By the "underclass," I presume you mean 13-17 year old kids from middle class families, since that's apparently the makeup of most of the looters.

It's hard to feel much sympathy for the plight of that underclass.

This would make sense if it wasn't for the fact that both arrests, and interviews granted to the media, indicate that the majority of the looters appear to be 13-17 year old boys and girls. That's why a major push towards parents to keep their kids home has been taking place during the last 24 hours -- because it's the kids that have been doing the damage.

You're telling me hotel computers might be insecure? Information I could have used before now...

You can't explain that.

I was a graduate student in Ann Arbor at the beginning of the 90s. At the time, the Borders brothers still owned Borders, and there were just two Borders stores: one in (I think) Plainfield (a Detroit suburb), and the original store on State Street. I loved that store like I've never loved a bookstore. The best thing about it was the staff that worked there. To get a job there, you had to pass a written test; and if you showed expertise in a particular subject area, you got to take some responsibility for ordering and stocking that subject area. The result was that if you walked in looking for a book on numerical thermodynamics, or differences in translations of The Inferno, you had a pretty good chance of being able to ask questions of someone who knew about the topic and had ordered the books and could provide you with useful info. Under no circumstances at all were you being helped by a high school kid who didn't know much of anything about the merchandise.

Then the brand got sold (to Waldenbooks/K-Mart, I believe), the State Street store moved into larger quarters (the old Jacobsen's store), they exploded coast-to-coast, and I found myself wandering into Borders in other cities that were certainly big, but didn't have the single biggest thing I liked about Borders: an exceptionally competent staff. Their newer owners had decided to compete purely on price and selection; it was inevitable that an internet vendor was eventually going to be able to beat them on those.

Which leaves me missing what I liked about them in the first place, something no internet vendor (even Amazon) has really replaced.

There's a pretty good breakdown of what happened. Lucky catch, yes, but not really bizarre. I'm grumpy today...

I saw a comment in a previous article about Bitcoin suggesting that /. was acting as a shill for this 'product'. How is they hyperbole justified when the only place it's talked about is here? Shenanigans.

I'm fairly certain that 'allegedly' is unnecessary in this case. i.e it's Ryan Giggs, definitely. :p

Rants like that work best with a smaller Slashdot UID number :)

Not always true.

A lot of people get headaches from the disconnect between the information their eyes are telling them and what their brain has learned to understand. The brain resolves stuff into 3D using a number of visual cues. These include stereoscopic imaging (different images to each eye) which we get in 3D movies but also include information to do with focal distance (i.e. the brain is confused because the image appears 3D but the eyes are focused on a flat plane - and if you try to focus on something outside of the plane, you can't resolve it unless the filmaker happens to have recorded it in focus) and parallax (i.e. when you move your head, the images shift according to distance away from you. Birds do this a lot). There are more cues but these are the biggest usually. In 3D movies, we only simulate one of these - the stereoscopic effect. As such, the brain is getting conflicting information about what is in front of us and it is this attempt to "fix" the issues that causes many people to get headaches and/or sick when watching 3D.

I find, for example, that the fact that I can't decide which part of the allegedly 3D scene in front of me is in focus gives me serious eye-ache (leading to a headache) as my brain tries to focus on the blurry object in the foreground of the scene that was never recorded in focus. Were it real 3D, I would be able to focus on it but that data is not in the 2D image in front of me. It's a bit like trying to read a book which is held much to close to your eyes for an couple of hours.

Avatar was better than most because they used smaller (virtual) apertures, thus creating a greater depth of field, meaning I could visually wander through the scene without too much trouble. The effect is at it's worst in 2D movies which have been 3D-ified and were recorded with the typical narrow depth of field used to draw people to a specific part of the scene.

You're probably going to get modded down for that; but it illustrates the error in the original assertion quite succinctly.

Not such a good idea to appeal to "the people" in a discussion sub-thread where Rosa Parks or Selma was mentioned. When the U.S. judiciary in the 1950s, and the executive in the early 1960s, acted to protect the civil rights of blacks, "the people" were not yet in favor. For instance, the majority of Americans thought Brown v. Board of Education was decided wrongly. Sometimes the U.S. government acts against the popular will of the people -- and thank goodness for it.

That's not to say that your appeal to "the people" is off-base -- not at all. Just that the world has more shades of gray than you seem to be allowing. Similarly, many people here on /. are adamantly opposed to government secrecy of any kind, even though it's easy to point to cases where government secrecy saved lives or prevented horrible things from happening. Those cases are almost always historical -- that is, they happened decades ago -- because at the time such events occur (or are prevented from occurring), the secrets are, well, secrets, so most people don't know about the positive role secrecy played until a long time later when the need for secrecy is no longer present. But that doesn't mean there aren't secrets being kept right now that aren't necessary, despite the black-and-white worldview of a lot of people here.

This has been asked-for many, many times on /.

Nobody here ever makes the effort to substantiate this claim.

However, lots and lots of people here repeat it, nonetheless.

Well, yeah, if you doubt the greenhouse effect, you'll get called worse -- like, say, stunningly ignorant -- since not only is the presence of a greenhouse effect on Earth well-established since the mid-1800s, but human habitation on Earth would be hard-pressed if it didn't exist. The terrestrial greenhouse effect is why the average temperature on Earth is something like 15 degrees C and not -18 degrees C.

Hint: "greenhouse effect" is not a synonym for global warming. Anthropogenic global warming is thought to involve an increase in magnitude of the greenhouse effect. But even if there's no anthropogenic global warming, the greenhouse effect would still be around -- and thank goodness, too.