My current political knowledge and world history are insufficient to comment on the exact number of wars that have occurred since 1945, but I'm quite certain it's more than those two. I think perhaps you mis-interpreted the issue as the number of wars the U.S. has been involved in.

And that's not really true. Yes, our executives have recently avoided the legitimacy of getting a declaration of war before mounting a large-scale military invasion of a nation, doing combat with the armed forces of that nation, and ultimately replacing the government of that nation. However, just because they haven't had the integrity to use the word "war" doesn't mean we didn't go to war - it just means our Congress should be upset that its constitutional role was usurped by another branch of government.

And just to shake up the traditional Slashdot vibe...

Your citation was helpful. Thanks for the correction. I was wrong to incorrectly mention only those two uses of quotation marks.

That said, wikipedia lists the following correct uses:

• direct quotes
• irony (I called it sarcasm)
• unusual usage (as mentioned by parent)
• use-mention distinction (as mentioned by parent
• titles of works
• nicknames and false titles (Nat "King" Cole)

It also mentions the incorrect, but increasingly common amongst the un- or insufficiently-educated, usage of quotes for emphasis ( "No" food or drink in the theater).
That said, none of these categories explain the use (I was referring to the title) of quotes around "too intrusive". Context clues still indicate to a reader that this is a direct quote, but he did not say it.

Maybe it's a nitpick, but if you employ quotation marks, you are denoting one of two things - sarcasm or direct quotation. Given the context, it does not appear to be sarcasm. RTFA shows that Torvalds did not use the words "too intrusive".

Sure, it's one somewhat questionable paraphrase of what he said, but to use quotation marks there is dishonest. His complaint was not even over the amount of effort, but rather of whom the effort was required. That is, non-root users were being required to know the root password for routine tasks.

Seriously? This is months old! You know how old this is?

It's a collection of new C++ features, and prominent compilers have already added support for it. Getting C++ compiler vendors off their butts to implement new features takes freakin' forever, but I can already play with lambdas, auto, and variadic templates - at least.

That said, as a professional C++ developer working in HPC, this is exciting.

I think medcalf is specifically referring to the precedent set by Wickard v Filburn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn).

tl;dr: Federal government used ICC to set wheat farming maximums (to drive prices up). A farmer grows more than his quota, but not for sale - only personal consumption. Supreme court rules that ICC applies even though the situation doesn't relate to interstate commerce because, had he not produced his own wheat for his own consumption, he *might have* bought it, and he *might have* done so from a farmer in another state.

So, under current Supreme-Court precedent, yes they could take away your hand-blown bulbs. You are correct to point out that they would not under current law, but medcalf is correct that they *could* (if the law were changed).

But just in general, the federal government does a lot of things that are outside its constitutionally enumerated powers. Whenever this fact is brought up in relation to a specific law, it is usually ICC that is used to justify it.

We should be careful about how we define what "25%" is a percentage of? Your estimate is right on if we're discussing screen real-estate.

But screen real-estate doesn't contribute to anyone's bandwidth cap, so maybe we should consider bytes. In that case, most blogs have >75% ads, since they consist of text content (small) a logo (cached after loading once) and flash video or image ads (very large, reload each time you open a new article or refresh the same article).

And many of us still have connections whose caps we never go near, so we really care about load time. For a great many websites (most with ads?), ads again take a majority, because many ad networks us javascript hacks to ensure that the content doesn't load until *after* large images or flash are pulled from an overloaded server.

Actually, this just might work!

To: Vic Toews
From: Me

Hey, all I did today was post on Slashdot.


To: Vic Toews
From: Me

Oops, forgot to mention I also emailed you my internet activity for today.


To: Vic Toews
From: Me

Oops, forgot to mention I also emailed you an update to my internet activity for today.


To: Vic Toews
From: Me

Oops, forgot to mention I also emailed you an update to my internet activity for today.



ad infinitum

That's not really how trademark works. Two different companies can use the same trademarks if they work in sufficiently different fields as to not lead to confusion.
Evidence:
http://www.delta.com/
http://www.deltafaucet.com/
http://www.deltamachinery.com/
http://www.deltadental.com/
http://www.delta.edu/
http://www.deltasociety.org/
http://www.deltacycle.com/
http://www.deltacreative.com/
http://www.deltacollege.edu/
http://www.deltastorage.com/
http://www.deltatargets.net/
http://www.madebydelta.com/
http://www.deltachildren.com/
http://www.deltawaterfowl.org/
http://www.deltamarine.com/
http://delta.ncsu.edu/
http://www.deltasrestaurant.com/
http://deltamotion.com/
http://www.deltaeducation.com/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0910860/
http://www.deltapress.com/
http://www.deltatire.com/
http://www.deltarf.com/

And even this is not technically true. There are still assumptions - usually Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory and predicate logic. I've never heard anyone say that they doubt the truth of such fundamental claims, but there is *some* room for doubt.

Not technically true. Power7 belongs to the same family of architectures as PowerPC, but it's not really appropriate to say that Power7 is a PowerPC implementation. You might say that PowerPC is an uncle of Power7.

When I was in college (2 years ago) I brought my laptop to most classes, simply because I can type about 4-5x faster than I can hand-write. The only thing running was emacs, but none of my professors minded.

The thing that makes this work for college is that I *want* to be there. If I really don't want to take a class, I just don't register for it. So if I'm sitting in a classroom, it's because I'm actually interested in what the professor has to say. Such a thing would never work in a setting like high schools and lower precisely because attendance is compelled.

A good GUI is easy to find. Here goes my recommendation:

1. Are you willing to undergo a learning curve? if yes, then you probably want a window manager like awesome. I've never heard anything but praise for tiling window managers from those who actually use them.
2. If not, try one of the boxen. I recommend fluxbox. It's nice because there's almost nothing to learn. No UI paradigms pushed on you. Add a panel and it has all the GUI complexity of Win95 (which I'm putting forward as a good thing).

You will get crap options though if you go for one of the "big three" (Gnome, KDE, Unity), but nobody says you have to stay. If you prefer a more integrated experience than one of these window managers, then go XFCE.

Sure, they won't spin your desktop like a cube. They won't make your windows close in a puff of smoke. They won't animate everything in 3D. Because it's a desktop, not a fucking video game.

Slashdot has so many comments boiling down to "Judges don't understand technology, and they look foolish when they rule on it anyways."

Then we have this article and it's responses, which basically boil down to "A bunch of technologists don't understand the law and the mechanism of precedence, and they look foolish when they comment anyways."

IANAL, but no, EULA are not the same as free software licenses. The primary difference is that one is a *licensing agreement*, and the other is a *license*.

The concrete difference between the two is that a licensing agreement rests on contract law, in that it is an agreement between two parties. Generally speaking this means it must have (at least) two parties (software vendor and user) and there must be mutual consideration (they give you a license to software, you provide the agreement not to do certain things, and often toss in some money). A license rests on copyright law. Thus it does not require two parties or mutual consideration. Rather it is the unilaterally granted permission of a copyright holder to someone else to use their work.

The best place to see the difference is in the consequences of failure to adhere. The only way to fail to adhere to most free software licenses is to distribute binaries without the source and/or license du'jour. If you fail to adhere to the conditions of the license, then you have no license and are distributing a copyrighted work without permission of the author, which is copyright infringement. If you fail to adhere to the conditions of an EULA, then you are in breach of contract.

A helpful overview: http://www.law.washington.edu/lta/swp/law/contractvlicense.html

I hope this is a joke. But being paid well to burn out on a job is not slavery. Being compelled through the threat of violence to labor against your will to no benefit of your own is slavery. And sadly, human trafficking is a real thing in the world.

This is more like an investment banker who donates some of his money to groups fighting rape. Sure, some people overly fond of hyperbole might say that he has "raped" the economy, but that doesn't make him a hypocrite because he has never committed rape, and is doing real good in the world.

I understand that what Google is trying to do here is purchase good will. But it worked - they bought mine. It's not a bad trend to start. Any corporation that decides to donate considerable sums of money to ending atrocities in the world will get my consumer loyalty.