Between inline spellcheckers and T9 input on my phone, I actually find my spelling improving.

An inline spell checker will tell you every time, patiently you've spelled a word wrong (as long as you don't have one that auto-corrects you), so the repetition teaches effectively. With T9, it's actually easier at times to spell out the whole word instead of trying to hack it to spell out the short hand phrases that used to be most efficient.

To say nothing of the fact that Netscape is the direct ancestor of Mozilla Firefox. Some defeat; it's like open licensing makes the browser undead.

If you measure "defeat" as a business game, where the losers are liquidated or go bankrupt, sure. But business isn't a measure of success users often concern themselves with.

Drop a guy in the wilderness, and prohibit him from making of tools.

Real smart.

The question is, how cheap ubiquitous are what tools? Sure, you might lose your phone - but teaching kids to weave cloth is not exactly an efficient use of their time.

> ...forced to tattoo shirtless adult inmates who eventually turn him on...

Wait, did that just say...?

> ...forced to tattoo shirtless adult inmates who eventually turn on him...

oh. ok. right.

WORK LESS.

If you spend so much time working that you literally can't afford to stay healthy, then YOUR WORK IS BAD FOR YOU. Don't start fooling yourself just because everybody is forced to work that much. Cut your hours.

I suppose I can understand if it's censorship if Wales, et al., were interfering with consensual, non-duressed communication of wikipedians posting about the kidnapping and the wiki audience. But how is it censorship if the details of the kidnapping remain in publicly-accessible revision history?

I never understood why this is supposedly frustrating. In short, ineffectiveness is job security. I remember having a self-drawn roadmap at my last job. Every time I'd be called down for must-do sales support quick fix project, I would tell them how much time this would take off of accomplishing my larger projects. I t was all the same to me, just as long as nobody could blame me for missing deadlines I wasn't allowed to abide by.

Eight hours is eight hours. If I'm not the one prioritizing my projects, I'm not going to sweat the results of those priorities.

There. One post to Slashdot elicits critics galore.

Happy now?

"ESPN cuts itself off from Internet viewers"

Good luck with that business model, guys.

Hm... I sense a new business model coming on.

1) First, we give everyone guns.
2) Then, we fine them every time they shoot someone.
3) PROFIT!!

It's brilliant, mate.

So because it was "human nature" that slaves would just naturally not want to be slaves, you think you can denigrate the struggle for abolition as "a farce?".

Nice logic, asshole. Having something to gain does not somehow magically de-legitimize struggles for justice.

I just started learning Python a couple of months ago (I come from a Perl/PHP web development background).

Really, get over the whitespace-indentation thing. It's such a small thing to get hung up on compared to how much more powerful, elegant, and flexible the syntax is (for starters). That, and it encourages you to indent source code properly anyway.

It's getting easy to pigeon-hole libertarian rhetoric that seeks to divide politicians and government in general from the people they represent.

The argument that "we should do nothing, because we suck at it" (where "we" means us and our government by the people) just doesn't pull weight for me anymore. It's not as if we have more influence over commercial network operators through any other means.

Sure, market fundies are always telling us that we can exert influence within a robust, competitive marketplace. NEWSFLASH: 2 options for millions of consumers is NOT competitive! Foster some real competition in the marketplace, and then you can use the competition argument.

And, gee, who do we call to enforce competition? Could it be, government regulation?

So much for doing nothing.

The idea that a technology "works better" is also conveniently vague. There are many goals to a network. Some people want to communicate. Others want to make money. These two do not always mix. I'd like my interests in how to reconcile the conflicts of these interests represented by some policy other than "always give the businesspeople what they want".

Maybe the FCC sucks, but it's //mine//. Your oligopolist ISP is not.

I normally have 3-10 tabs open at any time, but Slashdot is my home page, so it usually pops up when there's only one tab open - when I start my browser.