However, even the most jaded, cynical atheist cannot deny that organized religions have also done some amazing things for the societies in which they existed.

Yeh, I'm sure Scientology has done some good. So what? Are you suggesting we try and keep some kind of score card, we can put "imprison children and malke them slaves" on one side and "feed homeless" on the other? Not sure what we do when they "convert" a follower with those "selfless acts" though.

Of course Atheists never do any charitable works on their own, so as long as the nutjobs "help" roughly as many as they screw over, it's all good.

is every bit as ignorant and superficial as claiming that someone cannot drive because their plumbing is different than mine ...

That's right, I forgot that most "organised" religions fought so hard for equal rights and civil rights, oh wait...

And for anyone else who is not an economist "negative income elasticity" means "prefer cheaper, lower quality, goods".

Depends, I don't see many people using wordpad/gedit instead of MS-word/OO-writer. Features always matter, and they often matter more than speed/security/usability (all of which have their fans who ask "why can't all apps. consider X, and stop being bloated") ... but sometimes, if you do _really_ well on one of those three and you are "close enough" feature wise, then people can live without the features you don't have. But it's a big gamble, much bigger than just adding features as fast as possible.

leaving you with a junk file

That's why the minimum recommendation for updates like that is to "write to tempfile, close, check that close is happy and then rename". Unless you can deal with someone pulling the power at any point as you update.

According to that page on that site, _minimum_ pay for a pilot is 67k (which I would put a lot of money on being BS). Of course a different page (http://www.avjobs.com/salaries-wages-pay/historical-aviation-wages.asp) says 16k-60k or 23k-250k (depending on if you are "regional" or "national"). And I assume for "average" they are using mean and not median which, from all I've heard of the industry, will make the numbers higher.

People want free, anytime they can get it. Not a good business model.

I think the PS3 "video rental" is a good counter example, I'm a happy netflix subscriber ... and would be happy to give money to sony instead, for a comparable product. But the product is significantly worse and a lot more expensive. I assume they think the fact I can have it "instantly" should make up for that, but it doesn't.

If you then look at "buying" instead of renting, the product is a little cheaper but a lot worse -- and there are even weirdos with the price (like their "sales" which are much more arbitrary than any real shop could get away with). Plus the "instant download" feature isn't as big a hook.

I use the Amazon mp3 store all the time, I hear iTunes is doing great ... I'll likely never use the PS3 store again though. So just saying "people want free" is outright ignoring reality.

When it was launched, the DS was an experimental console, Nintendo's so-called "3rd leg". Nintendo had no significant faith in it, but threw it out there anyhow as an experiment while working on a proper Game Boy.

One consequence of this is that the components of the DS weren't necessarily picked as they would have been for a handheld designed to match the long life of a Game Boy.

It was an "experiment" sure, they didn't know it would succeed and likely had some backup plans. But to pretend it wasn't meant to succeed is just insanity. Nintendo haven't made a "top of the current gen. specs." console since the N64, so the fact they do that for the DS means nothing.

Meanwhile in Sony-land, manufacturing technology has finally caught up with the ridiculously overbuilt PSP, which was an absolute brick when launched. The Go has some pricing/design issues

hahaha ... you mean like the "issue" that it isn't backwards compatible AT ALL. So you can't buy any cheap used games, and PSP owners are basically forced to not upgrade. And combine that with the fact that it's digital only, so your gamefly subscription is useless and you need to buy two games if you have a spouse/brother/roommate/friend who likes to play occasionally (compared to the DS which not only let you share disks but often let you play limited multiplayer on one disk) and they are the same price as original PSP games (which have none of those restrictions).

I was interested in the PSP Go, when I first heard about it 3-6 months ago (mainly due to the size), but there's no way I'm getting one atm.

SELinux has this capability: http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/28545.html

Glad mine were [...] consolidated to 3% after I graduated a few years back (and then subsequently paid in full within 2-3 years)

Math FAIL.

http:org/slashdot/tech/story/... (use SRV record)

I've always liked that idea (which I've seen before) because it treats subdomains in the same way it treats subdirectories under the document root

This seems like a really bad idea, to me, for that reason. Given the above, the client now has to do 4 DNS lookups (org, slashdot.org, tech.slashdot.org, story.tech.slashdot.org ... instead of one). Then depending on the rules, they'll have to see if tech.slashdot.org/story exists, before falling back to slashdotr.org/tech/story. Saying if DNS exists use that host would be terrible, saying if DNS exists and a webserver is there might be doable but would be really annoying as you'd have to migrate the entire sub-dir. On the other side testing what is there is much more expensive on the client side, and is bound to get screwed up with things like "oh someone put a global 301 mod_rewrite on tech.slashdot.org so now nothing works"

It's also well-known that if I had invested in the market back in last summer (2008), I would have lost about half the value of my investment.

No, not even if you were insanely unlucky. Even if you were stupid enough to put all your money into the market around the beginning of May 2008: the S&P is about 76% of what it was (not including the dividends you would have got) and the DJIA is about 75% of what it was (again, not including dividends you would have got) -- note that the worst day to invest was different in both cases, by a week or two.

And, again, a professional financial advisor would likely have told you to use Dollar Cost Averaging ... and you'd have to have been really unlucky to suddenly get a lump of cash to invest just as the market went down as it did. But, hey, set fire to your money for all I care (but I wouldn't recommend it to any lurkers reading this).

You mean those persons that worked for Lehman and other bankrupt firms?

Personally I use Edward Jones, but I'm sure there were plenty of good and honest people working for some of the companies that went bankrupt ... and I think it's very likely that people going to them have made more than people putting everything in a savings account and trying to guess the market.

Well it's starting with the F11 (been and gone) and F12 changes to x86 support: F11 moves to i586+ and F12 moves to i686+

The stats. used to backup these plans were from smolt data, and download stats. ... IIRC the data was released on fedora-devel (as the data on those pages doesn't show that info.

The other point that was made (maybe on fedora-devel, maybe on IRC) was that the smolt arch. data is misleading as to usage of i?86, as that has been on a steady decline ... and there would come a time within the next few releases where only x86_64 would have any significant % usage (esp. if you remove machines which could be x86_64 but are i?86 atm.).

Sure, someone will fix it ... eventually. But why take that risk for 0.001 cents of disk space? It seems like the most retarded feature in the world to me, and yet I can't deny that people are asking for it in yum ... so you aren't the only person with a big OCD desire to remove every unneeded bit.

How many processes have you seen complain that they are out of address space with only 4GB?

To be fair, there are now realistic cases where you want to mmap()/etc. a 4GB+ file. It's not always needed, and there are workarounds, but it's pretty soon going to be the case that 99% of users won't care if the developer starts making those assumptions.

On a related point within the next 12-18 months Fedora are supposed to have x86_64 as the only primary arch. so some code requires 8GB of virtual memory, it won't even be a primary bug anymore in Fedora.