from the whatever-it-is-that-they-write-it-on-up-there dept.
Dear Canada,

Owing to recent increases in heating costs, we must ask that you suspend all shipments of cold air for the next several months.

Respectfully Yours,
The United States of America

P.S. Our words are backed by nuclear weapons.

from the push-the-button-frank dept.
There has got to be a better way to arrange Slashboxes than moving one single box up or down one space at a time using those dinky little arrows.

from the food-for-thought dept.
Why are (brand-name) Frosted Mini-Wheats bigger than (generic, non-mini-) Frosted Shredded Wheats?

Was there a memo about this that I missed?

from the ian,-this-is-unacceptable dept.
I just tried the new Freenet with "next generation routing," and thus far have seen little or no improvement over the situation described in my last entry. While it seems to pay more attention to connection limits this time, it still causes the same weird behavior in internet apps, and thus cannot be run in the background without driving me batshit insane. I'll wait for the next version; thanks anyway.

from the the-price-of-freedom-is-eternal-torment dept.
C:\WINDOWS>netstat -n | wc -l
40

C:\WINDOWS>GOOD HELL!
Bad command or file name

This is after limiting Freenet to 20 connections due to the ongoing Winsock-monopolizing spree it's been on since the previously-journalled Slashdotting.

Note that although the number above is inflated by 3 lines of headers, 2 fproxy connections, and a partridge in a pear tree, that still leaves over 30 connections.

from the you-bastards dept.
I think this article is going to do wonders for the Freenet userbase. Why do I say that, you ask? Because I had 38 fricking connections to my node after it was posted, and no remaining bandwidth whatsoever! Unfortunately, I only thought to get a screenshot (I will be very surprised if that link works at all for the next 24 hours.) later, after it had gone down to 33.

Of course, my ISP cut me off a few minutes later, but I've begun accumulating connections again; 16 at last count. Update: Connections seem to be going back to normal now. I saw it get up to ~25 this time, but a few minutes later things got so bad that the Open Connections page wouldn't even reload, so I don't know what the real peak was. At least the screenshot will load in a reasonable time now.

from the i-feel-pretty dept.
Anybody else notice that the games, Apple, YRO, etc. themes get applied to your config page, journal, etc. if you go there from those subdomains? Screwy, innit?

from the tête-du-merde dept.
Am I the only one who really wants to punch all the trendy French-hating fuckwits who have suddenly oozed out of the woodwork? Now, I enjoy a good "France surrenders" joke as much as the next guy, but the kind of people who are willing to shoot up a French-owned business just because they don't like the French government's stance on Iraq really disgust me.

Speaking of shooting at the French, does anybody else think the invasion of Iraq bears a striking resemblance to the German blitzkrieg tactics? I mean, we've got:

• Air support paving the way for ground forces.
• Authoritarian leadership on both sides of the war.
• Overextended supply lines.
• Shitty weather.

Damn near identical, innit?

from the use-LAME-you-hippies dept.
These are just a few of the many things that really piss me off:

• Really long file names (already bitched about this).
• Duplicate ID3 tags. If you're not going to add anything that requires an ID3v2, but insist on having one anyway, you're a lame fuckwit who should be shot for wasting valuable bandwidth.
• Stuff with a higher [[bit/sample]rate/number of channels] than needed. Speeches by Dubya do not need to be encoded at 128Kbps 44.1KHz stereo. Take it down to 32Kbps 11025Hz mono or you're still a lame fuckwit who should be shot for wasting valuable bandwidth.*
• Stuff with a lower (bit/sample)rate than needed. I can understand this if you're using a hardware player, but when I can't find a single copy of a song that's above 128Kbps, I start to get pissed off.**
• Not really an MP3 gripe, but would somebody please hit the idiots offering "DVD rips" of [insert the name of any movie that George Lucas is refusing to release to DVD here] with a clue-by-four? While you're up, please hit Michael Eisner, Jack Valenti, and Hillary Rosen too.
• Sound effects in MP3 format. If it's less than, say, 4MB to begin with, I don't think the size-quality tradeoff of MP3 is worth it. Use FLAC instead.

*While you could argue that distributing Dubya speeches in the first place is a waste of bandwidth, they do have some value when placed in the hands of parodists, musicians, etc.
**You may think this makes me a lame fuckwit who should be shot for valuable bandwidth. Tough.

from the sport-utility-filename dept.
Why the hell do so many people think it's necessary to have filenames like John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra -- Star Wars - Episode VI - Return of the Jedi - Special Edition Soundtrack -- Disc 1 - Track 02 -- Main Title - Approaching The Death Star and Tatooine Rendezvous.mp3? They're called subdirectories, mmmkay?

And yes, I would like some cheese with that whine.

from the republicratic-national-party dept.
There are few things that annoy me more than sitting down to read a story on Slashdot and having it suddenly turn into a pedantic political bitchfest. "Oh, your Republicans are actually liberal." "No, they're conservative." "What are you talking about? They're fiscal libertarians!" "No, no, no! They're right-wing. It's the left wing that's for intrusions into privacy." "The Republican Party being broad-minded, the privacy of conservative accounting freedom." "The campaign conservatism representative of the copyright accounting financial national assembly of the group of improvement of campaign public finance becomes deformed." "Lie, lie, and the statistic which are severely criticized." "Duck of mother of soccer!" "Huh?"

I am really the sickness of this excretory ones. Er, sorry... I'm really sick of this shit. Here's a hint, people: The word you keep using does not mean what you thing it means, so why don't you save us all some trouble and say what you do mean! I guarantee, using specific terms like "pro-choice, pro-gun-control, anti-inflamatory pain medication" will take up a hell of a lot less space in the long run than a huge debate over the real meaning of the word "liberal."

from the burn-baby-burn dept.
Is it just me, or would a huge fleet of flaming paper airplanes be a really cool thing to rain down upon your enemies?

from the resistance-is-floor-tile dept.
I just remembered part of a dream last night. In it, I told someone, "When an octopus becomes upset, it may eat itself."

I think I'm assimilated now.

from the great-!white-north dept.
It's the middle of December, five miles from Minnesota, and it's still warm enough that I can almost forget I've got a window open.

Either my system's running hot, or there's something seriously wrong with this picture.

from the normal-is-odd dept.
I was at Wal-Mart the other day, and some lady was there, getting her kid's ear pierced. The kid didn't seem too thrilled about the whole idea (which you could hear from across the store), but the lady made her go through with it anyway. I briefly considered making a comment along the lines of, "Yeah, lady, why don't we all poke holes in our children," but, due to a chronic case of I'm-not-George-Carlin-itis, decided against it. Instead, I started wondering:

Who the hell invented ear piercing?

I mean, think about it: At some point in history, some guy must have said, "Hey, I've got an idea! Why don't we all poke holes in ourselves and hang shit off 'em?"

Odd, eh?