I believe that the phrase "The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions" has always been applicable.

Or Thomas Moore's (apocryphal) dialogue from A Man For All Seasons:
"Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"

Google too tough for you?
http://nypost.com/2011/04/17/h...
"US Attorney General Eric Holder and his brother failed to pay the property taxes on their childhood home in Queens, which they inherited last August after their mother died, The Post has learned.
And because their ailing mom, Miriam, was already behind on two quarterly tax bills when she succumbed to illness on Aug. 13, the charges went unpaid for more than a year â" growing to $4,146.
It wasnâ(TM)t until The Post confronted Holder last week about the delinquency that he and younger brother William Holder finally paid up Friday..."

And as for Geithner, one might expect the man appointed TREASURY SECRETARY to be fairly careful about his taxes? Don't we kinda hope those guys are obsessive about numbers and details?

1963 called, wondered where the imminent apocalypse was?

The media doesn't bat an eye when the president's treasury secretary or attorney general are found guilty of tax evasion. Why would we expect that they conform to any other standard for other members of the administration?

> You have fined European banks billions and let your own banks off the hook for pennies.

Correction: our government has fined European banks and handed many domestic banks billions. o.O

Tell me that this doesn't scream for implementation with porn?

Jesse Jackson: "I desperately need a new cause to trumpet, or I'm no longer going to be able to afford my lifestyle. Therefore, I shall identify a desperate need for my community, for which I shall naturally be named the spokesman. By this method I shall articulate a set of vague, impossible goals such that we can once again identify an entire culture as 'victims' of the nebulous (but nevertheless nefarious) forces that keep us "down". I shall continue attach myself to this I-hope-ever-growing-movement, in order to be able to pay for my cars, mistresses, and if I'm lucky, even the lawyers needed to keep my son out of prison. Perhaps I have finally found the cause celebre that will even allow me to ride into media sinecure, like that dirty sellout bastard Al Sharpton."

Well, that's what I heard, anyway.

I'd call his plan for IT diversity the Nationwide IT General Graduate Effectiveness Resource System. Come up with your own acronym as required.

The real question, for the IT community is, of course, does his plan ensure enough vaginas in IT departments? If not, then his victim train will have to wait until that one leaves the station.

Privacy != blocking ads.

Personally, I use Chrome not because I have a hardon for Google, but because:
a) it's generally been the fastest smoothest browser out there. Sure, this or that may just nudge ahead of Chrome now and again, but I'd rather take "1st or 2nd fastest every time" over "was first once, then was never heard of for 7 months, then was first again".
b) I don't honestly care about "privacy" in the FUD context it's generally bandied about. Frankly, if the great "them" collecting data on me want to know that I'm a 46 year old hetero white male and serve me ads of stuff that I want (preferably draped in scantily clad, easily-objectifiable women) I'm al lfor it.

I use adblock not for privacy purposes, but as a filter against the obnoxious, aggressive, in-your-face ubiquitous advertising that gets in the way of my browsing. In fact, I watch carefully the number of blocked cookies, etc. For sites I've visited for a while and seen they're moderately low and not too obtrusive, I disable adblock because I want them to get the revenue for my visits, as small as it is. TANSTAAFL.

I mean, what else do you call it when a director and studio execs repeatedly ass-hump JRR Tolkien's corpse until it's a tattered, torn remnant, not even recognizable as related to it's original form?

I'm not kidding.
This isn't The Hobbit...this is "fantasy action movie ver#3, including characters from The Hobbit".

And everyone knew it was coming. Do you know of a single person, anywhere who (when told The Hobbit would be 3 movies) didn't do a double take and say WTF?

I really loved the LOTR movies. I largely agreed with the editorial choices to remove parts that were non-germane to the plot. But this?

This is appalling. The trailer looks appalling, and the first two movies were appalling. Not only were they not The Hobbit, they weren't even GOOD 'generic fantasy movies'.

Fuck you, Peter Jackson, you weird, barefoot shitbird, for the future people your abortion will drive away from what's really a canon of fantasy literature. May your memory as a director rot in hell right next to Ralph Bakshi.

For those disappointed folks who haven't already seen them, CinemaSins has done an amusing job of reviewing the ample superficial flaws in the first two. Watch these, they're more entertaining than these films themselves:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (the first movie)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (the second)

In the immortal words of Judge Smayles: Well, the world needs ditch-diggers, too.

Who the hell is this guy sleeping with, that Slashdot has become his personal blog-pimp site? (Rhetorical question, it's clearly timothy, soulskill, and samzenpus....do you guys know about each other?)

Seriously? If his points were insightful, it might just BARELY be acceptable (but still, not really - did we want this to become the 21st century's Chaos Manor column?)...but I have to say, they aren't. I was going just refute as an example a few of his issues, but they're so fucking obvious, what's the point?

Bennett, I'm not going to educate you basic premises of business, marketing, anecdotal evidence, etc. Seriously, talking about the goddamn WEATHER?

What.
The.
Fuck,
Slashdot?

"...illegal drug use (including abuse of prescription painkillers) among technology workers and executives in high-pay, high-stress Silicon Valley. ..."

I know a shit-ton of people whose lives/work is JUST as stressful working their 3 jobs to make ends meet, but since it's not "high pay" that would probably mean they're not worth talking about, right? Certainly, we're less interesting in the 'why' of their drug abuse issues, because they can only afford cheap mood-altering chemistry like booze and cigs.

Personally, I'd say the fact that Silicon Valley folks make stupid-large amounts of money means they have even LESS of an excuse to complain.

Lots of people have more stress for much less self-inflicted reasons than pursuing of giant piles of cash.

You might want to revise your facts.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
Mice gengineered to be germ free were fed drinking water from public sources. Within the life span of the mice, they developed GI tract bacteria that were ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SPECIES.

Hell, Galapagos Finches evolved different heritable beak differences in http://www.plosgenetics.org/ar...
http://rspb.royalsocietypublis...

To answer your points in order:

1) I could point to thousands of species that have, and are growing, adapting, and doing quite well thank you. Bacteria, virii, insects, lots of plants, fungus, etc. I'm sorry that they aren't the adorable big/furry mammals that excite your sympathy gland.
2) Even with the most sophisticated weapons and tools, have we exterminated every species of whale? Nope. Heck, even with the determined effort of CENTURIES, have we (or are we even close to) exterminated the common mosquito? Nope.
3) I wasn't really blaming them for anything. I was saying that no species cares about its environment, in that, humans are EXACTLY like the other animals...we're going to reproduce and poison our environment until it kills us. That's just the natural way of things.

You ENTIRELY missed the point of my comment, by the way. Righteous indignation makes it hard to read, I get it.