No...that's still evolution. "Guided" evolution, you could possibly say, but still evolution nonetheless. ID pretty much says god created everything and that nothing evolved. A bear is a bear because god created it that way and nothing else. How is that what he's described?

My god that drove me crazy. How do you even mess that up?

Newzbin2 did it for a while as they transitioned over to their own domains. Seemed to work out quite well, actually.

Well there's certainly something dumb in that post but it isn't the phone.

Usenet doesn't always have everything. Torrents are more diverse than Usenet and you occasionally have to resort to them to get what you want. So while you're entirely right that Usenet is better in almost all aspects, you will have to use torrents occasionally.

Actually (at least with Dreamweaver CS5) I've noticed the code is nice and clean. After using FrontPage for a long time (basically as a glorified text formatter and table maker), I tried Dreamweaver and was fairly impressed. There isn't a lot of junk everywhere and you can setup lots of nifty formatting options to keep the code easier to read. You can even have it reformat pages you'd previously written in FrontPage to be formatted nicely again (thank god).

The thing is, starting with one of these is a nice way to learn. You fuck around with some stuff and look at the code while you're doing it (I love the design/code view and I wish we'd had this back in FrontPage 98 days). It's a nice way to learn...seeing the code generated while you do it. I don't let it generate CSS for me though...I do that shit manually. That's what Google is for. I'd say a nice healthy way to do web pages at this juncture is to learn the code and use an editor for the trivial things. You don't really need to type in the damn bold and italics codes by hand do you? I see a lot of elitists when it comes to this kind of stuff but I've been doing web pages since I was 12 years old (I'm 26 now) and I've found a nice balance of hand coding and editors makes life easier if you know what you're doing...especially when you are not fighting with it like FrontPage.

Jesus christ I hate FrontPage. I learned its kinks over the years and how to not fight but it was a long learning process. Dreamweaver is nowhere NEAR as bad. In fact, it is quite pleasant.

Well if you search for and then start a program, you can pin it right there on the taskbar. It makes an icon there, obviously, because you are running it so all you do is right click an already running application to pin it.

When you work for an employer, you are signing up to be working for that employer. When you sell things on eBay, there are various reasons you might be doing so and various scenarios in which it is none of the government's business. Selling something on eBay is not the same as getting a job at McDonalds or working at the bank. The mere fact that you've sold something on eBay should not put you on some government list. That's absurd. You aren't WORKING for eBay (they DO report that)...you are just using it. Should they start searching and calling everyone that puts a classified ad in the newspaper? Everyone that puts an ad on Craigslist? Where exactly does this end?

Why exactly do you think they would do this rather than simply sharing the info like he said? They're the government and they can pretty much do whatever they want with the info once they get it because no one is going to limit them. That's the kind of the point of stopping them from going on a fishing expedition in the first place. Harassment is all that will come from this. Plus it is just YOUR preference for ONLY welfare cheats and other people are more concerned about taxes or other government programs for all you know. You can't just tell the government "sure you can completely undermine someone's privacy BUT ONLY FOR THIS ONE THING, OKAY?" It seems pretty naive to me for you to even suggest this. When does that ever happen? Seriously...once they have the info, it is going everywhere and quite frankly they have no right to it in the first place without a warrant. That is the point of having a warrant system...so they can't just go out harassing people for no reason.

My keyboard has a sliding switch to disable it (G15). It's quite a good idea and doesn't require me to disable the key in other ways. I mean shit happens sometimes...you get a little excited playing a game and you're getting dumped back into your desktop without disabling that thing.

Not that I agree with Blizzard's decision here (this always on shit makes me mad too) but the "turning the servers off" argument is kind of a bad example for Blizzard. You can play literally every game they've ever released online still (D1 is still up and running if you wanted to do that as well as D2 obviously). They've been better than pretty much any other company in existence (except perhaps Valve) at that.

Yes, because it is reasonable for everyone to be as paranoid as you and keep 18 backups of their data. I mean silly me, I only have a hard drive with my shit in addition to the original place the data is. I must be stupid. Or you know...I'm just being realistic. What you only have 5 different backups? What kind of dumb ass only keeps 5 backups of data? I chiseled mine into the concrete foundations of my house and can read back the data at any time by typing in all the machine code. What are you using? Some shitty tape backups? What a bunch of stupid toys.

It's kind of unfair in the first place to compare a keyboard short-cut to something that actually DOES have a keyboard short-cut you just didn't know in KDE. At some point you had to learn it in GNOME, right? Did you even look for it in KDE? :p

So out of the 4 billion years the planet has been around, you have an anecdote about the last 10 and that is somehow a valid point to bring? I'm not even trying to say one way or the other but when people bring things up like this, it is so pointless. You have no idea what that means...that might be completely irrelevant to anything. Your examples about the mudslides and flooding could be more relevant but again...you're basing this on...what exactly?

And yet it's still the best option. No seriously though...I'm not saying this as "I AM AN AMURICAN" but moreso as...look at the shit the rest of your countries do with it. We have certainly fallen a long way, but the freedom of speech is still the most sacred right here and that affects things in a way that is very beneficial to the internet...even if we do fuck up sometimes. The thing is...our fuck ups seem small in comparison to the things that the nations of the UN would want to do. As the GP said...they tend to err toward censorship and the one thing I can still be proud of my country for is that they have an almost mindlessly addicted devotion to free speech.