Slashdot is a news aggregator? Funny, I don't think I've ever actually seen news linked from it. Sure, there are links, but I don't ever really click on them. That might explain something.

(I'm obviously not new here, that is to say ; -- Also, I generally avoid the comments section and ONLY read TFA.)

Funny thing, I have one of those bookmarklet things or whatever they are called nowadays. I just type 'find [search terms]' in the URL bar, even though there is a perfectly serviceable google search entry just on the right hand side of it. It is a habit I started before FireFox had that as a default, as far as I am aware, and just one that i have kept to this day.

Could be because I am lazy, and do not want to have to click on that search box, or do not care to learn what keyboard shortcut will take me to it directly -- ^L focuses the URL bar, and selects all of the text in it. Ready to type and go.

Lots of places (like mine) offer a financial incentive of a few dollars to respond to the pedestal giving that warning "BEEP" sound. However, there are rules to follow as well. Do not chase a customer. Do not accuse a customer. Do not follow a customer out of the building. And under no circumstances, ever imply that the beeping is a result of theft. Even if the person openly stealing stuff, offer to deactivate the tag that set off the alarm and let them go.

This is like a lock on your front door - it serves only to keep honest people honest.

The thing I think is actually funny is that the employee door is also a fire exit; and that alarm goes off all the time. So if there is ever a fire, nobody will look up or care.

I must be the only one here imagining what it might look like to brush my teeth using the same brush I would use for a toilet -- whether or not it was brand new, off the shelf... or previously used for that "other" purpose.

On a slightly related note, I got to wondering "we have electric toothbrushes, why not electric toilet brushes?" Well, ladies and gents, a quick google search reveals that we do indeed have electric toilet brushes. And get this, they look a lot like giant electric toothbrushes.

A lot of this leaves me scratching my head, because stoplights are not simple timers any more. At least, they haven't been anywhere i see them for the last 10 years. You ever notice those lines in the street by an intersection? the ones that cross over, and have the circles, and all that good stuff?

Those are sensors that measure how traffic is flowing through that intersection, and adjust the timings accordingly. If a particular stoplight (like the second closest one to me) starts with a green left turn arrow, and nobody is going through it, the green quickly goes to yellow, and then red, so the through traffic gets a green light within seconds. If there are lines of people waiting to make their turn, the green arrow just goes on and on.

The funny thing is, as a pedestrian, this is more visible to me. i can hit the "walk" button at an intersection and wait for a very long time. If intersecting traffic ever approaches, i can be there until the other traffic dies down, which can take a while. otherwise, the through traffic gets a red light, pretty soon after a few intersecting vehicles come to a stop.

Something else that's funny is that in the small hours of the morning, walking to work, I can trip the green light by jaywalking. There is no intersecting traffic.

Respectfully disagree. Now is indeed an awesome time to buy stuff, *if* you have money. Lots and lots of people are increasingly finding themselves without any, and nothing to do.

So the rest of us should go out and spend wastefully to prop up an overinflated economy? Or for what other reason? If my job is on the chopping block, you can be damn sure that I am going to curttail my spending. Well, I do that anyway as a matter of principle. I am not an economist, but my perception of the situation is that:

Inflation is bad, it makes your money worthless. Deflation is bad, because nobody has any money. There needs to be a certain balance in there, perhaps leaning slightly toward inflation. The problem, as I see it, is that in order to maintain this balance, people have to spend as much money as they have, which in turn widens the poverty gap.

In other words, you could never get insurance from geico (which they claim saves you money) because if wealth were evenly distributed, insurance would be expensive everywhere. (Ok, bad car analogy). My point is that these ginormous fortune 500 companies exist because *they* do the saving, and *we* do the spending.

I don't mean to defend AIG by any stretch. What they did was outright criminal. On an international scale. F*!# the Supreme Court, send them to the Hague. See how much other countries like being screwed over like that.

Not really sure how to sum up what I am thinking, other than "if nobody has any money, or everybody has lots of money, either situation is bad." And this, I believe, is the cause of the poverty gap. Deflation is merely adjustments for inflation, where the cash flow works the other way. The problem is, we do not get the money back as it deflates. However, when the deflation period ends, what we DO have is worth more.

What would I do in your situation? What the boss told me to do. I would certainly document it (just in case the axe falls on my neck for it), but it has been my experience in my 10 working years that if the boss says to do something, and you refuse, that the boss will simply pay somebody else to do the thing that you did not want to do.

In today's economy, I would be even more inclined to consider doing what I had to do to remain employed, whether I liked it or not. To a business, there are three decisions to be made. 1) The company has decided it wants something done (or done in a certain way). 2) The company has therefore committed to paying somebody to get this job done. 3) This last decision has not necessarily been made yet. This decision is about WHO will get paid to do whatever it was that came up as a result of 1). You get paid for it, or somebody else does. Subversion and refusals will not prevent this thing from going through.

To be honest, I never dreamed of growing up to be a yes-man, rubberstamping everything my employer puts in front of me, but my (rather limited, but growing experience) has taught me that I could not seem to hold a job for more than 18 months before I changed my mindset and became just that. I've been with my current company for over six years now, and I'm not planning on leaving any time soon.

Personally, I would have loved to have an app like this simply to be able to copy and paste emails that i get, and send them via SMS to myself, to forward to other people who (believe it or not, do exist and do not have an email account).

The other killer use for this app I can think right off the top of my head, is being able to sit down at a computer, and actually *type* the message I want to send or forward to somebody with an actual keyboard, which you may or may not be aware, would get the job done with a much higher level of comfort, and unparalleled speed.

It's not about unlimited texting, it's a matter of comfort and efficiency. just because a service is offered for free right now on an unlimited basis does not mean that it will always be free forever and ever, no matter how much it is used (or in this case, abused -- Google did not implement this feature to foot the bill for people trying to weasel their way out of saving a few bucks per month). I suspect we will see this service come back as a paid add-on, which will prevent this "abuse" that took advantage of Google's good will in this relatively new frontier of communication.

And when they do, I will *definitely* sign up, unless the cost is not justifiable (I pay for limited texts per month, 400, and don't quite break the 300 mark, so an unlimited texting plan does not make any kind of sense at this point). I have actually calculated the number of texts I would have to send per month to make it worth switching to an unlimited plan. It is comfortably over the 400 limit.

While I agree with you completely, I would argue that this is actually a legal feature, not a bug.

Of course, you can very well end up with the conditions the original law wanted to impose. -OR- you might not. If there are some useful things in very bad laws (as is often the case), we can, as a society, try implementing these features piecemeal and see how they work out before making them all mandatory.

Although again, I do agree wholly, and I do not think this idea has any redeeming qualities whatever. Especially since it is essentially a "foot in the door," and from there is likely to only get worse.

As one of your "luddites," I can only greet this idea with utmost enthusiasm. I have owned a TV for less than 3 weeks. It's so old, it's a CRT. It's so old, the inputs are coax or component. It's so old, I'd really like to have a newfangled TV for free. Where do I sign up?

WRT walking, one thing I never understand is why so few people do it. I live just shy of two miles from where I work -- it's a 28 minute walk at a good pace, 36 minutes if not.

I have no car to break down on me, no tyres to go flat, a very reasonable commute time (lots of people spend more time driving than I do walking to get to work), no car payments, no auto insurance, no gasoline expenses.

Sure, I have a driver's license, but why on earth would I want to incur all the extra costs of actually using it? If I really have that far to go, I can catch a bus, call a cab, call a friend, or have whatever it is that I'm buying delivered to my doorstep.

This is why I assume that passwords are a flawed method of authentication (seriously, 11 characters is a lot to have to type!) all for five minutes of security. I just use the same password everywhere: 12345.

And for a second there, I was expecting your comment to be something about bananaphones.

I keep all the books I really want to keep separate from the ones I would give away for free, or toss in the recycle bin (Portland Recycles!(tm)) if I cannot find a new owner.

For the record, there really is no further organisation for my own library.

Yes, you should, but don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen. The *AA have yet to find a drm solution that actually does what they want it to do, but you want them to try to add in functionality to relicense the file for another device to support your sale of the product? You do understand, I'm sure that they would prefer that if somebody were to buy that MP3 from you, they would want that person to buy it from THEM instead. Suppose you want to give that MP3 to somebody else? Well, they make no money for either hypothetical situation.

This is part of the reason I ONLY buy physical media -- I can sell it, loan it, or transcode it to whatever format I wish for whatever portable device I happen to be using at the time. And they can't do jack shit to stop me. Well, there is the DMCA, but as long as I'm not sharing the bits with anybody, how are they going to know that I've broken the DRM involved?

This creates for me a conundrum which I have not yet been able to solve, so I usually buy half of my physical media new, and the other half used. Roughly a function of how much I like the particular artist/group.

The disadvantage that I can see to buying new music is that it gives these clowns more money to ramrod DRM down our throats. The advantage is that they DO continue to produce stuff, though. Been to a good used music store lately? I find way more stuff in those than I do virtually anywhere else -- I'd never shop at a store that specialises only in selling new music, of course -- Suncoast sells pretty much movies and music only. The price of shopping at Suncoast is *extremely* high. The selection (from the stores I've been in) is very limited. I cringe to think how bad an actual *music store* might be.

This is why I prefer to buy music and movies used, though. It does not give the studio anything for their asshattery, and is usually so cheap that even if 1/3 or so discs that I buy is unusable, I'm at least breaking even, financially. I can easily purchase another used copy to replace it.