I say...

Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish, that's the way we do things lad, we're making shit up as we wish. The Klingons and the Romulans pose no threat to us, 'cause if we find we're in a bind, we just make some shit up.

Sorry, but every comment I've read in this thread makes me think of that song (admittedly, I have only read a few)...

Okay, I'll bite, because I haven't noticed anybody making this point yet:

You are correct, they got exactly the legislation they wanted. But their problem now has nothing to do with the internet being big, like a fleet of trucks moving around the world. Youtube does them a *huge* favor by making it relatively *easy* to find infringing content. So what they want now is to not have to spend their own money to defend the "rights" they claim to have, but more importantly, my second point is that:

The DMCA is *exactly* what they wanted. It is not a blanket law that they expected would cover all of their best wishes. It was vague, sure, but the more vague a law, the more that can work to your advantage; if you can get the law passed, and hire enough good lawyers to defend your cause, you can generally get it interpreted however you want, and set precedents for future litigation.

But even in a "worst of all cases scenario," barring the rejection of the DMCA, if the bill passes, it is a *foot in the door.* The door has been opened, they put their right foot in, and are gearing up to put their left one in too.

I believe it was Francis Schaeffer who said "what was unthinkable yesterday is thinkable today... and commonplace tomorrow." I don't believe the DMCA was intended to be a silver bullet, but merely as close to it as one could get. You get your foot in the door, and it gets a whole lot harder to close the door. The proverbial horse is leaving the barn.

While this is a very good point to raise, and I might have done well to consider it when I finally broke down and got a mobile phone, my thought process ran a little differently:

I searched through "reviews" of various mobile service providers, and who would have guessed that the vast majority of reviews are strongly negative? What this taught me is that there are some categories of services and goods for which most people, for the most part, are ambivalent.

I would not generally think to myself how much I love my utility companies (although admittedly, I really have no choice regarding their selection anyway). But my ISP? I have choices on that one, and I can tell you from personal experience, just like a phone service provider, either they do what I want, in which case, congratulations to them, they did what I expected them to do and I am not angry -OR- they do not do what I want in which case I am going to be all kinds of fired up and angry with them and voice my opinion to whoever will listen.

According to those ratios, only 1 in 3 customers love verizon. The other two obviously hate verizon. But it does not consider the relatively large segment of their customer base who do not *care* about verizon enough to rant about it online. The most vocal group is always going to be the people who are extremely displeased.

Seriously, my experience reading reviews taught me that while a lot of people do have certain preferences for their mobile phone service provider, for the most part, everybody hates every provider they are not currently paying, and in a lot of cases, also hate the provider they are.

Moral of the story? Just as filtering out negative reviews will not help your customers (you listening, newegg?) find what they want, if you really want to figure out which provider is the "best," you have to understand that most people do not feel strongly enough to say anything at all. Which means that for the most part, any of these companies are actually doing a pretty good job.

Disclaimer: My service is provided by T-Mobile right now, and am not at all dissatisfied with it, and while I can think of ways to improve my experience, I really do not ever think I would say to anybody that I love (or even like) T-Mobile. They do what I expect them to do, therefore I do not hate them.

Unfortunately, I rather like Mayhem and Burzum, so this might constitute a performance of these works, around these parts. Oh, and I do work the graveyard shift, so I *am* up all night, but you're welcome to share some tunes with me in the daytime, too. ;)

Okay, fair enough question to ask. But there is a stipulation that you want to avoid "creationist museums" is exactly the same as an avid follower of fox news refusing to accept the BBC as a valid authority for no reason other than "I don't believe that."

As for me? I expose myself to every input, at every venue I possibly can. Whether I disagree with the source is another matter, but *ignoring* the source is tantamount to saying that "I have made up my mind, and I believe your opinions are of utter disinterest."

Personally, I may not agree with the person I am talking to/hearing from, but "communication" is worthless if you choose to ignore the other person/people.

Communication is little more than the exchange of ideas, and lots of ideas are ones with which you will disagree. However, by ignoring this input, you are no better than those who do the same. You have already made up your mind, I do not think that being brainwashed is a legitimate fear. Be the bigger man. That's all I have to say about that.

I consider three miles to be "walking distance." takes about 45 minutes, lots of people drive longer than that to get to work.

I live 1.7 miles from work, takes me about 25 minutes to get there on foot. And anything that I cannot carry home with me on a bus/taxi/what-have-you, is something I can order online and have delivered to my doorstep. I do not need a car for anything.

Obviously, my situation can change, but it is not a fair comparison. My problem with word is not that I do not print many documents, it is that Word has so many features that nobody I know will ever use more than 10-20% of them. Seriously, in the world of word processors, you probably don't need most of the crap that's in Word. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Word is the emacs of word processors.

(N.B., I actually use emacs -- which easily has thousands of features I will never use)

It has been said by others in this thread, but my oldest brother (of 8 siblings I have), is a nuclear technician, served on the Enterprise. Nuclear reactors are ALWAYS in critical condition. Without criticality, you have no reactor. "Going critical" is a Hollywood term, and smacks of ignorance that LWATCDR highlights. Critical is normal operation, super critical is a bad thing, ranging from meltdown to a mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb.

Slashdot is a news aggregator? Funny, I don't think I've ever actually seen news linked from it. Sure, there are links, but I don't ever really click on them. That might explain something.

(I'm obviously not new here, that is to say ; -- Also, I generally avoid the comments section and ONLY read TFA.)

Funny thing, I have one of those bookmarklet things or whatever they are called nowadays. I just type 'find [search terms]' in the URL bar, even though there is a perfectly serviceable google search entry just on the right hand side of it. It is a habit I started before FireFox had that as a default, as far as I am aware, and just one that i have kept to this day.

Could be because I am lazy, and do not want to have to click on that search box, or do not care to learn what keyboard shortcut will take me to it directly -- ^L focuses the URL bar, and selects all of the text in it. Ready to type and go.

Lots of places (like mine) offer a financial incentive of a few dollars to respond to the pedestal giving that warning "BEEP" sound. However, there are rules to follow as well. Do not chase a customer. Do not accuse a customer. Do not follow a customer out of the building. And under no circumstances, ever imply that the beeping is a result of theft. Even if the person openly stealing stuff, offer to deactivate the tag that set off the alarm and let them go.

This is like a lock on your front door - it serves only to keep honest people honest.

The thing I think is actually funny is that the employee door is also a fire exit; and that alarm goes off all the time. So if there is ever a fire, nobody will look up or care.

I must be the only one here imagining what it might look like to brush my teeth using the same brush I would use for a toilet -- whether or not it was brand new, off the shelf... or previously used for that "other" purpose.

On a slightly related note, I got to wondering "we have electric toothbrushes, why not electric toilet brushes?" Well, ladies and gents, a quick google search reveals that we do indeed have electric toilet brushes. And get this, they look a lot like giant electric toothbrushes.

A lot of this leaves me scratching my head, because stoplights are not simple timers any more. At least, they haven't been anywhere i see them for the last 10 years. You ever notice those lines in the street by an intersection? the ones that cross over, and have the circles, and all that good stuff?

Those are sensors that measure how traffic is flowing through that intersection, and adjust the timings accordingly. If a particular stoplight (like the second closest one to me) starts with a green left turn arrow, and nobody is going through it, the green quickly goes to yellow, and then red, so the through traffic gets a green light within seconds. If there are lines of people waiting to make their turn, the green arrow just goes on and on.

The funny thing is, as a pedestrian, this is more visible to me. i can hit the "walk" button at an intersection and wait for a very long time. If intersecting traffic ever approaches, i can be there until the other traffic dies down, which can take a while. otherwise, the through traffic gets a red light, pretty soon after a few intersecting vehicles come to a stop.

Something else that's funny is that in the small hours of the morning, walking to work, I can trip the green light by jaywalking. There is no intersecting traffic.

Respectfully disagree. Now is indeed an awesome time to buy stuff, *if* you have money. Lots and lots of people are increasingly finding themselves without any, and nothing to do.

So the rest of us should go out and spend wastefully to prop up an overinflated economy? Or for what other reason? If my job is on the chopping block, you can be damn sure that I am going to curttail my spending. Well, I do that anyway as a matter of principle. I am not an economist, but my perception of the situation is that:

Inflation is bad, it makes your money worthless. Deflation is bad, because nobody has any money. There needs to be a certain balance in there, perhaps leaning slightly toward inflation. The problem, as I see it, is that in order to maintain this balance, people have to spend as much money as they have, which in turn widens the poverty gap.

In other words, you could never get insurance from geico (which they claim saves you money) because if wealth were evenly distributed, insurance would be expensive everywhere. (Ok, bad car analogy). My point is that these ginormous fortune 500 companies exist because *they* do the saving, and *we* do the spending.

I don't mean to defend AIG by any stretch. What they did was outright criminal. On an international scale. F*!# the Supreme Court, send them to the Hague. See how much other countries like being screwed over like that.

Not really sure how to sum up what I am thinking, other than "if nobody has any money, or everybody has lots of money, either situation is bad." And this, I believe, is the cause of the poverty gap. Deflation is merely adjustments for inflation, where the cash flow works the other way. The problem is, we do not get the money back as it deflates. However, when the deflation period ends, what we DO have is worth more.

What would I do in your situation? What the boss told me to do. I would certainly document it (just in case the axe falls on my neck for it), but it has been my experience in my 10 working years that if the boss says to do something, and you refuse, that the boss will simply pay somebody else to do the thing that you did not want to do.

In today's economy, I would be even more inclined to consider doing what I had to do to remain employed, whether I liked it or not. To a business, there are three decisions to be made. 1) The company has decided it wants something done (or done in a certain way). 2) The company has therefore committed to paying somebody to get this job done. 3) This last decision has not necessarily been made yet. This decision is about WHO will get paid to do whatever it was that came up as a result of 1). You get paid for it, or somebody else does. Subversion and refusals will not prevent this thing from going through.

To be honest, I never dreamed of growing up to be a yes-man, rubberstamping everything my employer puts in front of me, but my (rather limited, but growing experience) has taught me that I could not seem to hold a job for more than 18 months before I changed my mindset and became just that. I've been with my current company for over six years now, and I'm not planning on leaving any time soon.