I lol'd. I saw an ad (maybe Best Buy?) not long ago, and sure enough, that old chestnut was in there and I smiled. Course, for me the point was moot because I could never connect at better than 48k anyway :(

Of course not. There is always room for improvement. UI improvement is sort of subjective though, and users that are used to doing $task in $os are naturally going to be critical when attempting to do $task in $os++.

Your parent post made the point of why the heck should we do all this upgrading of machine, os, and software -- to do the same thing we already do, but no faster. Its a valid point, and in the workplace is mostly a case of 'everyone else is doing it'. Sad but true, OTOH it keeps the tech sector employed and (hopefully) improving their products.

Change for change's sake in the business world is called 'innovation'. Its only natural that companies will occasionally drop the ball in the forward march we call progress. I mean hey, they've got like a million monkeys banging out code. They've got to get something right eventually, eh? :)

Sort of reminds me of the Plus! pack for Win95 (or was it 98? idk). Biggest rip-off evar. I mean, sure, pinball was cool for a little while, but honestly...

What a bunch of marklars.

Who's to say that hasn't happened?

Well unfortuately, it is just as legitimate a number as any of the rest used in the Fermi paradox.

I realize the numbers in the original paradox were meant to be conservative estimates, but hasn't science made any discoveries since then that might alter those numbers?

I mean, we here on Earth have been broadcasting radio signals for about 100 years. That time coordinate range is a needle in a haystack compared to the estimated life of the known universe. It could be up to 100 years or more before we would receive an intentional response. That we haven't heard from ETs yet only means that either our nearest listening neighbors are in excess of 50 light years away, they aren't listening, they choose not to respond, or we don't have any neighbors that close. None of that really gives us any useful information about intelligent life in our galaxy. The Fermi paradox needs to be thrown out the window because it isn't a particularly useful as a thought experiment, or for anything else for that matter.

I rather think the response to hearing those A-bombs go off would be more in the vein of "Awww, cute!", and that they are waiting for us to grow out of adolescence before they bother to try to have a serious discussion with us :-)

Most Christians? I take issue with that, so here is the obligatory [Citation Needed].

As long as we're talking bullshit, I'd say that most Christians do not take the creation story literally. Even if it were the case, there is nothing in Genesis that I am aware of that equates to "There is no such thing as aliens.". If so, please point me in the right direction, out of curiosity's sake.

I would have to agree though that the Catholic church is not the be-all-end-all representation of the Christian faith, and anything coming from them (or any other organized religion) should be taken with the appropriate amount of NaCl.

As an aside, today is the second Monday in a month's time that I've gotten a parking ticket for parking in a church parking lot over lunch -- when the lot is otherwise empty and unused by the church. What a bunch of assholes. Do unto others my ass...

Yeah it was off kernel.org. I think that might have been around Redhat 5.1 or so. I believe I needed the newer kernel for graphics card support. That worked, but it broke other things :-)

As for being marked alpha or beta, I totally agree.

True, it would be easier to follow. Then again, the Linux kernel's versioning convention is not exactly intuitive either:

Odd numbered minor versions are development trees (e.g. 2.1.x)
Even numbered minor versions are 'release' trees
(e.g. 2.2.x)

That surprised me the first time I 'upgraded' my 2.0.x kernel to 2.1.x and shit fell apart :-)
I don't know if they still do it that way though.

The first few minor versions of every KDE point release (2.0, 3.1, etc) tend to be rather crufty.

The reason they released it as 4.0 is because it is a new tree built on new Qt (i think) and as such merits a major version change. KDE.org did make it quite clear to stay away from 4.0 unless you felt like bug testing. It IS the distro's fault for adding KDE 4.0 when the development staff itself said it wasn't ready for everyday users. You'd think the distros would be smart enough to get that. At least Kubuntu 8.04 gave me the choice to use 3.5 instead.

If you grab the packages from KDE.org, you can mix and match to your heart's content. Its more work to compile and install it on your own, but you can get a lean installation that way. Go yell at your distro for a better installer :-)

But KDE4 was an alpha release. 4.1 was a beta release. Surrounding projects have done no better -- Amarok currently will not transcode automatically from flac to aac for ipods; it insists on mp3. This is a bug; it used to work. The stable Amarok won't fix the bug, because it's being depricated in favor of the kde4 version of Amarok, which doesn't yet support transcoding. WTF?

If memory serves, KDE 2.0 and 3.0 had the same issues. Whether using your favorite distros' packages or compiling from scratch, shit just didn't work that well. I'm not sure if in the past it was due to jumping Qt versions or what, but is was messy until 2.3 (and 3.3) or so. Its just how the KDE development and release cycle goes, I guess.

That said, KDE 3.5 works great for me, so I'll happily stick with that until KDE 4.4 or whenever they get the 4.x line straightened out. I just hope Kunbuntu continues to support 3.5 until its actually safe to make the jump to 4.x

WOW has a demo and it has the highest subscription rate out of any MMO in the country.

Exactly what I was going to say. The funny thing is, the WoW 10-level demo actually kinda sucks insofar that you don't get to run an instance or pvp. But, I guess that stuff is a little complicated for a newbie taking a test drive, so simple is good.
The cool thing about WoW is that the full game basically gets more kickass the further into it you get. Some titles like AoC apparently couldn't deliver on that point. My new boss wants me to try Lord of the Rings Online, which I am sort-of interested in trying, but AFAICT there is no demo, and I just can't justify buying another MMO 'sight-unseen'. I don't want to play with him if the game sucks, even if he is my boss XD

Yeah, thats pretty much along the lines of what I was thinking. Even after reading in this thread that there is a 'g' in there, I couldn't see it at all.
Firefox's addressbar background color is white :-/

The favicon wouldn't be all that bad if they would just put a dark colored border around the edges.