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The Almighty Buck

Journal: The wall street bailout

Journal by Androk

I've been looking at all the wall street bailouts happening with a sense of profound disgust. I've read that we've already guaranteed upwards of a trillion dollars, and it looks like we're about take some more. http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080918/wall_street.html?.v=44
When this mess started blowing up last year, if the government nationalized fannie and freddie, bought all the housing loans under 500k made since 2004, chopped 25% off the amount owed, then made the people pay back the rest at

Government

Journal: Email to My US congressman

Journal by Androk

Rep Langevin,

I think your vote of Yea on FISA Amendments Act of 2008 was unconscionable. It guts the 4th amendment of the Constitution. The 4th amendment was in direct response to British Writs of Assistence:
A Writ of Assistance is a legal document that serves as a general search warrant.
Unlike the warrant, it is generally open-ended, and requires all parties to support the officer to whom it was issued.
So, if this passes, the senate, I can be spied on for no good r

Comment: Re:My Experiences (Score 1) 518

by Androk (#20573627) Attached to: Believe the Occupational Outlook Handbook?
Some of the issues with the above quoted article:
1) teachers don't get OT Fire fighters and others do.
2) That figure shows the number because teachers get more time off - they don't make the schedule, schools do, look at yearly average salaries, they aren't terribly overpaid. the 43200/52/40 gives a little over $20 an hour, not exorbitant.
Games

You Played Violent Games - Why Can't Your Kids? 501

Posted by Zonk
from the time-to-sit-your-kid-down-to-have-the-frags-and-camping-talk dept.
An anonymous reader writes: "On the Wired site, Clive Thompson has up an article that points out a sobering truth: gamers are getting older. Folks who grew up playing videogames like Doom and Quake are now facing parental decisions with their own kids regarding appropriate content. Thompson cites well known gamer dads like Kotaku's Brian Crecente, discussing some of the approaches folks educated in gaming take with their own offspring: '"Everybody knows, as an adult, that the world is not always a nice place," Crecente told me. "But I don't want him to know that yet. I want him to have a childhood." So he disallows games with "realistic" combat, like World War II titles, or Resistance: Fall of Man, but permits highly cartoony shooting, like Starfox on the Nintendo DS -- since he regards it as essentially as abstract as playing cops and robbers with your fingers as guns.' Where do you think gamer parents should draw the line? If you have kids, what approach are you taking to introducing them to gaming? How old is 'old enough' to start fragging?"

Slashdot Posting Bug Infuriates Haggard Admins 262

Posted by CmdrTaco
from the this-is-never-good dept.
Last night we crossed over 16,777,216 comments in the database. The wise amongst you might note that this number is 2^24, or in MySQLese an unsigned mediumint. Unfortunately, like 5 years ago we changed our primary keys in the comment table to unsigned int (32 bits, or 4.1 billion) but neglected to change the index that handles parents. We're awesome! Fixing is a simple ALTER TABLE statement... but on a table that is 16 million rows long, our system will take 3+ hours to do it, during which time there can be no posting. So today, we're disabling threading and will enable it again later tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience. We shall flog ourselves appropriately. Update: 11/10 12:52 GMT by J : It's fixed.

Transmeta Sues Intel for Patent Infringement 161

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the easy-advertising dept.
Cr0w T. Trollbot writes "Today Transmeta filed suit against Intel for patent infringement. From the article: 'The suit [...] alleges that Intel infringed upon ten of Transmeta's patents. The patents cover computer architecture and power efficiency technologies.' Transmeta offered a low-power x86 processor until last year which used Transmeta's vaunted 'code morphing' software."

It is sweet to let the mind unbend on occasion. -- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace)