Maybe I'm too cynical for slashdot. But I think these daughters, and their lawyer, are seeking to benefit not from a dead relative but from defendants with deep pockets who are likely to pay them to shut the fuck up and settle out of court.

I'm no fan of current copyright law. But I really dislike the mud sucking bottom dwellers who file lawsuits seeking not to win but to walk away with a fat settlement. I hope that CBS and Warner recognize that if they handle the publicity right, the cost of dragging this suit through the courts can be offset from the value added to the "Big Bang Theory" from an increase in viewership.

Agreed. "Incestuous words" puts a whole new spin on oral sex and only proves the adage, that if it can be put on the Internet, there will be porn of it.

This librarian has found a way to create thesaurus porn, but thesaurus porn does not satisfy any of my particular perversions. So I have not read his article.

besides, tl;dr.

The idiot is the a**hole who buys equipment or software without first determining if the product is suitable for its intended purpose. There are standards in place for towing hitches (Category I through Category III, etc) so the idiot who buys a truck or a trailer with a non-standard hitch system has fully earned his right to pay a fool's tax. The same with software, since although there are fewer recognized standards, the Internet with all its forums makes it easy enough for someone who hasn't yet learned the where the pitfalls are to borrow the expertise of others.

Failure to do your homework and thus lock yourself into somebody's walled garden is not the fault of any OS. It is solely the fault of the purchaser. Parent poster's inability to recognize the difference between being in Microsoft's walled gardens and using a computer that is desktop ready is a serious limitation, but one he will probably outgrow, in time. Yes, those within the walled garden are currently using desktop ready systems. But so are a lot of other people on the other side of those walls, where the view of the real world is much larger.

Some people need to unshackle themselves, step out of the cave, and look around. There is much more going on than Windows' puppet and shadow show will ever put before your eyes.

Too true. But that conflates the concept of being "ready for the desktop" with being "idiot proof". No operating system can protect its user from stupid purchasing decisions.

To put that another way, no desktop ready operating system can compensate for a user who is not desktop ready.

Car analogy: Persons in the market for a 2.5 ton crew cab pickup truck can that can tow a 10,000 lb camping trailer should not be purchasing top of the line Lexus or Porsche products based on the quality of their entertainment systems.

I have been the "goto geek" for several dozen computer users for the last 25+ years. Most of these users have no technical savvy and no interest in what goes on in the box. They want to mess with their photos, use FaceBook et al, shop on line, do YouTube, etc. They go to me when they get in trouble. They are most definitely computer users.

About half of them are now using Ubuntu and various FOSS software. Thois group has no more trouble with their usual uses than those who continue to buy Windows upgrades, Windows security patches, and commercial software. The only difference I see (apart from the obvious savings) is that the Ubuntu/FOSS users more often call for help because they have downloaded something from the Ubuntu repositories that will expand their capabilities and need help in understanding something that is entirely new to them. In contrast, the Windows users are more reluctant to try anything new and their problems mostly involve regaining functionality after some newly bought upgrade has wrecked their old way of doing things. Example: The Ubuntu user wants me to show him how to get started with a vector graphics art package like Inkscape while the Windows user needs help in getting his photo galleries working since his last Windows upgrade.

Ubuntu and similar Linux distros are definitely ready for the masses. But as Linux distros with good quality repositories are adopted, the role of the computer support geek shrinks. That is very threatening to those who have invested a lot of their ego into Windows expertise. And even more threatening to those who want to make a living off of fixing other people's problems with proprietary software. People threatened by these kinds of changes to their inflated egos and income streams make a helluvalot of anti-Linux noise.

Rocket technology has advanced far enough at this point that relatively simple and cheap rockets could be used to drop spent fuel rods on the Moon. This converts the problem from waste disposal to long term warehousing since eventually someone will make use of the material.

I think its time to do a cost and risk comparison study between Yucca Mtn and lunar storage. Lunar storage has the obvious risk associated with a launch failure, but it would be possible to develop abort procedures that would minimize the risk. And the risks associated with processing spent fuel rods, which over a hundred years would likely be greater, would be avoided.

Good long term storage of spent nuclear fuel is probably rocket science. But easy rocket science: one way trips without bothersome life support or complicated maneuvers.

Since the advent of computers and large data sets of accurate birth records, it is now possible to develop falsifiable astrological hypotheses. This would be inexpensive research. But I doubt that this will be done in the next decade or so, since the scientific community is too strongly invested in its irrational prejudice against astrology.

Good point.

That the kid was prominently described as "Sikh" in the article suggests that there was something in his appearance that marked him as clearly different from Baptists, Catholics, Lutherans, etc. I'm pretty sure that if he had looked like a Methodist the situation would have been defused much more quickly, probably without involving the cops.

Sometimes I think the USA would be a better place if Texas had remained an independent nation. I have met a couple of broad-minded persons from Texas, but they tend to say "I'm from Texas... as far from Texas as I can get." Yeah, I'm biased. But of itself that doesn't make me wrong.

At the age of 12 he would be a couple of years too young to wear a turban or carry a ceremonial blade. Sikh boys of that age would, however, have long hair tied up in a bun and covered by a head cloth. So those things would have fed the rampant xenophobia of the Texans involved. The kid was some kind of long haired hippy towel head.

The Sikh way is highly tolerant of other religions and beliefs, and profoundly pacifist. These factors along with his appearance quite likely made him an outcast in his peer group, and teachers and school administrators may well have recognized him as some kind of weirdly disruptive influence.

I do not understand why the police held him for three days. What possible justification could there be for that? There is a gross systemic failure there.

I don't know enough about string theory, or for that matter cosmology in general, to comment about that part of parent post.

I do know enough about astrology to know that the scientific method could now be applied to its core concepts. It just won't be, because it is not real easy to do, and because the prejudice against astrology in the scientific community is very strong.

One approach that could be done now that was not possible until the last few decades would be to find some birth center that recorded times of birth in a consistent manner for several decades, take all the birth records for a few decades and reduce them to only date and time (thoroughly anonymous). Then compose a set of random dates and times of similar size with the same start and end points. Use software like Astrolog (that can be automated to work on large data sets) to generate horoscopes for each date/time in both data sets (using the birth center location for longitude and latitude). The random set is now representative of all possible births at the birth center, while the other is the subset of births that actually occurred. As anyone involved in obstetrics will tell you, births are not uniformly distributed over time: there will be periods of many births in a day or a week and times of many days with few if any births.

If there is anything to astrology, there will be significant statistical differences between the two sets of horoscopes. However these probably will not be blatantly obvious or they would have been noticed before now. There might, for instance, be more of a particular type of relationship between Sun, Moon, and Ascendant in the subset of birth charts than in the random charts. We don't care what the astrological significance of any findings are-- that might be the subject of further research. We are only interested in whether we find a significant difference between the moments when a real birth occurred and what the random sample of potential births shows.

It sounds like your ability to express yourself in your native language is much better than your ability to express yourself in English. That seems reasonable. Perhaps as you learn how to express yourself well in English your prejudice against the English language will decrease. And make no mistake: you are clearly prejudiced in this matter since you are judging English's semantic carrying capacity before you even know how to use its flexible syntax to deliver your meanings in a satisfactory way.

Hint: English is less structured and logical than many other languages but instead provides the tools to construct new expressions on the fly, as the need is encountered. This makes it ideal for today's Internet as new concepts from foreign cultures or research can be easily assimilated into the mainstream language. I don't see this advantage disappearing any time soon.

Since the beginning of the Internet, English has become the fastest growing human language on Earth, ever.

There are now many times more speakers of English as a second language-- ESL speakers-- as there are those native born to speaking English. Even more to the point, there are more business and technical exchanges between ESL speakers than there are similar exchanges where all parties are native English speakers. Like it or not, English became today's "Lingua Franca" about a decade ago. Please try to keep up :-)

English is better suited to this role than any other native language. It is itself a mongrel language where most core concepts have multiple synonyms drawn from different ancient roots. And the pathway to adding new concepts from foreign languages remains wide open. "Namaste", the use of "fail" in constructions such as "he fails it", "samizdat" distributions, and hundreds more words absorbed from foreign root languages have changed English so much that a Professor of English of a hundred years ago would have difficulty understanding its daily use on blogs and forums, and would have vast difficulty in making his comments intelligible to others without first studying the new English.

English rules, but not because it is inherently better for global communications than any other language. English rules because it is so fantastically flexible that you can totally mangle all its rules of syntax and bring in any number of foreign words and still deliver a semantically valid message. English rules because its "rules" carry no more weight than mere suggestions. So you can mangle it in all kinds of ways, and still deliver something meaningful.

While there are definitely Javashit programmers, Javascript has evolved into a solid programming language with some interesting pieces of elegance.

As to the Javashit programmers, that is a case of the 99% giving the rest of the Javascript programmers a bad name.

Slashdot is always at its worst this time of year. It's a seasonal thing, related to the start of the academic year and the great number of wannabee clever-than-thous who are suddenly thrust into new environments and forced into searching for new sources of ego food. It will get better around the Fall Quarter midterm exams.

Until then, us graybeards must suffer the little children and their antics. Some of them will mature into tomorrow's hope; others will drop out or flunk out.