There's a big difference. Dish pays for broadcast rights. Use of the internet is not a question, legally. It's just a transmission medium.

So as long as Dish is paying their fees, they should be free and clear.

How many biologists understand the nature of randomness though? When it comes to metaphysical stuff, the biologists are punting the difficult bit into the term 'random' and ascribing this 'random' thingamajig the properties that fundies ascribe to their God. Then things such as mind, consciousness and intelligence have yet to be turned into sufficiently concretely defined concepts to answer questions like 'is evolution directed in an intelligent way' let alone how and if human intelligence and consciousness arise from brain activity, or emerge in other ways. We really know less than we think, and many untestable hypothetical foundations are elavated to the position of unquestionable dogma by the phenomena of 'near universal acceptance by experts'.

That climate change is happening is beyond doubt, but the case that humanly produced CO2 emissions are the primary cause, and that massively reducing our CO2 emissions will fix the issue is not beyond doubt. Funding for projects which subject these ideas to scrutiny is harder to get than funding for projects which assume the CO2 caused warming and then show results consistent with it. The diagram correlating CO2 with global temperature as inferred from ice cores, famously used by Gore in his 'inconvenient truth' has been claimed by some to put the causative relationship the wrong way round (suggesting that instead rising temperatures cause the oceans to release stored CO2, hence the increase in CO2). Some have advanced the notion that solar activity is the cause, with evidence. But global warming has become so politicised that proper scientific debate is stifled, for example by the need to adhere to CO2 caused warming theories in order to get funding for your project.

Your point of 'Never underestimate the power of a person to disagree if agreeing means that they will need to alter their worldview.' is just as valid for the wide acceptance of the CO2-warming relationship. The great political momentum attached to this worldview is hard to argue against, even on scientific grounds, since those who don't wish to change can keep pointing to the mass who believe CO2 causes global warming.

Caveat: I'm not an expert in this area, but find how politicised it is to be worrying.

Sure. He's blown his eardrums with 10 years of over-amplified stage work. He probably can't hear worth shit anymore and is constantly going "Hunh?" to his wife.

I can type a copy of whatever I want to paste far more quickly than I can shift my hand to do it with the mouse, or I can use these little features offered by control keys like ^V and ^C. The mouse is a crutch.

There are multiple manpage sections. For example

man -s1 stat

will get you the docs for the command line tool called stat, which will have STAT(1) in the top left, whereas

man -s2 stat

will get you the docs for the C library function stat, and this will have STAT(2) in the top left.

*.* is a DOSism -- in *NIX shells it matches all files who have a . in their name, such as 'file.png', but will not match a file called 'hello' which does not have a dot. sudo rm -rf /*.* won't do a lot, whereas sudo rm -rf /* will.

It's a good thing for everyone but the US, so fuck the US.

You do realize that if you're sending email about a commercial product it's a commercial email, right?

It doesn't have to be advertising -- it just has to be commercial in nature, as in about a product that you charge for, not commercial as in advertising.

That may be technically the case, but IBM, Oracle, and Sybase/SAP have all asked for permission to keep sending technical newsletters. No one wants to take a chance that some bozo is going to interpret a technical notice as being spam and laying charges accordingly.

What were simple mailing lists now require an authorization database to comply. In many cases companies are just going to shut down the lists rather than go to the expense/hassle of authorization databases or risking non-compliance claims.

On the bright side, it's nice to see US companies abiding by foreign laws for a change. For far too long they've gone with the attitude "we're on US soil, so we only have to follow US law", but now they're finally waking up to the fact that they have to follow the laws of every jurisdiction they do business in, or stop doing business there.

Here in Norfolk, we had a young man that decided to just start shooting. He first killed a 17-year old kid in Norfolk, who was waiting at a traffic light.

When the police were investigating, he shot at them, and killed one, severely wounded to other.

There then was another cop who responded, and ordered the shooter to stand down; he started to shoot, and was killed.

Now, I'm going to point out that the cop who died was a really good guy, who would always tell his coworkers, 'it doesn't matter what happens here, so much as it matters what happens in heaven. That's why you need to get right with Jesus.'

Now, with an attitude like that, I suspect he would have been a little slower on the draw. It's too bad he died.

I also think he had a good effect on those around him. It's too bad he died.

If someone's going to die, I don't prefer that the cop be the first one to die. I prefer that nobody dies.

The whole approach reminds me of a "graphical programming" tool for web interfaces that I used a few years back. While I was intrigued to try something new, I soon realized it was the slowest and clumsiest means of programming I had ever used, and just as prone to errors (though not syntax errors -- but those are but a small fraction of the mistakes programmers make, especially with any decent syntax highlighting editor.)

The whole point of a shell is to not need the mouse. Keyboarding is inherently faster than mousing -- you're using 8 fingers, not one pointer -- especially if you're a touch typist.

Being able to put your commands in a script for re-execution is an added bonus.

It's not about who has it harder. It's about the fact that it's supposed to be illegal to make hiring decisions based on race or sex and a host of other criteria, yet companies are encouraged to do precisely that -- so long as they discriminate against whites and men. If you can't recognize that as being an absurd situation, there's no hope for you ever being anything but a bigot.

Sexism and racism are perfectly acceptable if you're against men and whites.

If the editor really matters, you're not much of a programmer. Text is text -- any editor should do.

Don't confuse relying on IDE crutches with being an editor.