People, including some from our online group, were mopping it up with the old papers that are everywhere. "Try doing that with a website," I observed as I walked by.

When your newspaper's remaining unique feature is its absorbency, you know you're really in trouble.

Indeed; ever seen "+2, troll"? It comes from someone moding an interesting comment "troll" followed by a couple of "underrated" mods. I've had comments go up to three, back down to minus one, and wind up as a 5.

Also, you have to acknowledge the fanboy and astroturf elements. On the whole, /.'s moderation system works pretty well, though, even if I do wish they'd bring back meaningful metamoderation.

And then I want to deal with a store that will give me immediately a replacement instead of sending it in and waiting 3-4 weeks 'til they get a replacement from their distributor.

Dunno about the US, but, in Australia the big stores are the most likely to have enough rolling stock on hand that they're able to pull a replacement item from stock — and then they'll chase up the warranty replacement paperwork themselves.

Being a big client with large recurring orders, the manufacturers and the big company have a business relationship to maintain so they don't stuff each other around. So they're happy, and they keep the customer happy. They see it as part of customer service.

Really? Why so short, doesn't that show lack of experience, etc? Mine is pared down (I thought) to about 12 pages....I've done too much to squeeze it down to less.

Any more than 2 pages and a lot of CV reviewers will bin it unread. They simply don't have the time to read all of that. A 2 page CV demonstrates that you can summarise.

By all means, take a 12 page CV in with you to the interview "to provide some further detail" if you like, but, it's the 2-3 page CV gets your foot in the door.

Says MartinSchou:

If anyone describes themselves as a nutritionist, just be slightly weary, alright?

I'm a little tired of this argument.

"I still use a 22" CRT I bought years ago for $800. What, I should throw away a perfectly good monitor and buy an LCD because you'll stick your nose in the air?"

Nope. You buy an LCD because it'll pay for itself in power bill savings in 6-9 months. After that, it's extra beer money!

No reasonable person would ever take "A link is not in of itself libel" to mean "I can shield myself from a lawsuit just by putting the libelous text inside tags."

I dunno. I think there are times where the text itself may not be libellous, but, the link makes it so:

"Always excellent to see someone with such an open mind" :)

The legal system needs to recognise that the Internet's just another communication medium and the real test is whether someone's been defamed as a result of someone else typing things.

I don't think anyone says that greylisting doesn't work because it does. The problem is that it's not a good idea for most email users. There are far too many (poorly configured) mail servers out there that will not attempt a second delivery -- mostly automated systems such as Delta's itinerary mailer, various online retailers, etc. Sure, you could reject their messages out of principle, but that doesn't work in the real world where people expect email delivery to be 100% error-free.

The very few mail domains I care about that don't handle greylisting well, I can white-list. Meanwhile I'd be asking them why, if they're such a reputable company, they can't hire a competent systems administrator. Even traditionally woeful mail server software like Exchange can be configured to work correctly these days. There's simply no excuse.

"... and the Linux distros and Mac actually have a chance."

Neither has any real chance as a mainstream OS. Mac's been willfully overpriced and is sold as a luxury product. GNU/Linux, on the desktop, is an also-ran — a nice try but the small demographic who cares about running commercial apps on Unix systems are migrating to Mac OS X. The lumbering bohemoth that is X11 on Linux hasn't been tamed, even after all these years, and many are essentially sick of the unfulfilled promise.

The only real hope for the open source/free crowd taking it to the mainstream is ReactOS. The more contributors that project gains, the quicker the FOSS will bury Microsoft and the expensive proprietory vendors. The Windows platform will be with us for many years to come, if only because of the specialist app dependency — but the Windows vendor doesn't need to be Microsoft with its bloated, vastly overpriced offerings.

``[...] I believe you get 3 months of AppleCare Protection or whatever when you buy Mac from them.``

A barest minimum 3 month warranty, eh? Now that's confidence in the quality of your product!

If computers were cars, and Apple Macs were BMWs, I think I might stick to the Hyundai with the 5 year warranty ;-).

``The key to it all is that kids own their machine, so all the admin stuff (networking, power management, etc.) *needs* to work within a consistent, simple GUI.``

That view, and the Sugar UI FWIW, stem from a completely flawed understanding of children. Kids are inherently quick at learning and highly adaptable. Give them a Linux or a Windows UI and they'll thrive, taking that knowledge with them and building on it to adulthood.

What Sugar did was try to lock them in a world of Fisher Price toy simplicity, as if they were intellectually retarded. None of the UI knowledge of Sugar would benefit them later. It thoroughly deserved to fail.

This is right up there with that politician who wanted to sue God.

Well, given The Pope claims to be His representative and The Vatican hoards gagillions of dollars in assets (aside: while begging for donations), God's a very ripe target with plenty of ability to pay.

In Australia, we were encouraged to buy textbooks in highschool and uni but not overly penalised if we bought second-hand. Assignment questions were handed out separately and not those from the book; the ones in the book we'd use during classes to revise with.

I'm very glad not to have had American university lecturers, from the sound of things.

And I know that fsdn.com is also a trusted site.

Funnily enough, I know I don't want fsdn.com's content because the side bar is annoying bloatware that cripples the utility of the site. I'm very glad to have NoScript on the case, blocking it for me. (Which makes me wonder how many other horror websites there are out there whose horrible bloat I've been saved from by virtue of my browsers blocking XSS.)

"Lunix is the crappiest OS since the days of Dos 6.2"

Honestly, what did you expect from a small Unix for the Commodore 64 microcomputer? Frankly, I think its features list is pretty damned impressive considering the hardware they're targeting.