Since I rarely post at slashdot any more, instead going to soylent where they're not run by corporate morons who are STUPID enough to add horizontal scrolls it seems I always have mod points.

I used a few in one of your journals, but it was one of the right wing trolls I moderated.

Slashdot has nearly run me completely off of this site.

I can pretty much say we're all guaranteed to die. Might as well accomplish something along the way.

sums up one of the potential dangers of this technology.

"Gerhard shows his findings to Ross, who realizes that the seizures are getting more frequent. She explains that Benson is learning to initiate seizures involuntarily because the result of these seizures is a shock of pleasure, which leads to him having more frequent seizures. Ross checks on Benson, and discovers that, due to the clerical error of the nurses not having been able to read McPherson's signature, Benson has not been receiving his Thorazine. She then finds out that Benson, using the black wig and disguising himself as an orderly, has evaded the police officer assigned to guard him and escaped from the hospital."

is far more entertaining than a mere goto.

Rob Pike and I came to the conclusion that you can get too concise in a language. The example was APL.

My workaround for the idiotic preview thing is simply to link a less retarded site. My workaround for the incredibly stupid and unprofessional sideways scroll is dropping slashdot, except for reading journals. "Classic" slashdot is now almost as moronic as Beta.

I think you're right, Dice is trying to kill slashdot.

Just as I'm not going to go to the effort of working around Windows' bugs when Linux exists, I'm not taking the time and effort to work around slashdot's fuck ups when I can simply paste the text in soylent and just leave a link here.

I've thought about simply not posting items with smart quotes here at all. Dice needs to get its shit together. Every change they make makes the damned thing less usable. The last change they made seemed to do nothiing but force a horizontal scroll in my browser.

It's almost like they're trying to run users off the site. They're coming close with me.

UNIX RTR is still used to place most of your phone calls. It ain't dead yet. There are still a lot of Fortune 500's running the majority of their operation on AIX, Solaris, or even HP/UX.

Back in the "Good Old Days" Social Security cards were clearly marked as "DO NOT USE FOR IDENTIFICATION"

Sadly, when Emperor Reagan was elected, we forgot all that.

Prior to that, it was illegal to use your SSN for identification, outside of the military.

I think it was the military who pioneered the use of an SSN as an ID.

"1980: General Motors implements a proprietary interface and protocol for testing of the Engine Control Module (ECM) on the vehicle assembly line. The 'assembly line diagnostic link' (ALDL) protocol communicates at 160 bit/s Implemented on California vehicles for the 1980 model year, and the rest of the United States in 1981. The only available function for the owner is "Blinky Codes" that transmit the Diagnostic Trouble Code (DTC) with the blinking pattern of the "Check Engine" (MIL) light."

Yes, that's exactly what I thought.

My oldest daughter is autistic and I'm pretty sure I know why. Autism spectrum disorder has a huge genetic component and is linked to families with high intelligence, which makes sense since they recently discovered that an autistic brain has too many neuronal connections.

Leila had birth complications, but despite our worries she was advanced in almost everything. She delighted in freaking people out by waving and saying "hi!" to them at six months. She discovered at a very early age that she could roll anywhere she wanted to go, so had no need to learn how to crawl. She walked at a normal age, and it only took a single day to potty-train her at fifteen months.

Then she got her MRI when she was two. An hour or two after we got home she started crying, then screaming and running a fever; we had no thermometer so don't know how high. We called the doctor, who said it wasn't that unusual and not to worry.

By the next morning she stopped talking, stopped using the potty, stopped playing, and withdrew into her own little world. Note this was early 1988 before vaccine fears came about and before autism was well known. Despite our poverty we took her to specialists, every one of whom misdiagnosed her. One doctor said mentally retarded, one checked her hearing and said she was deaf and we should all learn sign language (Leila has better ears than anyone I know).

It's my belief that a very small number of children who have the genetic component can't handle getting all three vaccines at once, or perhaps is allergic to some component. The doctor said fever is common, but perhaps a dangerously high fever happnes, too. That's what I think caused Leila's problems.

At any rate, thanks to the incompetence of some highly educated quacks, Leila, who turns 30 this year, will never hold a job or drive a car. She spends most of her time reading the news on the internet; she has the worst interpersonal skills of anyone I ever met.

You can be sure that we got separate vaccinations for Patty, rather than the MMR superbomb.

Get the measles vaccine, NOT the MMR. Get the shots separately, and if your kid gets a fever afterwards, take him or her to the hospital. We're a lot less ignorant than we were when Leila was 2 or 3.