Hell, the waves from them passing is probably pushing the oily water *over* the booms, making them that much less effective. I think that 300 ft rule should have been put in place, and 300 yards would be better, likely.

Seriously - they're orange tubes of canvas filled with kitty litter and enough styrofoam to float (that's *my* guess, anyway.) Take three close-ups, shuffle them, and you wouldn't be able to tell which is which.

Perhaps that's what the reporters really want! They go swishing by, too fast, let their wake wash over the booms, and then report on how the booms are completely useless, and BP is just wasting more money.

Microsoft is not satisfied with getting nine women pregnant and getting a baby in a month - they think we should get 259 women pregnant, and get a baby in a day.

Somethings just *HAVE* to happen in sequence, and can't happen in parallel. You can't add x and y to get z *WHILE* you're adding z and w to get n.

Why is it "orange and purple" are automatically considered more professional than "brown"? Is it because it's a warm, welcoming color, reminiscent of freshly plowed ground, ready to grow crops? Is it because "flashy" is considered more important than "it works"?

Or has Ubuntu been taken over by flippin' LSU Tiger fans, and the menu will start getting all kinds of fake french suffixes and spellings applied to it? The brown of Ubuntu's current default Gnome theme goes so *VERY* well with my Enlightenment 16 theme (ShinyMetal). We don't *ALL* have to fall into Microsoft's Fisher-Pricing of the user interface!

One of the hard things about archiving these tweets is ... do they get to archive the tweets that his tweets may be in reply to? How do they verify a bit.ly link actually pointed to what the expanded URL archived claimed to be? These are 140 character type-bites! There's no space to have internal context - the majority of their meaning is in all the tweets they reply to, and that reply to them!

Agreed! I started it up - and then went to pick the directory to look in for pictures... Unfortunately (Ubuntu 9.10), it's a drop-down that gives me my 2TB RAID array that I have mounted under my home directory, and "No cameras detected". At that point, it's trying to crawl down the directories of mirrors of old Linux installs. And it wants to move everything it finds into *ONE* directory?

The other story of the 20th Century was "Just-In-Time", which meant reserves and stockpiles have been kept as low as feasible. That would be another factor limiting acceptance of sail - we'd need larger stockpiles to ride out any delays. Honestly though, with satellite imaging, and computer control - there's no real reason sail travel should be any less controllable and predictable than using fossil fuels. And at the speeds involved, there wouldn't even need to be any major code to do image processing and interpretation on the ship itself (though with the computer needed to handle the rigging, and the need to monitor against potential collisions, should be enough to actually do the planning on ship... but coordination would be better from a central site and general directions relayed via satellite.)

Um... You missed a news report - Iran launched a satellite of its own a few days ago.

Now, you're a jihadist terrorist organization that would like to make sure everyone follows your particular religious views (which includes you at the top, defining the rules, including the rules about what you can do that other people can't - see Sumptuary Laws)... What do you do to make sure *NOBODY* escapes - even if they try to escape into outer space? What do you do if you don't like their spy satellites watching you? What do you do if you think the other Great Satan is an alien from Outer Space and you want to keep him from attacking us? In sum - what do you do if you're batshit crazy and want to fuck up the world's future?

You launch a few satellites, that don't even have to be *THAT* reliable, as their whole purpose in the first place is to get up into the orbital area and explode, filling the LEO and Geosynch orbital ranges with steel shot 2-5mm in diameter.

Watch NASA have to send an emergency call to the ISS telling the astronauts to bail out *NOW* and land where-ever they can. Watch the mixmaster of debris turn the ISS into even *MORE* debris for the cause of Allah.

Or just launch a few big rocks, and pick where you deorbit them. Maybe not quite as explosive as your friendly nuke, but hella cheaper and not nearly as finicky about duds. And if you're not excessively concerned with accuracy (after all, you currently own just 5% of the US land surface, and most of it is unoccupied), toss the rocks past the moon for a gravity assist and get them coming down faster than escape velocity.

The whole problem with terrorism is that it's just too damn easy. People spook too easily.

Because the poster didn't ask for simply a list of games - the poster asked for *best* games that work on a certain class of machines.

I'm thinking Slashdot needs a new moderation category: "Actually answers the original question", or maybe "On Topic".