The worst are the ads telling you not to pirate movies. Since you're seeing the ad, I think it'd be safe to assume you didn't pirate it. Because if you did pirate the movie, you certainly wouldn't be seeing that useless crap.

The stupidity just boggles the mind sometimes.

Sure, but for the sake of the exercise, let's assume that you can only pick one. Which would you think would yield better results?

In fact, even if we don't make this assumption, there really is one answer to which fix would yield better results. You may have a better shot at fixing one over the other as an individual acting individually. But then I have to question, is acting individually the ideal means by which you can employ to fix the issue? And as we're social creatures living in society, the answer to that particular question should be fairly obvious.

Now, I'm not factoring in your level of comfort, or whether you can make money doing it, or how many minutes of fame it'll get you, or any other such fringe benefit. Because as much as some of these people might be doing it for primarily those reasons, they're also genuinely trying to fix the problem or at least present solutions. And in this context, wouldn't you say there is one issue their collective efforts would be better expended upon addressing over the other?

Here's another way of looking at it. Going for the low hanging fruit is only effective if the immediate effect is necessary for survival or if the effort to get to the higher fruits are prohibitive. That is to say, you don't try to bail the water out first before you plug the hole unless you're sinking rapidly or there's no hole to be plugged and the water's seeping in through the cracks. This is because if you go after the low hanging fruit, you're not fixing the problem itself, just deferring the effects of the problem to another place or time. Are we in such dire straits, or the cost of the alternative so prohibitive that going after the low hanging fruit is necessary?

It's actually a trick question because both are low hanging fruit. Only, one is lower than the other. The fruit at the very top is impossible to get to without something drastic like say, cutting off all of the branches in between.

It's also rather short-sighted, not to mention lazy, to look for "Windows 9.*". I mean, Windows began with version numbers (Windows 1.0, Windows 2.0, Windows 3.0). There's no reason to think that Microsoft wouldn't go back to version numbers.

At the very least, look for the string "Windows 95" and "Windows 98", since there are really only two versions of Windows relevant to the "Windows 9.*" search string. I know hindsight is 20/20, but this one really was avoidable by the simple principle of not being lazy (even if ignorant).

Schools are too poor to pay for a whole fleet of brand new buses and the charging infrastructure around it. And since the largest and majority of school systems are publicly funded, there's too much oil money floating around to allow this to happen anyway. It might work for private schools, but they're also operating on thin margins and there's oil money there too.

Not to mention it'd be a PR disaster waiting to happen. One school bus fire involving the batteries, and you'll bet there's big oil ready to scream, "Think of the children!" irrespective of whether anyone was actually hurt. This is especially true considering diesel doesn't go up in flames easily (the fumes do, but the fuel does not), which is easy to spin.

No, to effectively promote the electric vehicle agenda, school buses should be the last ones to convert. Now, to sabotage it, school buses would be the first point of attack.

It's NIH (not invented here, not the national institute of health) and protectionism at its worst. Rail is invented in Europe and the technology is dominated by European companies. Obviously, we should double down on cars.

Taking this attitude to the extreme yields Detroit. Not suburban Detroit, but inner city Detroit. On the complete opposite side of the spectrum is New York City. I know where I'd rather live in and around.

Of course, it takes a country much, much longer to go bankrupt, but even at that level, it's inevitable (and some may argue has already happened).

So here's a question then: Would it be a better use of time, money, and effort fixing education, or fixing hiring?

The fashion industry consists of more than just the lowly retail worker (of which I argue that the ratio of men to women are fairly close to how much men and women respectively pay attention to their fashion and are willing to spend money on fashion). The fashion industry goes from designers to models to critics. And if you get fancy, there are also interior designers and architects. While you don't think there's any value to such work, I would completely disagree. I would argue that aesthetics does have a place in life. A world of pure utilitarianism (your world where engineers are socially more worthwhile than artists) would be as unproductive and miserable as one that consists of no substance and all appearances.

Perhaps you wouldn't mind living in a world consisting of Soviet-era dormatories, but I certainly would think it a bleak and undesirable lifestyle.

This is the same mentality as people who would rather get liposuction and spend a few weeks in the hospital than regulate their diet and exercise over the course of a lifetime. Attack the symptoms, not the cause. Live looking only a few inches ahead and blame the guy who put that lamppost in front of them when they hit it.

I don't subscribe to biological (genetic) factors. Yes, with respect to an individual's performance, biology plays a major role. But in a group, the distribution, with all things except ancestral origin equal, will be the same. If the distribution in different groups differ, it is another factor. Of course, if we had a pure social meritocracy, it'd be easy to pinpoint what the differing factors are, but because we don't (and won't), differentiating between an external factor and an internal factor is harder. It's not impossible to compensate against such biases, but the methods are complex and the benefits less clear-cut.

A lot of argument revolves around solutions, but quite frankly, it's impossible to assert the One True Solution when the factors in play haven't been firmly defined. Of course, those doing the advocating, the factors in play are unrefutable, but that is of course subject to their biases. Which I've found, for people who don't or can't recognized their own biases, their biases tend to have a stronger affect on their worldview and subsequently on their actions. And nobody is purely unbiased; they can choose to or not to compensate.

Some people like to hear themselves speak. Other people like to get things done. (Of course, I'm on Slashdot, so I'm probably one of the former rather than the latter.)

The fault lies in those who give people in the former group a soapbox. It's just being fair and balanced, obviously.

And I'm not talking specifically about women in STEM or any other particular fire that's about to break out sometime somewhere for somebody. This applies to any large show of indignation. Usually, it's no more than just that: a show. IMHO, the louder something gets said, the less credibility it has, because truth and reality needs no promotion to make it true and real. Of course, it doesn't apply to that which is being or is already covered up by loud voices, which complicates things significantly, especially when (in the words of Mark Twain) âoea lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.â But a good litmus test of falsehood is when people try just a little too hard.

I apologize for the rant, but this kind of thing bothers me as much as I gather it bothers you.

Yep, tell that to the homeless guy on the subway the next time you see him. Better yet, tell yourself that while you're in the same car. And then tell your friends and coworkers afterwards that the smell coming off of you wasn't from getting skunked.

Sorry dude, you will stink. Eventually. Some people faster than others. But it will happen. Just because you can't smell it anymore doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

Other than that, you certainly will stink after bathing. Especially if you bathe in hot water. Cold water not as much. That's why people put on nice smelling things during and after they wash up.

If you're cooking that exact to the recipe, you're probably doing something wrong.

Relax. The recipe is just a general guideline, not code to be compiled and run on a math processor.

Oh, and don't forget to taste before you serve. An appropriate salt level for the recipe creator may be too salty for your tastes. Same goes with every other taste.

The big problem is that commas are used in mathematical notation elsewhere. Namely, tuples like vectors (coordinates), and other sets of numbers. Granted, the dot is used for multiplication, but we don't say dot for the decimal place, we say point.

That, and people here have enough trouble with grammar and punctuation. It's terribly easy to forget the space between two numbers (or add the space between the integer and the fraction). At which point the rational number turns into a range.

The difference between powershell and *sh (besides the obvious many-small-binaries unix philosophy vs the one-giant-blob windows philosophy) is that *sh is both a CLI and a scripting language. Powershell is useful just as a scripting language. Sure you could use powershell as the CLI, but it does seriously suck.

Granted with bash illustrating the problems of a dual-use CLI and shell, separating the two might not be such a bad idea, but it's so much easier transitioning from shell one-liners to full shell scripting than the same from dos commands to powershell scripting. But posix enables this, not any particular unix shell in and of itself.

I believe the order goes: pre-95 (good), 95 (suck), NT4 (good), 98 (suck), 2000 (good), ME (suck), XP (good), Vista (suck), 7 (good).

Windows versions pre-95 were all good because DOS did all the sucking.

Sure the NFL will go PPV. And the networks will replace NFL with MLS.