Why bother with CLR? That's a lot of effort to keep your showerheads clean and safe.
What I've done to protect myself against this terrifying bacteria is to actively encourage the growth of black mold in my shower, which suppresses bacteria growth.
This has a lot of benefits:
1. Chinks in the grout between tiles are filled automagically with an attractive black growth. 2. I never have to clean hard-to-reach areas, since this is where the mold grows best. 3. My shower is now cute and cuddly due to the "furry" coating on exposed surfaces. It's like a panda bear, except without the bamboo and pointy teeth!
Also, hot water + soap + friction can kill a lot of germs, wouldn't the fact that you're already showering help the situation?
That doesn't kill germs. It just helps remove them from your skin.
Besides the concern for pulmonary disease is that you inhale water droplets with these germs inside them. I highly doubt that you use soap + hot water + friction inside your lungs (but if you do, you're more of a man than I).
There's no doubt in my mind - insurance is a scam. But there's also no doubt in mind that government is a *bigger* scam.
Then we'll never agree. I think you sell short the ability of private concerns to scam their customers, especially when they have the resources to buy the laws they want. What we have now is a system where the insurance companies are a scam, and the government supports them because insurance company money gets people elected. So we have an even more effective scam. Removing the profit incentive from the insurance business will reduce this.
If I don't like the proposed Government Healthcare Bill I can opt out and --- get fined $2000 a year for that decision. Hmmm.
That's disingenuous. You can opt out of the government system and go with a private carrier, and not pay any fine. The reason the uninsured will have to pay a penalty is because the general public (or hospitals private or public, currently) will end up paying for their care anyway. The penalty keeps people from freeloading on the system, which is a big problem when you have a mixed public-private system.
If I don't like Nationwide I can cancel my coverage and refuse to pay.
Are you talking about car insurance? Because in most states, you are either required to pay for insurance, or required to pay a fine if you are uninsured. Not sure how this one supports your argument...
Why haven't we reached that same conclusion in the US?
Because in the US, we have a list of rights that while not intended to exclude any possible other rights, is seen as the only rights it's possible to have.
Because in the US, the only thing more important than your rights is my money.
Because in America, as soon as we have money, we move to the burbs to escape the poor -- out of sight, out of mind.
Because in America, we have the FREEDOM to let the poor suffer without medical treatment.
Because in America, the poor have the FREEDOM to bootstrap themselves into the middle class with no help whatsoever, and if they don't have health insurance, it is entirely their fault for not taking advantage of the LAND of OPPORTUNITY.
OK, sarcasm aside...
What the guy really said was "I don't want any Federal tax dollars paying for any health care for illegal aliens".
They guy has a point, even if he was wrong. When people here legally aren't provided government services, why should people here illegally get them? My opinion is that we should offer public healthcare to every person, regardless of income or immigration status. If the government is fulfilling its obligations to those here legally, then it can provide them to others. But if it's not fulfilling its obligations to its citizens and legal immigrants, then illegal immigrants should not get service. But that's a little too complex for 30-second TV spots, which is the limit for complexity of political issues in the US.
Considering what you're describing, I'd have to think that the US is by far the most corrupt industrialised country in the western world.
I think it is one of the most corrupt, but that has little to do with what he described. Parent to your post made a couple false claims, namely that it is not allowed to purchase health insurance across state lines, and that businesses can deduct insurance premiums from their taxable income while individuals cannot.
The problem with US health insurance has nothing to do with whether private companies can provide better care than a governmental non-profit. We don't have general health insurance provided by a government non-profit -- the free market capitalists have ensured that, to date, the government is not allowed to provide health insurance to the general public. So we have private insurance companies looking out for their bottom line, with no other option. Government regulation is the only thing preventing insurance company margins from being even higher than they already are (forcing insurance companies to treat expensive-to-treat diseases, etc).
As an example, I spent four days in a mental institution (checked myself in). That did cost me. A staggering 320 Swedish Kronar or 46 US$. Sure, that's more than it'd cost to feed myself for four days, but not by much. And considering I have a suicide attempt in my medical history, I think I'd be excluded over a pre-existing mental condition by most US HMOs if not all of them.
Mental health is one area where some individual states have good policies -- they have found it is better for them financially to provide sound mental health care to people who can't afford it than to deal with the outcome of untreated mental health issues (e.g., crime, emergency medical care, etc). Someone I know spent 30 days in a mental health facility in a state out west, net cost to him about $30 (the state picked up the rest of the tab). The only requirement was that he proved he didn't have the ability to pay for it, and that he resided in the state for a year.
So it's a mixed bag, really -- it's not as bad as it's sometimes purported to be, but on the other hand there are tons of people who DO fall through the cracks and end up dead, disabled, imprisoned, or something else.
Just a quick note on that last line -- prisons are the last bastion of indigent medical care in the US. One way to ensure your illness is treated if you are poor and without insurance is to be put in prison. This is a last resort, but I've heard second-hand of people with mental health issues doing this.
Not sure why this was modded flamebait, other than it probably touched a nerve.
Sometimes something inflammatory makes a good point, and one worthy of consideration. A lot of the rest of the "civilized" world DOES think the American health care system is abominable, due to the way that it accumulates cash at the top while failing to treat the poor.
But I know that opinions that offend blind patriotism are often disregarded, so I'm not really surprised by the moderation. I just wish people could react a little less instinctively when their beliefs are challenged...
Its not legal to buy health insurance across state lines, you can't even take individual health policies across most lines, all unless your covered by your employer.
That is because each state has different laws covering health insurance. There is no government regulation preventing you from purchasing insurance from a carrier in a different state, nor is there regulation preventing an insurance company from selling in multiple states.
Your employer gets a tax deduction for your insurance that you cannot get if you buy your own.
100% false. You can deduct medical insurance premiums.
when you go to buy it you get soaked because each state piles on its mandated coverage to the already onerous federal mandates
This is a separate issue, and one worthy of debate. The alternative to mandated coverages (which are much less onerous than you assume, I think) is insurers selling insurance, collecting premiums, then denying claims for seemingly random conditions. This was a HUGE problem before states stepped in to regulate the medical insurance industry. While it needs to be balanced against efficiency, there is no doubt in my mind that mandated coverages have been a big benefit to insurance buyers.
As for the first two items I addrsssed, you are either being disingenuous or are grossly misinformed. I hope it's the latter, but I'm not sure.
While I agree that over-regulation can be a problem, under-regulation can also be a problem. Letting the insurance companies do what they want will not result in a better outcome for the people who buy insurance. We've been there, and it doesn't work. My big complaint with over-regulation is that it creates barriers to entry due to compliance costs; however, there are already significant barriers to entry in the medical insurance business because of the cost of catastrophic cases (capital reserves need to be very large, which keeps new entrants out; also, bad luck could easily mean insolvency for a small insurer).
The obvious problem is that no particular landlord is interested in "the housing industry as a whole": they're interested in their own corner of it. And so it's not clear why the landlord would want to do something to make it easier for tenants to move out, just because the end result is good for "the industry as a whole", unless they're altruists.
Landlords would want to make it easier for tenants to move out because then it's easier to get tenants to move in. You'd get more people interested in being tenants, if they knew they wouldn't have to leave all their stuff behind when they left. This increased demand for rental spaces means that existing capacity is more likely to be filled, and new capacity built as demand makes it profitable.
But it's a little much to expect people to follow a clumsy tenant/landlord analogy when a perfectly good car analogy can be made.
This is like you rent a truck for a big shopping trip, but when you return the truck you also have to hand over all the stuff you bought. The Google Data Liberation Group is working to ensure that you get to keep all the stuff you bought on your excursion, and you'll even be able to put it in the back of a competitor's truck if you decide to rent another one.
Except Google has old-tymey magickal replicator technology, and they kept a copy of all your stuff, and detailed records of how and where you bought it, so that they can make sure that you're bombarded with ads for products and services related to what you bought.
It won't help prevent a body from hitting the earth.
What it will do is lessen the relative damage caused by such an impact.
Instead of wiping out all of humanity, and drastically change the ecosystem humans live in, it will only wipe out part of humanity, and some of the ecosystems we live in.
You know that old adage about putting all your eggs in one basket (don't do it!) -- we currently have all our eggs in one basket, and it would be nice if we could change that situation.
NASA should be spending most - if not all - of its budget preparing to avert a comet/asteroid from hitting earth.
With all due respect, I disagree. Yes, some resources should be directed at that problem. But there is so much more that can and should be done by NASA. The Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer telescopes are a good example.
But what is the point in surviving if all we are doing is treading water? Sure we could spend billions on monitoring near space for potentially dangerous objects, but IMO we're better off spending those billions on things that can advance technology.
And in the (very) long run, our currently feeble attempts at space travel may lead to the best defense against catastrophic collisions -- another colonized planet.
Chump. You have a 5-digit UID, you're supposed to wait for a noob to read it and post a summary in the hope of garnering positive karma, which you could then mod down as you chortle diabolically about redundancy.
Seriously, what is the world coming to? A 5-digit UID who actually RTFAs (heretic!) and then passes along some useful information to the rest of us?
We have entered *the twilight zone*. (Do do do do, do do do do, etc)
That is because there is absolutely no direct relationship between game play and the graphics quality. Some of the most popular games have graphics reminiscent of the 1990s or even 1980s, while some of the greatest bombs sport fancy 3D engines with programmable shaders, deformable environments and what not.
And yet there IS a correlation between graphics quality and the number of people willing to shell out $50 for the game.
For a disconcertingly large number of gamers, graphics quality is an indicator of game quality when making purchasing decisions -- especially for people who buy games for other people to play (parents buying for their kids, for example).
It's been true since day 1, graphics have always sold games. I believe we're at the point where the relative increase in graphics quality now is outweighed by gameplay factors, but that's just me and some others... and I don't spend more than $20/yr on games. So why would the studios care about me?
The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the keyboard is as dull as a blunt pocket knife.
An ICBM is duller than a blunt pocket knife. That doesn't make it less mighty.
It's kind of scary how much impact the blogosphere can have... a bunch of bloggers get upset... their blog posts are picked up by some intern or volunteer at the Church of the Evangelical Scoundrel, who passes it on to his superior... the head of the Church of the Evangelical Scoundrel gets the ear of his local and state politicians... and the next thing you know, Jack Thompson uses his eye tooth to hatch from an egg, and all video game players are forced to confess their sins before a Grand Theft Auto De Fe.
Don't underestimate the powers of Christian bloggers.
so I hope they have zero gravity mouse wheels to keep these mice in shape while testing them for prolonged periods.
Where's your sense of imagination? If it's zero G, we're not limited to mouse wheels and/or hamster balls. How about a hamster tetrahedron? I mean, not to be one-sided, but surely a mouse mobius strip is the least we could hope for?
I was able to writ that post as quickly as I can type (using my split Dvorak ergonomic keyboard, of course). The delay to eighteen minutes was due to needing to sacrifice a virgin from the top level of my temple in Teotihicuan, a ritual I repeat before submitting every slashdot post, to ensure that I receive the favor of the Gods to prevent spelling, grammatical, and HTML errors.
Apparently, born-again virgins don't count. And true virgins are hard to come by these days.
that was brilliant! how long did it take you to get that acronym to work?
Well, seeing as my post was made eighteen minutes after the parent, some amount of time less than eighteen minutes. Given a couple minutes before I came across his post, and a couple minutes to compose the rest of the post, a couple minutes to hand up on some incoming phone calls, a couple minutes to remotely wipe the hard drives of the users who interrupted my slashdot time with their phone calls... I'd say it probably took me about 5 minutes. That is, if I had actually needed to make up the acronym.
The truth is, I'm a founding member of SPCQ, and due to our constant confusion with SPC-QUETZLCOATL in the non-profit world, I was able to writ that post as quickly as I can type (using my split Dvorak ergonomic keyboard, of course). The delay to eighteen minutes was due to needing to sacrifice a virgin from the top level of my temple in Teotihicuan, a ritual I repeat before submitting every slashdot post, to ensure that I receive the favor of the Gods to prevent spelling, grammatical, and HTML errors.
I was going to mod you down, then I decided to respond instead.
Slashdot has always been behind the "news" cycle.
This is fine. Most people don't come here for breaking news, they come here for (sometimes) informative, enlightened, or humorous discussion of the article and related topics.
I'll just add that your griping is none of those things. If what you care about is being the first to read about something, then please feel free to go elsewhere. And feel free to not bother with the discussion on Slashdot when the same item is up a day or two later... you won't be missed if what you post is similar to the post I'm responding to.
Oh, and one last thing... Slashdot is a news aggregator. There is very, very little original content in the items posted to the main page. However, it is a community-driven site. If you're unhappy that items come through later here than elsewhere, one thing YOU can do to improve it is to submit articles yourself in a timely manner.
Amercian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Microscopic Organisms That May Or May Not Be Alive
The ASPCMOTMOMNBA?
You, sir, need to work on your organization names.
Let me suggest a few:
The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Questionable Under Examination To Zoological Life Characterization Organisms Almost This (.) Large.
The SPC-QUETZLCOATL is, of course, dedicated to the humane treatment of viruses, and should not be confused with the SPCQ, which is dedicated to the humane treatment of feathered-serpent redeemer/savior archetypal figures.
Also it should be noted that the (.) in the official name of the organization is a tiny dot in parentheses, not a ASCII boobie, no matter how much you'd like it to be one.
Items that make the front page from the firehose are tagged 'story' so that when viewing from the firehose, you can see that the item has posted to the front page.
It's a functionality kludge (surely there's a better way to indicate item status) but then again, so is much of the slashcode.
The conductivity of hair is very low. I know this because I have inadvertently applied 600 V between 3/4" of hair and my (thankfully dry and unsweaty) skull, yet I live to type about it.
I'm just looking forward to a (hopefully) creeped out Mirkwood. I have high hopes for del Toro being able to make people squirm in their seats as the party traipses through it.
Unfortunately, I kind of dread what he's going to do with the physiognomy of the Wood Elves... I fear it may be too fairy-tale-ish, some kind of caricature of what we have all grown accustomed to from the three Jackon films.
OTOH, if the whole movie is done in del Toro's fairy-tale style, then it may work... but that's a big risk for New Line to take.
Otherwise it's just a bunch of hot air. If you think it is safe and the waste is safe then you can store the waste and have nuclear plants next to schools. If you don't then it really isn't all that safe.
That's ridiculous. Overwhelmingly so.
Do you refuse to drive a car at night because it isn't safe to drive without headlights? No -- you drive a car with headlights, and you turn them on at night.
You're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. We can have nuclear power, and mitigate the waste danger by storing the waste far away from population centers. This is basic common sense, and your objection to it is silly.
What I could see, is a state like NJ (very densely populated with almost no places for safe storage away from a population center) could pay a state like Nevada or Pennsylvania to store the waste. As long the the NJians bear a fair cost for the outsourced risk, then it works just fine.
The other thing I believe, tangentially related, is that electricity rates should be inversely proportional to potential fallout location given typical wind patterns. Then the NIMBYs will need to pay for their NIMBYism.
Slashdot Mirror
Why bother with CLR? That's a lot of effort to keep your showerheads clean and safe.
What I've done to protect myself against this terrifying bacteria is to actively encourage the growth of black mold in my shower, which suppresses bacteria growth.
This has a lot of benefits:
1. Chinks in the grout between tiles are filled automagically with an attractive black growth.
2. I never have to clean hard-to-reach areas, since this is where the mold grows best.
3. My shower is now cute and cuddly due to the "furry" coating on exposed surfaces. It's like a panda bear, except without the bamboo and pointy teeth!
That doesn't kill germs. It just helps remove them from your skin.
Besides the concern for pulmonary disease is that you inhale water droplets with these germs inside them. I highly doubt that you use soap + hot water + friction inside your lungs (but if you do, you're more of a man than I).
Then we'll never agree. I think you sell short the ability of private concerns to scam their customers, especially when they have the resources to buy the laws they want. What we have now is a system where the insurance companies are a scam, and the government supports them because insurance company money gets people elected. So we have an even more effective scam. Removing the profit incentive from the insurance business will reduce this.
That's disingenuous. You can opt out of the government system and go with a private carrier, and not pay any fine. The reason the uninsured will have to pay a penalty is because the general public (or hospitals private or public, currently) will end up paying for their care anyway. The penalty keeps people from freeloading on the system, which is a big problem when you have a mixed public-private system.
Are you talking about car insurance? Because in most states, you are either required to pay for insurance, or required to pay a fine if you are uninsured. Not sure how this one supports your argument...
Because in the US, we have a list of rights that while not intended to exclude any possible other rights, is seen as the only rights it's possible to have.
Because in the US, the only thing more important than your rights is my money.
Because in America, as soon as we have money, we move to the burbs to escape the poor -- out of sight, out of mind.
Because in America, we have the FREEDOM to let the poor suffer without medical treatment.
Because in America, the poor have the FREEDOM to bootstrap themselves into the middle class with no help whatsoever, and if they don't have health insurance, it is entirely their fault for not taking advantage of the LAND of OPPORTUNITY.
OK, sarcasm aside...
They guy has a point, even if he was wrong. When people here legally aren't provided government services, why should people here illegally get them? My opinion is that we should offer public healthcare to every person, regardless of income or immigration status. If the government is fulfilling its obligations to those here legally, then it can provide them to others. But if it's not fulfilling its obligations to its citizens and legal immigrants, then illegal immigrants should not get service. But that's a little too complex for 30-second TV spots, which is the limit for complexity of political issues in the US.
I think it is one of the most corrupt, but that has little to do with what he described. Parent to your post made a couple false claims, namely that it is not allowed to purchase health insurance across state lines, and that businesses can deduct insurance premiums from their taxable income while individuals cannot.
The problem with US health insurance has nothing to do with whether private companies can provide better care than a governmental non-profit. We don't have general health insurance provided by a government non-profit -- the free market capitalists have ensured that, to date, the government is not allowed to provide health insurance to the general public. So we have private insurance companies looking out for their bottom line, with no other option. Government regulation is the only thing preventing insurance company margins from being even higher than they already are (forcing insurance companies to treat expensive-to-treat diseases, etc).
Mental health is one area where some individual states have good policies -- they have found it is better for them financially to provide sound mental health care to people who can't afford it than to deal with the outcome of untreated mental health issues (e.g., crime, emergency medical care, etc). Someone I know spent 30 days in a mental health facility in a state out west, net cost to him about $30 (the state picked up the rest of the tab). The only requirement was that he proved he didn't have the ability to pay for it, and that he resided in the state for a year.
So it's a mixed bag, really -- it's not as bad as it's sometimes purported to be, but on the other hand there are tons of people who DO fall through the cracks and end up dead, disabled, imprisoned, or something else.
Just a quick note on that last line -- prisons are the last bastion of indigent medical care in the US. One way to ensure your illness is treated if you are poor and without insurance is to be put in prison. This is a last resort, but I've heard second-hand of people with mental health issues doing this.
Not sure why this was modded flamebait, other than it probably touched a nerve.
Sometimes something inflammatory makes a good point, and one worthy of consideration. A lot of the rest of the "civilized" world DOES think the American health care system is abominable, due to the way that it accumulates cash at the top while failing to treat the poor.
But I know that opinions that offend blind patriotism are often disregarded, so I'm not really surprised by the moderation. I just wish people could react a little less instinctively when their beliefs are challenged...
That is because each state has different laws covering health insurance. There is no government regulation preventing you from purchasing insurance from a carrier in a different state, nor is there regulation preventing an insurance company from selling in multiple states.
100% false. You can deduct medical insurance premiums.
This is a separate issue, and one worthy of debate. The alternative to mandated coverages (which are much less onerous than you assume, I think) is insurers selling insurance, collecting premiums, then denying claims for seemingly random conditions. This was a HUGE problem before states stepped in to regulate the medical insurance industry. While it needs to be balanced against efficiency, there is no doubt in my mind that mandated coverages have been a big benefit to insurance buyers.
As for the first two items I addrsssed, you are either being disingenuous or are grossly misinformed. I hope it's the latter, but I'm not sure.
While I agree that over-regulation can be a problem, under-regulation can also be a problem. Letting the insurance companies do what they want will not result in a better outcome for the people who buy insurance. We've been there, and it doesn't work. My big complaint with over-regulation is that it creates barriers to entry due to compliance costs; however, there are already significant barriers to entry in the medical insurance business because of the cost of catastrophic cases (capital reserves need to be very large, which keeps new entrants out; also, bad luck could easily mean insolvency for a small insurer).
Landlords would want to make it easier for tenants to move out because then it's easier to get tenants to move in. You'd get more people interested in being tenants, if they knew they wouldn't have to leave all their stuff behind when they left. This increased demand for rental spaces means that existing capacity is more likely to be filled, and new capacity built as demand makes it profitable.
But it's a little much to expect people to follow a clumsy tenant/landlord analogy when a perfectly good car analogy can be made.
This is like you rent a truck for a big shopping trip, but when you return the truck you also have to hand over all the stuff you bought. The Google Data Liberation Group is working to ensure that you get to keep all the stuff you bought on your excursion, and you'll even be able to put it in the back of a competitor's truck if you decide to rent another one.
Except Google has old-tymey magickal replicator technology, and they kept a copy of all your stuff, and detailed records of how and where you bought it, so that they can make sure that you're bombarded with ads for products and services related to what you bought.
That may be; however, I've *trained* women to fear ME.
Bukakekekekeke
It won't help prevent a body from hitting the earth.
What it will do is lessen the relative damage caused by such an impact.
Instead of wiping out all of humanity, and drastically change the ecosystem humans live in, it will only wipe out part of humanity, and some of the ecosystems we live in.
You know that old adage about putting all your eggs in one basket (don't do it!) -- we currently have all our eggs in one basket, and it would be nice if we could change that situation.
With all due respect, I disagree. Yes, some resources should be directed at that problem. But there is so much more that can and should be done by NASA. The Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer telescopes are a good example.
But what is the point in surviving if all we are doing is treading water? Sure we could spend billions on monitoring near space for potentially dangerous objects, but IMO we're better off spending those billions on things that can advance technology.
And in the (very) long run, our currently feeble attempts at space travel may lead to the best defense against catastrophic collisions -- another colonized planet.
Chump. You have a 5-digit UID, you're supposed to wait for a noob to read it and post a summary in the hope of garnering positive karma, which you could then mod down as you chortle diabolically about redundancy.
Seriously, what is the world coming to? A 5-digit UID who actually RTFAs (heretic!) and then passes along some useful information to the rest of us?
We have entered *the twilight zone*. (Do do do do, do do do do, etc)
And yet there IS a correlation between graphics quality and the number of people willing to shell out $50 for the game.
For a disconcertingly large number of gamers, graphics quality is an indicator of game quality when making purchasing decisions -- especially for people who buy games for other people to play (parents buying for their kids, for example).
It's been true since day 1, graphics have always sold games. I believe we're at the point where the relative increase in graphics quality now is outweighed by gameplay factors, but that's just me and some others... and I don't spend more than $20/yr on games. So why would the studios care about me?
An ICBM is duller than a blunt pocket knife. That doesn't make it less mighty.
It's kind of scary how much impact the blogosphere can have... a bunch of bloggers get upset... their blog posts are picked up by some intern or volunteer at the Church of the Evangelical Scoundrel, who passes it on to his superior... the head of the Church of the Evangelical Scoundrel gets the ear of his local and state politicians... and the next thing you know, Jack Thompson uses his eye tooth to hatch from an egg, and all video game players are forced to confess their sins before a Grand Theft Auto De Fe.
Don't underestimate the powers of Christian bloggers.
In Soviet Slashdot, depressing predictable joke comes for you?
Where's your sense of imagination? If it's zero G, we're not limited to mouse wheels and/or hamster balls. How about a hamster tetrahedron? I mean, not to be one-sided, but surely a mouse mobius strip is the least we could hope for?
Apparently, born-again virgins don't count. And true virgins are hard to come by these days.
Well, seeing as my post was made eighteen minutes after the parent, some amount of time less than eighteen minutes. Given a couple minutes before I came across his post, and a couple minutes to compose the rest of the post, a couple minutes to hand up on some incoming phone calls, a couple minutes to remotely wipe the hard drives of the users who interrupted my slashdot time with their phone calls... I'd say it probably took me about 5 minutes. That is, if I had actually needed to make up the acronym.
The truth is, I'm a founding member of SPCQ, and due to our constant confusion with SPC-QUETZLCOATL in the non-profit world, I was able to writ that post as quickly as I can type (using my split Dvorak ergonomic keyboard, of course). The delay to eighteen minutes was due to needing to sacrifice a virgin from the top level of my temple in Teotihicuan, a ritual I repeat before submitting every slashdot post, to ensure that I receive the favor of the Gods to prevent spelling, grammatical, and HTML errors.
I was going to mod you down, then I decided to respond instead.
Slashdot has always been behind the "news" cycle.
This is fine. Most people don't come here for breaking news, they come here for (sometimes) informative, enlightened, or humorous discussion of the article and related topics.
I'll just add that your griping is none of those things. If what you care about is being the first to read about something, then please feel free to go elsewhere. And feel free to not bother with the discussion on Slashdot when the same item is up a day or two later... you won't be missed if what you post is similar to the post I'm responding to.
Oh, and one last thing... Slashdot is a news aggregator. There is very, very little original content in the items posted to the main page. However, it is a community-driven site. If you're unhappy that items come through later here than elsewhere, one thing YOU can do to improve it is to submit articles yourself in a timely manner.
The ASPCMOTMOMNBA?
You, sir, need to work on your organization names.
Let me suggest a few:
The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Questionable Under Examination To Zoological Life Characterization Organisms Almost This (.) Large.
The SPC-QUETZLCOATL is, of course, dedicated to the humane treatment of viruses, and should not be confused with the SPCQ, which is dedicated to the humane treatment of feathered-serpent redeemer/savior archetypal figures.
Also it should be noted that the (.) in the official name of the organization is a tiny dot in parentheses, not a ASCII boobie, no matter how much you'd like it to be one.
Create an account and log in.
Items that make the front page from the firehose are tagged 'story' so that when viewing from the firehose, you can see that the item has posted to the front page.
It's a functionality kludge (surely there's a better way to indicate item status) but then again, so is much of the slashcode.
Bah. The easiest way to avoid spreading disease is to not leave your basement.
Plus there's the additional protection offered by a 2mm Cheetos-dust-and-hand-lotion crust on the hand(s).
Let's just face the facts: If you venture out of the basement to attend a convention, then you're not sufficiently introverted.
Meh. What was the amperage of those 600V?
I'm just looking forward to a (hopefully) creeped out Mirkwood. I have high hopes for del Toro being able to make people squirm in their seats as the party traipses through it.
Unfortunately, I kind of dread what he's going to do with the physiognomy of the Wood Elves... I fear it may be too fairy-tale-ish, some kind of caricature of what we have all grown accustomed to from the three Jackon films.
OTOH, if the whole movie is done in del Toro's fairy-tale style, then it may work... but that's a big risk for New Line to take.
That's ridiculous. Overwhelmingly so.
Do you refuse to drive a car at night because it isn't safe to drive without headlights? No -- you drive a car with headlights, and you turn them on at night.
You're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. We can have nuclear power, and mitigate the waste danger by storing the waste far away from population centers. This is basic common sense, and your objection to it is silly.
What I could see, is a state like NJ (very densely populated with almost no places for safe storage away from a population center) could pay a state like Nevada or Pennsylvania to store the waste. As long the the NJians bear a fair cost for the outsourced risk, then it works just fine.
The other thing I believe, tangentially related, is that electricity rates should be inversely proportional to potential fallout location given typical wind patterns. Then the NIMBYs will need to pay for their NIMBYism.