Oh, well, if Simon Cowell said so...

Reading a Simon Cowell interview? Paying heed to what he says and trusting its integrity? Bringing up what he says in a discussion about a serious issue? What are people like you doing on /.?

Here, let me help you. The interwebs can get confusing sometimes, take a wrong tube and you soon find yourself somewhere you don't belong.

Except that you're a retard who pulls statistics out of his ass and doesn't bother to wipe off the shit before waving them around in public. Yes, on a brainless glance at the figures, you're right, that's what they say. But congratulations on throwing yourself in with the homoeopaths and Intelligent Design crowd for the Outstanding Lack of Intellectual Integrity award. The UK statistics cover a huge number of crimes that are omitted in the US figures. A slightly more honest comparison would be the the US:UK homicide ratio. Which, as of several years ago was 4:1.

I can indeed. Because intelligent people around here in the countryside who walk their dogs at night wear bright clothing, or a reflective sash - or even jacket. It's extremely obvious that they're there, because they're glowing.

And the side effect: since my lights are on, they know I'm there too.

They are being stupid, and your ridiculously obvious "experiment" does nothing to prove otherwise. It goes without saying that if you have no artificial light available that waiting until your eyes adjust to the darkness gives you better vision. The point is that it's better vision only in comparison to what you would have if you had no light at all. How you've managed to take this answer and extrapolate it to night-vision being superior to a source of light in the darkness is stupefying. If you truly believed this wasn't stupid, tell me, do you drive at night without your headlights on? No? Thought not. As to the argument of counting the pennies saved on petrol - that works right up until the first time you hit a tree because you couldn't see properly. The only short-sighted thing here is these morons driving so dangerously and your leap to defend them from deserved criticism.

What other absurd superstitious beliefs of technologically backwards societies do you feel compelled to defend out of some political correctness gone awry? Voodoo? Condoms being responsible for AIDS? AIDS drugs being a plot of the "white man" to test out dangerous substances and keep their society down?

Romanticising and defending these cultures as somehow more "natural" than our own, is ridiculous, and I feel inclined to remind anyone bent to do so that the second they need their modern society for something, they'll jump straight back into it, romanticism be damned.

Because it cuts into two of Apple's core user segments:

1.) People who like to pay far more than something is actually worth.
2.) Exclusivity. To their userbase, an Apple product is a statement of who you are. IE, someone with more money than sense and probably homosexual (*). If everyone started picking up $1 iPads, they wouldn't be so special anymore.

* A funny aside, when the iPhone was new, Stephen Fry was doing an interview on Top Gear, espousing its virtues, and in particular talking about gaydar app that he found very useful. I fear though that this particular app may have fallen foul of App Store policy, as it would no doubt be duplicating functionality already present - in the hardware, no less.

She sounds awesome.

I'd suggest that the reason Gentoo isn't mentioned more often around here is the slashdot groupthink predisposition to actually like Linux. If however we were forced to focus too much on Gentoo, and put up with more Gentoo users, it is likely that the backlash would so negatively affect the image of Linux as a whole that it'd fall out of favour, turning slashdot into an MS fanboy website, hence collapsing reality, time and space into a supermassive black hole that consumes the rest of the universe.

At least until said black hole had finished its 'emerge universe', got on with another Big Bang and finally presented us with a command prompt to once again get something useful done. This process may however take many millions of years to complete, ironically similar to setting up a Gentoo system in the first place. Scary thought.

Or even worse, what if God was a Gentoo user, creating the fabric of spacetime with ridiculous and troublesome optimization flags. Dark Matter? Nah. Just a bug from compiling with -O3.

To be fair, they target gay men, so it's not that far removed from targetting women as you implied.

You're clearly lying. You must fear something. My bet would be your Shift key.

Oh but then, hmm. You did capitalise 'AND', so you are capable of it. Perhaps the fear is of a more general kind - fear of looking intelligent maybe? I'd say it was a stretch, but then, you are an apple fanboy who programs for the iPhone and doesn't seem at all concerned with the fact that Apple can at any time with no real explanation remove your products from their store. So yeah, that's not too intelligent either. Corraborates my theory.

Efficient as in, time efficient. Could well still be true, but not something to be flattered about ;)

The point is, it's Microsoft's fault that the problem has been allowed to escalate. It's Microsoft that released a hideous "upgrade" to XP and allowed it continue well past the point where it should have been consigned to history. It's Microsoft that continues selling a defunct OS out of a scrambling fear to stop a competitor from making inroads into a netbook market that they had disregarded. How many millions of netbooks with XP on them have been sold over the past 2 years? MS apologists like yourselves harp on about how ridiculous it is to support a 15 year old codebase. But guess what, if you continued selling the product of that codebase until recently, then yes, the consumer has a right to expect it to be maintained.

I get the feeling this conversation is turning into another User-Friendly strip.

+1 offtopic incoming. Regarding your signature, it's somewhat more difficult to find a feature of this nature in Linux as it would be in Windows. Which strikes me as a bit odd. Anyway, what you want to do can be simulated with this apparantly:

http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/~sm244/Jail.tar.gz

Though if you wanted that functionality for the same reason I wanted it (specifically playing games on a dual-headed Linux using TwinView, your best bet is to start researching adding a extra MetaMode into your X config. It's what I ended up doing instead, since it just turns the other monitor off and allows me to play on my main monitor. Works fine.

No it is not reasonable at all, because it leads to a situation whereby the consumers are ultimately penalised for the anti-competitive structures of business. Scale out your example a bit to include your competitors and your potential customers. You consider your discovery to be a unique selling point, something with which you will attract many customers. But your example is willfully stupid because it neglects to mention anything of your competitors other than painting them in the villainous nature of thieves. Lets say you have two main competitors, and they each have their own patented USPs.

One of them has developed an innovative gesture recognition system that's an order above anything else on the market. It is something customers find extremely useful and saves them time when operating their phones. However, they've got a solid patent on the system and even if you were able to successfully reproduce (even without reverse engineering) the result, you'd be unable to include it in a product.

The other has developed the means for a device to drain significantly less power than it currently does. Up to doubling the operational time between charges. It works in tandem with another of their patented developments to draw power from the environment. Solar cells in convenient locations, drawing heat from being in a near-to-body pocket, and drawing power from simply being moved around. Overall, their devices could last up to 4-5 times longer than yours, but you can't mimic that functionality.

From the perspective of a consumer, what I want is a device that can do all of the above. But I can't get it. The three companies have all patented their greatest innovations, and will of course refuse to license them to protect their unique position in the market. Surely the correct answer is not to artifically create a market where 3 companies with 3 sub-par products battle it out for our money? I'd much rather having a device that is capable of all of the above with the companies competing not on mutually exclusive technology, but on the efficiency of their production and distribution, the build quality of their devices, their customer service levels and their reputation as a company that's responsible to its immediate environment.

How lucky for us that you have taken it upon yourself to provide straitjacket definitions for commonly used words and impose them on the rest of us.

Newsflash: lag is not just network latency. It's a catch-all term, which if I had to summarise, I'd say would be best described as a failure in terms of performance to maintain expectations. You know, like, jet-lag, or a runner lagging behind the pack. In the case of the GP post, it was the failure of the 3D engine to maintain the framerate at an expected level. Hence, lag. As a term it does of course have implications in the speed of a network also, but that's hardly all the term is limited too.