NO mod points right now, but I'd give you a +5 informative. . .

How about calling the negative karmic particle a "less"-on since calling it a "mor"-on give it too much credit. . .

Something must be wrong, I can't find dilithium in this new representation...

The next step from saying that journalists are functionally equivalent to terrorists, is to say that by exposing information the government wants hidden they are helping terrorists. Then they are practically terrorists.

In the room cleaning example, you may have reduced the entropy in your room by ordering it, but you have still increased the overall entropy of the Universe. While cleaning the room, your body turned (ordered) food into (unordered) heat at a rate faster than if you had not been doing anything. The garbage can is less ordered. etc. Anything you do to make one thing more orderly will reduce the local entropy of that thing, but will increase the total entropy of the Universe. In the case of a black hole, you take something ordered (i.e. whatever fell into the black hole had *some* structure; it was matter made of atoms, or it was light made of photons vibrating at specific frequencies, etc.), and you remove that order from the Universe. eventually, that matter and energy renters the universe as random heat (i.e. Hawking radiation). So black holes essentially destroy information and order, which is the very definition of increasing entropy.

H. Beam Piper Paula E. Downing. May not be in print. May not even be in libraries.

I deal with a browser-based CMMS system at work that has this fault. One would hope for the cost of the purchase of software, hardware and the annual maintenance (not cheap) that the developers would make sure the system has something as basic as record locking, notification that the record is in use, or both. After all, it's a front end of a relatively sophisticated database. And databases have been around a while and for the most part are thoroughly understood. The first package we had: V2.0; the current package V4.0. Guess what? No record locking. And no luck with the vendor. They are very nice and seem to be attentive to bug reports, but still no record locking. The CMMS system is better than most for our application and is easy to learn and use. It's this one thing that's the pisser. We've learned to save work very, very frequently. And you're right, there's nothing quite as annoying as losing 15 minutes or more of work. Just gone. Just a information box saying, in effect, "So Sorry, record in use, entries not saved". Really wish you were on that dev team.

Where's the "funny" for this one, mods?

"What are we going to do tonight, Brain?"

"And cheese is just a form of milk that stores better, just like flour is wheat that stores better." And whiskeys are various grains that store better. Seventeen years, twenty years, give or take some . . .

I've seen just this very thing happen where I work. We're still recovering from the results. Not that any of those programs are necessarily bad, per sey, it's just WHO does the implementing . . . you know, the sycophant dancing-and-prancing, ass-kissing, no-real-life-work-experience so-and-soes. I once heard a executive of a high-powered engineering firm doing some contract work for us state he's "never seen an 6-sigma blackbelt that wouldn't get his ass kicked in the parking lot." I agree. Recently due to the, um, economic downturn, a new senior management team came to town. Within a few months the new management plan was obvious: ax the blackbelts: check; ax the total quality leadership program and any other "total" programs found lurking about: check; reduce the LEAN department from many to one: check; try to mitigate the damage done . . . well, that's harder to do both from the perspective of the company's employees and our customers, some of them former customers.

Mark Twain's autobiographical stories about life on the Mississippi River as a steamboat pilot are absolutely funny and at the same time insightful and moving. The collection is a great read and well worth the time the time spent.

Try the National Naval Aviation Museum, Pensacola NAS, Pensacola, Florida. Allow two days. (www.navalaviationmuseum.org)

Why isn't this comment modded up? Maybe it's too far down the thread. . . I'd give it a "insightful" mod point or two.

Sad part is: there's no grey bars or idiotic "friend/foe" buttons when viewing with IE 7 (not my browser of choice); say, Slashdot's rulers are not trying to tell us something, are they? Or, perhaps SUBSCRIBING to Slashdot will make this crap go away? Hm?