Alibaba is a kind, smart business person

Somehow I keep reading thief.

FWIW, this is precisely what I was intending.

DoublcClick has such negative value that their servers should be blocked at firewalls, or at least "host.txt". Even if you have AdBlock, blocking them earlier saves bandwidth.

that nobody cares about ... or PBS).

Your ignorance is showing.

too true. I like the servers with chat filters, which bring a level of amusement to the situation when the chat scrolls with tales of bananasing female dogs and so on

It does. There's a Craiglist-type feature on Bloomberg trading info terminals. Yachts, rentals in the Hamptons, that sort of thing. You can message other people via the Bloomberg system if you see something you like.

There's a paid social network for rich conservatives. This is independent, not a Bloomberg thing. It's only $5/month, which is apparently enough to keep the noise level down.

There's a persistent rumor that there are special news sources for rich people. There are, but they're very narrow. There are lots of newsletters you can buy for $50 to $1000 a month that provide detailed coverage of obscure business subjects. If you really need to know what's going on with bulk carrier leasing, oil drilling equipment activity, or wafer fab capacity shortages, there's a newsletter for that. Offshore Alert, which covers offshore scams, is one of the more readable ones, and you can see the first few lines of each story for free. There are expensive newsletters devoted to security and terrorism, which give the illusion of inside information, but they tend to be marketing tools aimed at rich paranoids.

If you want to know what's going on in the world, read The Economist. After you've been reading it for a year, you'll have a good understanding of how the world works.

You have fallen into my trap: So then why did it have to be part of systemd at all? Why couldn't it just be improvements to one of the existing syslog daemons? Answer, NIH.

I can't think of a single profession which doesn't seem to have a "problem." Makes one wonder.

A friend of mine's kid plays incessantly. Not even in kindergarten, but can build gigantic, amazing structures. And then he blows it all up. :)

Major plus sides:
Ability to express creativity with no real cost but time
Ability to socialize with others without having to worry about getting beat up
Ability to exercise lots of things, like planning. I mean, when we were kids, we built forts in trees to throw pinecones at each other, snow forts from which to throw snowballs at each other, and cardboard forts at which to shoot each other with bb guns. Now kids can kinda do the same in a video game. Plan out the fort, build the fort, then tear it all down and do it again, even better this time.
I'm pretty impressed with the game, but haven't actually played it myself. Shame. I wish I had more time for play these days.

Which is exactly what I said, he listens and says whether he likes the results of what the engineers come up with. Apparently enough people agree with his judgement that he was able to sell his company for a few billion dollars.

What's this "beta" I keep hearing about?

Um, no, he's much, much less an expert than Dre is. As a respected producer at least Dre has some validity as a good ear, and he can evaluate the results of different parametric curves on tone signature, Bono can claim no such expertise in container formats unless he's gone back and studied CS while the world wasn't watching.

Uh, we're getting chips over the next 12 months, next September is when the liability shifts to the merchant if you have a chip card and they accept it as a swipe so every issuer is going to be sure to have cards out there by then and every large merchant is going to have the ability to use them. The one thing is in the US we're mostly going to be chip and signature, not chip and pin.

Hell, even India got its independence peacefully, though the peace ended moments after independence.

You have no idea what the hell you're talking about.

The west idolizes Gandhi and completely ignores historical truths in the process. Gandhi waged a political war of attrition on the British, and a weakened Britain from WW2 caved in. But the truth is, Gandhi's role was the proverbial straw -- violent protests against the British were underway long before he was even born.

The first Indian battle of independence was in 1857, and was violent. There have been many, many violent conflicts with the British, up until the point of independence. In 1919, the British massacred thousands of non-violent protestors in Jhalianwala Bagh.

And from the hanging of the likes of Bhagat Singh (who was a socialist revolutionary) in 1931 to Subhas Chandra Bose's alliance with the Japanese and the Germans to fight the British, there were many militant freedom fighters who caused tangible hardship on the British.

Only someone ignorant of history would call the Indian independence movement peaceful. There's a reason Gandhi was shot dead -- he may have been a martyr in his death, but he waged a political battle with bitter consequences whose effects continue to be felt to this day.