The good news is, on X11 platforms, anyone can write their own lock screen program.

The bad news is, on X11 platforms, anyone can write their own lock screen program.

Interesting. I took you up on that challenge, and even a simple Googling of Finland Recession tells me Austerity has been a nightmare for them.

Hit 1 title: "Finland: Double-Dip Recession or Depression?"

Hit 2 title: "Finland's Economy is headed for a 'perfect storm'"

Hit 3 title: "Finland Economy falls back into recession", digest: "Finland entered its third recession in six years, preliminary data showed, as government efforts to halt debt growth collided with the longest ..."

My personal favorite, the title of hit 7: "Pro-austerity Finland falls into triple-dip recession"

Yeah. Gotta get me some of that in my country!

...and its not like it was a secret this was going on at the time, and only coming out now. Everyone knew these countries were lying, and still let them in with a wink and a nod (unless of course that country happened to be majority Muslim, in which case the rules were applied stringently, but that's another rant for another day). So countries like Germany do not really have a right to act "Shocked, Shocked!" about it now when its convenient for them to do so.

The only thing particularly special about Greece is that they happen to be the weakest member, so all the crap gets dumped on them first.

Exactly. That's why I said their current middle ground isn't working. The United States started out in that same wishy-washy decentralized manner with the Articles of Confederation. After about 12 years it was clear to everyone that it wasn't working, and the Constitution was written which created a stronger central authority. The EU is most likely eventually going to have to either go that direction, or disband.

Our civilization has been prevented from leaving the earth by our own silliness

 
Bullshit : energy and distance requirement belie this.

Look at the energy we have to expand to get out in LEO now. Even counting that and assuming you have a refuelling station , look at those requirement to go at 0.1%c speed and have enough fuel to brake. Even getting something like 0.1% C would be difficult. And at the distance we are speaking 0.1% c means thousand of years of travel. At such timescale, the GRB would still be able to wipe full quadrant out. Let us not get misty eyed, there is a lot of obstacle to going out there, and IMHO many people vastly underestimate the requirements. Technology helps us access more better energy source, and utilize that energy better, or make stronger material, but it does not remove the time length and energy requirements.

Because its interesting? The Prime Minister is Atheist as well, and refused to take a ceremonial diety-based oath. This is apparently a first in Greece since the war ended (if not ever).

I'm Christian myself, but I'm strongly for religious freedom, and I find it interesting. In an ideal world this wouldn't be big news, but it is to Greeks, so it is. That's what progress looks like.

That's why a large part of his job is going to be negotiating with the EU.

He's absolutely right too. When all those little countries gave up their own currencies, they also gave up control of their own monetary policy. That means it has to be run from the EU, or its not being run at all. Its like everyone jumping on a big ship with nobody at the rudder, trusting in its own sheer size to keep everyone safe. That might not be a problem while everything's going great, but if there are reefs or an iceberg ahead, and nobody is trying to steer things, all kinds of nasty disasters become likely.

Austerity for an entire government simply sucks. Cutting expenses is a great idea for an individual, but for a government that's more like trying to balance your checkbook by taking a lower-paying job close to home (Hey! Gasoline expenses are way down!). Or more accurately, a company trying to balance its ledger by selling less products. Adherence to this idea is why Europe is still deep in recession while China and the USA have been back to economic growth (and in the USA's case, falling real dollar deficits) for over a year now. If it needs to do so, a government should cut expenses during a recovery, not during a recession.

Greece has some systemic problems that helped get them into this mess (eg: tax cheating is practically a national sport). But when faced with a recession they have 2 basic problems. The first is that they aren't AAA borrowers like the USA, so their government can't just borrow money at will. If they want to borrow large sums, they have to cajole it out of someone (like the EU). The second is that they are shackled to the Euro, which means all the monetary policy options that the US relied on to pull itself out are not available to Greece. That means leaving the EU, or borrowing more money from it, are really their only 2 options.

It would really behoove the EU to develop some analog to the US's Fed to run their monetary policy. The problem is everything there seems to run on consensus, and I simply don't see how that's possible when you have such divergent members. They'd have to get themselves a semi-independent policy board, like the US has, or unify all their national budgets and expect to have to regularly pour EU tax dollars into poorer members, like the US does every year with Mississippi.

One thing is pretty clear though. The current middle ground the EU is trying to run just isn't working.

They are taking the average net worth in the world then apply it everywhere. You are not "rich" or even in the "10%" with 77K$ net worth in the USA or most of western europe. You have to compare against the LOCAL 1% and 10%. Not the global one. As such , there are far fewer of the 10% or 1% on slashdot than you would think.

Oh! Is that what they are calling the "charms bar"? Dayum, I seriously dislike that thing. I typically want to reboot my machine only when something I'm having trouble killing is making it sluggish. In that scenario, it would seriously take some impressive creativity to come up with an interface for doing that which is worse than how Windows 8 does it. If the little magic window doesn't come up, is it because my system is sluggish, or because I don't have the mouse in the right place? If I do manage to get it up, where exactly is that reboot control that I hardly ever need to use? Surfing through 3 touchy magic sidebar menus on a system that gives you only a few cycles a second is ridiculously frustrating. Particularly with the computer's reset button just sitting there on the case taunting you the whole time...

If that is going goodbye, I hope they remember to burn the corpse so that it can't rise from the grave.

OTOH, most of the rest of these complaints about Windows 8, I can't get behind. The "start menu" scheme of previous versions had gotten so unwieldy as to be useless. Everyone just used start-menu search tools anyway, so it makes perfect sense to redesign program starting around that interface. Just hitting the window key and typing a program name is the way it should be. I really appreciate the bigger icons on the Windows 8 "start screen" that autoupdates as I type in the search menu. I kinda hope they ignore the whiners and keep that (or at least give me something as good).

lol. Of all the "yeah but" comments I got, this is my favorite.

I still have 2 issues here though. 1: That's gonna be a pretty small minority of Slashdot readers (barring disaster). and more importantly 2: You left off the "that we know of". There are far more such objects out there that we don't know about than ones that we do. Admittedly, that's an unimportant distinction if you need a lot of advanced notice to see it. However, we discover more all the time (perhaps every day), and 12 years is a pretty large amount of days. This one, as the name implies, was only discovered 10 years ago. So if you'd tried to make such a statement 12 years ago in 2003 about the next chance to see one, you would have predicted wrong.

Sort of. Haley's comet only comes around every 75 years, so for most of us that's a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

However, there are oodles of asteroids and comets out there, so in general you will have plenty of opportunities in your lifetime to see some. So feel free to get some sleep tonight if you need to.

Pascal, the base language created by Niklaus Wirth, was a nice little strongly-typed toy language. I say "toy" for a very good reason: it had no standard way to modularize. In theory, you'd have to write every program all in one source file! There was also no way around the type system, which is good for purity, but makes low-level systems programming impossible (try doing a CRC on record including floats when you can't convert it to bytes!)

They released a new standard in 1990, which I understand did not correct these flaws. There was a further standard released in the same year called "Extended Pascal" which did. However, there are only a few compilers that just use that standard with no extensions.

That's the important thing here. When you see someone saying how great "Pascal" is, they are invariably not talking about Pascal. They are talking about Delphi or they are talking about Object Pascal. While those are both great languages, they are also both different languages. A typical Delphi program cannot be built with an Object Pascal compiler, nor with a standard Pascal compiler. Calling them "Pascal" is about as accurate as throwing Ada on the list, and calling them all "Algol".

So the real answer here is, No. Pascal is not underrated. Those languages Delphi and Object Pascal might be, but Pascal is not.

Making it worst for 1 or 2 persons or even a hundred (realistically, how many people can you break into home and put a bug) will make it better for the privacy of a few dozen million. Go for it do your worst. Bug the shit out of those few houses. Physically. Like you used to. And like you probably already do as anyway computer communication is only 1 form. Woopy-doo.

This comment was very difficult to read, as you kept leaving off the "OBOL".