Does it have inside of it a baby Cat, baby Lister, baby Kryten, and baby holographic Rimmer?

It is hard to quantify exactly how Slashdot and CmdrTaco has shaped my education within this world of computers and technology, but let's suffice to say that it's been incredible. Slashdot gave me a consistent and no-B.S. direct link to really important information that nobody else had back in my formative years, and I'm forever grateful.

I'm especially thankful for the vision and leadership of CmdrTaco who, despite the growing "corporateness" of the Internet as it raged on, insisted on keeping the same flavor going on at Slashdot because it worked, goddammit, and it got information in the hands of those who needed it.

I know I'm yet another drop in the pool of thousands, but Many, many thanks for your years of dedication and hard work on this project. I believe I speak for everyone on this site when I make a lifetime standing offer of buying you a beer (or ten) should we ever meet.

Good luck and keep your stick on the ice. We're all in this together.

I wish it WOULD pass. I'm in Iowa, the heart of ethanol country, and I can't stand the stuff and what it's done. Artificial inflation of corn prices, artificial money, artificial companies. Whole corporations and huge plants have been built up on the promise of ethanol and just as quickly have fell into bankruptcy because the dream failed to pay off. As people have slowly come to realize that the bang-for-buck of ethanol is so much lower than gasoline, even with subsidies, plus the corrosion factors on improperly-engineered cars, it's fallen by the wayside. E-85 was supposed to be the next big thing and it barely made a fart in the market at all. All we've ended up with is farmers who thought they had a huge market for their product and suddenly....don't.

I've heard a lot of arguments for things like switchgrass ethanol and so forth and, hey, I'm all for alternatives -- if they work. But the fact remains that despite whatever "green" intentions people may have, if you can't sell it to the general public without a crutch, you're going to lose in the end. Time to let ethanol stand -- and die gracefully -- on its own.

Word is they were pretty hard to find at first, on account of them vibrating right off the slide.

For the most part, unless you're a programming grunt and do nothing except hack code all day long, you're multi-tasking. Email, IM, a work order system, CVS system, perhaps ERP, CRM, DMS, etc. Any number of systems that may require constant or frequent monitoring. That is where developers (and most other computer jockeys) need a 2nd monitor.

Now...if you're lucky enough to be able to say, "Look, I'm coding this afternoon and I'll be unavailable entirely until I get done," and then you can close everything, open up your project, and hack/slash at it for a few hours interrupt-free, that's wonderful, and you probably only need one monitor. But I don't know of too many positions like that these days, where so many people are called to be Jack-of-all in most positions.

In the end, monitors are bloody cheap. If the developer wants one, GET HIM/HER ONE. The cost is extremely minor compared to the value it'll bring to their attitude if they think their needs are being met. It'll pay for itself easily.

Despite all this, I *still* can't use it to realign the starboard plasma couplings. Dammit!

Oh, right, because everything on the Internet takes about 5 years to come out. Everyone will wait for you, W3C. We've got Livejournals to keep us amused till then.

Seriously, though -- wouldn't we be that much better off if they would release the standard right now as, "final pending revisions for bugs", or similar, so the world can move on and not fall into 14 different camps of what is official and what isn't?

(I realize in a lot of ways this is all about terminology, but terminology matters, too. )

..don't they fix the parabolic action (or lack thereof) of the "bomber" birds' payload egg? I had gotten so used to the extremely satisfying physics of the game that when that one came along and didn't describe a curved trajectory upon release, it totally threw me off and still does to today.

To be honest, I was trying to be a dick to attempt some humor on the subject (perhaps poorly), although I do wonder what the spread of technical knowledge is on e-Readers. That's what *I* would use them for, if I had one.

I don't find Twilight all that offensive from a reading standpoint, although being a sci-fi/fantasy geek, it's far too scant of detail and background. That being said, as I said to someone who was protesting the books as being hackneyed vamp porn, if you're reading Twilight to read a good fantasy-vampire novel, you're reading it for the wrong reason.

TFA failed to mention that the bulk of the content found on the e-Readers surveyed was copies of the Twilight series and whatever's on O's list these days.

Somehow, I doubt it's the font that is making everyone stupid...