It was also excellent. Fast, intuitive interface, outstanding builtin help.

That's why a $140 Million F-22 makes more sense than three $40 Million Eurofighters.

Plus the F22 is much easier to simulate. Just put the trainee in an hypobaric chamber until they pass out.

The murder rate difference is MASSIVE, and I mean massive. Exponential.

Exponential does not simply mean "big".

Stop being obsessed with money!

Yeah, fuckers. It's not like you need money to buy food or shelter. Stop being so fucking shallow and go live under a bridge and eat dirt you money obsessessed fuckers. Jesus Christ it's not like you need to stay alive. You can't take your life with you.

black people commit crime at a higher rate than white people.

The thing about law that something is a crime simply because it is defined to be so. As a law maker, you can define crimes how you like, e.g. crimes (such as drug possession) which disproportionately target poor people. If black people are disporportionately poor then of course they will commit more crime because it is defined to be so.

All that proves is that the law is broken.

I'm not entirely sure what point you're trying to make.

There's a rather interesting analog in academic circles. Objectively, sexism exists as measured by relative publication impact required to get a job factoring in differet disciplines. It's a measurable number and quite dramatic.

Rather curiously, however it turns out that female academics rate female candidated more harshly than male ones [trying to find citation, read it months ago].

Basically the bias in the system is exhibited even more strongly by those biased against. It doesn't mean the system isn't biased, it means that yet again humans have strange brains.

You could argue C gives you all the rope you need as well.

C gives you all the rope you could ever want, wraps it wround your neck and encourages you to run very fast across a long, wobbly plank.

Oh, and don't forget to free() the rope when you're done with it.

Riiight...

Sure it does. It has wings, wheels, all the usual control surfaces. A wiggly thing just near where the pilot sits. Lots of knobs and dials, and a really low radar signature.

That's almost all the features.

Except it doesn't actually fly.

That's all but 1!

The main problem that was not mentioned here yet, was the Western protectionism.

What? That has to be one of the bizarrest claims I've heard about minidisc.

Minidisc had some decent advantages: smaller than tapes, random access and didn't chew up the tapes. But it was quite expensive. Back when I was at school the quality of ones portable music (i.e. tape) player was a big thing. Almost noone had MD since they were more expensive and the battery life was worse.

The thing is that most people carried around a D120 with the tracks of the day on. Random access wasn't particularly necessary, since one generally didn't expect it and didn't put stuff on the tape you didn't like. Also decent tape players could skip over a single track pretty quickly and entirely automatically, negating some of the advantage. And noone used original tapes in the portable players, at least not after the first original expensive tape had been eaten.

You also neeed special kit (an MD recorder), whereas the cheapest tape recorders were dirt cheap, which made sharing tapes etc much harder.

Basically in that market, they didn't quite have critical mass. At tha time, the teenage market was important since teenagers obsess over music and most adults didn't yet see the point of expensive portable tape players, especially as the effort to get the most out of them was high compared to MP3 players. Most adults simply don't have the time.

Most people thought minidiscs were cool. A few had them. A few people had parents with an MD player in the hifi unit. We would coo over them and obsess a bit and marvel over the smallness of an MD player, then generally go back to our tapes.

You are right in that MD wasn't revolutionary enough. The advantages weren't ever quite high enough. Partly that is Sony's fault. Because they obsess over "licensing" and "content" and other such bullshit they insisted on playing it too close. If they'd given manufacturers free reign it might well have taken off to a much greater extent.

Oh yeah, and we'd have had data MDs too that were common and didn't totally suck.

No.

No, of course not. This is not a bug in slashdot or a missing feature, it is a feature.

Much as people like to whine, the comment threads on slashdot are the reason to visit and despite the sometimes dubious quality are better than all but the most special interest forums and of course on a much broader range of topics.

An edit button is not a good match for robust discussions, since people can (and do) go back and change the pos when they get a reply that they don't like, making the replies look odd, and then they get strange replies based on the changed version of the GP's post.

Edit buttons work well for some kinds of forum, especially, the smaller less anonymous ones. On slashdot where people tend to read the posts and pay little attention to the name of the posters I think an edit button would be a bad idea.

There have been many "advanced feature" suggestions made to the slashdot staff over the years which they have not implemented and I'm sure that slashcode isn't the barrier. The reason is that the feature set of slashdot really seems to promote good, robust discussion.

And before anyone claims that the discussion on slashdot is not good: I won't take you seriously unless you can point me to somewhere which is consisently better.

It's called "work for hire," and it's entirely common, and understandable.

Yeah, like I said.

The teachers are paid to teach, not produce "content" or whatever. The school owning the lesson plan means that the teacher can't take it with them when they leave. That would certainly restrict the mobility of teachers if all their accumulated materials in that regard are tied to the school. IOt does not benefit the school, teachers or pupils.

Remember: teachers are hired as teachers: not creative workers in the sense of producing work for hire.

As it happens, where I come from and the organisation that I used to teach for did exactly the opposite. The lecturers own their own lecture notes. They could take them away after leaving, or turn them into a book. Quite often, the good long running lecture courses (i.e. the ones that did prove popular and effective over the years) were turned into books. Invariably the lecturers published the book through the university even though there was no need to do so, because they made it easy and worthwhile. Funny thing that if the university did assert copyright, then they would have got squat.

And it's not that bizarre system popular in the US where the hapless students are forced to fork out hundreds for a bad book which changes frequently, just to pass the course.

Profane, but seriously, fuck off.

On what grounds do they thing they possibly own student work?

I can vaguely see an exceptionally unethical argument for teachers work, but student work? It's not like they have a choice as to whether they attend and it sure as hell is not work for hire.

What is wrong with these people?

Are you a government stooge?

Yes, and my posting history will certainly confirm this.

Gee let me think for a nanosecond. How about NiMH with integrated charge management.

The automotive environment is absoloutely brutal. It is really terrible and incredibly damaging. Imagine a car out in the Texan summer or northern winter. NiMH batters simply are not as robust as lead acid and they have a higher self discharge. Looking after NiHM batteries is much harder than lead acid ones.

Seriously, lead acid batteries are amazingly well suited to car battery duty and it will be hard to replace them.

Lead free was not about the environment. I head never seen a paper that shows eutectic tin lead solder leaches lead.

Yes it was and you're not looking hard enough.

It was about the creation of beurocracy for its own sake. It was a solution for problem that didn't exist. Much like a lot of the new regulations released in europe.

You are suffering from paranoid delusions.

So now what? Why did the Automotive Industry get a 10-year "deferral" on RoHS? I can TELL you why: Graft.

That's some excellent paranoia you've got going there.

The medical, aerospace and military also got a 10 year deferral. Because they equipment has a much longer life and is life critical. Tin whiskers are still a problem, but that simply doesn't matter nearly as much for consumer electronics. You really don't want a tin whisker in your ABS controller. And lead acid batteries have the properties of being very robust to environmental conditions, electrically robust, not containing cadmium (worse than lead), low internal resistance and easy to maintain and recycle. There are no feasible alternatives.

So basically when there are no feasible alternatives, the industry gets a deferral.

So, what do YOU think the automotive industry could be using instead of lead?

Oh yeah graft because gubbmint must be bad.

Brogramming is prototyping.

Yes, because prorotyping is best done in a booze and testosterone fueled haze.