I don't think you can top this. Or at least that anyone will for the foreseeable future... ;-)

Here, these fell out of your post: ' e ' ' ' e. My pleasure.

Sometimes somebody really isn't a Scotsman though...

Do you deny that there are people who can't take care of themselves, through no fault of their own? If so, then you are delusional. If not, then you are an asshole.

The box was placed by the police department. See this follow up article (Google Translate), in which the police department (it doesn't specify which one, but probably that of The Hague) states that the box is theirs and it was being used in a large financial crime investigation. Nothing to do with investigating the recruitment of youths to come fight in Syria, as had been speculated. They say they had permission from the public prosecutor to use it.

I'm just going to state the obivous: NEVER, EVER, BUY ANYTHING ENCUMBERED WITH DRM! Or at least not without knowing you can remove it. This is what I do. I buy digital content all the time, but music only in the form of MP3's or otherwise unencrypted formats, and ebooks only in MOBI or ePub formats, from which the DRM is easily removed.

I don't buy movies online, since they aren't sold without DRM yet, and it can't be reliably removed yet. I buy them on physical discs, which may have DRM, but which I can at least pass on to anyone I want.

What is BBM? It would have been nice to define that in the summary, instead of assuming that every Slashdot reader is an experienced Blackberry user...

Admittedly the internship was 15 years ago; I'm sure the situation has changed since then, although I still noticed people paying for things with cheques when I was last there on holiday, three years ago, and my (Dutch) friend who runs a company in the US tells me that almost all his employees still want to receive their wages by cheque. 9 cheques is not many, but it's still 9 more than I ever used in my life (and I'm in my late 30's)... ;-)

One thing I'm noticing in this discussion is the fact that apparently in America the concept of sending money directly from one person to the next is considered alien and revolutionary by many, even though you can do that with good old USD too. It's called a bank transfer. I think it's because the use of cheques is still so widespread in the US.

I've never understood that strange preference for paying by cheque. I did an internship in the US, and I could choose between receiving my wages as a cheque, or having it directly deposited into my bank account. I chose the latter, as I am used to that and it makes much more sense. I think I was the only one in the entire company.

I don't get it. Really, a piece of paper? That you can lose? That can be stolen? That's a hassle because you have to physically bring it somewhere to get your money? That can bounce (a really weird concept to me)?

Here in the Netherlands (and certainly most of Europe as well, I don't know about the rest of the world) it's extremely common to pay each other by direct bank transfer. It's how everybody receives their wages and pays their bills. If you go out to dinner together it's common for one person to pay the bill and everybody else to transfer their share to their bank account. It's fast, easy, safe, and secure. With the phone apps every bank has these days it's a matter of seconds to do. There is no "bouncing", once you receive the money it's yours. Very odd that it just doesn't seem to want to catch on in the US.

"Public websites are public! News at 11!"

This is just a dumb publicitiy stunt. I hope nobody will be stupid enough to fall for it and take him on.

• You can't prove a negative.
• It's very unlikely that any judge would be completely impartial, and no way to make sure.
• There is no hard evidence, no way to test theories, no way to ground the whole discussion in reality whatsoever. It would essentially be bar talk.
• Win or lose, the outcome will be completely meaningless. I'm sure this person would spin a win for him as proof that Genesis is true, but of course it wouldn't be. Most likely it just means that his opponent happened to be a less skilled debater. The same would be true of a loss, of course.

It's bullshit. Again, I hope nobody falls for it.

Java is also from Oracle, and runs really well on SPARC, and Java is still hugely popular for writing enterprise applications, so there may be some potential there for them. Oracle Database obviously runs on SPARC as well, so it makes a pretty good platform for large enterprise applications.

Other tests have already shown that Americans rate atheists lower than muslims, so I would expect it to have a lesser effect. There is a strange and hypocritical effect where religious people think less badly of people of other religions, even if those religions completely contradict their own, than they do of people with no religion at all...

Thanks for demonstrating my point!

So in other words your decision had nothing to do with crime being, you know, wrong? You're really a criminal at heart who just opts not to actually do any crime for practical reasons? That doesn't exactly speak highly to your moral character...