voila!

It's been sent.

May I trouble you for an invite? uglyMood(gmail). Thanks!

So those of us who aren't Christians and are being beat over the head with it 24/7 while watching any possibility of social progress get flushed down the toilet by religious zealots are finally allowed some perspective? Amen to that, Brother.

Having reread your post, I see that you are indeed talking about the media degrading, and that with a lossless file format the degradation would be less noticeable. However, the way it is written gives the impression that a lossy format means your file is simply rotting away like a head of lettuce, while the lossless one is immune to the ravages of time. Both file formats suffer the same amount of damage due to media degradation, but the point I believe you were trying to make is that a lossless format is more forgiving of the errors.

I do not think that word means what you think it means. Degradation would occur upon re-encoding to a lossy format, not when the MP3 "sits on your hard drive." If that's what is happening, then you've got a disk drive that's deteriorating. The problem, dear Brutus, lies not in our files, but in our substrates.

You are correct. Corporations only write the legislation, and then have their lackeys in the political class pass them. If there's one thing corporations know how to do it's delegate.

The problem with this line of thinking is that any loss of revenue is immediately attributed to piracy, regardless of the facts. Case in point: the music industry. They've mostly been putting out autotuned garbage for the past 15 years, and when sales slumped because nobody wanted to pay twenty bucks for identical vocals that sound like they come out of a kazoo it was blamed on those darned music pirates. The entertainment industry needs piracy to cover for the fact that it's cheaper to produce utter crap no one wants than to produce quality work. A few arrests here and there merely reinforce the illusion that piracy is having a major impact on their sales.

I'd be more impressed with the javascript globe if it were rotating in the right direction. Unless it's representing the alternate Earth from 'The Green Berets', of course.

Do you french kiss your mother with that mouth?

How do you sleep at night?

Having spent much of last year working on an internationalization project, I can assure you that in some parts of the world where dollars are used, such as Canada, the dollar sign follows the amount. At no point did the above poster say it was USD. Even the Euro symbol switches sides from country to country. Before calling someone else a dumbass, perhaps you should examine the intelligence of your own hindquarters.

Oops! Missed it up there. Thank you, Slashdot, for restoring my faith in humanity.

TWO Iranian supercomputers and nobody's made a Photoshop joke yet?

Sorry, but I've got fifteen years doing exactly that. I am NOT saying that code should not be properly indented; I have a reputation as an indentation nazi. What I AM saying is that using an invisible character that is indistinguishable from three or four spaces to differentiate your code blocks renders the code unmaintainable. That's why God invented curly braces. I mean, honestly: can you look at a 4-space tab character and four space characters and tell me which is which without turning on "Show Whitespace Characters?" It's a nice idea, but in the real world, where I work very hard every day maintaining hundreds of thousands of lines of code that have been written by everyone from programming masters to farmed-out Indian hacks, it is utterly impractical.