If burning your own copy of a book is "religious violence," to the point of being terrorism, then we have no free speech rights whatsoever, do we?

Burning a book is not terrorism. It is protected by free speech.

I would go so far as to say that burning a copy of the Quran is not terrorism and is protected by free speech.

Free speech is not absolute - inciting violence, for instance, is not covered. When you burn the Quran, you are not inciting violence. When you burn the Quran, and at the same time say that the reason you are doing so is to condemn Islam as an evil religion responsible for the 9/11 attacks, you cross over into a grey area.

You know what would be cool?

A counter protest in which a number of religious and philosophical texts are burned publicly, with a Master of Ceremonies advocating the merits of each text in turn, and then reverently and respectfully laying them into the flames. It could conclude with a burning of the American flag. The whole thing could be framed as "None of these things are more important than the Freedom of Speech".

Not only for the lulz, but I seriously just spent about 20 minutes googling around and using amazon/froogle, and because "Wall Wart" and "Plug Computer" are both common phrases for things like - you know - ac adapters, these things are insanely hard to nail down an actual vendor or two in order to purchase one or two or five.

Need a new name like "wall computer" or "power pc".

Maybe not so much that last one.

Bin Laden is dead.

Seriously. There's no concrete evidence that he's been alive for about 6 years now; the guy was releasing videos or cassette tapes every month, and we haven't had a confirmed sighting or an authenticated recording or dated visual reference of him in around 6 years.

Rather than "harsh", it's all about consistency.

The problem is that mentally, this item has a real dollar value attached to it - because $35 -> 2 of these, each worth 280,000,000 in-game-currency.

But in reality, people lose ships worth 280,000,000 isk every day. In reality, this item isn't special, despite its real world implications. It's worth about the same as a "rare-ish" (mid-level rarity) shield booster, and worth 1/50th the price of the most expensive non-unique in-game module. But no one has the same feelings if they lose a ship fitted with a "Pithii C-type X-Large Shield Booster" like they do if the lose a PLEX; that's what CCP is trying to change. See the dev blog:

~X

BOTH SIDES ARE BAD!

(Vote republican!)

The lesser of 2 evils is still LESS EVIL.

And, with a cloud object storage system, the ability to upload things and not worry about file replication / redundancy. That's the idea for the end user - redundancy is taken care of. OpenStack lets people not worry about the system that worries about end user replication.

https://code.launchpad.net/openstack

Have fun!

High Five, from the Grandparent poster. I got 100% on both halves of my RHCE test, but I have about 8 years of professional linux sysadmin experience mostly on RH and RH-derivative distributions, plus I studied my ass off and my employer has a training program for it.

Also, to the parent, clueless rhces - I wonder if they're from back when it was a multiple choice (or part multiple choice)?

Woah, there, buddy.

Yes, there are entry level certificates for a lot of things:

A+ - anyone who puts this on a resume who is going for anything other than a repairman is stretching.
MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) - you have passed any one MS test
PMP - congrats you're a PHB-prototype.
etc.

But, there's a LOT of pooh-poohing of certs around here, and some of it isn't warranted.

For example: People who have a CCNP have passed four different cisco tests, including a troubleshooting one. That could be crammed for probably, as it's strictly a multiple choice test, but most people who have a CCNP probably have at least a decent familiarity with Cisco equipment.

People who have an MCSE have passed 7 Microsoft tests. Yes, you can cram for this and learn in books / etc, but - it's still more difficult than people think. How many people do you actually know that have gone as far as really getting their MCSE? There's a lot, but not as many as who think that it's just a piece of paper and stupid test. There's some higher level domain configuration and troubleshooting, etc.

And the RHCE (which I recently got) is a literal hands-on test - they hand you a broken linux box which you have to fix, and then a list of things to make it do via whatever method you think best (i.e. sendmail or postifx, as long as it delivers mail etc).

Certifications are not the end-all be-all of knowledge measurement. But, they're not completely worthless either. I see people on slashdot all the time who are like "I don't trust someone with a certification", or "I trust someone with an RHCE less than I trust someone without one!". That just doesn't make any sense.

~X

So that's what that was!

I worked in a repair shop in the 2003-2005 timeframe, and we used to see TONS of Compaq 3000/5000 series computers with the leaking caps on them. But other manufacturers had similar problems, and I remember some dells. Probably didn't see too many of the Optiplex ones, cause they tended to have corporate contracts.

Yeah, that problem was everywhere. You could tell how long a computer was going to last by the bulging capacitor tops - if they showed what looked like "rust", which was leaking brownish fluid, you had 4-6 months tops. If they were just bulging upward, you might get 8-12 months.

Wow.

To be fair, Starcraft is ENTIRELY an anomaly in the entire history of video gaming. Blizzard have a pretty good idea that people are and will be interested in Starcraft... because the game is still selling.

Seriously, the game came out 11 years, 2 months, and 10 days ago. Literally a week ago, I was in a GameStop and saw a brand new, in box copy of the starcraft battlechest edition on the shelf, for sale.

I cannot think of any other game that is still being sold as new that's anywhere NEAR that old - discounting things like the Civ anniversary pack or the C&C: First Decade pack, and other re-releases. This game has real staying power.

Anyway, like Yahtzee said: The point of episodic content is to release smaller sections of game, more frequently, at a lower cost. Valve have gotten the small sections and lower cost down, but the frequency is downright glacial. Half Life 2 Episode 2 Manchester United 1 took years for about 5-6 hours of gameplay. So, IMO, I hope they're releasing Ep3 via announcement at E3, but it wouldn't surprise me if they took another 18 months for ep3, and then another 3-4 years for HL3.

Stupid Valve. WE WANT GAMES, WE WILL PAY.

~X

God, again with the complaints about mining!

I have 4 eve chars, totaling almost 200 million skill points, and I've mined a total of 3 hours in over 4 years of playing.

The oldest, richest characters in Eve make their money on industrial stuff: Purchasing, trading, producing from valuable blueprints, etc. Value added kinds of stuff.

A lot of people (me, in my earlier days) just went killing NPC pirates for bounties. You can make enough to buy even the most expensive ship fielded in the tournament (probably one of the Macharials or Rattlesnakes) inside of a week, easy.

A lot of people do "quests", i.e. "go here, kill that", from NPC agents. Those make a huge amount of money.

The richer alliances control minerals, yes that's true, but largely it's "Moon mining", i.e. it happens in real time, and all you have to do is empty the silos every once in a while. That's where a lot of them make their money.

And on top of that, remember this is Eve - you can always steal your way to a fortune.

~X

If you think it's fun slash nailbiting to watch, try participating!

(Dystopia Alliance)

To be fair, google is using it's search revenue to muscle it's way into a lot of other online services markets by offering the services for free (domain hosted Gmail, google apps, etc). That seems pretty shady to me, but what do I know.