/dev/null is a file, not a program. So:
> /dev/null

Not that your example would do anything, it's just reading from a device. Your analogy probably wanted to be:
cat /dev/zero > /dev/ears

This is slashdot, do it right.

The USA pushed through a lot of the terms in the Treaty. The fact that they refused to ratify it is one of those things about the US -- its form of government and polarising two-party system simply leads it to a certain degree of instability. Remember setting up the League of Nations, then refusing to join it?

But that wasn't the ultimate reason. The reason was that pacifism, a short-sighted policy, was politically very popular. After the carnage of the First World War, nobody wanted another war, but in the public's mind that meant not building ships and guns. And frankly the money saved by gutting Britain's defences could be turned around into vote-winning domestic policies. It's as Kipling said "God and the soldier all men ador // In times of trouble and no more". The same thing happened just before the Falklands War -- the Tories were planning to scrap the Royal Navy's blue-water capabilities, i.e. no more carriers. It then turned out that those things could be useful after all, and that winning small wars could be quite a vote-winner, so the carriers were kept, after all. But cheapness aside, it would have been hard to convince the public that what was needed to preserve the peace after the Treaty was still a lot of money for ships and guns and aeroplanes. So everyone pretended that things were all right and ignored all the warning signs about Germany's re-armament, with a few notable exceptions that included Churchill.

I mean forget the levels of 1918. If Britain had kept the same level of arms spending and technological supremacy as in 1910, and used her power to enforce the terms of the Treaty, Germany wouldn't have had a snowball's hope in hell of starting anything. Heck, even at reduced spending at least her Navy and technological superiority were intact into 1939 and her industry caught up with airframes quickly enough, and she was still able to pay for all her arms into 1940 from her huge economic reserves. But that's more a tribute to the enormity of what had been built up in the hundred-odd years of Pax Britannia. The mistake was dearly paid for: markets and technology and cash reserves given wholesale to America in exchange for a little industrial output, fruit of which all spent, along with the blood of all the Empire, on fighting the carefully built-up German war machine. The roots of the Second World War are quite interesting, though more tragic than any Greek play.

No-one's arguing that that motivated the Germans to start "Round 2", but the fact is, they would have gotten nowhere if the terms of the Treaty had been enforced by a watchful and armed Britain and France. Not heavily armed: just their strength in 1918 or half of it would have been plenty. But gutting the Royal Navy, making treaties to hobble her, and standing idly by while Germany broke all treaties and built hers up? Ditto the RAF? It was sheer suicide; or if you like, the ball that set in motion the carnage of 1939-1945, the end of Empire and the transfer of power to America.

The British tried the pacifism by example thing after the First World War. The result was the Second World War, which could well have been avoided by keeping the balance of power as it stood in 1918. Instead they gutted their army and navy and only protested feebly at Germany building hers right up again.

France, Germany, Russia, Rome, Greece; and those just for starters. You're severely lacking in your sense of history. (No, I'm not American nor trying to defend America's conduct on an absolute scale.)

Try Tab Kit too one time -- it's got less fine-grained control for rearranging the tab tree, but it highlights unread tabs in a different colour and this state persists across sessions (for which I use SessionManager).

I'm the rare techie who loves glossy screens. Most people in my department complain about them, but I love them. As you said, for watching TV or films on my laptop, it's neat and makes the colours more vivid. Most of my time not spent with mplayer is spent in xterm and the slight reflection I get is handy -- I work in a cube and usually have headphones on to work undisturbed and it's neat to be able to see who's passing my cube (I may want to talk to them) or who's coming in (so I can turn around and greet them without having to wait for them to tap me on the shoulder). Admittedly I rarely take the machine outdoors.

And where's tabkit (vertical and tree tabs), sessionmanager, readability, skipscreens, imacros, greasemonkey (alright, Opera's got that too), firebug, and those are just the general-purpose useful extensions I happen to use. The Firefox addon world is simply tremendous; Chrome is a little kid's browser to a power user. Chrome is "ready" for all the folks who got by on IE and needed nothing more, but for anyone who needs to get more out of their browser (even if only occasionally) it's still way, way behind.

9. A pony.

Assuming you use more than 1k minutes per month, why not just get one of the unlimited plans? I think it's around $60 with most providers; I'm currently with Virgin and get unlimited voice for $55/month, no contract. Of course, you pay for your phone, ranging from a basic $10 LG Aloha I used to have that does everything you need (including alarm) to my current $30 Samsung Mantra, which is thinner and has a camera. But it's priceless having no contract and knowing that nobody will randomly charge your credit card without your permission.

I guarantee that you have not been able to ignore advertising or cause it to have the opposite influence. You're fooling yourself.
Oh good, a chance for some fun. What kind of computer do you use? What kind of portable media player? I guarantee that you chose them because of advertising. You know which components to buy when you build a computer because of advertising. You know which cereal to buy because of advertising.
The only computer I have is the laptop my company brought me. I don't have a portable media player. I don't buy cereal.

Even if you buy the cheap store-brand of corn flakes, it's because the store-brand is piggy-backing off the effect that Kellogs' advertising had on you or you wouldn't even know to buy corn flakes.
The ingredients I buy and the dishes I cook would not surprise a 16th century peasant, save for fruits like oranges and bananas. You're right, I don't know to buy corn flakes, because I have no idea what value they'd give me. I do know that I'm in no worse shape than people I know who eat corn flakes. Actually, the last reference to corn flakes I remember is them being dismissed by someone in Roald Dahl's story "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". I do see ads sometimes, but I couldn't actually describe a single one I've seen.

I bet you know the names of Apple's laptop computers. I bet you know the names of the individual programs in Adobe's Creative Suite. I bet you can tell me the names of car models made by the biggest car companies. All because of advertising.
You're right, I do, but only because that's what my company bought me and I dug around on the Debian wiki on how to install it on various Apple laptops. I haven't the faintest clue what Creative Suite even is. I'm notoriously bad with car models, though I know a couple of 60s brands and could tell you a couple of models that my friends have, but I couldn't actually match them up to a picture. Except perhaps the Mini, which I saw on Top Gear.

There's a long game in advertising too. Even if you aren't directly influenced to run out and buy a product, you learn the names, you learn the qualities that made one brand better than another. Eventually you will make a decision, and though you think you're making the decision based only upon your own independent thinking, the marketing plays a bigger role than you think.
Actually, I don't have time to pay attention to ads. Most on the Web are blocked and I don't watch television. I subconsciously ignore billboards. When I buy products, and I don't buy many (before you go on about shampoo, body wash and shaving cream brands, I just use soap for them all), I either go by price (as with toothpaste), habit (as with Old Spice deodorant because my grandfather used it) or developed taste (as with alcohol). Now, I'm not your typical consumer as I'm poor and spend extremely little, and that almost all second-hand. I did buy a refurbished ThinkPad once, largely on the reputation it had amongst my friends -- whether that was due to advertising, I don't know, but it held up much better for me than Dell laptops I've used.

That's great. So first they redefine the English words "theft" and "piracy" to mean "copyright infringement", then "gross" to mean "net". It's brilliant!

Before all that (I guess this dates me) you used to call a toll number up, when it found a match it would hang up and send you an SMS with the identified title.

Americans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_minerals,_rocks,_stones_and_gemstones

Oh, it isn't. Someone started a rumour to that effect but it's actually BS. Glad we could clear that up.