Huh. I always wondered where Allah would find a bunch of virgins. Then I figured maybe the afterlife isn't separated into two domains - heaven and hell - maybe it's a single place, but your role in it determines which it appears to be for you.

For instance, if your eternal "reward" is to be one of 72 virgin women serviced by one single hairy, smelly misogynist and your hymen grows back each time it is lost, make no mistake about it - you must have done something really evil, because you are in the deepest circle of hell.

I wonder what a virgin could do that is so wrong they get punished with that? Probably something unforgivable, like learning to read.

Yes, but since it also prohibits suicide and the killing of innocents, you have to realize that these guys aren't exactly following the game plan verbatim. Except for the virgins. There had better be virgins.

Any engineer who can't figure out which parts go together isn't a very good engineer. Connectors are called male and female for a reason - in case an engineer somehow has an opportunity for sex, he/she can remember what goes where.

Comedians basically review society. The art is to do so from an interesting perspective.

On one hand, I second your lament for the loss of penmanship. However, I doubt that handwriting is an important indicator of human intelligence, or even a marginal one.

Better. I was an appraiser in the early to mid 1990's.

There are a lot of rubber-stamp appraisers out there. OTOH, the appraiser needs to know the loan-to-value ratio. If the value looks like it is coming in low, the appraiser tries to give the loan originator a heads-up. Also, appraisal is as much art as it is science. There is a certain legitimate amount of discretion (about 5%) in writing the appraisal and arriving at a value, especially in an area where properties are not homogeneous

Meh. I wouldn't be so quick to blame the appraisers, even the bad ones. The appraiser's job is to determine what a given property would sell for given the current and recent market, which means that he/she is trying to predict the future based on the past. Anyone who has read a prospectus should recognize the phrase "past performance is no guarantee of future returns", which is apropos here as well. Done properly, even the best appraisal is nothing more than a point-in-time snapshot of a constantly moving target. If the market has soared, the appraiser has to appraise accordingly.

Prices rise because that's what people are willing to spend, which is what appraisers are trying to estimate. I remember seeing a property that sold for $390k that was only worth $370k by my appraisal and I know my number was dead on, based on the recent (at the time) local market. The low appraisal didn't kill the sale because the borrower was putting a lot of money down. Guess what? That sale helped benchmark the next appraisal values in that neighborhood.

I'm not defending the poor practices of those appraisers who take shortcuts or just try to hit a number, but it's unfair to blame the barometer for the storm. I have a whole big rant about how artificially low interest rates created artificially high real estate prices by boosting buying power and shifting the demand curve, but don't really feel like digging it out.

If you want to find a good appraiser, look for one that does work for relocation companies. They actually get graded on accuracy by the companies they do work for. They aren't given a number to start with. If they come in to high, the relocation company loses money when it goes to sell the property. If they come in to low, the relocation company loses the deal, because the homeowner isn't willing to sell.

Without the pay of athletes and surgeons, or guns and authority if LEO and military, I'd say the uniforms in question here connote something different entirely. Even in law enforcement, the uniform of a patrol officer is different than the suit & tie of a detective.

How about make things equal across the board? Sales gets mandatory "Sales" polo shirts, finance/accounting get their own, as does marketing, management, etc. Either everyone gets treated the same way, or the IT helpdesk is getting singled out in a less-than-flattering manner.

"Hey Bozo, my internet is doing that funny thing again"

FTFY

It also creates a time accounting nightmare. If a helpdesk guy gets a call, he works on it, logs what he did and how long it took, and moves on to the next one. If someone grabs him on the way by their desk because he has a shirt that advertises him as helpful, there is no audit trail. Come annual performance or budget review, the question "So, what did you do with your time this past year" goes poorly answered unless there is a way to document all those unofficial helpdesk calls.

Nope. It's being caused by the LHC.

Slashdot is no longer for geeky science. The geeky science here only serves as a pretext to allow nerds to come together to vent political angst. There's a Slashdot corollary to Godwin's Law, which states that the longer a discussion goes on, the odds of it spiraling off-topic into a debate over American politics approaches 100%.

Ironically, one of his supporters suggested something like this as a way to get out of serving the rest of his sentence.

That's what real estate appraisers are for.

You might want to re-check the status of the Bald Eagles.

I suppose that depends on what the user wants to do, doesn't it? Solaris rocks for its stability, power, security, ZFS, and containers, among other things, which makes sense considering it is generally used (and intended) as a server OS rather than desktop. But that's not to say it's not a good user desktop for web & office (OpenOffice), and other end user apps that are available for it, which is all many people need.