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The guys who were just messing around with stuff like "Can't wait to date her!" he responded in kind, and the people who were total shits he took the gloves off with.

Snowden is guilty of turning over a detailed review of our internal security apparatus to our national enemies

I'm not a great fan of the Guardian either, but "national enemies" is going too far.

Denial of certiorari sets no precedent. They could have rejected this case for any number of reasons, from a full calendar to the suit involving side issues which would make any ruling muddy to not liking the name of the defendant. They denied without comment.

I could make a political point about how kickstarter and its kin are a response to laws that limit risky investments by all except the wealthy and the effect of "the closure" in Venice in the 14th centuary.

That sounds interesting; go for it.

that doesn't mean it's lacking in good plot and characters

You've got to be joking. Abrams' Kirk is criminally incompetent (even in the first movie, before your "Khan wanted him to screw up" rationalization could apply). The plots of both movies have holes big enough to drive a planet through, let alone a starship. (For example, WTF is the point of starships anymore, since they can apparently just beam across the galaxy now?!)

DS9 got pretty dark (e.g. Homefront/Paradise Lost, In the Pale Moonlight), but it was good. Abrams alleged-'trek' sucked for (many, many) other reasons.

It is when the harassment campaign organizes blacklists, doxxes you, and spreads lies to try and get you fired.

But enough about Randi Harper.

"Cult"? You sound like the CEO of Nestle when he talks about people who don't want water delivery infrastructure privatised as "extremists".

And I'm just sitting here, drinking water delivered via privatized infrastructure.

Pay them to not fill your brand new machine with crap? Name another market where you do that...

"Natural" vs. regular processed foods.

I get, and sometimes sign, online petitions from the democrat party (as well as tea party-type petitions -- liberals incorrectly think I'm a liberal; conservatives incorrectly think I'm a conservative; go figure). One of the latest ones was titled something like "OMG, the Republicans want to shut down DHS; sign this to stop them!" and all I could think was that it's about damned time -- why the fuck would I want to stop them?! Shutting down DHS is an example of the Republicans doing something right, for a change!

But of course, since the Republicans are doing that the wingnut liberal lobbyists have to oppose them, even though it makes no damn sense...

Well, with some additional plumbing you could make mead...

Yeah, well, Japan doesn't count. Over there, they might as well have a vending machine corollary for Rule 34 ("there is a vending machine for it -- no exceptions").

I am highly literate and every once in a while I come across a word I recognize but want to find the EXACT meaning of.

Yeah, and the key phrase there is "every once in a while." A feature you use "every once in a while" is in no way the "fantastic benefit" that the GP claimed it to be -- the only way any feature can be a "fantastic benefit" is if you need to use it enough to make it so. Tautologically, anyone who needs to use a dictionary so damn often that having it instantly accessible is a "fantastic benefit" (rather than a minor one) is, in fact, illiterate.

But hey, thanks for entirely missing the point and then attacking me for it. That really sets a great example for how not to be a dick on the Internet!

Some people like to challenge themselves once in a while. By your logic, we should never move beyond our elementary school readers.

No, that's going by your strawman caricature of my logic.

By my actual logic, you should probably not try to skip directly from little golden books to Ulysses without reading incrementally more difficult things in between.

Gee, there's only one possible "point of reading"? And here I thought that one of the primary "points of reading" was to understand what the author was saying... which you can't very well do if you don't understand the words.

And if you have to look up every other damn word, you'll forget what the first part of the sentence said by the time you get to the end of it.

I have taught graduate-level courses at universities, and one of the things I strongly encourage students to do is look up recurring words that they don't know.

If your students are having to do that so often -- and that's the important word: "often!" -- that using an e-reader with a built-in dictionary provides a significant advantage, then what were they doing during their entire 'education' up to that point? Shouldn't people have already developed a decent vocabulary before becoming grad students? How do they even pass the verbal portion of the GRE?

Yes, that's a great exercise, and if you're in the middle of a fast-paced novel, it's probably a reasonable idea. But if you're actually trying to understand what an author is saying, and there's this word popping up a dozen times that you don't know, simply guessing what it means is missing an opportunity to learn something.

Well shit, if you've already tried figuring the word out from context and failed, and then it keeps coming up over and over again, then of course you should go look it up -- that's fucking common sense! Clearly, from your response, I overestimated Slashdotters' grasp of the obvious.

And recurring words are great for that kind of exercise, because it provides periodic reinforcement, which is one of the keys to learning natural language and recalling new things. Most authors -- even those who write "stories" and fiction -- tend to have "pet words" that aren't part of the standard core vocabulary everyone uses. When you see such a word and look it up [or figure it out from context], each time the author uses it again you'll reinforce that word. Suddenly, by the end of the book, you'll have expanded your vocabulary by a dozen or a few dozen words. (And you're more likely to remember the meaning than if you had just memorized the word for a vocab test or something -- seeing practical usage will aid recall.)

So you agree with me, then!