Chinese government corruption has moved away from the central government to the local governments. It's not fair or accurate to say that there hasn't been progress made.

Next week, when this story appears on Slashdice, let's all just link to this post.

... Sort of. I have a giant ad-blocking /etc/hosts file, and since I actually run httpd on all of my Macs, I often see my own 404 page in an iframe on sites I visit. So, yeah, works for me. :D

> I think I just hate the phone in general. I would much rather type everything.

Oh hell that is SO EFFING SLOW. If I text someone more than 3 or 4 times in a row it's because one of us is unable to speak. I watch people have 10- to 15-minute-long texting sessions with one person that could be settled with 2 or 3 minutes of actually talking. It's painful to watch.

In the 90s, there was a joke: "If you want to know if you're talking to a decision maker in a company or not, ask them how much RAM is in their computer. Anyone who knows, isn't a decision maker."

But now, we're riding on the cusp of almost a decade of "It just doesn't matter." Most computers are good enough for most tasks for most folks. And by "most" I mean 98% in every case. My work computer has 8 GB of RAM but I only know that because I remember it being upgraded so I could run VMs. My main computer at home has 4 GB and I know that because every once in a while I think about upgrading and I check prices and then I decide not to bother. But I couldn't tell you the exact CPU in either (one might be a Core i5 and the other an i7), nor do I know the speed on either to within 200 MHz. (I think one is 2.3 and the other is 2.7 but I couldn't say for sure which is which, nor am I certain about either of those numbers. Maybe one is a 2.5 or 2.2?)

God only knows what graphics cards they have or who makes them or how much VRAM they have and I don't even know if my machine at home has integrated graphics or discreet. (Work laptop is a MacBook Pro with both; required to drive my 30" display.) This isn't like the old days where it was easy to remember that 1 MB gave you 640x480x24bpp and 2 MB gave you 800x600x24bpp and I was happy to find the *one* 4 MB card that gave me 1024x768x24bpp because I had just found a SWEET 17" CRT for only $400, used, and I didn't want to buy an expensive card with 8 MB to drive it. My 4-year-old computer at work drives my 30" display at 2560x1600 and my equally old computer at home drives a 24" at 1920x1200, so who gives a shit if they're doing that with 1 GB or 2 GB or 512 MB VRAM? Yeah, I'll have to upgrade someday if I want to spend hundreds on a 4K display, but I have no plans to do that. (Dreams, yes; plans, no.) And when the time DOES come, my "upgrade" will be "buy a new machine, transfer my files, and sell the old one."

So anyway, long story short: no fucking clue. But I can bore you with the specs of every computer I owned before around 2008 if you want, including which parts I bought where and what I paid for them.

Seeing the same video bytes -- which I am not going to watch anyway -- EVERY TIME I scroll down the page.

So anyway, why is it that when I click the Xs on the boxes in the right column, they're back next time I come to the homepage? Since the polls aren't there anymore, there's really nothing I need to have in that column at all.

Yeah, I know, off topic, but where else can I ask?

We're doing 9 kidneys.

It's messed up that they arrested some poor working Joe who was just trying to do his job. He was just looking for droids.

Funny. I had a Dell desktop that I put a CD-ROM into. (Pentium 75; didn't come with one.) I forget why I didn't put it in the lower bay, or why I didn't have the right bracket, but anyway, a paperback copy of Stephen King's "It" was the exact right hight to hold it in place. I used it like that for several years.

... not with a bang, but:
_ a whimper
_ a hiss
_ no, wait, it was a bang
_ polls mixed in with stories
_ CowboyNeal

Seriously, this is FUCKING BRAINDEAD. Do you even know how this site works? Polls will get literally 5% of the votes and comments that they currently do. If you're going to take them out of the right column, you may as well just get rid of them. Seriously. Not kidding. Just fucking axe them. It's not like you give a shit about this site or its visitors or its history anyway.

So anyway, I was 17 when The Simpsons came out.* LOVED IT. Loved it for over ten years. Then it started sucking, then I started watching it less, then I quit watching it completely, and I was sad for a while (and watched the first ten seasons on DVD for a while), then I was still sad and wondering how it was doing, but couldn't quite be arsed** to find out, and just this year, I watched a couple episodes... and literally smiled once or twice during each -- nothing more -- and decided "Oh well, it's done, and it's kind of sad, but it sucks now, and I'm older, wiser, and can get by without it, and I won't even bother to watch unless I hear an episode is really great."

Finding a point in that narrative is an exercise left to the site owners.

Remember these stories? Good times.

http://meta.slashdot.org/story...

http://meta.slashdot.org/story...

* I might have been wearing an onion on my belt, as was the style at the time.

** USian here, but I *love* that term.

And that has been Tesla's argument for the last ten years, yet they still lose about $9,000 on each car they make.

"On" each car, or "for" each car?

"On" makes it sound like their marginal costs are negative -- that, literally, producing one more car increases their losses by $9K. Were it "for" each car, then they're losing money only after fixed costs, R&D, etc. are taken into account.

That latter makes considerably more sense -- folks can legitimately decide to back a company investing in itself rather than taking out a profit; indeed, Amazon has done that for years.

Tried Parker Quink, or the Noodler's Bernanke series? Both are quick-drying.

I'm actually a right-handed overwriter (rare thing that is), so I feel at least some subset of your pain.

please enlighten us as to why the fountain pin and/or feathered quill is superior to the free pens I get from the bank?

Y'know, I actually don't mind giving this a serious answer.

You don't need pressure to write with a fountain pen -- at all. (The modern competitor is a rollerball, not a ballpoint; rollerballs don't give you amount of flexibility on nib grind or opportunities for flex and shading effects that you get with a fountain, but at least you're not forced to use tons of pressure). Allows different, more comfortable grips.

Also, they're refillable with water-based inks -- meaning that they're not disposable, and that you have a huge amount of choice in terms of color and properties of your ink. Want an ink that's still viscous in below-freezing weather? I've got a bottle on my desk! Want an ink that changes from yellow to red depending on how much you're putting down on the paper? That too! Want an ink that responds to ultraviolet and is completely waterproof you can mix in with other inks that are water-soluable, so you can see where writing that's been washed away used to be under a blacklight?

Lots of room for geekery. :)

We can make modern flex nibs better than the old ones!

(Good flexible fountain pen nibs are pretty much all circa 1950s or prior right now; it's a sad, sad state of affairs).