Because some of us don't mind being advertised to provided the advertisement is entertaining and useful. The nine Best Picture nominees are all excellent for different reasons, and the show itself was entertaining. I imagine Slashdot wants to hate Seth Macfarlane for Family Guy and other reasons, but he was a pretty funny host.

That might be a relevant point if he weren't directly responding to the assertion that plastic bags "aren't actually a threat to our ecosystem."

Who solves social problems? Hint: It's not the techies. We techies generally have no power to solve social problems. The evidence is all around us. It is how the world works. That power goes to the socialisers with their ass-kissing, smooth talk, pointless speeches, and the riches and charisma to reach positions of influence.

I really resent your implication that I am not a socializer with ass-kissing smooth talk and pointless speeches.

You are correct about not upgrading. I am general counsel for a tech company. We will not be upgrading Office on our employee-issued laptops, and I'll be using this as fodder to push that we move from Office altogether.

Further: If you're a rich American and left (and renounced US citizenship) to avoid paying taxes, you'd leave for Switzerland or somewhere like that, not corrupt and poor Belize. Any money he makes now is almost assuredly capital gains, which is taxed at one tenth or one twentieth of the US rate in Switzerland (depending on long-term vs short-term, tax bracket, etc.).

US citizens living abroad still must pay US income tax. So I don't think it's that.

John Huntsman waves "hello" from his little tip of the GOP iceberg, having been prematurely and foolishly jettisoned by the rest of the pack.

Hmm,
-Office
-Visual Studio
-Bing (Bing Travel is actually really useful)
-DOS
-SharePoint

I love how the summary of the article doesn't tell me how the Wayback Machine is related to this at all, but it's mentioned in the title!

IMHO chrome has become too much of a behemoth. I'd migrate them to Firefox.

What? My experience is that Firefox is slower, uses more RAM, and has other problems Chrome does not. I switched from Opera to FF because Opera stopped handling Japanese input correctly. Then I switched from FF to Chrome because FF was so slow compared to Opera and Chrome was not.

One of many reasons why I am a devout evangelical atheist is because of all the Ten Commandments int he Bible, God chose not to outlaw rape.

Depending on the marital/betrothal status of the woman, rape violates either the proscription of adultery or theft in the Ten Commandments. Not revisionism. The Bible says raping a married woman carries the death penalty, and raping an unmarried, unbetrothed woman carries a substantial fine.

A couple caveats:

1. Rape was considered an offense against the owner of the woman (rape a married woman, you've offended the husband, and you die; rape an unmarried woman, you've offended the father, pay him a fine).

2. There is nothing in the Bible against raping your own wife.

The lack of understanding about the Bible is something I would expect from an atheist, so no harm no foul. Just amend your complaint next time. :)

Isn't that partly (wholly?) because Iceland has a language academy that regulates the Icelandic language (Like the Real Academia Española or L'Académie française) and it insists on coining proper Icelandic terms instead of using loan words? Sort of like how anyone born in Iceland is required to be given a name that must be approved before being introduced into the language (if it's not already an existing Icelandic name)?

Thank you for that informative post that has not been posted on every Slashdot conversation ever in the history of the Internet.

I'm general counsel for a consulting firm involved in the public sector. What you say is true based on my understanding, especially with so many troops returning home. A ton of things are being re-insourced, for lack of a better word. I just attended a talk given by contract officers in the military; they said there are going to be fewer opportunities for outside firms going forward because the military is taking over many functions again (combined with the current stress on the economy making budgets tighter).

And to respond to GP's point about how the Army should build missiles and such, the answer is similar to why companies operate on credit. Work needed is not flat and consistent; things fluctuate. It is SOP in business (and has been for decades) to outsource non-core functions of your business to take advantage of economies of scale and comparative advantage. Manufacturing missiles is no more a core function of the military than manufacturing radios or gunpowder is.

The military is not in the manufacturing business. It's in the de-manufacturing business (and defense, obviously).

Take your rose-colored glasses off re Digg. It is factually true that Digg had much bigger discussions, but they were awful. You can find any number of PhDs commenting regularly about niche topics on Slashdot, but that never happened on Digg. It was always college kids allcapsing their uninformed opinions.