They're divine punishment to us all for allowing homosexuals and assorted heathens to run amok! It's true. It's all there black and white clear as crystal.

Really? I'm in the US and I saw 1 blizzard and several nasty snowstorms last winter.

Then you're doing it wrong.

Once you are above the karma threshold for mod points, it doesn't matter how your current posts are modded (unless they bring you back below the threshold). What matters is how often you access slashdot, and I think how often you post.

If you want to reduce the amount of modpoints you get... either access & post very frequently or access & post rarely.

That's reasonable advice, but it just addresses an aside comment I made, not the actual point.

Furthermore, as advice, it greatly oversimplifies the nature of human relationships. While it's possible to be more fine-grained on Facebook, by far the easiest things to do are to share stuff with everybody or nobody. As a result, I generally opt for nobody (i.e. real, personal information doesn't get posted by me to Facebook any more, and I have my account privacy settings completely locked down now).

Furthermore there are people like business contacts, associates, acquaintances - people I know, and might talk to when I see them at a party, but they aren't the first people I'd pick up a phone and call if the shit hit the fan in my life. The information I want to share with them is different from what I'd share with a good friend.

And unless you are a habitual oversharer, there is essentially no cost to leaving people as "friends" on Facebook - unless they are annoying updaters, in which case I simply block their info from my feed. Fine, that's solved.

But there is a real cost to actually de-friending people who are within your real life social networks, even if you do not consider them friends any more. The cost is the awkwardness and embarrassment that can ensue from them knowing they have been de-friended by you. Unless they are so creepy that you want absolutely nothing to do with them, the harm from allowing them to continue as your Facebook "friend" is minimal. De-friending people you really never see or relate to, and don't like - sure, that's easy enough.

Additionally, it is very awkward to ignore friend invitations from people. The only people I actively refuse Friend invites from are a couple of folks I really strongly dislike who just don't get that I don't like them, and from my ex-girlfriends (and people I actually don't know).

These days, if I actually want to share pictures with my friends, I upload them to Picasa, make a private album, and give access to the people I want to have access to them and email those people a link. Much safer than putting stuff on Facebook where privacy settings and access control are in constant flux and the site defaults everything to share with everybody. And if I want to share personal information with a group of friends, I send an email.

Facebook is just something to idly gawk at, and to "microblog" some clever but completely irrelevant and impersonal bullshit you found online in your status line.

Use a browser dedicated to facebook. I upped my privacy settings as high as they go and I use a browser specifically only for facebook.

And thusly have they earned my $5.99. Thanks for the heads-up.

Since 1996, Opera would show both a list of pages and one (or more) page at the same time, which is basically all tabbed browsing does. The tab metaphor, when introduced in version 4, actually limited you to seeing only 1 page at a time. I remember they gave you the option of sticking with MDI - which I did for a while.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Opera_web_browser

Exactly! The word "smartphone" is misleading and demeaning. My Milestone happens to be able to make phone calls, but it's not its main function.

In fact, lately I've been wondering if it's possible to install some development environment on it. And I need to be able to hook it to a beamer. But it's possible I'm asking a bit much.

So does that mean books are not art? Or does it mean that story-oriented games are art? Because I still don't see a fundamental difference between those two, apart from the interactive aspect.

Or does any kind of interaction mean it's not art anymore? Clapping for a performance makes it not art? Comedy or theatre that relies on audience input is not art? Anything where the audience is part of the greater experience is not art?

I'm unable to come to a definition of art that rules excludes all games without excluding a lot of accepted art.

You should play Dead Space then. There were several times, as I was playing that game, when I peed a little.