The way you phrased this, it would seem to indicate that you are against slashdot for releasing this information. I fail to see how releasing this type of information is a bad thing. You would be better off believing in fairies than thinking only 1 person will find a way to exploit a bug. The more people who know about this issue the better as it will be more likely that microsoft will actually fix the bug instead of suppressing the author.

I have to agree with that. It has to be a combination of both story and graphics. I used to play nethack, I used to play muds (can we say wall of text?). A lot of them were great at the time. For the time. Now the world has moved on, the ability of graphics on these types of genre have helped to enhance the gameplay not detract from it.

Starcraft is a good example. When it first came out, the story and graphics blew my mind. It had me hooked from the first mission. Now, however, the level of the graphics has moved on. I would like to play it again but the graphics now detracts from the immersion that I once experienced. I will always look back on Starcraft with fondness, but I doubt I will ever install it again and spoil my memories of such a great game.

In Australia, we have a small enough population (and mandatory voting) that its not a wise option to piss off too many people while you are in power. Especially if you want to get back in. The ministers' defection was caused due to backlash in his region. It is my guess that the labor government will try and sweep whats left of the issue under the rug and we won't hear about it again (or at least until some other polly thinks it may be a good idea and may get some conservative votes and we will have to go through this again).

... if George R.R. Martin would just finish writing the damn series!!!

... to see Olympic athletes run barefoot... better yet, bring back the original way of having the Olympics and have everyone go butt nekkid (of course we don't need to bring everything back of old where only men could compete).

... they keep the Open Source. Oracle is a good product and for a production system, I wouldn't trust anything else (I know that is going to get a lot of flak but I have to say what I believe). MySQL is a good DB for small web servers, etc. There is a place for both and I hope they maintain both.

As to Oracle buying Sun instead of IBM. I think in the long run it is better for us the consumer. An IBM/Sun merger would have potentially created a monopoly and if we've learned anything from Microsoft is monopolies suck.

There could have been some really good synegeries between IBM and Sun (just think what may have been with OO) and it is feesable that IBM could have used their powers for good not evil. Myself, I'd just rather not take that chance.

I'm not really sure what you are trying to imply. Just the term itself, "you google something" kinda prooves my point. When someone asks a question that you have no idea about, you don't say "I'll yahoo it" or "I'll MS Search it". Google (rightly or wrongly I'm not trying to defend them or say they are the best) are a household name. You know how much some companies pay to be household names?

Google is now synomonous with the internet. It would take an amazing search engine to be able to topple Google's power.

I must admit, I found transformers started off quite interesting... until the robots showed themselves and it basically turned into robot slugfest. It's like the writer wrote half a script, went on a 2 week bender and just came back and wrote insert robots fighting each other here.

Have you seen what happens when a teacher gets accused of sexual harrasment? The teacher is immediately suspended (sometimes without pay) and an "inquiry" is set up.

I know of one teacher who has been accused. Three years on and she still is no nearer to clearing her name. There is no evidence against her, just the claim of one kid and this is how she is treated. There hasn't even been any form of court case. Her name is trashed and she will probably never be allowed to teach again.

If something like that can happen I think this child should be put up on charges (obviously I personally would prefer that she didn't) simply so it could spark some public outcry and hopefully get the laws changed to something a little more reasonable.

Your logic is flawed. Lets have a look at the following scenarios and see where I become an evil person.

Scenario 1: I buy a second hand book from an op shop (I do not compensate anyone who produced that item). There is no theft involved, all perfectly legal.

Scenario 2: I borrow a book from the library (again I do not compensate anyone that produced that item). Again all legal.

Scenario 3: I give/loan a book to someone else to read. (Yep, nothing wrong there)

Scenario 4: I give a copy of a digital book I have to someone else. Oh no I'm a thief, someone didn't pay for a copy call the FBI! The costs of the digital download are $0.01 per copy. There are no printing/paper costs and very little distribution costs yet I'm expected to still pay roughly the same price as I would if I bought a hard copy. Due to DRM, if I wanted to loan my digital copy to another person, I would need to hand over my ebook reader. It is expected that if a second person wants to read that same book, they need to buy a copy for themselves. Don't you think (considering what I can do with a hard copy that obviously costs something to create) this is could be evil or greedy?

The reality is digital distribution is impacting on the market monopoly publishers/middle men had on media. They want to keep their profits up but digital copies affect that. The one digital copy I make of a book can be easily passed to 10 friends in a matter of seconds, they don't have to wait to read the book. Is this a bad thing? For the author, not really. If I really like a book, I'm going to tell my friends. If I have a hard cover and am still reading it, they will have to wait until I finish and might loose interest in bothering to read it. If I can give them a copy then and there, they are more likely to pick it up and read it themselves. Marketing in this form is very powerful. With the digital age, an author can bypass a publishing house completely and sell their next book directly to their fans.

But that is just the beauty of it. Apple doesn't have complete control of mobile phones. Fortunately it never will. In fact, with the exception of America, Apple isn't even a market leader in other regions.

This makes me wonder what it is Ballmer is really up to. Is he concerned that Apple has enough hold on the mobile market that Microsoft isn't able to obtain a strong dominance?

Personally, I believe Microsoft/Apple/Google are all evil. Companies are out to make money. However, if no one company has market dominance, then companies will act in the best interest of customer, instead of themselves.

The sky is falling, the sky is falling... oh wait... my bad... This is not the melting ice cap you are looking for.

You forgot to add... "May contain traces of nuts"...

What shit. I hear this during pre production testing as well. "Don't worry that it is slow, it'll be faster in production."

Know what? If it's slow in build it will be just a slow (or worse) in production. Just look as Vista. I have never seen a speed issue just "ironed" out, it has usually been a complete rewrite of several queries or loops to get the system performing better, even then, until you are running in prod using a full production load of data (ie more than 6 rows of data) your not really sure if you got it.

And as for a system being stable as a rock for a beta? What the fuck? Have you ever tested a beta product of ANY FUCKING VARIETY? You expect (and will unless you are a complete moron) to find several bugs in the system which will fuck your program stability.