'Gives a whole new meaning to "Freudian slip."

Sounds like an Idea they have taken from some Maid Cafes in Japan,
You can pay to play games with one of them.
Sure we are ronrey nerds, but it helps to get them out of the house.
Hopefully they wont end up being Hikikomoris
I am also a strong supporter of Arcades, They should not be dead,
They are great play to hang out with friends and practice moves.

I'm not going to repeat myself. Read through this thread. I'll leave you with this (as well as my agreement that apparently civics classes in America really are that bad in what they teach):

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands"

What about when that really hot girl walks by?

printf("Hello Wor Oh my god, look at that ass. I would really love to... shit, it's being typed out. Delete delete delete

Indeed - basically all NeHe is lacking is a Linux version of http://nehe.gamedev.net/lesson.asp?index=01 , instead of just Windows, Solaris and OS X. The rest of NeHe works fine.

I think a bigger point to watch out for is that some of NeHe's tutorials are quite old, and not that relevant for modern rendering techniques (e.g., immediate mode, display lists).

People print out documents because, for one, they want to view non-continuous pages. A monitor that could show, say 6 full pages might do the trick.

Another reason is to have a permanent copy; people all have a story where documents were lost due to some data-related problem.

Finally, some people want to mark up pages. Although there are ways to do that on a computer, vendor proprietary formats, cost of applications, and generally not really working as well as people want make print and the pencil by far the easiest solution.

I find myself printing out less since I got an e-reader, but it's still just for certain documents. Temporary stuff, mostly. If I could doodle and use colour that might cut it down some more. I don't think screen size makes a lot of difference for me, but it might for some people. You can't pass round electronic documents as easily, but what if someone built an e-reader that allowed you to dock with other readers and transfer files between them? That would change things (provided everyone in the office has compatible machines).

I live 20 Km away from Bern, and let me tell you that when I take my motorbike, I don't see 2 hours of a ride like an hassle. Seriously, if you go north direction Basel, you have Germany and France around 1h30 of highway. South, you have Italy, but the alps make the drive much longer. West, you've got France again. And a nice ride along the biggest European lake, at the feet of the alps. On a sunny day, I can think of worst alternatives. On the East, you've got Liechtenstein, and a bit more North, Austria. So, really, from Bern, apart Italy (and Liechtenstein), you can reach 3 country in less than 2 hours. Not so bad. But what is most chocking, I think, is that apart /., I never heard of anything on the radio nor read in the newspaper about that subject. The people in this country are, for most of them, a bunch of lazy fat ass that like to listen to the extremist telling them how afraid they should be from the alien peoples and think that every living being want to come here to get rich.

Liabilities are not debt.

They are the short term costs of doing business, and will be reflected in next year's financial statements as being fully paid out of operating revenue.

Debt is simply that ... money you borrowed and will have to pay back some day.

Examples of liabilities are ... employee wages, rents, utilities, paying the contractor who painted your office building, invoices for product delivered (last week) but not yet paid for (once every 30 days, etc), etc. Another (Big) example is shareholder's equity. That is money you technically owe, but never have to pay; if the stock goes to zero there is no payment required to cover that.

It's ongoing business accounting, with the payment coming out of your ongoing sales.

" ... Yes, I know this, but how does it constitute fraud against the listener? It's not like anybody who listens to commercial radio would expect the music to be untainted by commercial interests. ..."

Perhaps you misunderstand the meaning of "Payola". I will only comment on the obvious difference: Payola is a kickback paid in secret to a staff member of the radio station; advertising is a contract for promotion with the money going to the corporate entity.

Payola is more akin to "coke and hookers" and although it's certainly not unheard of for "coke and hookers" to be part of a company to company "arrangement", it too would be illegal.

Legally speaking, "Payola" is an illegal bribe.

I'm guessing you've never been on a jury before, and so have absolutely no idea what a jury is there for. Juries don't know the law. They aren't expected to. That's what the Judge is for. . . . if you think this should have ended in jury nullification, you are a buffoon.

The law cannot answer questions of morality. Only human beings can do that. Lawyers and judges do not have privileged access to morality. They are not more moral than other people. They do not necessarily have a better (or worse) understanding of what is right and what is wrong. What is legal is not the same is what is right, and what is illegal is not the same as what is wrong.

Given the choice of obeying the law or doing what is right, what should you do? Do you do what you believe is right, or do you follow orders? The closer you are to the law - lawyers, judges, etc. - the more likely you are to choose the law. That is your bias. In fact there is no perfect answer. Sometimes breaking the rules is the right thing to do. Sometimes putting personal moral judgments aside is the right thing to do. The thing is, there can be no system of rules that can tell you which is which. Acting morally often requires of us that we step outside the constraints of the system. The law is a human construction. It is a machine, like a computer. It has its uses - but it also has its limitations.

Sometimes there are cases in which two people must choose contrary courses: in which one person breaks the rules, for example, and the other punishes them for it - and yet both are doing the right thing. There never has been a guarantee that all problems will have clean solutions. There will always be flawed judgements. Perhaps the greatest horrors are inflicted by those who believe that there is a perfect rule or a perfect machine. I'm afraid that's what you seem to be suggesting. Whatever the right or wrong of the jurists' actions, your simple recourse to the letter of the law cannot resolve that question. You have replaced the book of God with the book of man - and I say that as someone who does not believe in God.

Actually, there are !!

And I tried to illustrate it on an earlier message in this thread but unfortunately Slashdot does NOT support double-byte Unicode and I couldn't post that very useful trick my Chinese language teacher taught me.

Yes, the N95 is so amazing that it's selling like hotcakes... /sarcasm

The things you state that make the iPad a non-starter are clearly things that most people don't value as much as you do. Plus, you've got a few facts wrong.

1. The iPad has an SD card adapter. The dock connector is the I/O connector, and the SD card adapter users that, as it should
2. The iPad (and iPhone) has GPS. A-GPS is GPS. Saying it's not is silly. But it allowed you to get this next one wrong:
3. The iPad can be used as a map. There's even a damned app built into it to do just that.
4. You can type on it. Did you not see the onscreen keyboard?
5. The only part of the Internet that is fundamentally tied to the mouse is Flash, and we all know how that story is going.
6. As for games, this is nonsensical. You can't play games there weren't designed for specific form factors on those form factors. It's like saying the problem with shoes vs hats is that shoes can only go on your feet.

But, and I mean this sincerely, stick with your N95, if it does the things you want from it. And if the iPad doesn't do what you want, don't buy it. But as an interface (and this was entirely my point), Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are all *piss poor* for use on a tablet type device. The hardware isn't the problem, it doesn't matter if you have an SD card slot, full stand-alone GPS, a 10 MP full motion camera, 500 hour battery life and a GeForce 9800, if the OS isn't designed to be used as a tablet, it's not going to be generally appealing.

It's easy to blame popularity of the iPhone on people ignorantly flocking to Apple logos, but that's just an excuse for other companies being unable or unwilling to develop an OS as great as the iPhone OS.

Which brings me back to my original point:

It's the interface, stupid.

Just to let you know, I thought I'd actually have a look to see if any antivirus detected anything on my disk, so I downloaded and ran MSE. It picked up a trojan in an ancient zip that I never ran because I knew it was suspicious, so fair play for that. Nothing else though, MSE detected zero apart from that one file, and nothing else suspicious. MSE then proceeded to completely hose my system. Booting into Vista produced a BSOD and immediately rebooted. I caught "bad disk" before it rebooted once. Repair did not work, system restore to before MSE was installed did.

So a quick trial of MSE actually caused me way more problems than any virus ever has. A cost/benefit analysis would produce patently obvious results. I'll stick with my way.

When I was in college a second language was still mandatory to graduate. Basically this meant at the time that you have to pass one full class in a non-English language. Today I don't believe a second language is mandatory any more, and 20 years before I was in school, it was four years of a second language or no diploma, sonny.

Anyway, I took French like I had for four years in High School (we could also take German at our school, it was a bit easier to learn).

My buddy in College took Chinese. I asked him if he'd ever spoken it before ... not a word. Pure Rookie.

He would come to lunch and start doing these chinese characters for his assignment. Pretty much every class you had to write out some phrase in Chinese characters, and hand it in ... this was for class credit.

He had this book; look up something, write a stroke, look up some more, write another stroke, and so on. I asked if it was hard. Nope, but you pretty much have to look all this stuff up every time, he said. Too many to remember, although you eventually figure some of 'em out. Basically, you talked in class and wrote this assignment between classes. He said it was one of the easiest classes he ever took; everyone was getting 100% on the class assignments.

I asked about the prof ... doesn't he want you to do any closed-book exams (without the "little book" handy)? Nope, he said. The prof uses the little book too, all during the class.

Oh, I said.

So, you need to repetitively write the stuff down. Eventually you learn a few of them, but it's not expected that you learn them all. Apparently no-one does.