unspoken Islam
Create a gulag: Two words... Guantanamo Bay
Develop a thug caste: Not yet, I think so at least.
Set up an internal surveillance system: See article
Harass citizens' groups: Again, see article and peaceful oriented groups have already been infiltrated. Okay, my source is ~~Roger~~ Michael Moore so a grain of salt the size of Canada is needed.
Engage in arbitrary detention and release: This goes along with Guantanamo. However, non-fly lists are in those lines....
Target key individuals: Is most certainly happening....
Control the press: Conglomerates do this... Don't even bother. Real historic dictatorships couldn't do this as well as capitalistic US.
Dissent equals treason: If you're not with us, you're against us.... I have to say no more.
Suspend the rule of law: Habeas corpus is gone, more laws have followed and more will follow.

The Dark Code Knight

2008-08-18T22:58:00.000-07:00

Re:Allegiances (Score:4, Funny)

by bigstrat2003 (1058574) * on 21:01 Monday 18 August 2008 (#24645849)

3. The Joker writes a new improved scheduler which has the potential to replace the old one.

when (process.wantsToRun) { retort(process, "Why so serious!?"); kill(process); }

Very efficient. I like it.

What about free speech?

2008-08-10T01:09:00.000-07:00

If I tell you how to hack the DC transit system... (Score:5, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on 3:07 Sunday 10 August 2008 (#24539925)

If I tell you how to hack the DC transit system right here in this post, will DC issue an injunction to have slashdot remove the post? Let's find out!

In the DC system, you have to scan your card to get into and out of every station. Rather than having standard boarding fares like NY, it actually takes into account where you scanned in and where you scanned out and then deducts the appropriate amount for the fare between those two points at the time you scan out.

But say you leave the same station you entered. Maybe you missed your train and decided to take a cab, or forgot something, or got a call and changed your plans, or just want to rip off the DC transit system. Whatever. You always have to scan a card to get out, and if you scan the same card, it doesn't let you out for free, but charges you a minor fee. I think it was $0.25.

So, say you have a standard commute to work and back every day on the DC transit system:
Go into your point of departure and buy two cards, one with the appropriate fare to your destination. Swipe both of them in.
Ride to your point of departure. Swipe the exact fare card out and throw it away.
Go about your business at your destination. When you return:
Buy a new card and swipe it in.
Ride to your point of origin and Swipe OUT the card you only swiped IN at the same point earlier. You just rode there for $0.25.
The next day, swipe that same card in at the same station. Ride to your point of departure, and swipe out with the card you bought at that point yesterday. Another $0.25 trip.
Always continue to scan in and out at the same station using the same card. Every trip between those stations will be $0.25.

There is no expiration on how much time may pass between swiping in and out of the same station for the minimum fee. There is nothing set up to catch that one card is swiped in and out of the same station every day about 9 hours apart, while another card is swept in and out of another station about 15 hours apart. At least, not unless they've fixed it in the past few years.

Obviously, buy the cards you use for this with cash, not a credit card.

If you really want to be a cheap skate, quadruple your money [schneier.com] also. Then all repeat rides in the system will be priced at approximately $0.07 each.

McCain for President

2008-08-08T04:25:00.000-07:00

McCain for President (Score:5, Funny)

by fermion (181285) on 3:22 Friday 08 August 2008 (#24517295) Homepage Journal

My Freely offered Blog entry. Copy as you see fit. I need no rewards.

I admit it is a bit over the op, but if we are in a world where millions of dollars can be spent comparing a magna cum laude Havard Graduate to Paris Hiton, anything goes.

McCain was not born in the US but is considered a US citizen anyway, unlike many who are born in the US that the republican party wants to consider foreign.

As a proud third generation employee of the government, McCain is uniquely experienced to be president. His third generation military status uniquely places him to find the best government military solutions for every problem, without the distractions of diplomacy or allowing the free market to work. Like the current president, he entered higher education on a legacy, thus putting him in touch with the problems of the elite he represents. Also like the current president, he has a storied military carreer, flying planes around the world. At one point his plane got shot down and he no longer flew planes, but was kept in a POW camp. He was tortured for some time during the captivity. This experience wad apparently not bad enough to make him unconditionally opposed to torture.

He also has a unique perspective on government medical care. As a third generation government employee, he has spent his entire life with free access to the government medical facilities. Although he is 71, and claims to be in good health, he experience has shown him that government medical care is not good enough for the general populous, so is absolutely opposed to it.

Some might think a third generation government employee may not be the best president for a country based on free enterprise, but wait. His second wife, whom he married soon after divorcing his first wife, is the chair of one of the largest beer distributors in the country. As such, McCain has experience with the perks of the corporate life, like luxury corporate jets, which he used to ferry himself between campaign stops during his bid to become president. He understands the compromises that must be made when growing a business, like how many alcohol related teen deaths are acceptable to maintain a certain profit margin.

As we can see McCain is uniquely qualified to understand the needs of the nation. The military can solve all problems. The health care system that has kept him so healthy is not adequate of capable of doing the same for the masses. American Corporations has special problems and must be given significant leeway in their right to earn a profit.

Adam Smith fundaes

2008-06-09T04:11:00.000-07:00

Re:Bush (Score:5, Informative)

by MillionthMonkey (240664) on 1:20 Monday 09 June 2008 (#23701979)

I wonder if this has anything to do with Bush running up trillions in debt and making everyone hate us?

Well look at it this way.

The government is the only entity that can effectively control the amount of currency in circulation. It is the only entity that can create and destroy money by fiat; it can print currency, it can create funds to lend to central banks, and it can destroy the money it created.

The government takes money from you every year in April. Someone has to repair roads, pick up garbage, provide for the common defense etc. Asphalt, garbage trucks, and missiles cost money. The government prints this money and spends it. It's all OK because it picks your pocket, pulls out dollars, and destroys them to account for it. And you shouldn't complain because you get to drive on nice roads with no garbage or foreigners.

What if they didn't take your money? That's what George W. Bush did. He figured you'd like him more if we skipped the part where the money comes out of your pocket and gets burned up in order to close the books on the services you receive from the government. So the money escaped your pocket (or at least your $300 consolation prize did), and suddenly all this money that had been spent paving the roads and collecting garbage was suddenly appearing at Wal*Mart for its second life, and it got spent a second time to buy more garbage, predominantly imported crap from overseas. Basically the government printed crap dollars, we spent them on imports, giving sellers overseas dollars that they promptly exchange for their own currencies. The currency exchange markets are quickly overwhelmed by dollars. These quickly end up parked in immense T-Bills held by foreign banks, who would like to unload them but cannot risk damaging their value by flooding the dollar markets with their own holdings. But the value of the dollar is deteriorating anyway, much to everyone's dismay- because dollars are the most widely held currency in the world. And we owe them to everybody. You see how awkward this is.

Let's say now you're sitting on a loading dock with 500 Nintendos on pallets. Do you want to turn them into dollars? Heh heh heh heh heh.

But the invisible hand has a way to correct everything. Maybe someday we can make our own Nintendos.

Middle-Eastern Matter

2008-05-12T10:58:00.000-07:00

Re:Not worth it (Score:5, Funny)

by gwayne (306174) on 19:00 Monday 12 May 2008 (#23377140)

Dhakmi does Mosel!

Iraqi Man 1: Would you get a load of the slit in her burka! I think I saw an eye!

Iraqi Man 2: Oh yeah, baby, put it on! More burka!

Iraqi Man 3: Halalalalalalalala...BOOM!

Microsoft OOXML Shenanigans

2008-04-15T02:17:00.000-07:00

Shame on ISO, delivering political IT standards (Score:3, Informative)

by omz (834760) on 19:13 Monday 31 March 2008 (#22920464)

Irregularities and political decisions in ISO DIS 29500 March 2008 votes:

Germany

In a steering committee of 20 people a vote was taken to answer this question: "did the process run according to the rules and without irregularities?"

6 answered no and 7 abstained!

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-49525/limited-choice-at-german-din [noooxml.org] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2008032913190768

Norway

21 members of the committee voted NO to fast-track this DIS but it was decided to vote yes anyway.

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-50031/oil-fire-in-norway-microsoft-buys-another-standards-body

Denmark

The technical committee didn't agree to change the disapproval vote but it was "decided" to vote yes anyway.

The committee S-142/U-34 under Danish Standards could not agree to change their vote from No to Yes.

A couple of hours later:

http://www.version2.dk/artikel/6718 says that the announcement from Danish Standards will not be made until Friday and that the Chair of the committee has been barred from speaking about the result of yesterday's meeting.

After some Microsoft political intervention to revert this ( the Prime Minister of Denmark is a Microsoft friend ), we have this: http://www.en.ds.dk/4227

Another political decision, influenced by Microsoft lobbyists.

Malaysia

The Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation decided on Malaysia's final position on OOXML ("abstain" ), overturning the 81% "Disapprove" position by ISC-G and TC4.

http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2008/03/the-minister-of.html http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2008/03/malaysian-indus.html

Poland

On March 20, 2008, Technical Committee (KT 182) of PKN was supposed to either accept the recommendation (which was to vote YES for the proposed standard) or not accept it, and thus recommend PKN to vote NO or abstain from voting. Of 45 members, 24 appeared on the meeting. And the votes looked like this:

12 votes supporting the reccomendation,
10 votes rejecting it,
2 abstaining to vote.

No consensus has been achieved concerning the recommendation. Thus, the chairman of KT 182, Elzbieta Andrukiewicz, decided to allow the missing members to vote by e-mail during the next 10 days (till the end of March).

The email vote was taken, counting a "no mail sended" as an "approval" !!!

Clearly, there was no technical consensus in Poland, but the chairman forced the rules to favour an approval.

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-49455/polish-chairwoman-distributes-microsoft-propaganda http://polishlinux.org/poland/possible-manipulation-around-ooxml-process-in-poland/ http://polishlinux.org/poland/poland-confirms-its-approval-for-ooxml-in-iso/

Croatia

Out of 35 members of TO Z1, 17 sent a vote, and there were three votes for, and fourteen against fast-tracking OOXML, which is relative rejection rate of 82%. Members who voted were individual experts, IBM, CLUG and HrOpen. However, since there were less than 51% of votes, the voting process was declared invalid, and the previous vote holds ( "approve" ) !

Microsoft Croatia heavily influenced the voting, arguing that there's no need for a second round and accusing commitee conveners of incompetence.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2008032913190768 http://www.oddparity.org/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=44&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=1

USA

The technical committee Incits/V1 was heavily stacked by Microsoft partners.

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-46044/committee-stuffing-also-in-the-united-states:11-microsoft-business-partners

Switzerland

The chairman Hans-Rudolf Thomann systematically blocked the technical opposition to the DIS, virtually deciding Switzerland position himself.

New infamous JTC 1 P-members

Accepted a few days before DIS 29500 ballot closing, who joined ISO JTC1 just to cast a "yes vote":

Jamaica island
Cyprus island
Malta island
Kazakhstan
Lebanon
Azerbaijan
Cote-d'Ivore
Pakistan

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-43510/ivory-coast-represented-by-microsoft-senegal-at-the-brm

Shameful. This is how ISO is delivering IT standards to the world, ignoring any technical analysis and accountability in NB decisions.

The sub-prime crisis, explained

2008-04-15T02:03:00.000-07:00

Re:This is getting ridiculous (Score:3, Insightful)

by gtall (79522) on 16:01 Monday 31 March 2008 (#22919404)

If you are referring to the current credit crisis, the blame goes to a lot more than a few mega-corporations. Let's assign the blame:

1. The Fed. Years of interest rates way too low made too much money available which had to go somewhere inflating somewhere's value, and it went to our next contestants...

2. The U.S. house buying public which bought houses on all interest payment loans, second and third houses, flipped houses, etc. This was enabled by our next competitors...

3. The real estate companies (and their lovely agents) and the builders...who believed everyone deserved a McMansion. This was heartily approved by our next scum suckers...

4. The local and state tax districts whose pols and legislators saw to it that zoning ordinances, lax environmental laws, etc. where there to Help Make America Strong. They were echoed by...

5. The federal Congress Critters and Administration who saw to it that a free market economy carried no responsibility for oversight since more economic activity meant more money to spend. That still wasn't enough so they deficit spent because what's a few more bucks for those policies needed to buy the next election. This enabled...

6. Your mega-corporations on Wall Street...even thought they are dwarfed by real mega-corporations but I figured you probably wouldn't know the difference...These Wall Street geniuses thought that packaging loans and thus cutting the link between value and collateral would be a great way to sucker the investors near and abroad in buying these "debt instruments"....and to make things worse...

7. Their other friends on Wall Street made more debt-instruments available all backed by the debt-instruments in 6, and this went several layers deep so that an entire domino tail was stacked up just waiting for a push. This also enabled...

8. Speculators in commodities to use this new found wealth to bid up the prices of oil, food, and other commodities.

8. The first domino fell when Joe Sixpack realized how overextended he was and couldn't afford to outlive his means and cut back...including defaults on those home loans.

And this is the simplistic view.

Out of the Wincloset

2008-01-22T21:16:00.000-08:00

I can just hear it now! (Score:5, Funny)

by techpawn (969834) on 22:38 Monday 21 January 2008 (#22127912) Journal

Because there are fewer and fewer of us, I must help keep our lineage alive. I am looking for someone to help me do this. I need a woman (obviously) who is willing to raise a child with me in the method of Unix."."

Mom: There's something billy wants to say to you dear...
Dad: What is it son?
Son: Well, ever since I was young I knew I was different... Not like the other boy you wanted me to play with and...
Dad: Billy? Are you telling us you're gay?
Son: No! Not that dad...
Dad: Well son what is it?
Son: I've been dual booting XP for weeks now! I want to use a GUI!
Dad: WHAT?!! I have no son!

All your freedom are belong to us

2007-12-03T10:52:00.000-08:00

Might be a good time to drag this out again... (Score:5, Funny)

by fletch44 (1070720) on 16:43 Saturday 01 December 2007 (#21542867)

Subject: NOTICE OF REVOCATION OF INDEPENDENCE

To the citizens of the United States of America,

In the light of your failure to distinguish between the scientific method and imaginary invisible friends in the sky, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective today.

Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths and other territories. Except Utah, which she does not fancy. Your new prime minister (The rt. hon. Gordon Brown, MP for the 97.85% of you who have until now been unaware that there is a world outside your borders) will appoint a minister for America without the need for further elections. Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. A questionnaire will be circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed.

To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:

1. You should look up "revocation" in the Oxford English Dictionary. Then look up "aluminium". Check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it.

Generally, you should raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels.

Look up "vocabulary". Using the same twenty seven words interspersed with filler noises such as "like" and "you know" is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication. Look up "interspersed".

2. There is no such thing as "US English". We will let Microsoft know on your behalf.

3. You should learn to distinguish the English and Australian accents. It really isn't that hard.

4. Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast English actors as the good guys.

5. You should relearn your original national anthem, "God Save The Queen", but only after fully carrying out task 1. We would not want you to get confused and give up half way through.

6. You should stop playing American "football". There is only one kind of football. What you refer to as American "football" is not a very good game.

The 2.15% of you who are aware that there is a world outside your borders may have noticed that no one else plays "American" football. You will no longer be allowed to play it, and should instead play proper football.

Initially, it would be best if you played with the girls. It is a difficult game. Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby (which is similar to American "football", but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds or wearing full kevlar body armour like nancies). We are hoping to get together at least a US rugby sevens side by 2011.

7. You should declare war on Quebec and France, using nuclear weapons if they give you any merde. The 98.85% of you who were not aware that there is a world outside your borders should count yourselves lucky. The Russians have never been the bad guys. "Merde" is French for "sh*t".

8. July 4th is no longer a public holiday. December 1st will be a new national holiday, but only in England. It will be called "Indecisive Day".

9. All American cars are hereby banned. They are crap and it is for your own good. When we show you German cars, you will understand what we mean.

10. Please tell us who killed JFK. It's been driving us crazy.

Thank you for your cooperation.

For everything else...

2007-11-20T12:11:00.000-08:00

Some things in life, money can't buy... (Score:4, Funny)

by Mr2001 (90979) on 8:35 Tuesday 20 November 2007 (#21416033)

(http://www.hansprestige.com/ | Last Journal: 2:55 Saturday 15 September 2007)

Subscription to Stereophile magazine: $10.

Additional hard drive to store your lossless music collection: $200.

Portable audio player that supports FLAC: $300.

High-end headphones and speakers necessary to hear the difference between MP3/AAC and FLAC: $1000.

Gold shielded power, speaker, and headphone cables to avoid picking up noise that masks the differences between MP3/AAC and FLAC: $2000.

Watching all that equipment turn into one big zombie spambot as soon as you press "play": priceless.

Communism is teh suxxorz!!1

2007-11-19T00:38:00.000-08:00

Re:Chinese "capitalism" is still largely an illusi (Score:4, Interesting)

by tftp (111690) on 4:39 Monday 19 November 2007 (#21401381)
(http://www.lib.ru/)

Socialism has at least one major fault: it depends on people taking their share of the common wealth, proportional to their contribution. Needless to say, this is impossible on every account. A genius scientist can be entitled to millions of dollars, but he is not married, lives at his lab and needs nothing. A family of janitors with 8 kids needs everything they can get from the society, and they are hardly earning anything from the society for their work.

This is an imbalance that was counter to the proclaimed idea of equality, and it was very real in the USSR. In Stalin's time, for example, a professor could afford a personal chauffeured car, a maid or two, and the best living accommodation - this was when people were paid for their worth. After Stalin things changed: a scientist went hungry (130 R/mo) and an uneducated metal worker at a factory (400-500 R/mo) started buying cars, dachas and tourist trips. This was one of those things that doomed the USSR; I can't imagine a more stupid idea than to herd your best and brightest into the lowest class. Many of them escaped to Israel and the USA as soon as they could; it was simply insulting for them to remain, be paid a pittance, and see their skills wasted on picking up potatoes in the field with locals just sitting around, smoking and crudely joking about it.

Communism goes even beyond that; but enough to say that Communism is based on the concept of unlimited availability of all worldly goods, and on unlimited consumption of those as your needs dictate. We can see Communism practiced on board of Enterprise in Star Trek, for example. Crew members can replicate anything they want and build whatever they like; use Holodecks as much as they want; and they are careful enough to take only what they really need, and not more. This is currently impossible because of many reasons, with unlimited availability of everything as one quite obvious example, and with a need for a "new human" as another concept that has no basis in reality.

Communism (or socialism) works for ants, but humans are possessive animals, with urge to own everything and control everything. You can't build socialism with those humans. But at least the basic capitalism can channel those human urges to the greater good of the society; socialism and communism just pretend that those urges do not exist. Capitalism is simply socialism with a working method of enforcing the rules.

Can you tell me how they got?!

2007-11-19T00:16:00.000-08:00

No big surprise here. (Score:4, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward on 0:18 Monday 19 November 2007 (#21399189)

Values have changed. Cartoons from the 1930's to the 1960's are hard to find in their original incarnations because of violence and racial insensitivity.

It's only a matter of time before the Cookie Monster becomes the Carrot Stick and Broccoli Floret Monster, Big Bird becomes Avian American of Special Stature, and Oscar the Grouch becomes Differently Tempered Oscar with Alternate Housing Preferences. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Amateur valuation fundaes!

2007-11-03T03:58:00.000-07:00

Within the bounds of reason... (Score:5, Informative)

by jordandeamattson (261036) <jordandm@nOsPAm.gmail.com> on 23:21 Friday 02 November 2007 (#21214677)
(http://www.dea-mattson.com/)

This proposal isn't like most out there (small fry buying company 10 times their size, etc.) which are completely outside the realm of possibility.

ADBE's market cap is 16% (27 Billion) of AAPL's market cap (167 Billion). APPL has $15 Billion in cash on the books, so this couldn't be an all cash deal, but it could be a mix of stock and cash or an all stock deal.

It is worth considering an AAPL acquisition of ADBE. Of course, AAPL would have to offer a premium. If I was putting together the deal, I would offer 1 AAPL share for 4 ADBE shares and $10 a share in cash.

This would value ADBE at 46.75 + $10 = $56.75 a share. This is an 18% permium to today's price. That is a reasonable premium on ADBE's current valuation.

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This is how shit happens

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Put *THAT* on Longbets.org

Future Slashdot Story on 5/23/2510 (Score:5, Funny)

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finally, this is on topic, sort of (Score:4, Funny)

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Daffynitions

Re:Yeah, and Blackwater is now called Xe. (Score:3, Insightful)

What have we come to?

Re:But the problem is (Score:5, Insightful)

Economics of Stand-offs

Having relatives in law enforcement (Score:3, Interesting)

iGross

Watching the presentation live... (Score:5, Funny)

China is just a really big Cuba

Cuba vs China (Score:4, Insightful)

News you can use - good to know

Read article without subscribing (Score:3, Informative)

Social commentary

Re:My god. (Score:5, Insightful)

Rupert 'The Dominator' Murdoch

Wow (Score:4, Funny)

OMGWTFBBQ?!

New Silverlight features have Windows bias? (Score:4, Funny)

US govt is roxx0r!1one!eleven

Re:Just another great goverment run program... (Score:3, Insightful)

The nuances of international trade

Re:It's good to be owed money! (Score:5, Insightful)

Poker and the economy

Its easy! (Score:5, Funny)

Only works with real money (Score:4, Insightful)

Cloud clothing!

Re:Buzzwords, because thinking is hard (Score:4, Funny)

There you go, Mr. Murdoch

Re:Evolve or die..... (Score:5, Insightful)

Pay for Hulu? Bollocks to that!

Let me get this straight... (Score:3, Insightful)

HN: Impact of sales tax on the poor

Windows, OS X and Linux girlfriends

Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!" (Score:5, Funny)

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!" (Score:3, Funny)

Learn something

Dead DRM remote-authorization services. (Score:5, Informative)

Reality bites

A reflection on the speaker (Score:5, Insightful)

Economics of opinions

Re:$1.40 per tweet (maximum) (Score:5, Funny)

+5, Insightful!

Re:Threatening plurality? (Score:3, Insightful)

Amen, brother.

Re:Liar. (Score:4, Insightful)

Eat that, homeopathy!

Put THAT on Longbets.org

Why NOT to use IE 8