Where's Edison's WD40?

Perhaps I've missed something, but Edison just did a few odds and ends that are just electric versions of things people have done other ways for years. Take the light bulb for example. That's just basically a candle that uses electricity.

Put another (non-sarcastic) way, you've missed something.

Well said.

That is perfectly true and I don't dispute that. What the blogger did in my example was wrong and illegal, but it is certainly not a black and white case of theft as some of the ancestors in this thread would have you believe.

No, it is not. Say I follow a blogger and they repost something from the Dallas Morning News' website. I'll probably read it on the blogger's site and may click on an advertisement on that blogger's site.

I don't regularly visit the Dallas Morning News' website, so if that blogger had never reposted that article, I would have had no idea of its existence, and I would not have visited the Dallas Morning News' website and they would not have gotten any ad revenue.

So:
Blogger re-posts?
Blogger: $0.10
Dallas Morning News: $0.00

Blogger does not re-post?
Blogger: $0.00
Dallas Morning News: $0.00

Is that stealing? No. Is it morally wrong? Yes.

Now, this logic only applies to news sites. News is fleeting, and you are much more likely read it on an RSS feed on a blog you follow or by visiting the news site directly than you are to just search for it. Now, if the reposted content is a product/service/business review or a tutorial or something else that isn't fleeting, this argument goes out the window.

http://www.google.com/pacman/

Slashdot developers are to blame, and it's not just chrome.

Bandwidth often times has little to do with internet responsiveness. The lag isn't because a lot of data is being transferred, it because Slashdot's server is taking forever to respond to your request (for some reason).

What? That was

1) A private school, not a public school
2) 3 years ago

Are you okay?

It is not society as a whole, but one school with moronic officials. I was going to high school in Texas when this law was implemented. The general idea is that the school can't sell students candy (or other snack foods with no nutritional value). This isn't and wasn't meant to be a "no candy in schools" law, just a law that keeps schools from selling pure sugar to students. No one in my school even dreamed that they would get any sort of punishment for eating candy at lunch, no matter where the candy came from. Teachers didn't even think twice about giving students candy for rewards or whatever. In fact, the school passed out peppermints on standardized testing days.

This school's administration officials are obviously off their rockers. This law was not meant to prevent kids from consuming candy, only to prevent schools from giving it to them.

http://xkcd.com/727/

According to the GP, neither did terrorism... directly. National airspace being shut down for three days was an overreaction due to the outrage of the public. Now, if the terrorists had somehow disabled critical aviation controls so that no planes could fly, you would have a point.

I'm not saying that I agree with the GP's perspective, I'm just saying that your response is off the mark.

You can also do that with Visual Studio, right there in your code.

/// <summary>
/// You'll see this in intellisense
/// </summary>
/// <param name="x">Intellisense info about what 'x' is</param>
/// <returns>Intellisense info about what is being returned</returns>
public string MyFunction(int x)
{
//do some stuff
}

See the intellisense

The tricky part comes when introducing new language constructs, not just new classes/functions etc. Try using LINQ in VS 2003. It's just not gonna happen... the IDE doesn't know what to do with it.

What point are you trying to make, exactly? All you are saying is that my brain says, "hey, there is a vehicle in front of you slowing down, and there is a vehicle beside you so you can't change lanes, so you need to slow down too" instead of "hey, that Red Honda Civic in front of you is slowing down, oh and by the way, you better store the fact that there is a motorcycle beside you in your long-term memory."

You would be similarly amazed at how many blue cars there are on the road that you didn't recall seeing if you look for them. The point is, it doesn't matter what type of vehicle you see, as long as you see a vehicle. That's the point the GP was trying to make.

So, in other words,

"My accounting program isn't broken just because users can enter letters in the number-only fields. I explicitly say in the instructions that in number-only fields, only numbers should be used. Companies who buy this program should get people capable of reading instructions and following them."

In other words, it's broken.