Actually, the web has always worked a lot better if you consciously avoid sites created by "designers"

So, no Slashdot Beta then...

> I really hope it's real 3D this time, not just some stereoscopic trickery where you need special glasses to eat your hamburger.

Yeah, I hate when it's just pink slime on one side of the burger and blue slime on the other.

And don't forget the Christians, who were able to live under Saddam's regime. This is no longer possible and Christians throughout the Middle East are being driven out and/or killed. This alone doesn't mean we should have left Saddam in place, but it certainly is one of the things that needed to be weighed against the benefits of removing him.

>> The classic example is the broken window fallacy...

Hey, if it works in Ankh-Morpork it should work in the real world, right?

>> Remember, you are a citizen of your state first and a THEN a citizen of the United States.

This is how it was supposed to work. And it's the only way it can work well.

It also occurred to me that excess centralization of power is likely to be the driving force behind all the secessionist movements, such as what we saw with Scotland last week. If government were kept as local as possible, these kinds of problems wouldn't happen... or would be much less likely to happen. This is what the Founding Fathers envisioned: Several sovereign states joining together only for those things (and they were very few, although very important) were there is strength in unity. Otherwise, they were supposed to mind their own business, ensuring the success of a republic made up of very diverse populaces. However, this is no longer possible.

Windows 8 is almost literally like going back to the 1980s. And the default wallpapers are all vomit-inducingly ugly. I agree that every UI designer at Microsoft should be fired and go spend their time making hideous public sculptures in major metropolitan cities that I don't live in like all their po-mo art school friends.

I'm amazed that Windows 8 is so advanced it's incapable of the "classic" Windows 2000 look that every other Microsoft OS in the last 15 years could do. And from a usability point of view, I could write a book on why Flat UI sucks. As far as I'm concerned the last version of Windows that wasn't eye-gougingly ugly by default was 2000. Actually, Windows 7 wasn't all that bad, but I still strongly prefer the "classic" look. But of course, Microsoft is so hypnotized by this whole "Flat UI" nonsense that they won't let me have it any more. Or they are so incompetent their state-of-the-art software can't display a 15-year-old UI scheme. Either way, stupidity or malice, it's really pathetic.

Flip a couple bits in the registry, make a SKU and charge and extra $100. They've been doing that for 20 years.

And the only pro feature I wanted (the Unix prompt)

What are talking about, Powershell? You can install that on any version of Windows. If you are talking about an honest-to-goodness Unix prompt then install cygwin or something that gives you bash or some other Unix-style shell.

Or is there something else I'm not aware of?

Mr Ellison is the head of a software company called Oracle.
If your computer is a car, then software is the fuel that runs it.
Hope this helps.

If your computer is a car, then Oracle software is the crank in the front that you use to start it up.

You're not the only one who had that thought.

I wish every native English speaker could communicate as well in English as you do. There's no need to apologize.... ... unless, of course, one of your first two languages is Klingon.

You do realize the code that generated the "hockey stick" graph won the the IOCCC back in 1999.

1. It brings all the music up to the same levels. In this way, it's a bit more 'democratic' with the music, all the parts will be equally hear-able.

Yes, because it all sounds like white noise.

2. they falsely associate 'aggressive' music with loudness wars

But the loudness wars were real.

3. Related to my second point, the real hear-able issues due to the loudness wars are incredibly minor, psychologically.

You may think so, but a lot of us don't. The heavy compression (and this is audio compression, not digital compression, which is a completely different thing) destroys the quality of the sound. This is an objective truth. Perhaps that kind of crushed sound might be desirable by some artists as a style or effect, but when old music is being remastered to have no dynamic range and to clip, it is severely damaging to the quality of the sound and the ability for a listener to hear everything in it. That definitely has nothing to do with changing tastes, because we're talking about the same music.

Rock 'n' roll isn't dead. You just can't hear it on the radio or other mass media any more. But it hasn't gone anywhere.