The fucking thing looked fine in preview. Why in the HELL does it look fine when you preview it and then look like shit when posted?

This is really amateurish, slashdot. FIX YOUR GOD DAMNED CODE!

My apologies to fans, there's an unfucked version here, where preview actually matches what it looks like when you post it.

Get your act together, slashdot, and fix this ugly fucking mess. This should be an embarrassment to you, but I guess Dice is unable to express that emotion.

The next mcgrew journal will simply contain a link to a site that is less retarded. Yes, slashdot, I'm pissed off. FIX YOUR BROKEN CODE or I'm gone!!!!

Well, you can call it a "double standard", but that's how science works. Interpretations of data that contradict the established theory face higher burdens of proof than interpretations that support it.

It's frustrating to climate denialists and perpetual motion inventors that their ideas aren't given equal dignity with the scientific consensus, but that's because by in large they're ignorant of the effort that went into forging that consensus. It took fifty hard fought years for AGW to become the scientific consensus, and as a result it enjoys a privileged position: it gets to play the null hypothesis. To do otherwise isn't fair to the people who fought that fight for decades, and won. You can overturn the scientific consensus, but it's an uphill battle, as it should be.

Well, I think I lowered its chances of acceptance even more by posting it.

The shiny side of the foil needs to be on the outside of the hat. The problem here isn't government intervention, rather a lack of same. The problem is corporate sociopathy and lack of standards. The standards should have been set up before anybody started building equipment. Where government fell down was not mandating that. Not a surfeit of regulations but a lack of them.

And had there been a monopoly there would have been no compatibility problems, but would have caused worse problems.

I tried Lo but it wouldn't do full justification, so it was a no-go for me; I need to format printed books. Oo seems to work like any other Windows program, except it loses it's "last used files" list in the start menu whenever it's upgraded (they really need to fix that).

Ebola is (according to the summary) completely contained in Nigeria and Senegal. This 2014 outbreak is all over West Africa, and according to TFA (I know, I know) the patient had just returned from Liberia, a West African country where the current outbreak has (obviously) not been contained.

Someone bringing this virus back is not so surprising. The big deal will be when we have our first case of endemic transmission -- when someone *catches* the virus here.

Overrated?? Asimov wrote over 500 books, both fiction and nonfiction. His stories were between the covers of all the science fiction magazines every month. And the trilogy you rate so poorly won a Hugo award (the most respected science fiction award there is, with the possible exception of the Nebula). He, Heinlein, and Clarke are are often considered to be the "Big Three" of science fiction authors.

Sheesh, judge the author of over 500 books on three. That's pathetic.

Oh, and in case you didn't figure it out, I've been a huge Asimov fan for fifty years (as well as Heinlein and Niven and most of the rest). I didn't care for Clarke, but I'd not call him unimpressive, I just didn't care for his style. If I cared for that style I'd probably love his work, but I don't.

Couldn't agree more. Not restoring the (useful) start menu for W8, even as an option, goes to show how much they really care about it's customers.

You're not their customer unless you're buying boxed sets of their OS and apps to install on your home brew machine. Acer, Dell, etc. are their customers. You didn't buy that OS from Microsoft, the OEM did. You bought it from him, and he's the one you should complain to.

I'm hoping W7 is it for me, but I'd said that XP was it; I've been mostly using Linux for a decade. Then about 3 years ago I bought this notebook and have been too lazy to install kubuntu (which I had on the older one that had been stolen). Despite its annoyances W7's still there.

From the time I got Windows 7, and I could just press "start" type the first few characters of the program name and launch it

And then open the file you want to work on. Meanwhile, using the Start Menu, two clicks and your document is open inside the app.

Your method is extremely problematic with something like GIMP that has little or no keyboard use.

Don't like Start? Don't use it. But just because I don't have a use for something doesn't mean it should be abolished.

On my small notebook I have the file manager, Thunderbird and Firefox pinned, but I mostly use Open Office Write. Most recently opened documents are two clicks away, while if Oo was pinned a click would open a blank document, and it's a couple more clicks from Oo's interface.

Getting away from that damned ribbon is one of the nicer things about being retired! Even better than not needing an alarm clock.

Far better than what I was going to say, which was that old Doctor Asimov is rolling in his grave. I do think he'd approve of that Japanese robot named Asimo.