Protip: the women who bother reading this story are probably at least somewhat interested in the subject, and thus won't be impressed by you showing how uninterested you are.
maybe we could just move to a calendar and time system that gives finer resolution and is based on 10's like the metric system.
Unix clock is using the metric system. "Second", after all, is the metric unit for time, and Unix clock simply counts the seconds after a certain point in time. It's only the human representation of that value which deals with minutes and such.
Someone who is not a politician by trade simply doesn't have the expertise to figure out the cause and effect
This implies that politicians DO have the expertise to figure out the cause and effect.
No it doesn't. "Not A implies not B" does not logically imply "A implies B". All I'm saying that politicians are the only ones who have even a chance of understanding it, both because they have the time to put into it and because they have connections and thus access to unofficial information sources and back-room deals.
I'm sure SOMEONE will bitch with "sources please", I have a degree in Economics and one of my textbooks in school had the source in it. I'm sure the smart people here can google it (I won't waste my time because the Obamanites will just ignore anything I say anyways).
Really ? One of my textbooks said that people who don't give sources because they've once seen a textbook which mentioned them and in any case it's the other people's job to find those sources are often full of shit. But then again, it wasn't an economics book.
If you reduce taxation, more job creation and more spending happens. This is simple math. If you have $2,000 in your pocket at the end of 2 weeks versus having $1,500, what would your response be?
Save it, since such drastic tax reduction means that when I lose my job, social security has likely been cut, and I need every penny just to survive.
If you are younger, odds are you would buy useless junk like more video games, or a bigger t.v., or whatever. If you are older, you might be putting aside that extra 500 for a bigger or better house. Maybe getting some of the repairs done on your existing house. For the love of all things holy, its common......fucking.......sense.
No, it's unbelievably stupid. Spending your earnings instead of saving them was one of the things which got us into this mess. Not the main reason - that was Free Market Fundamentalism - but one of the reasons. If people had savings rather than debt right now, this recession would soon be over, rather than just getting started.
The math that has been done by alot of well known and respected economists shows that the current amount, before cuts in the stimulus bill amounts to $75,000.00 to each and every unemployed person in the country. And you think it's not big enough? Get off of Slashdot if you can't even understand basic math.
Integer division is indeed basic math. Your opinion that $75,000 is "a lot" has nothing to do with math. And 800 billion dollars divided by 11.6 million unemployed (from http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm is about 69 000 dollars/unemployed. Oh, and nice form including decimal points to imply that the number is accurate to within a single cent.
BTW. Please learn to use paragraphs.
You can ALWAYS count on stimulating an economy of the US's size by reducing taxation.
Only if the economy relies on domestic manufacturing. When the majority of manufacturing has been outsourced to foreign countries, reducing taxation will simply result in people buying said foreign manufactured goods, which means that the economy will actually lose money, causing the country to go further into debt and making things worse.
Why are all these forclosures happening? Well, if the homeowners can't pay the mortgage, what's gonna happen? Reduced taxation=more money=less foreclosures and less debt.
Foreclosures are happening because people bought houses they can't really afford. Even with reduced taxation they probably couldn't afford them now that the housing bubble has burst. But here's a thought: How about using the incentive money to pay off those debts ? Sure, it would be rewarding incompetence; but hey, if Wall Street can get it...
Anyway, the way I'd do it would be to make unemployment benefits equal to the last job you held and have them continue indefinitely - dependent, of course, of you looking for a new job and taking one when offered. That way people would no longer need fear unemployment, which would allow the reallocation of resources - which is what getting kicked from a job because a firm folded or was downsized actually represents - to happen without destroying people's lives and causing the associated chaos. It might even eliminate the whole boom-bust cycle, since downturns would no longer cause a self-fulfilling prophecy of "I might be fired, thus I must stop all investment at once and start saving".
The engine of economy desperately needs lubricant, and generous unemployment benefits are that lubricant. Social security needs to be expanded a lot.
You are right though, it is a serious problem in America that political discourse, and hence the population's consumption of same, is dominated by these catchy and superficial soundbites.
It is merely a symptom of the underlying problem: our society is too complex to understand. Someone who is not a politician by trade simply doesn't have the expertise to figure out the cause and effect - and yes, that includes you who's about to reply that you do understand them; you don't, you just think you do - of anything, and even for them it's really a too difficult job. In every other area of our life, we get around such problems with increasingly fine-grained division of labour; but in politics, we can't just leave it to the politicians, since we can't trust them.
As a result of all this, political discourse tends towards soundbites, because any more in-depth discussion would be quantum mechanics to Joe the Plumber, and every politician has a huge personal interest to convince people to take their side. There is no solution to this.
When you give someone a tax break, you become less of a bloodsucker, than you were before, when you were taxing them higher...
Not someone but something. Corporations are not persons and should never be thought as anything except economical machines.
Apart from that... With the world's financial system in the brink of collapse from deregulation, isn't it about time to dump the bullshit right-wing ideology behind that deregulation ? Taxes aren't "bloodsucking", especially not taxes on corporation; they are the price of living in a society. In a better world people would participate willingly; unfortunately, this is not that world, so here they need to be forced to do their duty.
"Atlas Shrugged" was superhero fiction. People really need to get over it already.
Thus, you would need A LOT of land for planting enough plants so biofuels can become some major part of the energy pie. But pretty much all the good land out there that could grow plants is already being used by agriculture. There is simply not enough land on the Earth to do this. And as a society, we have to choose between feeding people or cars; both cannot be done because of the scarcity.
Luckily for us, most of the world's surface is water, and some of the fastest growing plants are water-based. Algae farms could supply us with biofuel without need to repurpose agricultural land for this; and as a nice added bonus, they would clean up the extra nutrients which are washed into sea from land-based agriculture.
i've said for years that PV is no good, molten salt solar and nukes are the only viable alternatives.
What's wrong with a big black basalt block ? Just drill a few holes for water pipes and heat it up at day with mirrors. Even a block of granite might work, and is pretty much the epitome durable.
The only bad thing I can think of is that it would take a few months to heat the thing up to the boiling point.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
We certainly do. Now what the Hell is keeping that slave who was supposed to bring the pencil? I want to finish this and go rape his sister already!
Seems to me that includes children (and yes, women). Our implementation may not be perfect, but that's a problem to correct, not something to point to as evidence.
But it didn't include women. Nor children, nor even most men. It included rich landowners, since they were the only ones who held power, on the account of controlling resources. Power; that's what it has always been about. You have all the rights you can and will back with force, no more and no less. No piece of paper can ever change that, no matter how grandiose statements it holds.
That fucker up there said it very simply over two centuries ago.
Even the fuckers who signed the fucker didn't believe a single word they wrote. They simply didn't want to pay taxes on their tea, and wanted to give a veneer of nobility on their conflict of interests.
Not that it matters. The paper exists, no matter whether the people who wrote it were sincere or hypocrites; now all you need to do is convince enough people to actually believe it to get to that "backed by force" point, without having it FUBARed in the process. No one has ever managed that for any document, except perhaps The Communist Manifest, and we all know how that turned out, so good luck.
What has Gates done PERSONALLY to make slashdotters so hateful of him? Honestly, the real reason Microsoft is able to get away with what it does is that monopolies are an inherent flaw in our current economic system. Microsoft is no different, or annoying and heartless, than the cell phone companies or how AT&T was.
Bill Gates smoothly made sure his company won the monopoly, but even without the man, a different software company would have won it.
What has Hitler done PERSONALLY to get Jews so hateful of him? Honestly, the real reason Nazi Germany was able to get away with what it did is that dictatorships are an inherent flaw of human psyche. Nazi Germany was no different, or annoying and heartless, than Stalinist Russia or how Mao's Cultural Revolution was.
Adolph Hitler smoothly made sure his party won the power, but even without the man, a different psychopathic ideology would had won it.
I think Al Gore plans on having a volcano erupt in downtown Manhattan to emphasize that ecological disasters are not just some fringe pacific "ring of fire" problem, but I hear he's having trouble getting a permit from the city.
A volcano isn't an ecological disaster, except in Soviet Russia. It's a geological disaster.
That is why ratings are there, to protect non adults from inappropriate content.
No, they're there to protect adults from the thought that the kids will see material those adults consider inappropriate.
Most children suffer far worse traumas IRL than seeing boobies or blood on a monitor, and yet grow up okay. Children aren't fragile and don't need anywhere near the level of protection we're giving them today, especially not against entirely imaginary threats; however, a parent's need to indulge in her parental instinct would put any glutton to shame, and various salesmen are more than happy to sell them "security". Parent's eat that shit up because it appeals to their instincts and because it alleviates their guilty conscience over not being able to protect their children from real threats, such as bullying or - far too often - themselves.
In a world where many parents are religious or ideological nutcases, I'm happy to know that the system leaks so that their offspring can view "inappropriate" content and thus break out of the conditioning. Help undermine rating systems and information control; it's for the children.
Incompetence I'll grant as a possibility, but, George W Bush notwithstanding, mouth-breathers with room-temperature IQs tend to have trouble getting into high office.
"Room-temperature IQ" is a non-fixed measurement. Einstein would have a room-temperature IQ in Australia - us normal mortals could only measure up to refrigerators;).
The problem in this particular example is not an active attempt to ban "adult" content, it's the pandering to a handful of conservative twats who can't get their heads around the idea that people other than 12 year old boys play computer games.
The conservatives know that perfectly well; however, being conservatives, they get enjoyment from lording it over other people.
You mean that you know how powerful the quake would have been without the water?
From the summary:
The Sichuan region is earthquake-prone, but has not seen anything as large as the 7.9-magnitude quake for perhaps millions of years.
This kinda implies that any effect the dam may have had likely made the quake bigger, since if it made it smaller, then it must have been even bigger - and thus rarer - quake to begin with.
Threat of a corporation leaving? Seriously? That's enough to violate the foundation of the Finnish constitutional republic?
Hey, caving in to threats is a step up for Finnish politicians. Usually they are actively looking for opportunities to bend over in the hopes that Russia, EU or the USA will pay attention to them and make them feel important, rather than the insignificant leaders of an insignificant country they really are. They're attention whores in all the meanings of the term.
I remember when USA was gearing towards attacking Afghanistan, when these morons publicly speculating that there's a line between these two countries which passes Finnish airspace, and that the US could use it to conduct bombing runs (from bases in the US to the Afghanistan - WTF?). That was beyond pathetic: "Please! Use our airspace! We beg of you!".
Man, that sounds like a Chuck Norris joke in the making.
Chuck Norris doesn't call the cavalry because if Chuck Norris called the cavalry he would call Mannerheim, and Einstein proved that that much force in one place would create a black hole.
I guess this is a question of whether it is possible to have a "perfect" user interface such that 100% of people who use it will get it right. Given the number of nincompoops out there, that is a pretty difficult problem. What is the percentage of mistakes with paper ballots? I bet there are 2% who manage to screw that up too.
You lose. According to EFFI, only 0.6 percent of paper votes had to be rejected, and of those, only 0.17 percent were not obviously intentional screwups, such as voting for Daffy Duck etc. Not that Daffy would be a worse politician than the current lot, but that's another discussion;(.
But that is not the real issue: the real issue is that nobody knows or can proof why which votes were lost, and the electronic voting systems make it completely impossible to find out even if 60% of votes were lost.
Even worse: for all we know, 60% of votes really were lost and replaced with computer-generated ones. The more cynical side of me suggests that this is the real reason for pushing for electronic voting systems, for as Comrade Stalin said: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."
No measurement is perfectly accurate. Counting votes by hand is not a perfectly accurate method. We expect computers to be perfect but the measuring system isn't perfect so the results aren't either.
Bullshit. We aren't talking about measuring physical system at the level where interference from the Uncertainty Principle or other sources would be a factor. We are talking about communicating an integer from a set of a few hundred at most from one human being to another.
It doesn't matter. Our voting system has always had a margin of error, and always will. Thankfully one court in the world understands this and is bold enough to say 2% is an acceptable error.
Losing 1 vote out of 50 is not acceptable, especially since hand-counting the votes in Finland typically takes just a few hours, and the results are ready by the election day evening anyway.
Then again, I suppose I shouldn't except anything better from Finnish courts. I mean, in the past they've come up with such brilliant gems as premature ejaculation being a mitigating factor in a rape case, or convicting a man from stealing... from a landfill. Or maybe being batshit insane is just a feature of courts everywhere.
Dune is a fantasy book with a very thin veil of scifi on top of it. It has everything from magic to the undead. It even has the "technology has not advanced for ten thousand years" cliche - no, the "no computers" rule wouldn't really stop people from building them. But sadly, that veneer nonetheless gives it a mild case of bastard syndrome - making every character a more or less nasty psychopath in an attempt to make them "realistic".
"Peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us." -- Golda Meir, Former PM of Israel
Peace will come to Middle-East when there's nothing but sandworms left there. Shouldn't take long the way things are going...
But of course, if there were sandworms there, then someone with Jew and someone with Arab ancestry might end up waking said ancestors with Spice, and the whole shit would begin again:(. So I guess we'd better hope that the average rainfall in the area will increase with global warming.
I pretty much agree with you. I've read a shit load of fantasy and s.f. over the years, but as I've gotten older, I've found much of it less satisfying. The truth of the matter as I see it is that a large portion of fantasy/s.f. is akin to those trashy romance books that my grandmother used to read by the hundred. They're geek porn.
Yes, that's true. But there's a difference between fantasy and science fiction: scifi tries to "explore the human condition", while fantasy tries to entertain. Fantasy is about Conan the Barbarian hacking demons to pieces with a huge-ass sword with a scantily dressed girl draped over his shoulder, while scifi is about Captain Picard engaged in a pissing match with the demigod Q due to formers unwarranted self-importance and the latter's maturity hardly reaching 4-year old kids level, and this is framed as giving great insight at humanity.
I nowadays simply avoid scifi. Fantasy is not ashamed to entertain, while scifi tries to be "high literature" and fails miserably at it, or a parody which, while entertaining, is the equivalent of ice cream cone: you can't live on those alone. There are exceptions on either side, of course; but they are few and far between, so it's just not worth the bother.
The most ironic thing here is that even that mortal/deity conflict was done better and with more believable characters in "Prince of Lies", which is a Forgotten Realms novel of all things - a marketing tool for D&D, basically. When marketing material features more believable characters than scifi...
But then again, I'm secure enough in my masculinity to enjoy trashy romance novels, especially if they come with a good helping of geek porn, so what do I know ?-).
Slashdot Mirror
Protip: the women who bother reading this story are probably at least somewhat interested in the subject, and thus won't be impressed by you showing how uninterested you are.
Unix clock is using the metric system. "Second", after all, is the metric unit for time, and Unix clock simply counts the seconds after a certain point in time. It's only the human representation of that value which deals with minutes and such.
No it doesn't. "Not A implies not B" does not logically imply "A implies B". All I'm saying that politicians are the only ones who have even a chance of understanding it, both because they have the time to put into it and because they have connections and thus access to unofficial information sources and back-room deals.
Really ? One of my textbooks said that people who don't give sources because they've once seen a textbook which mentioned them and in any case it's the other people's job to find those sources are often full of shit. But then again, it wasn't an economics book.
Save it, since such drastic tax reduction means that when I lose my job, social security has likely been cut, and I need every penny just to survive.
No, it's unbelievably stupid. Spending your earnings instead of saving them was one of the things which got us into this mess. Not the main reason - that was Free Market Fundamentalism - but one of the reasons. If people had savings rather than debt right now, this recession would soon be over, rather than just getting started.
Integer division is indeed basic math. Your opinion that $75,000 is "a lot" has nothing to do with math. And 800 billion dollars divided by 11.6 million unemployed (from http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm is about 69 000 dollars/unemployed. Oh, and nice form including decimal points to imply that the number is accurate to within a single cent.
BTW. Please learn to use paragraphs.
Only if the economy relies on domestic manufacturing. When the majority of manufacturing has been outsourced to foreign countries, reducing taxation will simply result in people buying said foreign manufactured goods, which means that the economy will actually lose money, causing the country to go further into debt and making things worse.
Foreclosures are happening because people bought houses they can't really afford. Even with reduced taxation they probably couldn't afford them now that the housing bubble has burst. But here's a thought: How about using the incentive money to pay off those debts ? Sure, it would be rewarding incompetence; but hey, if Wall Street can get it...
Anyway, the way I'd do it would be to make unemployment benefits equal to the last job you held and have them continue indefinitely - dependent, of course, of you looking for a new job and taking one when offered. That way people would no longer need fear unemployment, which would allow the reallocation of resources - which is what getting kicked from a job because a firm folded or was downsized actually represents - to happen without destroying people's lives and causing the associated chaos. It might even eliminate the whole boom-bust cycle, since downturns would no longer cause a self-fulfilling prophecy of "I might be fired, thus I must stop all investment at once and start saving".
The engine of economy desperately needs lubricant, and generous unemployment benefits are that lubricant. Social security needs to be expanded a lot.
It is merely a symptom of the underlying problem: our society is too complex to understand. Someone who is not a politician by trade simply doesn't have the expertise to figure out the cause and effect - and yes, that includes you who's about to reply that you do understand them; you don't, you just think you do - of anything, and even for them it's really a too difficult job. In every other area of our life, we get around such problems with increasingly fine-grained division of labour; but in politics, we can't just leave it to the politicians, since we can't trust them.
As a result of all this, political discourse tends towards soundbites, because any more in-depth discussion would be quantum mechanics to Joe the Plumber, and every politician has a huge personal interest to convince people to take their side. There is no solution to this.
Not someone but something. Corporations are not persons and should never be thought as anything except economical machines.
Apart from that... With the world's financial system in the brink of collapse from deregulation, isn't it about time to dump the bullshit right-wing ideology behind that deregulation ? Taxes aren't "bloodsucking", especially not taxes on corporation; they are the price of living in a society. In a better world people would participate willingly; unfortunately, this is not that world, so here they need to be forced to do their duty.
"Atlas Shrugged" was superhero fiction. People really need to get over it already.
Luckily for us, most of the world's surface is water, and some of the fastest growing plants are water-based. Algae farms could supply us with biofuel without need to repurpose agricultural land for this; and as a nice added bonus, they would clean up the extra nutrients which are washed into sea from land-based agriculture.
What's wrong with a big black basalt block ? Just drill a few holes for water pipes and heat it up at day with mirrors. Even a block of granite might work, and is pretty much the epitome durable.
The only bad thing I can think of is that it would take a few months to heat the thing up to the boiling point.
We certainly do. Now what the Hell is keeping that slave who was supposed to bring the pencil? I want to finish this and go rape his sister already!
But it didn't include women. Nor children, nor even most men. It included rich landowners, since they were the only ones who held power, on the account of controlling resources. Power; that's what it has always been about. You have all the rights you can and will back with force, no more and no less. No piece of paper can ever change that, no matter how grandiose statements it holds.
Even the fuckers who signed the fucker didn't believe a single word they wrote. They simply didn't want to pay taxes on their tea, and wanted to give a veneer of nobility on their conflict of interests.
Not that it matters. The paper exists, no matter whether the people who wrote it were sincere or hypocrites; now all you need to do is convince enough people to actually believe it to get to that "backed by force" point, without having it FUBARed in the process. No one has ever managed that for any document, except perhaps The Communist Manifest, and we all know how that turned out, so good luck.
What has Hitler done PERSONALLY to get Jews so hateful of him? Honestly, the real reason Nazi Germany was able to get away with what it did is that dictatorships are an inherent flaw of human psyche. Nazi Germany was no different, or annoying and heartless, than Stalinist Russia or how Mao's Cultural Revolution was.
Adolph Hitler smoothly made sure his party won the power, but even without the man, a different psychopathic ideology would had won it.
A volcano isn't an ecological disaster, except in Soviet Russia. It's a geological disaster.
No, they're there to protect adults from the thought that the kids will see material those adults consider inappropriate.
Most children suffer far worse traumas IRL than seeing boobies or blood on a monitor, and yet grow up okay. Children aren't fragile and don't need anywhere near the level of protection we're giving them today, especially not against entirely imaginary threats; however, a parent's need to indulge in her parental instinct would put any glutton to shame, and various salesmen are more than happy to sell them "security". Parent's eat that shit up because it appeals to their instincts and because it alleviates their guilty conscience over not being able to protect their children from real threats, such as bullying or - far too often - themselves.
In a world where many parents are religious or ideological nutcases, I'm happy to know that the system leaks so that their offspring can view "inappropriate" content and thus break out of the conditioning. Help undermine rating systems and information control; it's for the children.
"Room-temperature IQ" is a non-fixed measurement. Einstein would have a room-temperature IQ in Australia - us normal mortals could only measure up to refrigerators ;).
The conservatives know that perfectly well; however, being conservatives, they get enjoyment from lording it over other people.
From the summary:
This kinda implies that any effect the dam may have had likely made the quake bigger, since if it made it smaller, then it must have been even bigger - and thus rarer - quake to begin with.
Hey, caving in to threats is a step up for Finnish politicians. Usually they are actively looking for opportunities to bend over in the hopes that Russia, EU or the USA will pay attention to them and make them feel important, rather than the insignificant leaders of an insignificant country they really are. They're attention whores in all the meanings of the term.
I remember when USA was gearing towards attacking Afghanistan, when these morons publicly speculating that there's a line between these two countries which passes Finnish airspace, and that the US could use it to conduct bombing runs (from bases in the US to the Afghanistan - WTF?). That was beyond pathetic: "Please! Use our airspace! We beg of you!".
Chuck Norris doesn't call the cavalry because if Chuck Norris called the cavalry he would call Mannerheim, and Einstein proved that that much force in one place would create a black hole.
You lose. According to EFFI, only 0.6 percent of paper votes had to be rejected, and of those, only 0.17 percent were not obviously intentional screwups, such as voting for Daffy Duck etc. Not that Daffy would be a worse politician than the current lot, but that's another discussion ;(.
Even worse: for all we know, 60% of votes really were lost and replaced with computer-generated ones. The more cynical side of me suggests that this is the real reason for pushing for electronic voting systems, for as Comrade Stalin said: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."
Bullshit. We aren't talking about measuring physical system at the level where interference from the Uncertainty Principle or other sources would be a factor. We are talking about communicating an integer from a set of a few hundred at most from one human being to another.
Losing 1 vote out of 50 is not acceptable, especially since hand-counting the votes in Finland typically takes just a few hours, and the results are ready by the election day evening anyway.
Then again, I suppose I shouldn't except anything better from Finnish courts. I mean, in the past they've come up with such brilliant gems as premature ejaculation being a mitigating factor in a rape case, or convicting a man from stealing... from a landfill. Or maybe being batshit insane is just a feature of courts everywhere.
Dune is a fantasy book with a very thin veil of scifi on top of it. It has everything from magic to the undead. It even has the "technology has not advanced for ten thousand years" cliche - no, the "no computers" rule wouldn't really stop people from building them. But sadly, that veneer nonetheless gives it a mild case of bastard syndrome - making every character a more or less nasty psychopath in an attempt to make them "realistic".
Peace will come to Middle-East when there's nothing but sandworms left there. Shouldn't take long the way things are going...
But of course, if there were sandworms there, then someone with Jew and someone with Arab ancestry might end up waking said ancestors with Spice, and the whole shit would begin again :(. So I guess we'd better hope that the average rainfall in the area will increase with global warming.
Yes, that's true. But there's a difference between fantasy and science fiction: scifi tries to "explore the human condition", while fantasy tries to entertain. Fantasy is about Conan the Barbarian hacking demons to pieces with a huge-ass sword with a scantily dressed girl draped over his shoulder, while scifi is about Captain Picard engaged in a pissing match with the demigod Q due to formers unwarranted self-importance and the latter's maturity hardly reaching 4-year old kids level, and this is framed as giving great insight at humanity.
I nowadays simply avoid scifi. Fantasy is not ashamed to entertain, while scifi tries to be "high literature" and fails miserably at it, or a parody which, while entertaining, is the equivalent of ice cream cone: you can't live on those alone. There are exceptions on either side, of course; but they are few and far between, so it's just not worth the bother.
The most ironic thing here is that even that mortal/deity conflict was done better and with more believable characters in "Prince of Lies", which is a Forgotten Realms novel of all things - a marketing tool for D&D, basically. When marketing material features more believable characters than scifi...
But then again, I'm secure enough in my masculinity to enjoy trashy romance novels, especially if they come with a good helping of geek porn, so what do I know ?-).
Mod parent insightful ! He's earned it, even if he was a bit overly verbose for my tastes.
At which point someone uploads pics to /b/, someone else rule34s them, and someone makes a joke in poor taste on Slashdot.