It might be open source, or it might not be, but eventually, someone will come along with a "better Facebook than Facebook", and it will slowly die.

That's just creative destruction at work. It ALWAYS happens.

Facebook was a better MySpace than MySpace.
MySpace was a better Friendster than Friendster.
Friendster was a better Classmates.com than Classmates.com. ...and so on...

Google was a better Altavista than Altavista.
AOL Instant Messenger was a better ICQ than ICQ.
USENET was a better BBS than old-school dialup bulletin board.
Books were better scrolls than scrolls.

Something newer and better is going to come along. People talk about Facebook and the network effect "locking in" people, but creative destruction is even more powerful than the network effect.

Seriously, guys. You already f'ed up DNS beyond recognition, now you want to break http, too? Someone at Juniper needs to kick the marketers out of the engineering department.

Googling "Cherrypal fraud" may prove instructive, if you happen to find the time. Wasn't there a front-page story on these guys taking money for computers and never delivering them? Why more attention to these scam artists?

I stand corrected, excellent explanation. The joke is still good, though, right?

--Fortunato_NC

What you were supposed to say was:

I feel a great disturbance in the force, as if the Overton Window cried out after being shoved to the right very, very hard.

Congratulations on your inquisitive nature, but your personal habit of recreational reading is quite frankly irrelevant in this discussion. The vast majority of schoolchildren accept what is presented to them in the classroom as the gospel truth (pun intended). Should the conservative wing of the Texas school board get its way, many innocent students will be put hopelessly behind their competition in other countries - the ones that aren't slowly turning into theocracies.

My condolences.

Actually, that isn't necessarily true. Look up "regression to the mean" if you don't believe me.

Hey Multics, I'm really happy for ya, and imma let you finish, but UNIX is the best multiuser operating system of ALL TIME. OF. ALL. TIME.

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To bring this more on-topic: if I were a JotP, I would refuse to perform marriages for gay couples. I don't believe the State need recognize any rights for a union that cannot create a biological family, even in theory. (I know that not all heterosexual couples can or even want to have children, but the law is not about individual cases.)

So I would assume that you are also against marriages involving post-menopausal women? How about men who have had vasectomies?

I can see the bumperstickers now:

MARRIAGE = 1 (UNSNIPPED) MAN + 1 (FERTILE) WOMAN

Freedom of speech means that you have the right to express your beliefs secure in the knowledge that the government will not persecute you for your opinions.

It does not mean that you will be protected from being ostracized by the rest of society, however. Decisions have consequences, and if you decide that your beliefs require you to endorse state-sanctioned bigotry, then when that endorsement is made public, AS IT SHOULD BE, then you are going to have to face the consequences of your decision. If that means you lose business, or that your workplace becomes less welcoming, or that your picture shows up on a website, then maybe you should consider keeping your bigoted opinions to yourself.

No matter what your pastor says, gay rights ARE civil rights. Period.

People need to learn that being a SHITCOCK Internet Fuckwad is unacceptable. People also need to grow thicker skin, but when it truly hurts someone it's time to stop.

Perhaps you could start us on the return trip to civility by eliminating homophobic nonsense like "SHITCOCK" from your own vocabulary.

You negotiate up front. If you think something is outside the scope of your job and you deserve to be paid more for it, then you ask for additional compensation when the duties are assigned. Just because management feels that they need to dedicate a FTE to this now and have taken it off your plate doesn't mean that you can say, "Oh, since you're paying him for that, here's the bill for when I was doing it."

Asking for money now will get you laughed at, fired, or both.

you should change schools ASAP. Computer Science is a great subject, but you can't consider yourself well-rounded if you don't have at least a cursory understanding of how the world of money operates. No matter what you decide this semester, you should plan to take at least two Econ classes (micro and macro) while you're in school.