There are left-leaning political articles on the front page of reddit? Amazing. When I gave up on the place, the front page was the exclusive domain of 4chan memes, copycat submissions and bacon circlejerking. And any comment/submission complaining about it was met with "DUH it's YOUR fault for having a shit front page, just unsubscribe from all the reddits people actually read and submit to, and subscribe to the ones with 9 readers and one submission every 14 months, and then you don't get stupid crap flooding your front page".

Strangely, I haven't been asked to metamod (or otherwise metamodded) in, er, 3 or 4 years maybe? (Honestly can't remember) but I seem to have mod points almost permanently. Not right now, admittedly, but I only ever seem to have a day or so without mod points before I get more again. Also, I fairly often "spend" at least one of my one points in a way that some people might call "trolling via moderation" - e.g. upvoting a comment which says Linux is a bit shit and Windows ain't bad, or musicians and filmmakers deserve to be paid for their work under the terms they offer or GTFO, or some other viewpoint like that which is anathema to the general /. groupthink. I would have expected the resulting metamods to have reduced my mod point allocation, but apparently not.

You are wrong. Effect is a verb and GP used it correctly. If you don't believe me, perhaps you will believe this stick man. If you don't believe the stick man, try the dictionary.

That's not exactly a great justification for "random" FTP connections.

At my place I have a legitimate need for FTP, so do a few other people. These people submit a business case to IT and get FTP access. Everybody else does not. It may also be limited to specific sites, I'm not sure.

Btw (and I probably shouldn't say this, considering I'm going through their proxy, and they are probably reading this) - this is coming from a company whose IT dept appear to consider "reboot the server" as a decent first line of problem-solving for pretty much any ticket I submit, even ones where I carefully spell out that it's a client-side issue. So it can't exactly be rocket science to limit FTP to those who need it.)

No, really it's not being nasty for its own sake. It's being nasty for the sake of humour. This is FICTION. Satire, comedy, sketch, vignette, etc.

You might not find it funny, which is fair enough, but at least file the author under "bad comic" instead of "cruel sociopath".

For starters, why is the javascript comment stuff utterly broken on idle? Clicking a comment title doesn't ajax-y expand the comment but loads a whole new comments.pl?cid=### page, the old fashioned way. Moderation isn't even possible at all, because the necessary function is hooked via the non-functional-javascript to the select box onchange. It's been like this for months. I was tempted to insert a rant about how the hell has nobody in the /. staff noticed this and bothered to sort it out already, and what the hell happened to graceful degradation best practices anyway, but it's so idiotically broken that I wonder -- forgive my extreme naivety -- if it can't be /.'s fault, and there must be some bizarre issue with my browser configuation. (Although I get the same at home and at work, so that seems doubtful.) Any ideas?

OR, you need to brush up on the meaning of "for example", and follow GP's advice about 2 seconds googling before digging yourself in even further. He didn't say, or even imply, that the letter was the full extent of their efforts, so your cutting sarcasm about how much signing the letter taxed their PR team doesn't do much except make you look even more stupid.

Oh look, first two links from the 2 seconds googling, they went to the High Court for a judicial review.

ahem.

Do you really?

Don't you think that in this context "not doing your job" and "serious wrong-doing" amount to the same thing?

It sounds to me like you're saying the same thing. When evidence arises that you're not delivering on your responsibilities, monitoring is justified to find out wtf you are doing instead. (As opposed to monitoring everybody, in regardless of evidence they're not performing their duties.)

Hush now. It's just the standard American Idiot response to these discussions. It comes out like clockwork Every. Single. Time. some facts/statistics are cited which point to <<non US country>> being better in the league tables of <<any quality of life indicator whatsoever>>.

Please don't burst their cute little bubble of everywhere in Europe being essentially a single extended family of identical-looking smiling brothers and sisters. Without that as an excuse for why they have poorer press freedom, incarceration rates, life expectancy, drug addiction, etc, etc, I fear the poor darlings might just implode.

So just hush up and pretend immigration and globalisation somehow escaped Europe altogether, Sweden is entirely composed of cute little matching Scandi-elves, etc.

Bebo didn't need any help from AOL to ruin it. Have you ever actually seen a Bebo profile? It's like a bunch of feral children somehow discovered social networking despite being illiterate if not outright lobotomised.

In terms of quality of football, (as opposed to overall spectacle, etc) the CL has in my opinion eclipised the WC for at least as long as I've watched the CL (which is about a decade).

The WC is not the pinnacle of footballing quality. I know people like to puff it up as "all the best players in the world facing off" and suchlike, but it's really not true.

For starters, there are some of the best players in the world missing because they come from very weak footballing nations. But more than that, we don't even get the best footballing nations - if we had strictly the best teams in the world we'd have mostly Europe and South America. The likes of New Zealand wouldn't get through if it weren't "rigged" with a regional system of qualifying to ensure that someone from each part of the world does get through. So some of the best players are missing because they're from nations located in parts of the world with a surplus of even better footballing nations (random example, Ryan Giggs).

Next, some of the best players in the world are injured right now - whereas leagues spanning a whole season gives time for recovery and at least some sort of appearance in the competition. Next, some of the best players in the world aren't picked for whatever reason: disagreement with their coaches/managers, not enough room in this team for the both of us, etc. Brazil right now would probably be a pretty decent example.

Finally, you get down to the players who are there - and I don't mean to give the impression all the above results in any lack of talent, even despite all that clearly we do see many of the finest players - well, they're still not playing their best football.

National teams simply do not train and play together enough to produce their most dazzling football. Club squads are more consistent and work with each other week in, week out. The level of unspoken understanding between players is almost always visibly higher. England are a good example of this. Players like Gerrard, Lampard, Rooney are creative, free-flowing and often apparently telepathic for their clubs. In the national side they match this slickness only sporadically, more often seeming a bit disjointed.

This is not intended to denigrate the WC. It still scores highly for "big occasion" value. The sheer fact that more people, "normal" people who wouldn't follow domestic or European leagues, get interested in the games makes it interesting. And the national pride angle adds importance, for people who believe in that sort of thing (which is most people, sadly). In that sense the WC is obviously untouchable.

But for pure quality of football? All told, the CL consistently kicks the WC's arse from here to Jo'burg and back, and has done for years already.

This is a glorious phrase, thank you. I apologise in advance for using it myself without thorough citation. (Sorry, but "hey! said..." won't scan properly in meetings.)

Let's get this straight: referencing the solution to:

is not geeky, but awareness of a mainstream hollywood kids action movie is?

Someone must have changed the definition of geekiness while I wasn't looking.

No

No

So is the london underground.

London Underground actually uses a four-rail system. It's one better.

I don't know whether to blame GP for jamming together two discrete concepts (diesel trains and impure subway air) in such a way that a sloppy reader may infer causation, or to blame you for being a sloppy reader ("similarly" != "therefore") and failing to spend five seconds googling to confirm your healthy scepticism instead of spending it posting "Seriously?".