Yes, this is definitely a "WTF?" moment in the history of Slashdot. I suggest that you all just move on to the next story and refuse to feed the troll by asking him questions.

Slashdot, obviously, has to innovate in order to stay current. Thus, they are now taking the next step after "Anonymous Cowards". The new "Identified Troll" feature will include interviews of people who have prostituted their personal credibility to some company's calculated disinformation campaign.

Take a look at a Black and Tan.

Which is on the top: the Irish or the British. :)

hawk

perhaps the rest of the Common Market would have gone back to the old Roman measure?

A pound (livre/whatever) of silver being divided into 20 units, each of which was divided into 12 pennies was hardly a British development.

hawk

>We have a certain failed Mars probe to prove the case.

You mean the one that slammed into the ground because some idiot used metric units instead of real ones and miscalculated the thrust? :_)

hawk

Nah, it's just inflation.

Kind of like how a buck used to get you a great burger, but now only the dregs of the menu.

Two enormous rocky-ice things in orbit around one another used to be enough to get you a planet, but no longer . . .

hawk, pretty sure that it's not about a disney trademark . . .

The ballast in a CFL can't handle the dimmer.

Its not that you replace the dimmer,but that you need to use "cold cathode" florescent bulbs with them--andin the smaller sizes (candelabra mount), you can't get these (or LED) that are very strong.

My house has been almost completely devoid of incandescent for about ten years--more initially for heat (broken AC in the Vegas desert!) than power.

The only place they're left are in the refrigerator (don't want mercury there if it breaks . . .) and oven (heat). But the socket is bad in the refrigerator, and the oven is dead an needs replacing, leaving only the halogens in the stove hood. Inadequate LEDs in the ceiling fans family & dining room (3 25 watt equiv, all I can find), and just about everythign ese is CFL (and will slowly swap out to LED as they fail)

hawk

And even you are understating the matter.

I once represented the general manager of the biggest one of those in town on another matter.

Breakeven is on sale: the down payment is set to what they paid at auction. They sell, collect a few payments, repo, sell again . . .

Their idea of a good car is one they get to sell 3 or 4 times.

hawk, esq.

I last tried a Debian install around the time of Dayton Hamvention, so a few months ago. I don't have a bug #, I tried to debug GDM for a while but didn't have enough time. I can try another install sometime soon.

Well, a Core i5 tablet with two parallel screen digitizers is an odd enough bird that you can't expect it to run on the somewhat aged Debian stable. And indeed the older GNOME there handles the touchscreen incorrectly.

Because it has a touchscreen and a separate pen digitizer on the same screen. And now with the keyboard, it also has a Cirque touchpad, for a total of three digitizers.

The Toughpad has a touchscreen and a pen (with a separate digitizer!) and the touchscreen doesn't work properly in the older GNOME in stable.

There is a video of someone throwing around my model, without the keyboard, here.

>Relatively few people pick up a masters on their way to a doctorate.

Highly dependent upon field. In mine (economics), the masters is a sidestep. In others, its the norm.

And at some schools, there is a payment to the school for each master's awarded, so they're handed out along the way . . /

hawk

read the archives of alt.folklore.computers for great examples of some of these.

Swapping registers (in a two register + ALU architecture ) used to be a common one; you'll find an answer that was a step faster than the "correct" answer by using XOR in there.

My favorite, though, was handing the candidate a piece of convoluted code and asking what it did.

"Hopefully, it got the author fired." :)

hawk