You have to hand it to MS, at the university that I attend, they gave free copies of Visual Studio to every student in the intro level cs courses. It's no skin off of their back, because we would have probably all just pirated it and it got a lot of us hooked on them quite quickly.
Either that or the cost of Visual Studio is included as part of your tuition.
God, I wish I could find the link that was posted here about students from some schools finding out the costs of their "free" MS Office CDs was in fact buried in their tuition bill. (In other words, if you didn't take the "free" CD you paid for it anyways!)
Did anyone else notice that on the "disputed" ballot from Florida, one of the people running for president (in the "Workers World" party) is named Monica Moorehead?
Yes, but she's not a gag reference to Lewinsky, if that's what you're implying -- I remember her being in the '96 election as well.
I watched a "third-party candidate debate" and she and the Worker's World party crashed it, claiming that the media was trying to suppress their voice. No, I'm not kidding...
I've heard that Oregon has 100% of their polling handled by the USPS (snail mail) this year.
They're probably waiting 3-10 days for all the ballots postmarked November 7 to arrive.
Nope, we don't throw them in the mail on November 7; most of the old voting precincts (libraries, etc.) had special drop-off booths set up so people could drop their votes off.
There may be a few votes that were mailed, say, Friday or Saturday that are caught in transit, but after that everyone waited until the 7th.
I remember hearing Dan Rather commenting how _fast_ oregon would be called this year.
Well it would have if so many people didn't wait until the last minute to vote. They got far more votes at the last minute then they expected.
well then, its a damn good thing that we arent a pure democracy otherwise we would have been screwed.
So you think that the people's choice should not hold any weight simply because it's a candidate you dislike? Would you be saying the same thing if it was your candidate that had the popular vote but got screwed by the college?
if you payed more attention in your history class you would know why the electoral college exists.
I know why the electoral college exists. I also know how to spell "paid". I also know that you're not likely to be e.e. cummings, so you don't get to get away with using all lower-case letters.
I also know that if you had a point to make, you'd be making it instead of resorting to ad hominem attacks.
Nader's support in Florida is a little over 90,000 votes. The margin of Bush's (apparent victory) is likely to be much less than that, probably less than 5000.
As a result, Nader denied Gore victory, and the democrats who warned of this outcome were right.
Here's a hint for you: I am not obligated to support Gore; he's the one obligated to support me. That's how voting is supposed to work.
To mangle the Mel Gibson speech from Braveheart, we do not exist to provide the two big parties with power; they exist to provide us with freedom. If the Democrats and Republicans aren't going to support my desires for the direction of this country, I refuse to vote for them any more.
We do elect the president....in a indirect sort of way. We vote which electors we want to elect our candidate.
But only in a couple of states are the electors required to follow the mandate set forth by the people who elected them.
Think of this; if Bush wins Florida, he ends up with 271 electoral votes and wins the election. But all it takes is for two or three of those votes to jump ship and Gore is president -- which would be fitting, given that Gore is (at the time of this writing) ahead in the popular vote.
Now there's an interesting paradox:
Electors vote they way they're pledged, to and we get a president who did not get the majority of the popular vote. "Democracy" is subverted.
A couple of Bush's potential electors vote for Gore instead, Gore becomes president, but the people who voted for those electors are cheated. "Democracy" is subverted yet again?
I am sickened by all the people claiming that Nader is a spoiler, or that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush. I, myself, voted for Nader on the principle that both "Major" candidates consider themselves entitled to votes that go to 3rd party candidates.
Amen. It was Gore's bad luck that the ad I heard said, in effect, "OK, you can make a statement with your vote and choose a third-party candidate, but let's face it; only two people are likely to become President, and as for George W. Bush, [insert various 'he's the Anti-Christ and will devour your young' statements here], so cast your vote for Al Gore".
So instead of voting for the lesser of the two big evils, I voted for Nader. Sorry, Al, you screwed yourself on that one.
Maybe if Gore does lose they can spend the next four years figuring out why they lost so much support to a third party candidate...
"Denial of service", for the curious, happens when an attacker ties up a system, typically by flooding it with invalid requests or otherwise tying up resources, to make it unusable.
A valid point in deed. But the fact that an upgrade of some program has now become available in the unstable developer branch of some linux-distribution doesn't really strike me as a story.
Then go to your preferences and make sure that "Debian" is selected for exclusion from the homepage. Voila; no more stories about Debian, "unstable developer release" or otherwise.
And for the record, "unstable developer branch" doesn't adequately describe what woody (2.3) is; Debian doesn't follow kernel-style numbering.
It's rare that one finds an item on Napster that they couldn't find from a friend they already have.
Unless you don't have a lot of friends that trade mp3s, or aren't fans of the same bands/artists that you are.
The only reason I finally fired up Gnapster was because it occurred to me that I could find a couple of oddball songs by one of my favorite bands, Moxy Fruvous -- specifically a song they did on their demo tape which used the words to Dr. Suess' "Green Eggs and Ham". Apparently the good doctor (or his estate) pointed out that he discourages use of his works in certain venues, so they haven't distributed any more copies of their demo tape (though they will perform it live on occasion).
But all it took was for one person to rip it to MP3 and voila! It lives forever.
And in the process, I found out that they have not one, but two new albums, because the songs were available on Napster! I've tracked down one of them and am looking for the other one (I guess I'd have to say that yes, Napster does not discourage me from buying CDs) if only so I can re-rip them at better quality (or even ogg-ify them...)
I do. You buy most products outright. With software, you generally buy a (revokable) license to use the product.
No, you buy a physical copy of the installation media for the software, and a piece of paper with a "license agreement" that the company tries to convince you that you've agreed to, under dubious cirucmstances at best.
Contracts (such as, say, licenses) usually provide for a balance of the rights and responsibilities between the licensor and the licensee. That's why both parties have to sign a contract; if either party doesn't like it, they can try to renegotiate or, failing that, refuse to agree and therefore have no claim to the product or service being contracted for. But if you do sign, you know what you're getting yourself into.
Software companies try to tell you that you're accepting terms simply by opening the package, and that they've already signed the agreement by making you the box available to you. (And why shouldn't they sign? They have the deck stacked firmly in their favor!)
And, since you're accepting the terms of a license to a product that you haven't even looked at yet, they're going to tell you that you have no reason to expect any quality or stability from its product and that it doesn't have to work as advertised. Oh, and you can't try to inform the public of your problems with the software, or figure out how it works in case you want to fix it yourself. Oh, and that you can't sell your physical copy of the installation media to someone else if you get fed up with it. Oh, even if you are okay with these restrictions, the company can change or terminate the license unilaterally anyways.
Why would anyone agree to terms like these? This is not an "agreement"; anyone who tries to convince you otherwise doesn't have a very high opinion of you. And why should they? They got you to "sign" an agreement saying they don't have to give you anything more than you've already got, and are laughing all the bank to the bank with your money!
Given that the 99% of the license agreements out there are not printed on the back of the box in big, clear text for everyone to read before you open the box^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hagree to the terms -- gotta have room for all those pretty screenshots of what the software might do once you actually install it -- you're effectively being coerced into the agreement. One might be able to make a case for fraud, as well.
I hope that shrink-wrap licenses do get tested in court and are laughed out of the room. Because anyone who would try to enforce such terms on a piece of hardware certainly would be. (Are you listening, Digital Convergence?)
And you're probably still trying to finish that game as well... That game was @%$#@ IMPOSSIBLE!! Puzzles that had NO clues whatsoever. Bard's tale III was MUCH better...
I finished Bard's Tale III in, like, 5 days using the characters from when I finished Bard's Tale II. Maybe I would have found the game more challenging if I'd used new characters, but even then the final battle at the end was so anticlimatic it wasn't even funny -- the thief sneaks up behind Tarjan, critically-hits him with the miserichord, then I spent the next hour killing off all of the death paladins Tarjan summoned -- the rest of my party never survived, only the thief.
As for Bard's Tale II, there were plenty of clues for the puzzles. For the big "real-time" puzzle rooms, the clues were liberally scattered throughout the appropriate dungeon.
(Minor spoiler...)
If you had trouble figuring out how to get the last piece of the destiny wand in the final dungeon, the clues were printed on the back of the rulebook -- a series of pathways formed by arrows that look REALLY familiar if you, say, mapped them out over a room that had a series of ever-changing doors...
I'm not going to point out the reasons why you are an idiot.. however I will say browne is on 49 of 50 states. Pretty damn close I think.
Let me get this straight...
The above poster spends a good deal of time making many, many good points about the failings of the Libertarian Party platform. Failings that cause people who consider themselves libertarians (note the small "L") such as myself --people who want to actually go beyond sales-pitch catchphrases such as "Government doesn't work" and "My first question to nominess for the Supreme Court; 'can you read'?" and find out what a Libertarian presidency will actually try to accomplish should Browne be elected -- to question whether or not they plan to vote Libertarian this year.
And your well-considered and measured response is a two-sentence cheap ad hominem attack?
I really, really hope your reply is not the typical attitude of the Libertarian (note the big "L") voter or party member, because if it is the Libertarian Party will never, ever move beyond being a fringe party, and you'll have only yourselves to blame.
What's the current membership of the party, anyways? 40,000 or so? Kinda fell short of the mark that the LP's Project Archimedes, which boasted of trying to increase membership from 26,000 registered members to a goal of 200,000 "contributing supporters", was trying to reach. According to the LP's own news release in February, Archimedes was falling short of its mark and had only increased contributing supporters by 18,000 to around 39,000 (wait a minute, if you started at 26,000 and added 18,000, shouldn't that be 44,000? Where did 5,000 people go?). And that's counting "contributing supporters", which are distingished from registered party members in some unclear way -- I guess if you're giving the LP money, that's as good as actually supporting their principles.
(The same press release, by the way, claims that the goal of Archimedes is to reach 60,000 members by the end of 2000. Where did the 200,000 number go, I wonder?)
Maybe the LP had trouble generating support because people don't like being called "idiots" when they ask questions about the Party's actual plans for accomplishing its goals and expect more substance than regurgitations of LP press releases and position papers.
And doesn't say much about the LP's stance regarding "initiatory force" if they try to use the "meddlesome" court system to force the state of Arizona to recognize their faction as the "official" ALP, does it? Apparently the courts should keep their hands off of Microsoft, but heaven forbid that Arizona libertarians want someone other than Harry Browne as their presidential candidate!
...I mean, didn't you manage to whine your way into a front-page article on K5 to the effect of...
I recently left slashdot, in part over the moderation system. I thought that now that everything is settled and squared, it would be a good time to do a writeup on what group-think is, how FUD works, and how to be persuasive in any crowd. Click on the widget to read my screed.
Or was that, like just about everything else you seem to write, another totally self-serving, manipulative pile of crap meant to cash in on the "Slashdot sucks, we K5 readers are more intelligent than that" mentality?
Oh wait, never mind. If you read his user profile he's apparently letting anyone use his account for karma whoring and trolling.
Either that or it's his excuse for ending his pretense at "groupthink experimentation" and going back to being a shamelss karma whore / troll... argh, I've spent too much time thinking about this already...
1961 - Joe Quimby Sr. mysteriously disappears. His body is found a decade later, marooned in a sand trap in the back nine.
and then...
1978 - Joe Quimby reluctantly graduates from college, after his father threatens to take away his girlfriend.
I guess that Joe Quimby Sr. was a very influential man.
And who says that Joe Sr. is actually Joe Jr.'s dad?
1950 - On February 9, Joe Jr. "Joe-Joe" is born, his father's first legitimate child. Joe Sr. also has children with Agnes Moorehead and, later, with all of his son's nannies.
What, you're going to believe a politician's web site?
You forget... They can't pay a machine to say what they want.
But Microsoft took a wild stab at it. "Look! This video shows that the machine that had Internet Explorer removed is suffering a marked degradation in performance..."
Personally, I didn't bother with the upgrade-to-RH7-gasp-its-broken-time-to-switch cycle. Before I got around to buying Red Hat 7 (Fry's was out of copies, no high-bandwidth connection to download ISOs yet) I ordered Potato disks from CheapBytes.
It took about a week to get everything up to the point where it's running as it was before (and I anxiously await 'official' XFree4 packages so I can have decent 3D with my Diamond Viper 770) but I like it a lot. When I finally shell out for DSL, I can tell apt-get upgrade is going to be my best friend...
Then I suggest that Slashdot starts covering other countries' national politics as well,
I think that's a great idea, personally. Maybe Slashdot could look at hiring editors (or at least giving story-posting privileges to a user or two) from Australia, Europe, Japan, etc.?
Part of the problem would be, we'd need international stories that are covered on English-language sites, for us ugly Americans whose second langauges look better compiled than spoken -- but then again, there's always the fish, or the occasional helpful/. reader...
As for "174 little "Kazakhstan" and "Micronesia" customization boxes in Preferences;", start out a little more general;
* Europe
* China
* Japan
* Australia
* International (to cover "those other places", until they warrant a box of their own)
Everyone complains that most Americans don't care what happens outside of their own borders. Here's a chance to change that, at least as far as "geek stories" are concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
You have to hand it to MS, at the university that I attend, they gave free copies of Visual Studio to every student in the intro level cs courses. It's no skin off of their back, because we would have probably all just pirated it and it got a lot of us hooked on them quite quickly.
Either that or the cost of Visual Studio is included as part of your tuition.
God, I wish I could find the link that was posted here about students from some schools finding out the costs of their "free" MS Office CDs was in fact buried in their tuition bill. (In other words, if you didn't take the "free" CD you paid for it anyways!)
Jay (=
I can see it now!
"This is a great compilation disc! What's it called?"
[Showing the hard drive] "'The Eighties'..."
Jay (=
Did anyone else notice that on the "disputed" ballot from Florida, one of the people running for president (in the "Workers World" party) is named Monica Moorehead?
Yes, but she's not a gag reference to Lewinsky, if that's what you're implying -- I remember her being in the '96 election as well.
I watched a "third-party candidate debate" and she and the Worker's World party crashed it, claiming that the media was trying to suppress their voice. No, I'm not kidding...
Jay (=
... is available at OregonLive.com.
For people uninterested in following the link, the standing at the the of the story are:
Gore: 662,155 votes
Bush: 658,153 votes
Nader: 68,255 votes
Jay (=
I've heard that Oregon has 100% of their polling handled by the USPS (snail mail) this year.
They're probably waiting 3-10 days for all the ballots postmarked November 7 to arrive.
Nope, we don't throw them in the mail on November 7; most of the old voting precincts (libraries, etc.) had special drop-off booths set up so people could drop their votes off.
There may be a few votes that were mailed, say, Friday or Saturday that are caught in transit, but after that everyone waited until the 7th.
I remember hearing Dan Rather commenting how _fast_ oregon would be called this year.
Well it would have if so many people didn't wait until the last minute to vote. They got far more votes at the last minute then they expected.
Jay (=
well then, its a damn good thing that we arent a pure democracy otherwise we would have been screwed.
So you think that the people's choice should not hold any weight simply because it's a candidate you dislike? Would you be saying the same thing if it was your candidate that had the popular vote but got screwed by the college?
if you payed more attention in your history class you would know why the electoral college exists.
I know why the electoral college exists. I also know how to spell "paid". I also know that you're not likely to be e.e. cummings, so you don't get to get away with using all lower-case letters.
I also know that if you had a point to make, you'd be making it instead of resorting to ad hominem attacks.
Jay (=
Ridiculous. Add it up.
Nader's support in Florida is a little over 90,000 votes. The margin of Bush's (apparent victory) is likely to be much less than that, probably less than 5000.
As a result, Nader denied Gore victory, and the democrats who warned of this outcome were right.
Here's a hint for you: I am not obligated to support Gore; he's the one obligated to support me. That's how voting is supposed to work.
To mangle the Mel Gibson speech from Braveheart, we do not exist to provide the two big parties with power; they exist to provide us with freedom. If the Democrats and Republicans aren't going to support my desires for the direction of this country, I refuse to vote for them any more.
Read Michael Moore's open letter to Al Gore about why he supported Nader. There are probably a lot of people who voted for Nader who feel the same way.
Jay (=
I think the media's refusal to cover the Libertarians shows who they (the media) consider to be the real threat to the status quo they are part of.
You'll only convince me of that if Browne ended up pulling more popular votes than Buchanan.
Jay (=
But only in a couple of states are the electors required to follow the mandate set forth by the people who elected them.
Think of this; if Bush wins Florida, he ends up with 271 electoral votes and wins the election. But all it takes is for two or three of those votes to jump ship and Gore is president -- which would be fitting, given that Gore is (at the time of this writing) ahead in the popular vote.
Now there's an interesting paradox:
Jay (=
I am sickened by all the people claiming that Nader is a spoiler, or that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush. I, myself, voted for Nader on the principle that both "Major" candidates consider themselves entitled to votes that go to 3rd party candidates.
Amen. It was Gore's bad luck that the ad I heard said, in effect, "OK, you can make a statement with your vote and choose a third-party candidate, but let's face it; only two people are likely to become President, and as for George W. Bush, [insert various 'he's the Anti-Christ and will devour your young' statements here], so cast your vote for Al Gore".
So instead of voting for the lesser of the two big evils, I voted for Nader. Sorry, Al, you screwed yourself on that one.
Maybe if Gore does lose they can spend the next four years figuring out why they lost so much support to a third party candidate...
Jay (=
As it says in the topic.
"Denial of service", for the curious, happens when an attacker ties up a system, typically by flooding it with invalid requests or otherwise tying up resources, to make it unusable.
Jay (=
A valid point in deed. But the fact that an upgrade of some program has now become available in the unstable developer branch of some linux-distribution doesn't really strike me as a story.
Then go to your preferences and make sure that "Debian" is selected for exclusion from the homepage. Voila; no more stories about Debian, "unstable developer release" or otherwise.
And for the record, "unstable developer branch" doesn't adequately describe what woody (2.3) is; Debian doesn't follow kernel-style numbering.
Jay (=
It's rare that one finds an item on Napster that they couldn't find from a friend they already have.
Unless you don't have a lot of friends that trade mp3s, or aren't fans of the same bands/artists that you are.
The only reason I finally fired up Gnapster was because it occurred to me that I could find a couple of oddball songs by one of my favorite bands, Moxy Fruvous -- specifically a song they did on their demo tape which used the words to Dr. Suess' "Green Eggs and Ham". Apparently the good doctor (or his estate) pointed out that he discourages use of his works in certain venues, so they haven't distributed any more copies of their demo tape (though they will perform it live on occasion).
But all it took was for one person to rip it to MP3 and voila! It lives forever.
And in the process, I found out that they have not one, but two new albums, because the songs were available on Napster! I've tracked down one of them and am looking for the other one (I guess I'd have to say that yes, Napster does not discourage me from buying CDs) if only so I can re-rip them at better quality (or even ogg-ify them...)
Jay (=
We must demand the source code for every actor!
Oh, God help us if Natalie Portman ever makes a guest appearance...
Jay (=
I do. You buy most products outright. With software, you generally buy a (revokable) license to use the product.
No, you buy a physical copy of the installation media for the software, and a piece of paper with a "license agreement" that the company tries to convince you that you've agreed to, under dubious cirucmstances at best.
Contracts (such as, say, licenses) usually provide for a balance of the rights and responsibilities between the licensor and the licensee. That's why both parties have to sign a contract; if either party doesn't like it, they can try to renegotiate or, failing that, refuse to agree and therefore have no claim to the product or service being contracted for. But if you do sign, you know what you're getting yourself into.
Software companies try to tell you that you're accepting terms simply by opening the package, and that they've already signed the agreement by making you the box available to you. (And why shouldn't they sign? They have the deck stacked firmly in their favor!)
And, since you're accepting the terms of a license to a product that you haven't even looked at yet, they're going to tell you that you have no reason to expect any quality or stability from its product and that it doesn't have to work as advertised. Oh, and you can't try to inform the public of your problems with the software, or figure out how it works in case you want to fix it yourself. Oh, and that you can't sell your physical copy of the installation media to someone else if you get fed up with it. Oh, even if you are okay with these restrictions, the company can change or terminate the license unilaterally anyways.
Why would anyone agree to terms like these? This is not an "agreement"; anyone who tries to convince you otherwise doesn't have a very high opinion of you. And why should they? They got you to "sign" an agreement saying they don't have to give you anything more than you've already got, and are laughing all the bank to the bank with your money!
Given that the 99% of the license agreements out there are not printed on the back of the box in big, clear text for everyone to read before you open the box^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hagree to the terms -- gotta have room for all those pretty screenshots of what the software might do once you actually install it -- you're effectively being coerced into the agreement. One might be able to make a case for fraud, as well.
I hope that shrink-wrap licenses do get tested in court and are laughed out of the room. Because anyone who would try to enforce such terms on a piece of hardware certainly would be. (Are you listening, Digital Convergence?)
Jay (=
And you're probably still trying to finish that game as well... That game was @%$#@ IMPOSSIBLE!! Puzzles that had NO clues whatsoever. Bard's tale III was MUCH better...
I finished Bard's Tale III in, like, 5 days using the characters from when I finished Bard's Tale II. Maybe I would have found the game more challenging if I'd used new characters, but even then the final battle at the end was so anticlimatic it wasn't even funny -- the thief sneaks up behind Tarjan, critically-hits him with the miserichord, then I spent the next hour killing off all of the death paladins Tarjan summoned -- the rest of my party never survived, only the thief.
As for Bard's Tale II, there were plenty of clues for the puzzles. For the big "real-time" puzzle rooms, the clues were liberally scattered throughout the appropriate dungeon.
(Minor spoiler...)
If you had trouble figuring out how to get the last piece of the destiny wand in the final dungeon, the clues were printed on the back of the rulebook -- a series of pathways formed by arrows that look REALLY familiar if you, say, mapped them out over a room that had a series of ever-changing doors...
Jay (=
I'm not going to point out the reasons why you are an idiot.. however I will say browne is on 49 of 50 states. Pretty damn close I think.
Let me get this straight...
The above poster spends a good deal of time making many, many good points about the failings of the Libertarian Party platform. Failings that cause people who consider themselves libertarians (note the small "L") such as myself --people who want to actually go beyond sales-pitch catchphrases such as "Government doesn't work" and "My first question to nominess for the Supreme Court; 'can you read'?" and find out what a Libertarian presidency will actually try to accomplish should Browne be elected -- to question whether or not they plan to vote Libertarian this year.
And your well-considered and measured response is a two-sentence cheap ad hominem attack?
I really, really hope your reply is not the typical attitude of the Libertarian (note the big "L") voter or party member, because if it is the Libertarian Party will never, ever move beyond being a fringe party, and you'll have only yourselves to blame.
What's the current membership of the party, anyways? 40,000 or so? Kinda fell short of the mark that the LP's Project Archimedes, which boasted of trying to increase membership from 26,000 registered members to a goal of 200,000 "contributing supporters", was trying to reach. According to the LP's own news release in February, Archimedes was falling short of its mark and had only increased contributing supporters by 18,000 to around 39,000 (wait a minute, if you started at 26,000 and added 18,000, shouldn't that be 44,000? Where did 5,000 people go?). And that's counting "contributing supporters", which are distingished from registered party members in some unclear way -- I guess if you're giving the LP money, that's as good as actually supporting their principles.
(The same press release, by the way, claims that the goal of Archimedes is to reach 60,000 members by the end of 2000. Where did the 200,000 number go, I wonder?)
Maybe the LP had trouble generating support because people don't like being called "idiots" when they ask questions about the Party's actual plans for accomplishing its goals and expect more substance than regurgitations of LP press releases and position papers.
As for why your candidate isn't on the ballot in all 50 states, why is it that the Arizona Libertarian Party has split into two separate parties, with the party faction sponsored by the national Libertarian Party suing the Arizona Libertarian Party for the right to be the "official" LP of Arizona? And unsuccessfully, at that; the ALP is still the official party, and is endorsing their own candidate, L. Neil Smith, as the Libertarian candidate for President. (There's a thought; maybe the LP should fracture even further, and have 50 LPs each offering their own presidential candidates? The [Ll]ibertarian voters can write in the candidate that they feel is best...)
And doesn't say much about the LP's stance regarding "initiatory force" if they try to use the "meddlesome" court system to force the state of Arizona to recognize their faction as the "official" ALP, does it? Apparently the courts should keep their hands off of Microsoft, but heaven forbid that Arizona libertarians want someone other than Harry Browne as their presidential candidate!
Jay (=
Or was that, like just about everything else you seem to write, another totally self-serving, manipulative pile of crap meant to cash in on the "Slashdot sucks, we K5 readers are more intelligent than that" mentality?
Oh wait, never mind. If you read his user profile he's apparently letting anyone use his account for karma whoring and trolling.
Either that or it's his excuse for ending his pretense at "groupthink experimentation" and going back to being a shamelss karma whore / troll... argh, I've spent too much time thinking about this already...
Jay (=
Jay (=
I did.
There's a guy saying "Hmmh, hmmh." and hanging up.
Weird.
Jay (=
This is my new desktop wallpaper on my NT terminal at work!
Jay (=
and then...
1978 - Joe Quimby reluctantly graduates from college, after his father threatens to take away his girlfriend.
I guess that Joe Quimby Sr. was a very influential man.
And who says that Joe Sr. is actually Joe Jr.'s dad?
What, you're going to believe a politician's web site?
Jay (=
You forget... They can't pay a machine to say what they want.
But Microsoft took a wild stab at it. "Look! This video shows that the machine that had Internet Explorer removed is suffering a marked degradation in performance..."
Jay (=
Personally, I didn't bother with the upgrade-to-RH7-gasp-its-broken-time-to-switch cycle. Before I got around to buying Red Hat 7 (Fry's was out of copies, no high-bandwidth connection to download ISOs yet) I ordered Potato disks from CheapBytes.
It took about a week to get everything up to the point where it's running as it was before (and I anxiously await 'official' XFree4 packages so I can have decent 3D with my Diamond Viper 770) but I like it a lot. When I finally shell out for DSL, I can tell apt-get upgrade is going to be my best friend...
Jay (=
Then I suggest that Slashdot starts covering other countries' national politics as well,
/. reader...
I think that's a great idea, personally. Maybe Slashdot could look at hiring editors (or at least giving story-posting privileges to a user or two) from Australia, Europe, Japan, etc.?
Part of the problem would be, we'd need international stories that are covered on English-language sites, for us ugly Americans whose second langauges look better compiled than spoken -- but then again, there's always the fish, or the occasional helpful
As for "174 little "Kazakhstan" and "Micronesia" customization boxes in Preferences;", start out a little more general;
* Europe
* China
* Japan
* Australia
* International (to cover "those other places", until they warrant a box of their own)
Everyone complains that most Americans don't care what happens outside of their own borders. Here's a chance to change that, at least as far as "geek stories" are concerned.
Jay (=