"A female terrorist with a small child as hostage tried to ram capitol gates today. We have yet to gain inormation if^H^H how heavily armed the jihadist was."

Yeah, better Fox didn't release this as first page scoop. ;)

I guess the joke is there seems to be zero comments on the subject.

There can be - Ususally it's called black humor. but when the trains and passengers are "enemies" it's a hilarious triumph. To some.

OT, yes.

Yes, they too have an agenda, but without their viewpoint all we'd have is hard left liberal news.

Now that's just funny. ...and kinda sad to be honest. I've yet to see any left-wing politician in power in USA - if there are any they would have to be in 3rd parties. And your people have been largely brainwashed into belief that 3rd parties, for all purposes don't exist.

IBM fucked up big time by being so stupidly greedy with OS/2 to kill it at birth by overcharging for it, rather than going in dirt cheap.

Yeah, I dunno if it that much about greed rather than not understanding markets (like I at age 17 when I bough my own computer + OS/2 WARP 4 thinking it's technologically superior so they *will* win - and it wasn't *that* expensive if I bought it with my summer job money) - after all in comparison to other desktop OS's the price/quality ratio was great. But that's not winning on the markets - I don't know if they were greedy, but I think the prices were justified (there are things where XP never got to same level that WARP 4 was in 97), but if they had better grasp about marketing and competing against another giant they would have used cheap price as weapon instead.
So basically I agree with you that IBM fscked the comptetition with pricing - among other marketing related shortcomings.

You know this, I know this, but despite all the evidence there aren't many people who can accept this on Slashdot. It would damage their eternal belief that Microsoft is on the brink of destruction.

You know, I would love to see Microsoft burn crashing down but I don't think it's going away for some time yet (although nobody can predict the future, just make informed guesses/estimations). But it's really more on the emotional level - it's not as much from their crappy appliations (at command, taken from *NIX but with lesser functionality, executing entered commands under SYSTEM account, not under the users own account and priviledges, on XP, wtf!?) as it is because of their shady and/or downright illegal and immoral "business tactics".
MS however has provided a lot of motivation for many F/OSS developers to push Linux and/or software for it further - in fact back when MS still tried to fight unix/linux systems a fault in samba was found in MS Windows vs. Linux as file-server competition. It made samba slower than it should be and thanks to that we got it fixed - and unlike some products, we never try making server run faster by allowing parts of it run in kernel space ;)

To be honest I have enough trouble leaving Microsoft products at times, although often it's because they are the best at what they do.

I have understood they were pretty good in designing very realistic flight simulators - whatever happened to that?

There's nothing that beats MS Office, Visual Studio, heck even the Explorer file manager has no equivalent in terms of speed, functionality and usability compared to anything in Linux (which might simply be because Linux file management is mostly done through the CMD, hence a lack of a desire to improve the GUI experience).

See, this is why you're an ass: you lie like no tomorrow.

Whatever you mean by CMD, I can only guess from CMD being *Windows* OS command promt and text console window (kinda like terminal emulators) that you probably mean CLI applications. You might mean TUI apps, but from what you wrote I'm guessing no.

Explorer is garbage, personally when I've had to work long with windows, if it involves use of filemanager, I've tried to find at least acceptable quality free dual-pane (extra pane for showing directory tree is a plus if it can be switched on/off but a big minus if it's forced to be there).

While CLI is indeed ultimately best tool for many operations that people usually use filemanagers for, it's not the best tool for anything/everything. There exists huge amount of different GUI and TUI (Terminal User Interface) applications for Linux. For terminals Midnight Commander is probably most known, liked and if you really get deep into it, really extendable/configurable. For GUI I personally like to use ugly but powerful dual-pane filemanager named "worker" - it's also extendable, has different modes for each pane (defaulting both to showing directory content), can bind general functionality (like generating symbolic links of selected files on active pane into directory on inactive pane - or simply copying/moving them) or filetype specific (image, audio, video, etc. conversion for example) into hotkeys or buttons (which also include possibility for defining a hotkey).

As for Visual Studio, I used to like that kind of IDE's - and before that I used Borland Turbo Pascal/C/C++ type IDE's, which actually are not that bad but nothing special either. When it comes to editing code, whetever it's a small shell script or big projects, I'm like this Microsoft dude:

On Tuesday I attended a full-day Microsoft Developer Network Event in
Stuttgart, Germany. They flew in Don Box and had him deliver a
presentation about .NET. For this he used a laptop with Windows XP and
EMACS as the "presentation tool", and the command line versions of the
C++ and C# compiler that come with the SDK. No VS.NET anywhere. Thought
you might like to know.

...though I use GNU build tools and compilers, that is when not working with interprepted code - makes it easy to write cross-platform build system if I ever want to make program for *nix and windows platforms in language such as C - I really prefer Emacs for IDE. IDE and much much more, in fact I would bet that some people out there have written more than one filemanager in emacs-lisp, so emacs could provide that too, and much better than Explorer ever could.

Explorer is just easy to learn, hard to use. It has very minimal functionality. It's a poor filemanager, and in fact back when I used Windows I rather worked on command line - not the default one, with 4DOS (for Win9x/ME) or 4NT (for NT). They are not equivalent to bash but they provide a good load of functionality - in fact people have build text user interface (not CLI, TUI) applications with it's extended functionality which can turn batch files to a type of "shell scripts" if you will.

I have no idea whatsoever about this bug, but if you know about it then it should not bite you again - you should always keep a backup, preferrably on another computer or at least on another HD or if even that can't be managed on some system a backup copy even on same HD is better than nothing. It sounds like a bug that should be flagged critical and fixed as quick as possible, but if this was needed to teach you to backup (and not trust the applications own auto-backups it manages and keeps in same disk) your important data then there is at least one good thing resulting from it.

And no, that is not trying to paint the bug as feature - just like I'm not saying that it was good when I burned my HD and lost most of my data back in the days because it taught me the importance of keeping backups ;) It was awful, but it did have one minor positive effect :)

In the social network of IRC we had awaylog which you could configure to capture lines which contain a string or match an expression - by default most clients captured anything with your nick.
It was also a convenient way to set status, ie. /away "Gone to sauna, brb" while you were away to be shown for anyone private messaging or querying /whois from you...

There was nothing that important you could not go to sleep at 3am for at least 3-5 hours when I was a teen ;)

Note: Long babbling ahead, skip to end of message if bored/sane/etc. for something I actually wanted point out...

I've been addicted to social networking for a long time.
I do have facebook account, and I've chosen to associate myself with only certain people, which keeps it actually around as largely interesting for me as slashdot postings - but only for very limited time.

I practically never really "use" facebook, but sometimes I do go there for one of several reasons:
1) To post text, link or images (like when I came from Kraftwek gig at Flow Festival in Finland last month) to people, like my sister for example, usually to make something easily (for me and them) available to one or (most often) several friends at once.
2) To contact someone when the only way - literally or only way using internet - is via facebook. Or if the other way (such as email when you need to contact him/her right now and he/she doesn't know it).
3) Someone else contacts me via SMS or other way and asks to continue there because of one or another reason that makes it hard/impossible other way.

Having to go there for these last two annoys me to no end. It usually means that I'm loading the freaking script-asylum webpage which will slow my computer so much that though it doesn't use much of my 50Mbp/s line, it makes all other loading via browser (or in extreme cases, which means all cases on my slower systems) any downloads as it slows any and every program running - and for what? Text based chat which makes me wan't to whip up a greasemonkey script to disable the awful automatic smilie to image conversion.

I've tried to recommend adding my social netwok addiction to their addictions ;)

I can do anything I would want using it and use next to none of my machines capabilities. Talking, sharing links, videos, images, it all works - and it's way older than facebook.
It's called Internet Relay Chat, and is not accessed via web, that is by using www browser - though there have been web based frontends of IRC clients for longer than I've known IRC even... But for true social network addict this is nothing but a crux you could use on extreme emergency when no other option was available. Using a client of your liking to connect at least to one IRC network (for the most popular ones there are mirrors worldwide to provide faster and less laggy connection) and join at least one channel.
I'm currently on IRCNet, OFTC and Efnet networks - on what channels and using what nick(s), I won't tell.

Benefits: IRC client shows text - it can be scripted to choose links, launch them in one or another application, etc., but most clients show text only. And most support terminal/text-mode/cmd.exe type character based output.
While there are channels that have bots automatically saving logs and putting them on the channell webpage the common rule is that once you said something it's gone (not readable to those not on the channell at the time you wrote it), not stored forever like is the common rule with anything you write in web. It doesn't mean that someone can't/isn't currently saving log of the conversation - probably for personal use, but like anywhere (even offline/IRL) you can find later that your being quoted for something stupid. But that has been true before internet or BBS systems just as well.

Also wherever I am, if there is a simple SSH client, I can access not only my usual channels, not only my session but use my preferred client, loaded with scripts (read plugins/extensions for browser equivalent) to enhance the experience. Heck, and old VT100 terminal connected to *nix system with ssh client will do - in fact the experience was not far from that with my old 286 system connected via null-modem cable to my linux box and using OpenDOS and Commo for the connection and terminal emulation, except for the colors :) Also, like VT100 terminals, Commo didn't seem to support sending the letters å, à & à in any mode (ansi, vt100, etc.) understood/compatible with Linux/agetty/screen - I've never had this problem dialing to BBS's from DOS in the old days so I tried to find what to change/configure/etc. in Linux, but back then I was new to it and wasn't able to find a way.

Read this far?
Here's what I have remarked. Back in the late 90's, in my teenage/early adulthood I was mocked as geek/nerd for my computer hobby and as having no life for my habit of talking more with people online than IRL - but I had healthy social life In Real Life, it's just very easy to talk about more stuff with more people on IRC because one channel usually has at least dozen, often several, people. Also I find it much more social what happens in IRC networks than facebook.
Nowdays I see young people, who don't understand computers, and even in a group I have seen such people all staring at their own phones, all using facebook (so maybe occasional twitter). And I was a nolifer!?
I have to wonder how much their data bill is in comparison to one from spending as much time on IRC would be? ;)

Working in the software industry does not mean you know that - for one because in some places the management, marketting, etc. is not messing up coders work and/or schedule.

But there are other reasons... For one, I worked in one firm where my job consisted of mostly porting code - mostly libraries and tools for internal use - between Visual Basic (yuff, I would never had needed to learn that if it wasn't for the job) and Java (lesser yuff, but back then I liked Java - haven't discovered perl yet, didn't know a language can easily be made mixing both cross-platform and platform specific anyway you like, without a class for everything and their gnomes). There were projects, though mostly I knew nothing of them. One project was porting an important and huge library from Java to VB - it was a breeze. I had a lot of free time because there was almost never a hurry.

But I don't know about the projects that were the moneymakers. I know that my work was also needed to complete those projects and I never heard anything negative, but then I guess I wasn't in direct contact with those who might have worked under pressure... But from how I feel it seemed that the firm was finishing it's projects in timely fashion.

I'm not sure what you mean but at least you put socialism in quotes.

I don't think peer-to-peer video with computers has ever been not obvious - it's made obvious already back in the day of first video phone systems made known to public. Since that, for programmers, it only needed a network system with enough bandwidth to make it obvious - and research probably started in several places way before it became possible and viable for common people.

Extreme left? Wait... I get it! What country are you pointing your finger at?

Aw man, I wrote "people have much greater hobbies", but what I meant to write was "greater motives".

The main motive for a private enterprise and for people in general, is profit.

For private enterprise, sure, but people have much greater hobbies - generally profit is seen as means to an end (or to ends if you will), at least by healthy individuals.

But people in general have very little motive to colonize mars (as being part of it), and to be able to achieve it they would need to either be able to pay someone enough to make it profitable or do all the work needed to get and set up conditions they can live in there themselves. I don't see that as likely - However there might be growing amount of people willing to leave from this planet to existing colony in future... if there would be one, that is. And I see such colony being rather unlikely to be done as a long term for-profit business plan - in comparison a (multi)government supported colonization sounds far greater, but one likely to happen much further in future, if ever (rooting for the former).