Speak for yourself. If you're incapable of distinguishing between acting and lying (false statement about reality vs. an adult version of children playing "pretend"), or between a human acting and a muppet/animation (hint: facial expressions, shifts in posture, minor physical tics or movements, subtle details of all kinds), that's your personal deficit, not a factual statement as to actors' capabilities. Likewise, your rejection of modern celebrities doesn't extend to the rest of the population; if anything, celebrities of all types are given more attention than in the past, as evidenced by the personal tabloid-esque info being covered by mainstream news rather than shows like Entertainment Tonight. Your belief that your personal feelings are shared by everyone else is a great enough sign of narcissism that you're in no position to throw stones in that department...

FYI and FWIW, I can't tell the difference between good & crappy acting, I haven't really been into TV/movies in 20 years, and was never into media celebrities...so nope, I'm not arguing because you offended my sensibilities.

Nonsense. I read on my Nook Touch while listening to high-energy music for the 30-45 min I'm on a cardio machine so the time just flies by, then I put it away and use the various weight machines. I'm motivated to actually show up twice a week by the chance to focus completely & without interruption on reading & then thinking about a book, and the feeling of mental peace I often have for the rest of the evening. If had to rely on fitness classes or outdoor sports instead, I'd exercise once or twice a season at best.

Even though Apple has made a fortune leading the public to believe otherwise, Jobs didn't design or make the changes to Apple's products himself; engineers like Wozniak, Hertzfeld and Ive did. (He has patents on record, but they're not for any of Apple's actual products.) Likewise, *his* choices were what almost destroyed Apple, and would have if John Sculley hadn't worked hard to limit the damage he could do. (Some good articles: Showdown at Apple, this Forbes article. The "Father of the Macintosh," Andy Hertzfeld, also wrote an article on the events leading up to it.)

Jobs' genius was actually in presenting items to their best effect and persuading people — intuitively knowing just what to say, how to say it, what appearance or impression to give, how to use his charisma, and so forth. That's why it was his original job with Wozniak: one Steve created the product, the other found buyers & investors. Apple, which had little left to lose by the mid-90s, thus hired Jobs so he could play the role of the long-lost genius behind Apple who had returned to "save" it, somebody that they could use as the face of the company for the public to latch onto.

Apple isn't innovating any less than before: they were already bouncing between phone & tablet prior to Jobs' death. It just seems to be doing more poorly now because — well, much as "Dumbo" was led to believe he could fly due to a magic feather and that he'd fail without it, Apple led its iDevice-era fans to believe that Jobs exerted some magical force on the company that produced near-miraculous tech, and that it will fail without him. You're just now seeing the company from the outside perspective of people that were never affected by Apple's/Jobs' tactics — very much like the Apple II-era/Woz fans (including me) came to in the early 1990s.

FWIW I don't have anything in particular against Jobs, but it drives me batty when a company or individual is given a great deal of credit for other peoples' work. Give him credit for his incredible talent at persuasion & salesmanship, and for the role that trait played in directing the industry — but let the unsung engineers, artistic designers, etc. behind the actual products have their due as well.

Or it was. The devs retired KDE 3.5's code with 3.5.13 — everything after that is a brand-new DE that is designed to look/act similar to KDE/TDE 3.5. I wouldn't care, except I noticed that some things no longer work properly, some other things are no longer present, and from what I could tell, dropped HAL in favor of udev+systemd.

Two problems with that theory...
1) Character limits aren't an issue on the vast majority of the web, and the exceptions (like /. signatures) often don't allow emoji.
2) Emoji sent via SMS are usually sent on their own, like the equivalent of responding to "see you later" with *kiss.*

SRA 2.0 - boredom 'on a computer'.

My elementary school used the old form up through at least the late 1980s, but there was no pretense of it teaching us anything. It was blatant, boring busywork: if we finished the in-class assignment for a subject well before time was up, then we were to go do SRAs while the teacher worked with the other kids.

My mother tried that when the time-out type approaches failed; it still didn't work. She was frustrated by then, so the next time I bit her, she bit me right back and made damn sure it pinched! When I started crying, she said, "biting hurts, doesn't it?" I never bit anyone again -- it wasn't until I physically experienced what I'd been doing to others that I had the empathy to fully grasp why I shouldn't bite.

What we call "empathy" is actually more a matter of a person having had similar enough experience to know "intuitively" what someone else is feeling; that's why people show a stunning lack of empathy when it comes to others that are very different from them. (As a firsthand example, few neurotypicals genuinely empathize with autistics when told certain things cause us pain or distress that have never bothered them.) Little kids are referred to as "sociopaths" because they lack the life experience needed to have that "intuitive" empathy, and most then slowly improve from that point onward as their pool of shared experiences grows.

You mean Early 90s NeoCon Care and Reagan/GW Bush Phones — Obama can't rightly take the credit (or blame) for either program.

That's a fine attitude if you're either very young, haven't found a good match, or simply have good old fashioned "issues" like commitment-phobia. It doesn't work so well if -- like the vast majority of people out there -- the person grows to dislike the drama of new/failing relationships and starts to desire the emotional stability of having a partner that is publicly committed to making the relationship work long-term.

I'm sorry that you were in anemotionally draining marriage (or that somebody you're close to has been) but that doesn't mean that's what most successful marriages are like. If things are "going strong" now, that's because you/they are with someone that they're far more compatible with, not because they've avoided committing to somebody. Your belief is essentially no different from some people's belief that they'd excel on one subject's exam because they were wearing their week-old red underwear and (all else being equal) perform poorly on a different subject's test because they were wearing a regular freshly-laundered pair.

Actually, reports since then are that the unedited video shows that he put down some of the items, but paid for the rest; he goes to take something else instead, but the clerk grabs at him and they exchange words, then Brown pushes him back away.

That's why the store's attorney has now publicly stated that nobody working for the store called for the cops: they had no reason to. The cop that Brown encountered had no idea about the incident in the store, meanwhile; that's not why he was there.

The community regards Brown as a martyr because of the ongoing problems they've had with the almost-entirely-white police force -- very different from a "hero."

Where I'm at, we have very low humidity compared to the rest of the country and regularly have several days during summer where temps are in the 90-100 range... The mid-70s are considered just about perfect, though, and 85 *is* considered hot. (FWIW people here are in good shape.)

I knew something looked buggered about that image, but I couldn't figure out what -- I was too distracted by frustration at the equally user-hostile oversimplified flat outline icons.

What's worse is that it's so awful without even including the planned window decorations, which someone on the team posted to OpenDesktop in April. Imagining the two put together...not pleasant.

I use KDE in large part because it separates the window element/widget design (checkboxes, etc.) from the colors, and lets me control what color everything is -- the defaults that KDE, Xfce, etc. all pick tend to be so low-color & high/low-contrast that they give me headaches. I also generally prefer KDE because of the little useful touches like the easily-added/programmed extra context menu actions in the file manager, integration of KDE-Look, and things like that.

I know it's not unusual, but damn that's a bad reason to reproduce -- I've known too many kids &adults that (like me) were the product of couples that reproduced to fulfill an emotional wish that's not directly related to taking care of infants/kids/teens. Sometimes the adults managed to be good or even great parents, but most of them didn't, and more than a few reacted to the harsh reality by being abusive in some way. :-(

Similar here -- I'm disabled and on SSI, which is closer to forced early retirement. "Unemployed" implies a deviation from the person's norm where they temporarily don't have a stable income.

I don't think that those two options should be left off, as there are more than a few people here on Slashdot that are in one or both situations, and we screw up polls by having to pick the 'wrong' options.