Yeah, when you have absolutely no qualms about being trillions of dollars in public debt, there really is no such thing as a dichotomy when it comes to spending.

I'm all in favor of adding unnecessary car analogies, but man, that one is so analogous that it adds absolutely no explanatory value.

The first two posts are false dichotomies. Way to go, Slashdot. Nerds are supposed to be smart.

It is possible to reduce carbon emissions, plant more trees, AND plant trees that capture more carbon.

For static content, you're right. But when you're designing dynamic applications in something like GWT, you're way beyond being able to think about the semantic web.

Yeah, this is nothing new. My school system implemented a system like this years ago. My school system assigned 6-digit student IDs when I was in 4th grade or so, probably around 1997. I don't remember when we implemented debit accounts for lunches - maybe 5 years later. It's convenient.

That's right - "gay" has been used for "lame" for decades now. The problem is that it is *also* used to indicate homosexuality.

While we're at it, let's note that "lame" has been used for "undesirable" for some time. The problem is it is *also* used to indicate physical disability.

It is difficult to keep up with what offends people, indeed.

Literally meaning 'word processor-stupid', it refers to someone whose kanji-writing ability has suffered due to over-reliance on the kanji conversion systems used to input Japanese text in a word processor or computer.

English speakers could find a similar use for this term, describing people who have forgotten (or never learned) how to spell due to relying on spell-checkers.

There are very few crimes that should follow someone around for their whole life - sexual offenses and first degree murder spring to mind

Why is it that if a crime is of a sexual nature, you are willing to import a harsher sentence, or are less willing to eventually forgive it?

Why doesn't Windows enforce it's security?

I question your assertion that Windows is security.

From what I've seen, wiki vandalism comes most often in the form of an entire article or section replaced with something like "STeve is a fagot" - so I don't think that whether a reader will believe misinformation is really the concern here.

City living is nothing more than a concentration of workers to benefit industrial interests.

Really? I moved into a city because a university is there. And because I didn't particularly care for the suburbs.

The thing doesn't sound very useful if the only way to erase is to wipe the entire screen. I'd like to use something like this to replace pencil-and-eraser for math, but not if it's like using a pen...

If you think more abstractly... There's no reason that "counting" has to denote that you mentally encode a number in decimal notation. If you can remember some nontrivial quantity, regardless of what process you use to recall it, I see no reason why you can't call that "counting".

For example, we can say informally that a pushdown automaton has the ability to count, because it can retain some unbounded memory of the number of symbols it has encountered. The information is there, even if you can't directly ask it and get an answer like "613".

Anecdote: Microsoft was pitching student-discounted Windows 7 on my uni campus a few days ago. After waiting patiently through a demonstration of the silly window gestures, I asked a rep how I would go about opening an SSH terminal. His recommendation was "go to Google and download something".

You live by your customers being idiots, you die by your customers being idiots.

I'd bet that if AT&T has decent voice coverage and spotty 3G, it has benefited from a lot of customers not realizing that those coverage areas can be different. Verizon's ad turns the same ignorance against them, and now they're upset about it.

The notion of a mobile phone service provider suing anyone over being misleading is astoundingly ironic.