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User: ConceptJunkie

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  1. Re:Do they prosecute the existing laws? on FCC Opens Flood Gates for Junk Faxes · · Score: 1

    More than a fraction of a second delay after saying "Hello" before someone responds is, in my experience, about 95% likely for the person on the other end to be a telemarketer (who are more and more often from overseas now, so not only are they annoying, but hard to understand... I have to resist the temptation to immediately hang up on someone with a foreign accent).

    Therefore, not saying hello twice helps me to avoid most cold calls (if I do pick up the phone which itself is a rare event), and if the call was legitimate, the person will call back anyway. It works well and has never been a problem.

  2. Re:Tool - Lateralus on Fibs - Fibonacci-based Poetry · · Score: 1

    I know a lot of people who are very musically literate, and among them, Tool is mentioned often. I'm not familiar with them myself, but just because you can appreciate driving a Lambhorgini doesn't mean you can't enjoy driving an Acura.

    From what I understand, Tool is head-and-shoulders above most rock music (not that that's very hard).

  3. Re:So, lemme get this straight on Republicans Defeat Net Neutrality Proposal · · Score: 1

    I tihnk you have forgotten that corporations happen to be (legally) the richest, most powerful people in the country. Otherwise, I agree with you.

  4. Re:Why isn't Bill Reading Slashdot? on How Bill Gates Works · · Score: 1

    Naah, I'd rather see a BSOD.

  5. Totally lame... on New 25x Data Compression? · · Score: 1

    Obviously nothing concrete or released yet so take with the requisite grain of salt.

    Come on, editors. There are people who believe the world is flat and stars are little candles in the air who are shaking their heads in disbelief over this article.

    No Digg!!!

  6. Nope. on Buy PC Without an OS... Get a Visit From MSFT? · · Score: 1

    No monopoly here. No, sir.

  7. Re:wow, more echoes from the past on Microsoft Providing Virtual Server Free · · Score: 1

    I believe that most politicians can distinguish between free as in speach and free as in heroine

    Yeah, Wonder Woman has a golden lasso.

    The fact that vista may incorporate an anti-virus function that threatrens to kill off yet another U.S. tech sector

    If MS suddenly started writing secure software that would threaten to kill off yet another U.S. tech sector too. Is _that_ also monopolistic behavior?

  8. Re:Maybe that's where the good writing went on The Simpson's Movie Confirmed · · Score: 1

    Too often the jokes are merely silly and almost random,

    Actually, I'm findinf the show to be more and more predictable in the past season or two. The first 3 or 4 times they used the Crazy Cat Lady as a gag it qwas funny. Now it's just sad.

  9. Re:Obligatory- on Neutrino Mass Confirmed · · Score: 1

    They're not too devout about it. It's mostly an Easter and Christmas thing. Now the top quarks, on the other hand...

  10. Re:There shoud be plenty of opportunity to film th on New Plans From Lucasfilm · · Score: 1

    I hear he does a cameo in "Dooku Does Dagobah".

  11. Re:Down with big government! on Pork Barrel Tech Projects On The Rise · · Score: 1

    Also, they don't need to win, they only need 5-10% to make the other major parties take notice and start moving the debate from how quickly to grow the government to whether the government should grow or shrink.

    As much as I'd like to believe you, 5-10% of the vote would cause the Demolicans and Republicrats to rig the system so it's even more hostile to third party candidates. Look what they did to Nader. I mean, I think Nader's a kook and only ran because he's an egomaniac, but I was still really ticked off at how they shut him out.

    Bust up the Duopoly!

  12. Re:Good Riddance on MS Gives 60-Day Deadline to Web Devs · · Score: 1

    Best to declare you are like Switzerland- neutral

    Better to declare you are Germany, ambitious and misunderstood!

  13. Re:Slashdot bias on Diebold Threatens Wary Voting Clerk · · Score: 1

    You've got a good point, but it would be more effective if your userid were spelled correctly.

  14. Re:That and... on Why Windows is Slow · · Score: 1

    "triumpherant"

    What a cool word. Sounds like something Steve Ballmer would do if Vista is a big success.

    I think the word you are looking for is "triumvirate".

  15. Re:The old guard passes away... on Stanislaw Lem Dies in Krakow · · Score: 1

    I couldn't decide whether to mod your post down as a troll or mod it up as a great piece of schizophrenic conspiracy ranting.

    My sarcasm meter and BS detectors both blew their circuit breakers.

  16. Re:How edifying on The Beatles, Apple, and iTunes · · Score: 1

    I wish he could (or would) buy the rights to his music back. Who knows what Freak Man will do with them once he gets more desperate for money.

  17. Re:the answer of life? on 42 *IS* The answer to Life, the Universe and Zeta · · Score: 1

    Uh, oh. I'm not quite 41. Don't tell my wife and 4 kids.

  18. Re:How edifying on The Beatles, Apple, and iTunes · · Score: 1

    I seriously doubt that McCartney is a billionaire, and I know Ringo makes a modest income from his royalties (modest for a rock star anyways, better than I make).

    Still at least they did it without riding on the coattails of a monopoly.

  19. Re:Let me be the first to say it... on Bring Home the Biotech Bacon · · Score: 1

    It was a joke, lighten up. If the Good Lord didn't want us to laugh once in a while, then why did He give us a sense of humor?

    (or for /. I could say: "...then why does He allow Microsoft to exist")

  20. Re:Yeah, I'm running on First Steps Toward Artificial Gravity · · Score: 1

    I wanna know when we can have Freddy vs. Pinhead, Predator vs. Pinhead

    Zippy would win, hands down.

  21. Re:Please Don't Interpret this Incorrectly on 60% Of Windows Vista Code To Be Rewritten · · Score: 1

    Without trying to sound like a reactionary ./ MS hater (after all, I developed on Windows for 15 years, and often liked it, and I still use Windows primarily), they've been working on Longhorn for _how_ many years and they say they have to rewrite 2/3 of it a year before it's supposed to ship?

    This begs 3 questions:

    1. What have they been doing for the last 4 years? I understand that Vista has some significant architecture changes (and improvements), but 60% of tens of millions of lines of code is a massive amount of work!

    2. What decade will it ship?

    3. When it does ship, how many features of The MacOS and Linux will it immediately have to start playing catch-up on? I think the biggest problem with MS is that a lot of the work they are doing is to fix security and saturate the OS with DRM. While the first is important, the second does not add any value to users, and neither gives us functionality we don't already have.

    In other words, the only selling point of Vista will be the flaws of XP, and at the end of the day, I really don't have problems with XP.

  22. Re:imminent scientist? on Rewriting Environmental Science · · Score: 1

    Thank you. I actually don't recall it being that far ahead of the election, so thanks for correcting me. Nonetheless, the story was in fact part of the ANG investigation. I'll agree Bush probably got preferential treatment. By his own admission, he did some really dumb things when he young. Most of us do at some point. But CBS comported itself in a very unprofessional way... and it's far from the first time. There was this little thing about Dan Rather pushing a huge story in the 80's about a Vietnam vet who, it turned out, was making almost everything up. These days, we hear on a weekly basis about how major news outlets are being fooled, pranked or otherwise brought to publish false information.

    You know it is possible to conclude that the media is biased without being a lock-step partisan. I also believe the media is portraying the war in a biased way by only showing bad news ("If it bleeds, it leads."), wihtout showing the large-scale, but boring, good things that are going on (building schools and hospitals, people going to work again, businesses being created, no fear of secret police, etc) and constantly harping on polls about how disaffected people are about the war. Of course we don't like the war. War is bad, and this one wasn't executed well (at least after major combat). I'm sick of polls being news, especially since they are abused so severely, and are affected by slanted news reporting in the first place. If polls were any indication of importance or truth or accuracy, horoscopes would be Gospel and Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie would be the most important people in the world. I'm sure you could rig a poll to prove that the majority of Americans worship Satan. It's amazing how slanted questions can be made to draw whatever conclusions the poll's sponsors want.
    I don't care what people think of the war. I want to know what the President is going to do to try to make the situation better. "Stay the course." is a fine motto, but it's not a plan, and "the course" so far has gotten a lot of our men and women killed, but not a lot of progress made in stopping violence. Of course, all the Democrats can say is "We wouldn't have screwed up in the first place.", which is why they lost in 2004 and deserved to. They had that election handed to them on a silver platter and ran the worst campaign since Mondale (and even that's debatable), and it's gone downhill since then. Of course, the Republicans respond to this lack of vision by pretty much throwing away everything they've stood for since the days of Goldwater. Like I said, this is a low point in American politics, which is never very high to begin with (take a look at campaigns in early 19th century... they can make today's negative campaigning look pretty mild).

    Newsweek reported in 2004, that by their editor-in-chief's estimate, slanted media swung the polls 15% away from Bush. Given how close elections have been since the 80's, this is enough to alter the course of history. Far from being a "tool" of the GOP, I want to support changes to the system to break the Duopoly of the Know-Nothing Party and the Do-Nothing Party (assign as you see fit) and get some other organizations in the mix. I think Nader is a kook, but I was outraged at how they treated him when he tried to run. Unless we stir up the pot, half the country* will think the government is corrupt and the other half will blindly agree with what it says, and periodically they will change sides. Eurasia today. Eastasia tomorrow. Blah blah blah.

    * The part of the country that doesn't pay much attention to what's going on, which I think is a lot of people. Most of the rest of us think they are _all_ corrupt.

  23. Re:Horrible. on CBS Coming to the Produce Aisle · · Score: 1

    It's coming. Wal-mart now sounds like a Best Buy (used to). And walking in Best Buy now feels like a sensory overload attack in Guantanamo Bay.

    Noise pollution is increasingly rampant, and will cheaper and cheaper electronics, nowhere will be quiet.

  24. Re:You're right on Solving the Home Library Problem? · · Score: 1

    I mostly agree with you. The Constitution isn't flawed, it's just being altered out of all recognition and ultimately it is money, which is synonomous with power that is the _catalyst_ (not the cause) of the corruption. That there is little or no accountability makes the matter worse, and that there is little or no actual _choice_ in the voting booth guarantees the system stays that way. 90% of the people we can vote for (and 99% percent of the people who could actually win) are all part of the clique that wants to (amd cam) maintain the status quo.

  25. Re:imminent scientist? on Rewriting Environmental Science · · Score: 1

    Yes, but this isn't about Bush. This (my original post) is about a so-called journalist who felt it was more important to try to swing an election than get the story documented correctly. (And this is far from the first time where the veracity of his reporting seemed to take a back seat to the politics of his reporting.) It's not like this was breaking news. It's not like we all didn't know that Bush did a bunch of questionable and even bad things when he was young. Show me a national political figure who didn't take unfair advantage of his social and economic status at one point or another. (Well, not John McCain... there are a few).

    In fact, the only reason the topic was so hot is that John Kerry emphasized his service in Vietnam to the almost total exclusion of his 20-some years in the Senate. He tried to make this an election based on their resumes as of about 1972, apparently because on the balance, he comes off a lot better. I think it's great he served, but what has he done lately? All he seemed to be able to come up with was "I'm not Bush." I think it's awful that Bush pulled strings and got away with crap. I did a lot of things 35 years I'm not proud of (like peeing with the seat down... I was 5), but it was proper to judge him on his first-term performance and not so much on things that happened before half the voting population was born. No one seems to have a problem electing in perpetuity Mr. KKK Byrd, or Mr. Swimming Coach Kennedy, and being a member of a hate group or trying to cover up an accidental(?) death are a little more serious than doing a lousy job in the military. But that's just my opinion.