Why would anyone mark the parent 'Flamebait'? He's certainly making a valid point.

The Wall Street Journal referred to him yesterday as the "mastermind" behind the "notorious" Pirate Bay, which was an amusing use of language. Or alarming.

Virtually every major art movement of the twentieth century (and the present century) can be traced in a straight line back to Picasso in some phase. His importance has far less to do with whether or not you "like" him than it does with the incredible fecundity of his ideas and his perceptual acuity -- and what they gave birth to. Not to engage in artspeak, but it's true.

It's strange to be on a site where so many discussions take place at a satisfying level of understanding and yet find opinions about art that I would expect from the mouth of my 83-year-old aunt, sitting in her room full of doggie pictures and sunset seascapes.

The high precision timestamps in Rsyslog, specified in RFC5424 are not epoch seconds. They look like 2011-12-02T04:31:39.171878-08:00 and yes that's microseconds. High precision is essential for multi-source, high volume collection and analysis. It allows you to see the actual order of events when they're coming in from multiple hosts like a large pool of webservers. But hey, if near enough is good enough for you...

The asshat who wrote the first study sited in TFA is a shill for ExxonMobil. The article hinges it's entire premis on the results of the second scholarly work which is a month old draft of an unpublished, unpeer-reviewed, unproven idea for an econometric model to analyze policy effects on on safety (translate: probably not even close to accurate). In fact, the article states as it's first line "Research confirms that increasing fuel economy standards does cost lives on the road.", as if this is proven fucking fact now. Stuff like this on slashdot makes me want to punch people in the face. Few bother to question or even read linked articles but love to go all modern jackass on meta shit that doesn't even have anything to do with the subject.

Sorry to tell you Jane Q. Public, but you're full of shit. Anyone who has lived in both Europe and the United States for extended periods of time (I've lived 20 years in each) will tell you that the US crime problem is IMMENSE compared to Europe. Violent crime in America is not restricted to the big city. I lived in US cities from Podunk, Nebraska to several large cities in the East. Americans feel threatened by crime in each and every one of them. In Europe, when crimes do occur, they really are almost exclusively between various breeds of mafiosi. There are no serial rapists haunting the suburbs, ordinary people do not feel compelled to pack a firearm in self-defense (something you'll find is the case in virtually every small American city in the West, justified or not), there is no danger in any city – even the large ones – walking home from a theater or bar at three in the morning or getting on the Metro. University professors do not shoot fellow faculty members in the head at faculty meetings. School shootings have occurred in two countries, Finland and Germany, the first of which is unusual in Europe in that its gun laws pretty much mirror America's. But the scope of these phenomena is extremely restricted compared to the copycatting that has gone on in America. So don't be so quick to pat yourself on the back. You don't deserve it. America is a culture of violence, plain and simple.

That's bullshit and easily checked with a search. US consumed 138.5 billion gallons of gas in 2010. While Exxon Mobile made profits of $30.46 billion on $383 billion in revenue. Why are so many people compelled to be apologists for big business. I bet you believe that rapist really loved you too. I suppose it's possible that they made on $0.02 per gallon and made up the rest on t-shirt sales to corporate fan boys.

Absolutely right. I'm a translator. Google Translate can now be set to feed into memoQ, SDL Trados and probably other CAT software automatically. I don't know what the terms of service are on Google Translate but perhaps the 'abuse' they're talking about is partially related to the several hundred times per day that I and many other Trados and memoQ users hit the site via the API for a translation. The irony is, I blow the Google translation out without even reading it about 90% of the time. But since Trados grabs it automatically for every translation unit (read: every sentence), it adds up to a lot of hits.

It might have behooved SDL Trados and the others to make getting a Google translation optional for every unit -- i.e., no translation from Google if you don't press a key. That way, you'd only make use of Google when you really needed to, instead of using it en masse for the entire document.

In any event, I think this'll have a real impact for translators who've gotten used to using it. Trusting a (free) external source for the tools you need to work probably isn't wise.

I'm creating a new programming language called ChrisMaple. Because programming can be hard for people to understand, it will only have 2 functions with no arguments: Stop and Go. I plan on writing a new OS in it :D

I will never pay for cable or dish or watch broadcast tv again. Roku streams Netflix, Hulu, even Aljazeera and Democracy Now to my TV. Device only cost $60. You don't need a DVR when you're watching on demand. I also watch tv and movies on my laptop, which enables me to sit outside and drink and smoke. Roku has tons of channels and you can even create your own.

You should change that to "...never go to college for FREE". It's true that if you test poorly the government doesn't give you a free ride. You can sill pay. Heck you can even come to the US on a student visa and attend ITT. You would be better off buying a few books, a good laptop, attending local programming user groups and trying to work on open-source or mechanical turk projects.

Exchange started out not support SMTP or even TCP out of the box. You had to buy a special enabler that came on a separate floppy. Exchange had it's own crappy protocol but now supports IMAP4, POP3, LDAP, NNTP and IRC (go figure). It used to have WebDAV but now a soap api. NTLM became kerberos. AD's LDAP started with their own schema but now includes iNetOrg. IE used to suck but now, not as much. Sony memsticks lost to MMC All cell phones will one day just use a regular USB cable

...that one day, all God's androids will join hands and sing, in the words of the old Nokia spiritual, "Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, we're free at last!"

I'm used to PR people spray painting happy faces all over everything, but this is some of the gaggiest PR barf I've had spilled in my path.