School just teaches you what you need to memorize and later regurgitate on the paper to get credit. The after-school religious education programs are what teach you what you need to believe lest you disappoint friends, family, and community.

Been down that road, it just didn't click. On the plus side it sounds like the new Pope is letting everyone into Heaven these days so you don't really need to hedge your bets any more.

I think it's just a natural geek tendency to look for scenarios in real life that are even remotely related to one's favorite science fiction universe and then to fantasize about how one's favorite science fiction universe is finally becoming real. People who dream up headlines know that geeks will drool like Pavlov's dog over a science-fiction tie in reference. People have a tendency to conveniently forget that the reason advances in technology occasionally align to science fiction themes is that science fiction incorporates both real and hypothetical scientific theories in the first place.

Modern computer controlled weapon systems are far more similar to a guided missile or even a trip-wire mine than some "I, Robot"-esque machine with a hand-waved synthetic form of free-will. These systems do exactly two things: 1) match a pattern 2) deliver / activate a munition. It's no more relevant to get into a discussion over violations of the three laws of robotics of a trip-mine; the pattern matching of which consists simply of whomever / whatever snags the wire.

The appropriate use and legality of autonomous weapons systems is a serious and relevant discussion to have. Bringing Asimov into the mix reduces the discussion to intellectual masturbation.

That's not what Darinbob is saying. Both the declaration and the definition of the function take 4 parameters as mandated by the API he is writing to. In his particular instance, however, he does not care what the value the caller passes to one of the parameters. This is common with things like callback routines / event handlers. Often the callback API provides you with information that you don't need for your specific implementation.

I still recommend compiling clean with -Wall but it does mean that there will be times where code is already correct but you need to add something just to tell / trick the compiler into not emitting the warning.

Irradiated food doesn't spoil but it can still go bad, usually around the time it starts making anti-Semitic slurs.

I'm not sure why someone would do that either but the way you talk about it perhaps they should make a movie about it. It would feature the heroic adventure of a person browsing and reserving a rental online then trekking to the climate controlled grocery store to pick up the disk from the kiosk along with their groceries.

[spoiler] In the climax of the movie our hero returns the movie the next day and purchases a soda and bag of pretzels from the adjacent vending machines to celebrate the $2 he just saved. [/spoiler]

Seized property is auctioned all the time without acknowledging said property as a currency. All they'd be acknowledging is that they possess something they have no use for that someone is willing to buy.

You can own a trading card however many online games have explicit terms of service that state that you do not own the in-game assets associated with your account. A real-world analogy would be when you play checkers at your friends house; you don't own the game pieces but you are permitted to control them within the scope of the game. This makes the publishers the judge, jury, and executioner with regards to any dispute involving in-game assets, no need to waste the time of law-enforcement. Now perhaps there could be real world charges associated with unauthorized access to your account but often the terms are written such that any such action would be between the publisher and the offender and that any charges would not factor in the supposed value of the in-game resources.

How to Build a Happier Brain:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0V4TZAyd8I

More like the name for a Garbage Pail Kid depicting Oscillating Eddie grinning while vibrating rapidly in a paint shaking machine.

I'd be more inclined to believe you if not for the hordes of people who rush out to buy the newest iGadget even when their old one still works fine. Hardware companies have no problem marketing to people who already have a perfectly functional product.

Correct.
http://earth911.com/news/2009/06/01/epa-penalizes-improper-cfl-disposal/

And once you've finished burying the carbon we could immediately start mining it to burn (combine with oxygen to release energy) in existing coal (aka carbon) burning power plants!

As long as we get energy by burning naturally sequestered carbon based fossil fuels in solid, liquid, and gaseous forms and producing gaseous CO2 we will be fighting an increasingly inefficient uphill battle.

I'm a little confused as to your aggressive tone, especially since I'm not trying to contest you only clarify my original statement. It's perfectly reasonable for you to point out the technical merits of other approaches, just without the ad-hominem attack.

I never said there aren't other ways to restore last-known-good working configurations for Linux or even Windows for that matter, I was only describing my own preferred solution.

The whole civility argument is nonsense anyways, I'm just surprised it isn't pointed out more. Who honestly believes that people who use their real names are going to behave in a civil manner? Have the people who believe this argument never encountered a jerk face-to-face? Did the world not have jerks before the Internet? I guess all the radio shock jocks and other media pundits are by definition civil because we know what their names are. /sarcasm

You are spot on using Slashdot as an example of how to achieve the same effect less intrusively.