Dorothy: Hello XXXX.
XXXXXXXXX: Hello
Dorothy: Welcome to HP Total Care for Pavilion Notebooks. My name is Dorothy. How may I assist you today?
XXXXXXXXX: How do I find a compatable docking station for this model of laptop?
Dorothy: I understand that you want the docking station for your notebook model. Am I correct?
XXXXXXXXX: yes
Dorothy: Sure, I will help you with this regard.
Dorothy: To proceed further, could you give me the serial and product number of the notebook?
XXXXXXXXX: **********
XXXXXXXXX: ******
Dorothy: Thank you for the information.
Dorothy: Could I have a few minutes of your time while I look at the computer's configuration in my database?
XXXXXXXXX: OK
Dorothy: Could I have 2-3 minutes of time to check for the exact information?
XXXXXXXXX: ok
Dorothy: Thank you for your time and patience.
Dorothy: I apologize for the delay.
XXXXXXXXX: no problem
Dorothy: Let me explain in this regard.
Dorothy: As you notebook does not have the expansion port to your notebook.
Dorothy: However it is not possible to connect your notebook to expansion base.
XXXXXXXXX: ok
XXXXXXXXX: thank you
Dorothy: as I searched the entired database.
XXXXXXXXX: sorry for the inconvience

Why is Google better at finding old Slashdot stories than Slashdot is?

I was trying to find some old story I remembered about some TV executive that said that all people who skip commercials are thieves.

I typed my query into Google:

site:slashdot.org PVR commercial theft

Result: The exact story I was looking for was the top result.

Try typing "PVR commercial theft" into the slashdot search bar and see what happens...

My uncle is an assistant for a senator in a state legislature. Recently, they enacted a bill requiring government documents to be stored and transmitted in "electronic format."

Unfortunately the state agencies complied by scanning all the paper forms into PDF format. So now, he and his colleges are drafting a new bill and want to clarify that the electronic documents must be capable of being edited. They don't want to specify a particular document format, to prevent getting locked in to a specific technology.

I can't think of the specific term he's looking for, so I'm asking Slashdot. Here's your change to influence the law of a rather large state. What term would describe electronic documents that can have their data manipulated, instead of storing it as a graphical black box?

Economics is, at root, the study of incentives: how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. Economists love incentives. They love to dream them up and enact them, study them and tinker with them. The typical economist believes the world has not yet invented a problem that he can not fix if given a free hand to design the proper incentive scheme. His solution may not always be pretty - it may involve coercion or exorbitant penalties or the violation of civil liberties - but the original problem, rest assured, will be fixed.

I'm falling down the slippery slope. I just added another slashdot friend for no particular reason, and now I'm making another journal entry. Soon, I'll be completely overcome by the dark side. Mostly this entry is here so my most-visible journal entry doesn't have "fuck" in it.

...
...shit

Battlestar Galactica continues in 2008 ?????????????????

WHAT THE FUCK?!?

It seems that Linus has given approval to merge Con Kolivas's new super cool process scheduler into mainline.

The 2.6 version of the process scheduler has been a mixed blessing from the beginning. This scheduler has the potential to fix the last(only?) significant regression incurred in the 2.4 to 2.6 transition.