To be fair, even the Saudi government claims that they would rather have their oil used for the things you mention. Especially if oil becomes scarce enough to make them even richer... Of course you can't (and shouldn't) take their word for granted as they are about as addicted to oil money as an economy *can* be.

The whole Line idea was to start transitioning their society to a more sustainable model, which is laudable in itself. It just shouldn't have been so absurdly and incompetently designed as what seems to be no more than a rich guy's masturbation fantasy.

CmdrTaco's ghost gave me a lifetime ad-free slashdot experience. Thanks slashdot!

This USRobotics is really worth it. I wonder if I'll be able to upgrade the daughterboard.

You can also mail me at 2:292/807. Hope dad doesn't hog the line again :(.

At the very least all this compute will ensure that we have plenty of energy going forward. People still assume that green power is about replacing fossil fuels. It isn't. We will need way more power in the future, and thank gods the green power wave came in time so that we won't burn up the planet next century with all those energy requirements. But we're not off the hook, because waste energy alone will simply cook us all in the 2300s, so we're going to have to find ways to reduce our energy footprint anyway. But that's another discussion.

... appear to be awake past our bedtime

Bart Ehrman is a new testament scholar. He studied theology at a religious university and when he started looking at the new testament with a scholar's eye, putting the gospels next to each other line by line, sentence by sentence, he lost his faith. He believes it's likely that Jesus existed though.

One remarkable thing is the end of the gospel according to Matthew where some monk in the middle ages added the resurrection to the text cause he couldn't understand why it was present in other gospels but missing in this one.

So I'm wondering what evidence the journalist you mention found. The evidence regarding even Jesus himself is extremely scant; outside the Bible there is only one reference to him that is considered genuine (by Josephus), even though even that one was embellished with extra wording afterwards. The resurrection story is found in just about every culture that ever existed (as far as we know). Are all of those true too?

I suspect that the journalist somehow "found god" and then found him in all sorts of places, looking at stones and bread and so one.

I really don't get why so many Americans still believe in god. Why hasn't rationality taken more of a hold?

You can mail me at charlotte@enron.com

Exxon and other companies are terrified that transparency will give the public information that can be used to sue them (like big tobacco was). And they're probably right too. I can't imagine they haven't formed cartels like tobacco did.

This seems fair enough to me. Apple was able to make a lot of money off their investment, which is not unreasonable: rolling out a product like the iPhone was a huge risk and some rewards are due if and when it works.

Once they started using it to strategically carve their market share in stone it became another matter.

Slashdot can do images? When was that feature added?

It's not like I had a choice at the time. Most software was only made for Windows so if you needed get shit done (like write a thesis) you were stuck with Word on Windows.

It all went downhill after MS-DOS 5 I think. They never quite recovered from that...

Jobsworth, n.
"an official who upholds petty rules even at the expense of humanity or common sense."