The Pope is Catholic, bears shit in the woods, and kids are mean to each other. Also, American teachers and principals turn a blind eye to bullying. It's seen as a necessary process of determining the social pecking order. So what if, every now and then, some sensitive artist or nerdy engineer kid commits suicide?

I believe it was Tolkien who said that the internal combustion engine is the worst invention of mankind.

More chinks in the armor of the abominable Copenhagen Interpretation. Bohr, Heisenberg and Schreodinger were very smart people, but they couldn't be right about consciousness affecting physics. That's just stupid.

Until there's a replacement bulb that actually works with standard household dimmers, I'll be hoarding incandescents. I'm all for energy efficiency, but no one has come up with a viable alternative that works with legacy dimmer hardware.

Of course, if you were a corporation such as a distributor, music label or movie studio, you could instantly delete the offending content, no questions asked. Seriously, I'm not kidding. In the land of YouTube, alleged copyright holders such as performing rights organizations can take other people's content down with no proof of ownership. If the claimant is a powerful corporation, they can do whatever they want. The person against whom the claim was made can dispute the claim, but the corporation can immediately dismiss the claim. That's right. YouTube does not arbitrate. It's assumed that the corporations always hold the moral high ground, and individuals are nothing but scumbag pirates out to destroy the economy.

Another vote for Zelazny. He did walk the line between science fiction and fantasy, sometimes combining the two in one work. His mastery of world-creation was astounding. I've always thought that the Chronicles of Amber would make a better film series than Lord of the Rings. And Jack of Shadows was quite inspired, I thought. He even collaborated with PK Dick on a wonderful satirical crapsack world novel, Deus Irae.

Everyone who said that "Childhood's End" is depressing (including tvtropes.org) is suffering from a profound lack of imagination. The end of civilization as we know it may not be a bad thing if it is replaced with something infinitely better. The author left that part up to our imagination. How one interprets this book speaks volumes about our ability to imagine a better existence. A pessimistic interpretation indicates an inability to conceive of a posthuman future in which consciousness exceeds its current limitations. Isn't the title of the book enough to make the point that humanity is leaving the cradle? Or is growing up a bad thing, and we should all pine for the nostalgic days of infancy?

So the assumption is that all Slashdot readers are IT professionals? That's kind of narrow-minded. I'm a teacher. I like to keep up with news about technology. Am I welcome here?

Correction: this is the most expensive GAMING card you can buy. The price of a professional card can be up to US$10,000.

Correction: Magical Thinking WAS Good For You In A Prehistoric Age, Today It's A Maladaptive Anachronism

GOD-AWFUL design abortion

If there's no way to disable the GOD-AWFUL Windows 8 Start Screen, then I'm switching to Linux. I'm tired of being condescended to. This is so much like Microsoft BOB that it's not even funny. I need a neutral interface that gets out of my way and lets me do my work. I don't want real-time status updates on what my friends are doing. I don't want big colorful square buttons in preschool primary colors. I just need a stable OS that permits me full control over my own data, period. Clearly, Microsoft and Apple don't care about professional users, so I guess I'll have no choice but to jump ship to a Linux distro, despite the administrative hassles that entails. It's about time, really. I'm just sick of Windows, sick of OS X, and absolutely DETEST iOS. It's the triumph of lazy consumption over intelligent creation. My only problem is that so many of the graphics programs I make my living from do not exist on Linux. And before anyone jumps down my throat telling me all about the GIMP etc., I know about it. GIMP and other Linux-only programs are problematic because I'm a teacher, and I have no choice but to teach the software applications that are dominant in the marketplace.

Indeed, and it comes with the Feinberg accessory sensor

I've seen plenty of user applications that list download and upload rates in Kilobytes per second. And I hate it.