Just as I'm not going to go to the effort of working around Windows' bugs when Linux exists, I'm not taking the time and effort to work around slashdot's fuck ups when I can simply paste the text in soylent and just leave a link here.

I've thought about simply not posting items with smart quotes here at all. Dice needs to get its shit together. Every change they make makes the damned thing less usable. The last change they made seemed to do nothiing but force a horizontal scroll in my browser.

It's almost like they're trying to run users off the site. They're coming close with me.

Yes, that's exactly what I thought.

It helps if you're humming A-Team theme music while you read it.

In the 1980's, a think tank with access to classified information and all the data they could put their hands on about oil and food calculated that when US oil access decreased to a certain threshold there would be a cycle of problems ending in wide spread starvation. They also realized that it would be possible to minimize the starvation deaths if enough land and equipment were dedicated to corn production, but at the same time realized that there was no way the market profit margins would entice anyone to make the investments. So they had the necessary secret meetings and ethanol fuel additives were the result; essentially they created a government incentive to ramp up the capability to produce food in an environment where the food isn't needed.

That's my guess anyway.

Or else, you know, it's just government bureaucracy making poor decisions, but that seems unlikely.

Thank you for some perspective. I've been reading the other posts and I've been just a little disgusted by the entitlement attitude throughout. I've worked for a company that went under, worked for a division that was eliminated, worked for a company that couldn't pay me for a while and been fired for problems that weren't my fault (that's four different employers.) It sucks, but none of them owed me a job. I'm not owed a job even now when I feel I'm doing great work for the company that employs me.

I was very close to writing a snarky post.

Your comment reminded me how much it sucks to wonder how you're going to get by, what you're going to do to take care of your children and if you'll ever get back to where you were. IBM may need to do this; they've been slowly building to an implosion for decades. I'd love to have IBM come back. I root for companies that can come back from the brink of oblivion, like Yahoo is, like Microsoft is trying to and like Radio Shack has failed to manage. I hope that in ten years, when my children are telling me about how cool IBM is, I'll be able to say that there was a time it looked like they were doomed before they turned it around however painfully.

To those who have to find new jobs, I add my heart goes out to you and I hope I get to work with you some day when we can both look back on this as a point when things started to get better.

My oldest daughter is autistic and I'm pretty sure I know why. Autism spectrum disorder has a huge genetic component and is linked to families with high intelligence, which makes sense since they recently discovered that an autistic brain has too many neuronal connections.

Leila had birth complications, but despite our worries she was advanced in almost everything. She delighted in freaking people out by waving and saying "hi!" to them at six months. She discovered at a very early age that she could roll anywhere she wanted to go, so had no need to learn how to crawl. She walked at a normal age, and it only took a single day to potty-train her at fifteen months.

Then she got her MRI when she was two. An hour or two after we got home she started crying, then screaming and running a fever; we had no thermometer so don't know how high. We called the doctor, who said it wasn't that unusual and not to worry.

By the next morning she stopped talking, stopped using the potty, stopped playing, and withdrew into her own little world. Note this was early 1988 before vaccine fears came about and before autism was well known. Despite our poverty we took her to specialists, every one of whom misdiagnosed her. One doctor said mentally retarded, one checked her hearing and said she was deaf and we should all learn sign language (Leila has better ears than anyone I know).

It's my belief that a very small number of children who have the genetic component can't handle getting all three vaccines at once, or perhaps is allergic to some component. The doctor said fever is common, but perhaps a dangerously high fever happnes, too. That's what I think caused Leila's problems.

At any rate, thanks to the incompetence of some highly educated quacks, Leila, who turns 30 this year, will never hold a job or drive a car. She spends most of her time reading the news on the internet; she has the worst interpersonal skills of anyone I ever met.

You can be sure that we got separate vaccinations for Patty, rather than the MMR superbomb.

Get the measles vaccine, NOT the MMR. Get the shots separately, and if your kid gets a fever afterwards, take him or her to the hospital. We're a lot less ignorant than we were when Leila was 2 or 3.

Yeah, I know, that's funny and yes, for a good three seconds, I had a moment of incoherent and dumbfounded shock at the idea someone could be seriously saying that. Then I saw the moderation and realized I'd been had. I paused for a second and realized I had some actual experience that wasn't so far off.

There was a time I liked VMWare. I used it until I discovered how much better Xen performed for me. I was a fan of XenSource until they were taken over by Citrix. When I took a job with Microsoft as the standard (no kidding, the boss sat me down and gave me the lecture my first week for daring to use VNC instead of MS Remote Desktop) I learned to use Microsoft virtualization instead. This was before Hyper-V and it.. well lets just say it was a hard acclimatization, so when I needed something that actually worked well, I convinced them that VMWare was a big enough enterprise player that we could use it where MS just couldn't do the job. That didn't mean I got a budget of course, it just meant I could use the free version. It wasn't great, but it was good enough. IE worked with it but keeping IE patched meant that IE stopped working, so now I had a system that couldn't work with anything but outdated and insecure software. Long story short, until I retired that system years later, I had portable Firefox 2 to run the interface.

I still don't love Hyper-V but it has performed better than VMWare free crap and if it still doesn't do some things (seriously, when will they enable USB access for clients?) at least I don't have to keep ancient browsers around to manage it. I miss Xen and still don't think KVM is as good. For that matter I miss the Phoenix browser. The best thing that could have happened to the Mozilla browser was to throw away all the crap that kept it from doing the one thing it was supposed to do best. I will appreciate it if Spartan is even half the improvement Phoenix was over Mozilla. I won't be surprised to write a comparison on how both started out with noble goals and decent performance before they were killed by the same loss of focus by their parent company in ten more years.

Thanks, I just may. I wonder who the other person was?

B&N has one too, I may just go for both and look for more.

Amazon was an experiment. I read the library's copy of Andy Wier's The Martian, really liked it, and googled to see if he had any more titles. Wikipedia said that he couldn't get a publisher so he introduced it as an Amazon ebook, it went to their best seller list, and a publisher bought the hardcover rights for a six figure sum.

So I thought, what the hell, why not give it a try? I thought it might give me extra exposure, but I was wrong.

I came here to moderate, but unfortunately slashdot's bug initiation team has made it so I either have to have teeny tiny print or a side scroll. Hey, slashdot, we aren't all using thirty inch monitors! Jesus, even the newspapers (most are the worst sites on the web) don't fuck up this bad.

Really, slashdot, is Dice trying to get rid of you? This is really lame. You really should hang your heads in shame.

See you at Soylent News.

Now, someone else with points please mod me offtopic. Thanks.

ASCII is fine if it's only going to be published at slashdot, but conversion is a pain in the ass I shouldn't put up with.

It seems that slashdot no longer fixes bugs, but are trying to introduce more. Today I have a choice between a tiny font and a side scroll. LAME!

I think the writing was on the wall over a year ago when they tried to shove Beta down our throats.

I miss Taco, the place worked when he was here.