> I would love to have lower taxes. Who wouldn't?

Unless you make more than $300,000USD/year, Obama has lowered your taxes.

I'd much rather have slightly higher taxes and have a healthcare system modeled on France or the UK, better public transportation infrastructure, free or heavily subsidized college education, a revitalized space program, and a raft of other things that would make the country run better for everyone.

Of course, we could fund all of this and still keep GWBush's billionaire tax cuts by cancelling just one war, but that's a third rail that no politician can survive contact with.

Reminder: 100.0% of the people who post on Slashdot that picking up women is easy, are virgins.

Please make a note of it.

> What I don't understand is why they wouldn't want as much independent coverage of the incident / whatever as possible.

Because they want to have the option to lie about it, obviously.

You assume it hasn't become self-aware and buggered off, Wall-E style.

-nod- I realize this is an expression of the spam problem, and therefore the "Your plan won't work for the following reasons" form letter applies. However, without the financial incentive to get their shit through, plus the fact that every target potentially has a different set of filters (as opposed to say, Gmail, where if you can get something through it goes through for everyone) we might not be in worst-case territory here.

At any rate, the least you could say is that it *would* be an arms race, whereas now the non-trolls are completely unarmed.

Suggestion to Slashdot devs... give us regex-based comment filtering. I'm fairly sure any post matching /nigger/ or /GNAA/ or /\ ps0t\ / will never have any further contents I care to miss.

Urban Dictionary knows.

Well, XP was displacing Win2k, still in my opinion the best offering MS has made to date.

Win7 was displacing Vista.

> Seriously, anybody over thirty could do this in their sleep, if they owned a computer in the late 80s or 90s.

-nod- A quick command to make you seem a bit like a secret agent to anybody still on dialup:

AT M1 L3 S11=30 DT ###-####

For me the big advantage of Ubuntu over plain Debian (let's face it, Ubuntu is just another branch of Debian) is that it provides exactly the release schedule style that matches my expectations. With Debian, you can basically choose from among the following:

1) Exquisitely release-engineered branch; all packages 100.00% guaranteed to work together, upgrade flawlessly and not have weird dependency cycles that require "apt surgery" to get working. Package versions often months or years old. (stable)
2) Zero day, bleeding edge versions of all packages. Very likely to have large swaths of the dependency graph borked up at any given time. You'll learn the difference between "upgrade" and "dist-upgrade" the first time that a package obsoletes the current version of glib or libstdc++ or something before the new version is uploaded. (sid)
3) Somewhere in between (1) and (2). A bit old, mostly but not completely stable dependency graph (testing).

With Ubuntu, you get a fourth option: Packages on a predictable age range from 0-6 months depending on how close you are to April or October, with almost as well tested a dependency graph as Debian stable. Almost.

For me, that's the option that matches best with my needs. Ubuntu is, for me, the best way to use Debian. =)

And what would libertarians do to prevent that, hmmmmmmmm?

Then you are a liberal.

But if we don't get going, will we ever create the tech? Nothing spurs innovation like a target and a very public deadline.

I'll leave others to pick apart the rest of your post and just say this: please try applying the same level of skepticism to your Bible that you do to the theory of evolution. The latter has a mind-bogglingly thorough body of evidence in support of it, the former has no evidence of any kind, at all, ever in support of it and quite a lot of contradictory evidence to support dismissing it. If you were uniformly skeptical I think you'd turn out alright.