I went west... life was peaceful there. Then I got eaten by a grue.

"Checking today there are 3,180 videos matching the term "lighting farts"."

The real question on my mind and alot of other /.'rs is of those 3,180 videos matching the term "lighting farts" how many combined views do they have?

Armed with that knowledge then and only then would I really begin to wonder about civilization.

Some things are quicker on the command line. On any OS.

Just because you don't know how, don't want to learn how, or would rather use a mouse (delete as appropriate) doesn't alter the fact that I can manipulate text files much much faster on the command line than I can in a GUI.

Why would I install 17 GUI based network tools when I have them all already available on my command line (which is always open anyway).

I've been using GUIs since 1987. I've been using command lines since 1982. I still use both, on any OS I use (including my phone).

People that would rather waste worktime manipulating an inefficient pointing device to fill their screen real-estate with 'user friendly' imitations of the powerful tools available within a second of touching a keyboard.. ridiculous.

Sadly, I have to agree, and it happened right from the start, as you say. For example:

Oh, except for the men from Africa or anyone recently from that lineage. They can be enslaved. I always wondered how they could write those words, then go home to their slaves. (I suppose they didn't see them as "men", which is even more depressing. What groups aren't seen as "men" now?)

But since its america, no one complains because "god bless america". If china had this kind of propaganda there wouldnt be as big of a problem.

Morality is a luxury that not everybody can afford.

Well, in this respect Haiti must be rather affluent. 96 percent of Haitians are Christian, which makes them more religious than the United States.

The poor can embrace morality, if for no other reason, as a matter of pragmatism. The rich are generally well insulated from the consequences of their actions and can do as they please.

If a society won't abide by a common morality under all conditions, why have morality at all? In such a case, it becomes what we in the Western world call politeness. The common morality in Haiti allows people to share, so that instead of one person hoarding and everyone else starving, you have everyone surviving, even if not as well fed as they would like.

Well I'm personally waiting for an EPIC win!

it's a lame attempt at being retro-cool, just like the retention of the Gates Borg icon for Microsoft.

They can screw with the slow-as-molasses Web 2.0 Javascript on a weekly basis, but downloading a icon from Wikipedia to use for Ubuntu would be too much work.

tag: giveubuntuanicon

What's interesting is that, once again, DRM is only affecting legitimately paying customers.

In this case somebody ripped a screener copy of the movie a couple weeks ago, so this first run theatrical resolution film isn't terribly interesting to the pirates anymore. Anybody who wants to grab a pirated copy of the movie has been able to do so for a little while now. They don't need this DRM-laden film.

The folks who do need this DRM-laden film are the theater owners who are trying to show the movie to their patrons. And they have, presumably, acquired their copy of the movie through legitimate means. Which is why the lack of a key to the DRM matters to them. If they were using a pirated copy they wouldn't be having any trouble showing it.

If RMS was never born then there would be no GNU. There would be no Linux. There would be no Apache. There would be no mainstream, payable internet at that time. There would be no netbooks. There would be no 3G modems in laptops. There would be no Android. The Intel atom would have never been created. There would be no Firefox. There would be no... well... want me to go on?

nature vs nurture then? that's fair. i would argue that most societal differences b/w men and women at some point come from evolutionary differences. for example, for the longest time (lesser now, but still very prominent) is the male's domination in the household, in gov't, etc. I would say that stems from the biological differences, let me explain....

men, because of their testes, produce more testosterone, which in turn aids in the production of muscle tissue. Men (traditionally) have had the stigma of being the hunters, while women (again, traditionally) had stereotype of staying with the young/children and collecting food. fast-forward a few hundred generations, with men staying in power (if you are stronger than someone, it's easy to stay dominant over that person. in certain ways, we're still cavemen inside) and we have our societal 'roles', that yes in some way are very unfair, but also have their roots in evolution and the differences in our physical make-up.

No, no, no. Obviously people are not watching in theaters because of piracy. It can't possibly have anything to do with the poor service, amazingly high food prices, dealing with annoying people, having that jackass walk through the theater with the flashlight to make sure you're not doing anything bad, being treated like crap, the sticky floors, it must be piracy.

Seriously though, I don't know how theaters can be so clueless.

Contracts are performance based as of 2007. This means that a) the lowest bidder doesn't always win, and b) there no more incentive for contractors to "fill seats" by hiring more people than they need. (Although to be fair, in many cases the government dictated the number of "required" hires under the old system).

But here's why they use contractors: Aside from doctors and pilots, officers do not generally do "work." They're managers. People with college degrees don't usually go enlisted, therefore they end up as managers whether they like it or not, and even if they went enlisted, there is no such job (MOS/AFSC/NEC) as "programmer" for any branch of the military, that I'm aware of.

But for the sake of argument, if there were such a job, enlisted personnel need only pass the ASVAB and then their training, and it's in the instructor's best interest to make sure they pass the training. Passing such a course would mean taking multiple choice tests that you'd have to be not merely incompetent, but truly stupid to fail. In other words, you're not going to weed out incompetence in military training.

Essentially, the *only* option right now is outsourcing. That could change in the future, but currently the government is not in the business of developing products, including software.

All of that said, there are incompetent programmers in just about every organization I've ever seen or been a part of. Now I wouldn't call myself a *great* programmer. I make less than ideal design choices all the time, sometimes even *bad* ones, and I always look at my old code and wonder what the @#$% I was thinking. Even so, I understand the relevant concepts, I learn from my mistakes, and I get the job done. I regularly encounter people who can't even do that. I could only speculate as to the reasons they're not fired, but regardless, they're out there.

[quote]I'm not saying shooting the laptop was necessarily justified or the right thing to do. I don't know enough of the details of the situation to say that. But I will say that there are some security measures that Israel absolutely *has* to take, that would be viewed as unacceptably harsh in places with relatively low levels of terrorist violence.[/quote]

Or you could just stop fucking with your neighbors (I live in the US and feel the same way about what we're doing).

Yeah, open sourced games. Both of those were commercial at first and only opened later, those games have paid professionals working on their creation. Most unpaid open source games are horribly derivative and usually ugly and unintuitive.