No Correlation has been shown! Just because I put a fire underneath ice and it melts doesn't mean fire melts ice. Ice will melt in the air too. And in water.
See? Anything could be causing the ice to melt
1. Determine that prisoner is Jew 2. Determine if Jew is still worthwhile for forced labor 3. Determine if Jew is attractive enough for rape 4. Determine if new shipment of Jews is coming in and room needs to be made 5. Determine if Jew will make a delicious stew 6. If Ammunition is Low, Kill Jew with Bayonet or strangling 7. Otherwise, use low-caliber ammunition at close range. Try to kill multiple jews with single shot to conserve ammo
Just because it's a regulation doesn't make it right.
Mass tackle a guy for asking a question? Really?
You will do what the uniform says you should do.
You will do what the uniform says you should do.
You will do what the uniform says you should do.
You will do what the uniform says you should do.
You will do what the uniform says you should do.
You will do what the uniform says you should do.
Good boy.
Let me ask a question. If you have a mass group of uniformed security forces armed with guns, tasers, and mace, try to lead you away in a politically charged event, what does that say?
Does it say that you are just trying to enforce the rules of questioning, or does it say you are using jackboot thugs to control information and thought processes?
FUCK THIS POLICE STATE BULLSHIT.
After decades of atrocious anticompetitive behavior that programmers and users are negatively impacted on a daily/hourly/minutely basis, Microsoft deserves absolutely no slack.
On THIS SPECIFIC DEBATE they have shown willingness to bribe and undermine legitimate voting efforts with the bribery of the ?Swedish? delegation. Therefore, they already have no credibility, and have proven that this is a dangerous trojan horse standard. Their actions and internal correspondence leaked to the internet has demonstrated it further.
To apply a "throwing mud" analogy at critiques of a 6,000 page standard is fundamentally disingenuous. The criticisms will be from people of varied backgrounds and limited knowledge of the various areas, either word processing experts, XML experts, or spreadsheet experts. I have read several criticisms, some were a little weak, but they did fundamentally show that the Microsoft Office applications didn't respond to basic, natural changes to an XML file it exported, with little or no specification in the standard as to why it was.
This means that the standard is a hollow shell, and the actual, functional standard is determined and hidden in the binaries and application behaviors of Office's closed source programs. No "standard" can exist in such a situation.
Thank you for the invective at the end. Hang on, I need to look up a proper response....oh, here it is: you have a little penis.
Um, maybe because public employees are being forced to donate labor toward a private company the university president has glaring conflict-of-interest ties with?
I heard a lot of Windows code was ripped off from BSD. And who knows what else they ripped off in their applications. Does Microsoft REALLY want light shed on the nature of its competitor's source code if that implies countersuits can be filed that would require Microsoft to reveal its source code?
This is a battle Microsoft doesn't want to fight. That's why it uses SCO as a small fall guy. If it directly chases Linux, it will get burned so badly in court. A court case against Linux would be such a major legal event that it would bring the software patent system into question, and closed-source companies don't want that either. Because there are so many examples of negative consequences of the patent process in the US that it risks complete destruction of the system.
Legal experts for linux should prepare themselves for an all-out war on Microsoft that will kill them. And like others are pointing out, they can't kill Linux. Not internationally, and probably not domestically in the US.
hundreds of millions of people will die from flooding, storms, drought, starvation, loss of freshwater, topsoil erosion, disease, and pestilence that will lose jobs from economic controls.
If anything, cleaner power generation will require more people since it must be distributed across geography as well as methods, rather than the huge wealth concentration that results from power coming largely from one source: oil. Monetary distribution in this manner generally coincides with a perception of a more wealthy economy. Also, since many many different strategies from biological, chemical, geological, hydrological, and nuclear must be pursued, the broad base of research investment is more likely to yeild a range of useful associated technologies, rather than the current technologies which have matured and played out.
I wouldn't doubt that economic equations can show that concentrated oil results in a larger overall amount of money, say 1 quintillion dollars, but if it's concentrated 95% with a select few and quibbles for the rest, while 1/2 quintillion dollars is distributed more evenly, I think the vast vast majority of people will do better with that. So I dispute that carbon emission restrictions will harm the proverbial, hackneyed "average joe".
After a while, the fallacy of South Park becomes apparent: they make fun of anyone that believes in anything or takes a stand for anything
So eventually, you have to conclude that the political tenor or the show is to believe in nothing. Except watching TV. And doing nothing.
In an ideal world sarcasm is humor to paint ones path through the world. In high school mentality, it is an illusion of airs of superiority maintained by denigrating everything that is not you.
It's a four headed beast feeding on the trough in medical care.
You already mentioned doctors, with the AMA and medical schools restricting supply. This gets even worse in specialties. Actual plain doctors aren't making nearly as much as they used to, but the specialists are raking in a lot still.
Drugs companies are a primary culprit. It is no coincidence that this is the most profitable sector (percentage wise) of them all, I think they average a 10-20% profit. Combine that with the ugly fact that 40-80% of drug company expenditures are advertising, and, well, that becomes a lot of money/cost real fast.
Lawyers. Malpractice insurance exists because of these guys, and it is expensive. Part of the problem is the doctors and their old boys network that protects the incompetent. But most of this is greedy lawyers.
Finally, the insurance guys. They only make a 4-8% profit under most circumstances, but the merits of economic competition producing a more efficient management infrastructure isn't very true here. First off, most insurance companies have merged and scaled up so that there is an effective cartel in action. Second, they get most of their revenues from the government, so their goal isn't to be efficient with the government, their goal is to be efficient at getting the government to give them money. Exactly like how Enron assfucked California for 3-6 months.
I suppose you could add the government itself to this equation. After all, it takes your tax dollars and imposes a huge administrative clusterfuck on the world. But being antigovernment in this case isn't constructive, just like water and electricity are regulated utilities (again, look at what happened with Enron and the California deregulation to see how utilities are best kept regulated pseudo-governmental entities).
I would be remiss to omit the steady aging of the most self-centered generation of all time: the Baby Boomers, who partied, drugged, fucked, and consumed with no restraint in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, and now expect us to clean up the mess. A big Fuck You to those people.
Whenever any debate about health care comes up, each of these point to the other ones as the culprit. Since stupid Americans can't figure out that all of these are the problem, they just get frustrated and tolerate the current shitty system.
I'm not 100% certain on this, but as I understand it, when the IPCC did it's initial scenarios on the temperature rise, it obviously predicted a range of values from low to high for temperature rise.
Then five years or so went by and the results were the worst-case scenario, so IPCC has to upwards-revise its future predictions. This is the temperature change that has already happened. So the tendency in models may be to assume the high end, since that is what has already occurred.
I have not run this option, but most people indicate that Windows is totally built around assuming there's a swapfile, and doesn't properly handle not having a swap file in an optimized manner. Enough seemingly-smart people have indicated this that I don't do it.
I think most people's issues with this is that there aren't a lot of good options in windows. Either you deal with their crappy swapping decision algorithms, or you go without swap in an OS that has assumed swap has been there for about a decade.
Sure when you had 128MB of ram, and you had a 256MB swap.
But dude, my next box will have two GIGABYTES of RAM!
Every one of your usage options assumes you'll run out of physical ram. Maybe if the OS is wasting it on pointless disk caching, but don't you think the programs in memory should have priority over blind disk caching?
Lest a foolish reader believe your two options (swap immediately, or swap as lazily/late as you can) are the only two possibilities, how about swapping when, say, only 20% of physical RAM is left? That way my Firefox and Eclipse don't swap to disk and take twenty seconds to swap in when I have 500MB of GODDAMN FREE RAM!
When will you get your due? Why does the world stack itself against you and scorn your creative ways of taking money from investors and lining your pockets?
I cry for your predicament! Worry not, hell hath no wrath like an MBA wronged!
Yeah, wake me up when we go a solid week without gross examples of cronyism, boards not doing their jobs, and investor fraud. Then do it again for a whole year, then we can complain about the "witch hunts". Instead I'm guessing there's a lot more stuff to uncover. In fact, the louder they complain, then the more there is. If they didn't have anything to worry about, well, there'd be nothing to complain about.
There isn't enough leftover McDonalds fryer oil to supply all diesel in America. Most "garage Biodiesel" articles I have seen have been reusing stuff like this, but that doesn't mean that you're actually creating energy in the process, you're actually probably just conserving it.
I think the fundamental engineering problem of BioDiesel and Ethanol are equivalent - how do you get maximum energy concentration and yield from the sun shining on a square mile, and harvest it with a minimum of energy?
He works for the oil industry. I read that summary, which was surprisingly matter of fact as to what the viewpoints were, but it's clear he has a pro-oil viewpoint.
Using precious third world children going hungry as an argument against using corn as fuel? Wow that's stupid, didn't we just have a World Trade Summit where the fundamental argument was over first world countries killing third world farming operations with subsidies and the like? There's an oversupply of food in the world, it's politics and war that cause localized starvation conditions, usually by preventing aid supply operations from working properly. In cases of true localized overpopulation, there is no humanitarian solution, feeding over-procreating societies produces even more starving mouths. Plus, from what I've read, from a fundamental standpoint freshwater is the true limiting factor on human populations, not food availabilty.
I find it amusing this oil company shill can't beleive that a carbon tax is politically impossible. The lobbying of his industry is primarily responsible for this via fake research, extensive funding of pro-industry Republicans (and some Dems where needed), funding of environmentally hostile, anti-regulation, anti-taxation, radical free market think tanks, and right-wing media like Fox News, right-wing "commentators", and many others.
And please people, stop arguing as if corn is the only ethanol production potential. The reason it is the primary game today is the political bullshit known as agriculture subsidies, which the Republicans are now the staunchest supporters of (they own the breadbasket, so screw laissez-faire principles, bring on the subsidies). I'm no true expert, but every crop from soybeans to sugar shows substantive improvements over corn in ethanol yield. True scientific muscle hasn't been exerted on this yet.
One of the things I was looking forward too as gas/oil prices skyrocketing was a decrease in offshore manufacturing. Economics and exploitation of slave labor may say that it's cheaper to manufacture something and then send it 2,000 miles over ship rather than manufacture locally, that entire equation depends on cheap oil.
Stuff like this will save oil and carbon outputs, but really just allows the same wasteful economic system. I have mixed emotions.
Ahh, the military will probably ban them b/c it disrupts their radars.
A late-night help desk shift worker once received a wrong number call from a lady complaining that her dog's testicles were grossly enlarged. Rather than tell her it was a wrong number, he proceeded to give advice over the phone, and logged the call on the incident log, with full details of the advice given, namely wash the dog's testicles in warm soapy water, give it some aspirin and see a vet in the morning! This was the only time in my career in which an incident on the incident log was actually deleted - not until I printed off a copy and emailed it to my friends!
- this is clearly a fake
Asking a lady to switch her printer off and on again because it wasn't responding at all. Whereupon she said "it's already off, do I need to switch it on before switching it off and on again?" to which I replied, "no switching something on is normally sufficient to allow it to work". This is not made up or anecdotal, I really had that conversation.
- I've had compaqs back in the day that you couldn't power on again too fast after powering off
- in that same line of thinking, perhaps they wondered if the action of quickly switching off an on from a state where the machine was warm was important
End User: "My Rabbit's Dead." Support: "Sorry to hear that sir, how can I help you though?" End User: "No my rabbit's dead, I can't move the pointer about the screen!" Support "You mean your mouse isn't working?" End User: "Yes, I knew it was some sort of animal!"
- as if the term mouse isn't ridiculous in its own right. There's a ton of terminology in this world, especially since language is so malleable. This doesn't even vaguely seem mockable, he knew how it worked and what was wrong, and he was in the rodent family.
Girl from HR with large chest walks in to department and says "I'm sorry to bother you guys but I really need to get these out!" Talking about her newest pamphlet.
- Officially in the frat house now, that's a lame one.
I know it's been told many times in the past, but I really have had a user ask me, while doing a tutorial: "Which one is the any key?" In fact, he asked me the same question three times in succession when the prompt came up the next time.
- I blame this on bad UI. How many times in the early days would you hit "any key" and it would pop up the same message again? So of course someone would look for another meaning in the word, such as "any". To an uniformed user, what is "alt", "esc", or "tab" supposed to do?
Someone telling me their "broadbean" connection may be down."
- Hahaha, except how many times is a vague concept or unrelated idiom adopted in tech, like say, a mouse. Plus, there are things called J2EE beans, there is netbeans, etc. Or did they actually mean "broadbeam" and the support person misunderstood them?
When we first got the 21" monitors in, and were unpacking them, one of our helpdesk staff (female) was asked to lend a hand, her reply "I can't even handle 17 inches" - at which point there was silence followed by laughter from female/male colleagues and a very embarrassed staff member - her boyfriend worked at the other site and was informed that "he was a very lucky bloke".
- now that's how you do a infantile joke.
Most support stories are just condescendion by those in the know towards an inevitable percentage that don't know. Especially in computers. And practically all of those suck, like the 5.25 drive story or the off/on story. Then again, most support people are at the bottom of the IT totem pole, and like any good participant in hierarchical power structures, looks to the next level down to make them feel better.
Slashdot Mirror
And sasquatch hate them too.
No Correlation has been shown! Just because I put a fire underneath ice and it melts doesn't mean fire melts ice. Ice will melt in the air too. And in water. See? Anything could be causing the ice to melt
You have presented two options as the only ones possible.
You present scorched-earth "no justice" as the alternative of the current "broken" system.
That is false choice. There are reformist or radical reimaginings of the justice system that could be better.
REALLY?
You're #1 priority in the entire fucked up world and laundry list of problems is to legalize Hemp?
That will solve the financial crisis, the energy crisis, the overpopulation crisis, the radicalization of the muslims, the medical care crisis?
Hemp legalization?
Godwin's time - Execution of Jew Authorization:
1. Determine that prisoner is Jew
2. Determine if Jew is still worthwhile for forced labor
3. Determine if Jew is attractive enough for rape
4. Determine if new shipment of Jews is coming in and room needs to be made
5. Determine if Jew will make a delicious stew
6. If Ammunition is Low, Kill Jew with Bayonet or strangling
7. Otherwise, use low-caliber ammunition at close range. Try to kill multiple jews with single shot to conserve ammo
Just because it's a regulation doesn't make it right.
Mass tackle a guy for asking a question? Really? You will do what the uniform says you should do. You will do what the uniform says you should do. You will do what the uniform says you should do. You will do what the uniform says you should do. You will do what the uniform says you should do. You will do what the uniform says you should do. Good boy. Let me ask a question. If you have a mass group of uniformed security forces armed with guns, tasers, and mace, try to lead you away in a politically charged event, what does that say? Does it say that you are just trying to enforce the rules of questioning, or does it say you are using jackboot thugs to control information and thought processes? FUCK THIS POLICE STATE BULLSHIT.
After decades of atrocious anticompetitive behavior that programmers and users are negatively impacted on a daily/hourly/minutely basis, Microsoft deserves absolutely no slack. On THIS SPECIFIC DEBATE they have shown willingness to bribe and undermine legitimate voting efforts with the bribery of the ?Swedish? delegation. Therefore, they already have no credibility, and have proven that this is a dangerous trojan horse standard. Their actions and internal correspondence leaked to the internet has demonstrated it further. To apply a "throwing mud" analogy at critiques of a 6,000 page standard is fundamentally disingenuous. The criticisms will be from people of varied backgrounds and limited knowledge of the various areas, either word processing experts, XML experts, or spreadsheet experts. I have read several criticisms, some were a little weak, but they did fundamentally show that the Microsoft Office applications didn't respond to basic, natural changes to an XML file it exported, with little or no specification in the standard as to why it was. This means that the standard is a hollow shell, and the actual, functional standard is determined and hidden in the binaries and application behaviors of Office's closed source programs. No "standard" can exist in such a situation. Thank you for the invective at the end. Hang on, I need to look up a proper response....oh, here it is: you have a little penis.
Um, maybe because public employees are being forced to donate labor toward a private company the university president has glaring conflict-of-interest ties with?
Other than that...
By their standards Metroid is the originator of nonlinear back and forward movement.
I heard a lot of Windows code was ripped off from BSD. And who knows what else they ripped off in their applications. Does Microsoft REALLY want light shed on the nature of its competitor's source code if that implies countersuits can be filed that would require Microsoft to reveal its source code?
This is a battle Microsoft doesn't want to fight. That's why it uses SCO as a small fall guy. If it directly chases Linux, it will get burned so badly in court. A court case against Linux would be such a major legal event that it would bring the software patent system into question, and closed-source companies don't want that either. Because there are so many examples of negative consequences of the patent process in the US that it risks complete destruction of the system.
Legal experts for linux should prepare themselves for an all-out war on Microsoft that will kill them. And like others are pointing out, they can't kill Linux. Not internationally, and probably not domestically in the US.
hundreds of millions of people will die from flooding, storms, drought, starvation, loss of freshwater, topsoil erosion, disease, and pestilence that will lose jobs from economic controls.
If anything, cleaner power generation will require more people since it must be distributed across geography as well as methods, rather than the huge wealth concentration that results from power coming largely from one source: oil. Monetary distribution in this manner generally coincides with a perception of a more wealthy economy. Also, since many many different strategies from biological, chemical, geological, hydrological, and nuclear must be pursued, the broad base of research investment is more likely to yeild a range of useful associated technologies, rather than the current technologies which have matured and played out.
I wouldn't doubt that economic equations can show that concentrated oil results in a larger overall amount of money, say 1 quintillion dollars, but if it's concentrated 95% with a select few and quibbles for the rest, while 1/2 quintillion dollars is distributed more evenly, I think the vast vast majority of people will do better with that. So I dispute that carbon emission restrictions will harm the proverbial, hackneyed "average joe".
After a while, the fallacy of South Park becomes apparent: they make fun of anyone that believes in anything or takes a stand for anything
So eventually, you have to conclude that the political tenor or the show is to believe in nothing. Except watching TV. And doing nothing.
In an ideal world sarcasm is humor to paint ones path through the world. In high school mentality, it is an illusion of airs of superiority maintained by denigrating everything that is not you.
1996....2006...isn't that 10 years?
Why isn't Ze Frank being picked up? I'm surprised the Daily Show doesn't show his stuff.
It's a four headed beast feeding on the trough in medical care.
You already mentioned doctors, with the AMA and medical schools restricting supply. This gets even worse in specialties. Actual plain doctors aren't making nearly as much as they used to, but the specialists are raking in a lot still.
Drugs companies are a primary culprit. It is no coincidence that this is the most profitable sector (percentage wise) of them all, I think they average a 10-20% profit. Combine that with the ugly fact that 40-80% of drug company expenditures are advertising, and, well, that becomes a lot of money/cost real fast.
Lawyers. Malpractice insurance exists because of these guys, and it is expensive. Part of the problem is the doctors and their old boys network that protects the incompetent. But most of this is greedy lawyers.
Finally, the insurance guys. They only make a 4-8% profit under most circumstances, but the merits of economic competition producing a more efficient management infrastructure isn't very true here. First off, most insurance companies have merged and scaled up so that there is an effective cartel in action. Second, they get most of their revenues from the government, so their goal isn't to be efficient with the government, their goal is to be efficient at getting the government to give them money. Exactly like how Enron assfucked California for 3-6 months.
I suppose you could add the government itself to this equation. After all, it takes your tax dollars and imposes a huge administrative clusterfuck on the world. But being antigovernment in this case isn't constructive, just like water and electricity are regulated utilities (again, look at what happened with Enron and the California deregulation to see how utilities are best kept regulated pseudo-governmental entities).
I would be remiss to omit the steady aging of the most self-centered generation of all time: the Baby Boomers, who partied, drugged, fucked, and consumed with no restraint in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, and now expect us to clean up the mess. A big Fuck You to those people.
Whenever any debate about health care comes up, each of these point to the other ones as the culprit. Since stupid Americans can't figure out that all of these are the problem, they just get frustrated and tolerate the current shitty system.
I'm not 100% certain on this, but as I understand it, when the IPCC did it's initial scenarios on the temperature rise, it obviously predicted a range of values from low to high for temperature rise.
Then five years or so went by and the results were the worst-case scenario, so IPCC has to upwards-revise its future predictions. This is the temperature change that has already happened. So the tendency in models may be to assume the high end, since that is what has already occurred.
Who didn't get the memo? Christ.
BMI and IQ aren't perfect measurements of their stated goal. They at least provide an approximation though.
It is the people who don't think they mean anything at all usually are either fat or stupid.
I have not run this option, but most people indicate that Windows is totally built around assuming there's a swapfile, and doesn't properly handle not having a swap file in an optimized manner. Enough seemingly-smart people have indicated this that I don't do it.
I think most people's issues with this is that there aren't a lot of good options in windows. Either you deal with their crappy swapping decision algorithms, or you go without swap in an OS that has assumed swap has been there for about a decade.
Sure when you had 128MB of ram, and you had a 256MB swap.
But dude, my next box will have two GIGABYTES of RAM!
Every one of your usage options assumes you'll run out of physical ram. Maybe if the OS is wasting it on pointless disk caching, but don't you think the programs in memory should have priority over blind disk caching?
Lest a foolish reader believe your two options (swap immediately, or swap as lazily/late as you can) are the only two possibilities, how about swapping when, say, only 20% of physical RAM is left? That way my Firefox and Eclipse don't swap to disk and take twenty seconds to swap in when I have 500MB of GODDAMN FREE RAM!
When will you get your due? Why does the world stack itself against you and scorn your creative ways of taking money from investors and lining your pockets?
I cry for your predicament! Worry not, hell hath no wrath like an MBA wronged!
Yeah, wake me up when we go a solid week without gross examples of cronyism, boards not doing their jobs, and investor fraud. Then do it again for a whole year, then we can complain about the "witch hunts". Instead I'm guessing there's a lot more stuff to uncover. In fact, the louder they complain, then the more there is. If they didn't have anything to worry about, well, there'd be nothing to complain about.
There isn't enough leftover McDonalds fryer oil to supply all diesel in America. Most "garage Biodiesel" articles I have seen have been reusing stuff like this, but that doesn't mean that you're actually creating energy in the process, you're actually probably just conserving it. I think the fundamental engineering problem of BioDiesel and Ethanol are equivalent - how do you get maximum energy concentration and yield from the sun shining on a square mile, and harvest it with a minimum of energy?
Money. For his oil company reps.
He works for the oil industry. I read that summary, which was surprisingly matter of fact as to what the viewpoints were, but it's clear he has a pro-oil viewpoint.
Using precious third world children going hungry as an argument against using corn as fuel? Wow that's stupid, didn't we just have a World Trade Summit where the fundamental argument was over first world countries killing third world farming operations with subsidies and the like? There's an oversupply of food in the world, it's politics and war that cause localized starvation conditions, usually by preventing aid supply operations from working properly. In cases of true localized overpopulation, there is no humanitarian solution, feeding over-procreating societies produces even more starving mouths. Plus, from what I've read, from a fundamental standpoint freshwater is the true limiting factor on human populations, not food availabilty.
I find it amusing this oil company shill can't beleive that a carbon tax is politically impossible. The lobbying of his industry is primarily responsible for this via fake research, extensive funding of pro-industry Republicans (and some Dems where needed), funding of environmentally hostile, anti-regulation, anti-taxation, radical free market think tanks, and right-wing media like Fox News, right-wing "commentators", and many others.
And please people, stop arguing as if corn is the only ethanol production potential. The reason it is the primary game today is the political bullshit known as agriculture subsidies, which the Republicans are now the staunchest supporters of (they own the breadbasket, so screw laissez-faire principles, bring on the subsidies). I'm no true expert, but every crop from soybeans to sugar shows substantive improvements over corn in ethanol yield. True scientific muscle hasn't been exerted on this yet.
One of the things I was looking forward too as gas/oil prices skyrocketing was a decrease in offshore manufacturing. Economics and exploitation of slave labor may say that it's cheaper to manufacture something and then send it 2,000 miles over ship rather than manufacture locally, that entire equation depends on cheap oil.
Stuff like this will save oil and carbon outputs, but really just allows the same wasteful economic system. I have mixed emotions.
Ahh, the military will probably ban them b/c it disrupts their radars.
A late-night help desk shift worker once received a wrong number call from a lady complaining that her dog's testicles were grossly enlarged. Rather than tell her it was a wrong number, he proceeded to give advice over the phone, and logged the call on the incident log, with full details of the advice given, namely wash the dog's testicles in warm soapy water, give it some aspirin and see a vet in the morning! This was the only time in my career in which an incident on the incident log was actually deleted - not until I printed off a copy and emailed it to my friends! - this is clearly a fake Asking a lady to switch her printer off and on again because it wasn't responding at all. Whereupon she said "it's already off, do I need to switch it on before switching it off and on again?" to which I replied, "no switching something on is normally sufficient to allow it to work". This is not made up or anecdotal, I really had that conversation. - I've had compaqs back in the day that you couldn't power on again too fast after powering off - in that same line of thinking, perhaps they wondered if the action of quickly switching off an on from a state where the machine was warm was important End User: "My Rabbit's Dead." Support: "Sorry to hear that sir, how can I help you though?" End User: "No my rabbit's dead, I can't move the pointer about the screen!" Support "You mean your mouse isn't working?" End User: "Yes, I knew it was some sort of animal!" - as if the term mouse isn't ridiculous in its own right. There's a ton of terminology in this world, especially since language is so malleable. This doesn't even vaguely seem mockable, he knew how it worked and what was wrong, and he was in the rodent family. Girl from HR with large chest walks in to department and says "I'm sorry to bother you guys but I really need to get these out!" Talking about her newest pamphlet. - Officially in the frat house now, that's a lame one. I know it's been told many times in the past, but I really have had a user ask me, while doing a tutorial: "Which one is the any key?" In fact, he asked me the same question three times in succession when the prompt came up the next time. - I blame this on bad UI. How many times in the early days would you hit "any key" and it would pop up the same message again? So of course someone would look for another meaning in the word, such as "any". To an uniformed user, what is "alt", "esc", or "tab" supposed to do? Someone telling me their "broadbean" connection may be down." - Hahaha, except how many times is a vague concept or unrelated idiom adopted in tech, like say, a mouse. Plus, there are things called J2EE beans, there is netbeans, etc. Or did they actually mean "broadbeam" and the support person misunderstood them? When we first got the 21" monitors in, and were unpacking them, one of our helpdesk staff (female) was asked to lend a hand, her reply "I can't even handle 17 inches" - at which point there was silence followed by laughter from female/male colleagues and a very embarrassed staff member - her boyfriend worked at the other site and was informed that "he was a very lucky bloke". - now that's how you do a infantile joke. Most support stories are just condescendion by those in the know towards an inevitable percentage that don't know. Especially in computers. And practically all of those suck, like the 5.25 drive story or the off/on story. Then again, most support people are at the bottom of the IT totem pole, and like any good participant in hierarchical power structures, looks to the next level down to make them feel better.