Slashdot

Protip: if you're having to overcome a bunch of objections, it's probably because the person doesn't actually need what you're selling. That's why so many of us think marketing people are scum: they make a living off of conning people into buying things they (or sometimes anyone at all) have no use for.

geekdoc writes "Reuters is reporting that George Carlin has died at the age of 71 from heart failure. "Carlin, who had a history of heart and drug-dependency problems, died at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica about 6 p.m. PDT (9 p.m. EDT) after being admitted earlier in the afternoon for chest pains.""

Also, .NET has really withered on the vine. Though you will always be able to find shops that use .NET, the general consensus that I've heard is that .NET is dying.

bladesjester writes "Ohio's Governor, Ted Strickland, has ordered that Nativity scenes be replaced at two state parks because they are "an appropriate part of our traditional holiday displays".

In response to concerns voiced over violation of the First Amendment, it was stated that some other symbols would be allowed on a case-by-case basis (at least one has already been refused).

If someone wanted to add a menorah near the Nativity scene, that would be acceptable, but not a Zoroastrian symbol, according to Strickland's spokesperson, Keith Dailey. "It's not something that is traditionally displayed" during the holidays, he said.

In a related note, the article touched on a similar controversy in the town of Whitehall in which the City Council refuses to remove the prominently displayed Nativity scene on public grounds. In response to the outcry, City Council member Chris Rodriguez said "I think people should get over it and stop being so smug about their rights.""

An anonymous reader writes "In apparent disregard for the separation of church and state, Ohio's governor, Ted Strickland has ordered that nativity scenes removed from two state parks be put back up.

Strickland spokesman Keith Dailey says the governor decided last week that the Nativity scenes should be restored to the state parks because they're appropriate and traditional."

conner_bw writes "This week's film blogs have been left aghast as Mike Judge's grotesque fictional energy drink Brawndo from the movie Idiocracy became a reality. To recap: Fox wouldn't support a film about Brawndo, the energy drink that destroys plants, debases the human race, and makes those who drink it 'win at yelling' but they are now putting wholehearted support behind the actual drink?" And if you haven't seen Idiocracy, you are missing out. It is the smartest stupid movie I've seen. Whoever did production design on that thing deserves an Oscar.

sfjoe writes "Are spammers giving up the game? Google seems to think so. In an article at Wired, Google, '... says that spam attempts, as a percentage of e-mail that's transmitted through its Gmail system, have waned over the last year'. They think their own filters are so good that spammers aren't even trying anymore. 'Other experts disagree with Google, pointing out that overall spam attempts continue to rise. By most estimates, tens of billions of spam messages are sent daily. Yet for most users, the amount of spam arriving in their inboxes has remained relatively flat, thanks to improved filtering.'"

ozmanjusri writes "Major news outlets are reporting that after 20 million years, Baiji (Yangtze River Dolphin) are now officially extinct. This is apparently actually old news; it was announced on a Baiji conservation website in December of last year. One outlet, though, is claiming they may not quite be completely dead yet. The same scientist that filed the report leading the the declaration of extinction is still hopeful: '"This is only one survey and...you can't have a sample in a survey, so you cannot say the baiji all is gone by the result of only one survey," he said. "For example, there is some side channels or some tributaries [where] we cannot go because of a restriction of navigation rules, and also we don't survey during the night-time so we may miss some animals in the Yangtze River." Professor Ding says based on anecdotal evidence, he remains confident the dolphins are still out there. "I'm pretty much sure there are a few of them left somewhere in the Yangtze River," he said. "I keep receiving reports from fishermen, they say they saw a couple of baiji somewhere, sometime."'"

Susan Elliott Sim asks: "In the science fiction novel, 'A Deepness in the Sky,' Vernor Vinge described a future where software is created by 'programmer archaeologists' who search archives for existing pieces of code, contextualize them, and combine them into new applications. So much complexity and automation has been built into code that it is simply infeasible to build from scratch. While this seems like the ultimate code reuse fantasy (or nightmare), we think it's starting to happen with the availability of Open Source software. We have observed a number of projects where software development is driven by the identification, selection, and combination of working software systems. More often than not, these constituent parts are Open Source software systems and typically not designed to be used as components. These parts are then made to interoperate through wrappers and glue code. We think this trend is a harbinger of things to come. What do you think? How prevalent is this approach to new software development? What do software developers think about their projects being used in such a way?"