You've just got this article prefect and some mayfly comes along and *changes it*. You'd got it the prefect mix of concise...
A prefect is a chief officer or government official who is responsible for a particular area in some countries (such as Japan and France). Is that really what you meant to say? Perhaps that's why they gave you grief. If I were editing and saw that kind of blatant error (really, dude, you spelled the same word the wrong way twice and what's worse, the misspelling changed the meaning of the sentence) I'd pull your shit out, too.
Yes I stopped editing pages
Thank you for that. I wouldn't want you near anything I wrote.
I wear glasses (near-sighted and have astigmatism, too). It would be *so* nice if there were a way to correct for that in software so I could wear VR goggles without my glasses.
If you have $15,000 you can have your vision fixed completely, but it involves surgery and each eye costs about $7k. It's a mechanical replacement for your eyes' natural focusing lenses, and if you get the surgery you not only won't need glasses, because it cures both your myopia and your astigmatism, but you won't need reading glasses when you get old, because age-related presbyopia is caused by the natural lens getting stiff and it's removed during the surgery.
It's called a CrystaLens, and insurance will pay all but $1000 for each eye, provided you have cataracts. You can get the surgery without cataracts but insurance won't cover it. If you have access to steroid eyedrops, that will give you cataracts.
I have one in my left eye. Best $1000 I ever spent (cataract came from prescription drops for a painful infection). I'm looking forward to getting a cataract in the other eye now... resistance is futile.
Indeed. I tried to edit Wikipedia exactly once, way back in 2006, and never will again.
I'd just had eye surgery, a CrystaLens implant. It had been approved by the FDA in 2003 but there was no mention in wikipedia's cataract article (I'd had a cataract caused by steroid eyedrops that had been prescribed for a painful infection). This new type of replacement lens is called an "accommodating lens". It sits on struts and will focus like a young person's natural lens. Better, even.
Wikipedia spoke of the problems with single-focus lenses (you need reading glasses with them) and multifocal lenses (which are like bifocal glasses so make stuff look weird) and stated that there was no way to focus once you've had the surgery.
Well, the new lens cures not only cataracts, but myopia, presbyopia (including age-related), and astigmatism and most patients need no corrective lenses at all after surgery. So I edited it to add the new type of lens and linked to Bauch and Lomb's description (they invented it) as a citation.
It was gone the next day. One of Bauch and Lomb's competitors probably took it out, I figured.
I probably spent all of twenty minutes on that edit -- wasted time and effort. Fuck 'em, I'll look shit up on wilipedia but I'm not going to go through the futility of trying to improve it, and I'm not sending them any money. That little incident soured me completely on wikipedia.
Yes, and not just in security or even in IT. If you can't find enough qualified employees, you're not offering enough salary or good enough benefits. It's like crying that nobody sells Teslas for $20k. You want a Tesla, you pay the asking price. If you can't get goods (in this case the goods being labor) for your offering price, you're not offering enough.
Um, lets see... filthy air, filthy water, the draft, college kids getting shot by the national Guard, the Vietnam war, the cold war, Nixon's war on drugs, society's war on homosexuals, institutional racial discrimination, twenty five inch CRT TV's (the biggest on the market then), being scorned for being a nerd (you young nerds are lucky), lack of things we take for granted like microwaves, computers, cell phones... oh yeah, life was paradise when I was sixteen (rolls eyes)
Could be one of those things where you just had to be alive during that era to appreciate it
You hit the nail on the head. TV was even more prudish then than when you were young, and all the things you already had like cell phones, self-opening doors, personal computers, less primitive hospital facilities were all fantasies from the future in 1966. The Star Trek you saw was not the Star Trek I saw.
That said, I like TNG better, too, even though I was rooting for Lore to throw Wesley out the airlock before Data threw Lore out.
I saw part of the new episodes and some of it was close, some wasn't. The new Spock sucked, the new Scotty hit the nail on the head (of course, he was played by James Doohan's son). The guy who played Kirk nailed Shatner even if he didn't look much like him. And Uhura, sheesh, Nichols was hot, the new Uhura is a plain Jane.
Like icebike said, this is about batteries. Your caps are leaking and exploding because they're cheap bottom of the barrel shit. Voltages are the same in today's computers as 1990's, but you didn't have the capacitors exploding because they simply used better components.
AND, the capacitors on your motherboard are for circuits that tie different chips together; the chips themselves have caps on silicone (and resistors and other components).
The subject we're discussing isn't more reliable capacitors; that's not what supercapacitors are.
The capacitors on your motherboard store small amounts of energy for tiny periods of time. They're used for various purposes, like oscillation circuits for modulating or demodulating, timing circuits, and as frequency filters. An AC current passes right through it (or appears to -- 60 Hz AC runs one way, then the other. The charge builds up on the plate until the polarity is reversed, then discharges. The higher the capacitance, the more low frequencies are filtered. They're usually used in conjunction with coils, which do the opposite of what capacitors do.
Supercapacitors are used for storing large amounts of power quickly and discharging that power slower and at a lower power. Their advantage over batteries is the speed that they can be charged. They should also last a lot longer than batteries, since batteries are chemical devices (depending on how the supercapacitors are made).
Lawmakers have a tendency to pass laws that would crush private industries unless they intervened.
Can you give some examples? And remember, we're talking Federal government here, not state or local. And if your examples include keeping food products safe, the environment clean, ensuring a safe workplace, etc, I say tough shit. If you can't obey the law and stay in business, you're in the wrong damned business.
You sound like a friend of mine who was born about the time TOS was cancelled. He hated TNG until an episode with the Borg aired while he was at a friend's house, and he was hooked after that.
I liked DS9. It was different not only from other Star Treks, but other TV sci-fi... and Avery Brooks impressed me as an actor. He'd had a regular role in "Spencer For Hire" as a pimp/gangster and the Sisko character was completely different, down to the speech (ebonics in Spencer, Starfleet in DS9).
I got a kick out of Doctor Johnnycab in "Voyager".
What does making it a municipal service get you? In return for ditching the profit motive, you get the traditional problems of government-run services: delayed maintenance, DMV-grade service, and political interference. Only this time, it's going to be that the mayor snoops on who's downloading porn, or the cops snooping on who posts under the name fourtwenty4eva, or they'll implement filters on everything "for the children". My water is municipal; the price I pay isn't markedly lower than what people who have privately-supplied water pay in my area, and the system needs over $100M in upgrades and repairs.
You're either voting for the wrong candidates or living in the wrong city. In Springfield, IL the city owns the power company. We have the lowest rates, lowest downtime, and best customer service in the state. Why? The CEO of Amerin (who most folks in the area have) is only beholden to the stockholders, which means as few repairs and as little maintenance as possible, as high as rates are possible, and why care about customer service? It isn't like the customer can go down the street for a different electric company (I have Amerin for gas service). OTOH if the power's out too much, the rates go up too far, or the customer service staff gets lazy and surly, the Mayor loses his job next election.
I have to agree with you about the Catholics. That's one of many things I disagree with them about. To the new Pope's credit, though, at least he evicted the "Bishop of Bling".
I also say that Pat Robertson has converted more Christians to atheism than Richard Dawkins ever dreamed of.
My church is a non-denominational church on the rich side of town. It's popular; they fill the pews four times each Sunday despite actually preaching what Jesus preached (even admonitions about wealth; Lazarus and the rich man has been brought up more than once).
The money goes all over; they send millions to Africa and Haiti and places like that every year. Cash is shoveled to places in the US that have disasters, like Hurricane Sandy, and to poorer churches. For the last couple of years they've been picking the worst public school in town and completely refurbishing them, paying for materials and the labor coming from volunteers. They buy two weeks worth of groceries for every family who has children in Harvard Park and McClernand over Christmas break, because school breakfasts and lunches are most of many of these kids' diets and they go hungry over Christmas break. Christmas is hard on a poor child.
The church's budget is voted on by all members of the congregation each year.
But you are right about many churches; a lesbian friend once told me that she wished she wasn't gay because she didn't want to go to hell. It seems her preacher was blasting homosexuality. I pointed out that her sins were no worse than mine, that everybody sins, that that's what Christ died for.
I took her to my church the next Sunday and coincidentally, the sermon was about judgement, as in "judge not, lest you be judged yourself", how we were all sinners and why Jesus was executed.
There seems to be a lot of such coincidences there.
Illinois has thirteen million people, the US has three hundred million. You'll need 23 times as many servers, and twenty five times as robust a database that in the fed's case has to pull data from different tables in different systems and feed that data to the states' IT depts. And Illinois' problem isn't ineptness, it's corruption (although Quinn seems pretty inept).
States opting out are cutting off their noses to spite their faces, since the feds are paying for it.
It is indeed interesting. If time doesn't exist to an outside observer, neither does free will, but since time is an emergent phenomenon, free will would be, too.
The main concern with regard to health records security is that health insurance companies would deny coverage to people with preexisting conditions based on evidence in medical records. That's been fixed, at least in theory, by obamacare, if they ever manage to get it up and running.
The ACA was passed and signed and gone through the courts; it's the law. Obamacare is in fact up and running, what's not is the federal web site.
Your state's isn't in place? That isn't the Feds' fault, it's your state government's. Illinois' is in place, and we have the most dysfunctional government in the US. Why isn't yours?
Of course, the real fix would have been to get the insurance companies out of the health insurance business altogether with a single payer system
I'd mod you up if I had points. The reason the US has such expensive health care is the insurance companies. They're simply parasitic middlemen who do nothing but add cost.
I think if your firm is big enough to build an online data system big enough to accommodate this kind of traffic, you're big enough to handle the paperwork.
Indeed, my Kyocera Android has the same size screen but is 720p, and the phone is waterproof. Since it's Android there are lots of apps (are there any at all on FF?).
And my phone costs half as much. Why would anybody buy this??
Like I said, lucky for me. Not necessarily everyone. But if I were collaborating I'd do it in plain ascii text and format in a word processor when it was done.
Christians tend to believe it's OK to make preaching the gospel a commercial activity, but not sex (go figure)... It's almost as if the leaders of major churches actually figure things out by looking at Jesus and doing exactly the opposite: they make churches into shops, and slam the door on women who are forced into selling sex by the shitty economy.
If your church is like that, you're attending the wrong church. My church actually gives stuff away to its members. Coffee is free there, they often pass out hardcover books with $20 price tags at no cost to the recipient, DVDs, all kinds of stuff. One Sunday they passed out envelopes with a twenty dollar bill in each, the goal being to use that money to take someone not a church member to lunch. They do have a coffee shop where you can buy pastries, but the money garnered (which isn't much because the goods are dirt cheap) go to the poor.
None of the preachers there wear ties... maybe that's your clue; the tie is the symbol of wealth and power, the useless article of clothing every banker, lawyer, and politician wears; the symbol of everything Jesus taught against.
"Beware wolves in sheep's clothing." Sometimes the wolves don't even bother slipping out of their wolves' clothing.
I had a heated discussion with a Catholic friend about the gift shop at the Our Lady of the Snows shrine in Belleville, IL once (they have a hell of a tree decoration light show) about their gift shop. Jesus would have trashed that gift shop.
But only from the point of view of an external god-like observer.
Nope, only within this universe... and you missed it. TFA says that to an external observer, there is no time, only quantum entanglement. So to an outside observer, there is no first post; everything happens at once.
Vote positive (to even slightly pro-MS posts) and you will no more receive voting points. I have huge amount of positive karma (tens of +5 posts)
I have 2^8 +5s (you have 2^3), have had excellent karma the whole time I've been here, and I haven't had points for well over a year, and I'm certainly no MS apologist. In fact, every time somebody tries to say Windows is more useable than Linux I always pipe up and set them straight.
You can always medamoderate, and vote on stories. Hell, every time I post a comment slashdot begs me to meta-moderate.
I've gone for years without points, then gotten 15 a day for months, then none again. The FAQ says it's random, well, that's how random works. "Damn, I never win the lottery, I must be buying the wrong brand of toothpaste."
That said, and more on-topic, to reply to the AC above you, I DO hate Windows (even though I've been too lazy to install Linux on my notebook). Face it, nobody would use Linux if they weren't just thoroughly disgusted with the OS that came from the factory on their computer. MS doesn't have to make a good OS, but Linux distros do and Apple needs to even more, since they're a bit more expensive than Windows computers (I would guess that Apples would be even better than Linux computers).
I find it sad that humanity stopped expanding as soon as it became a bit hard. And I don't think it's relatively harder now for us to expand than it was a thousand years ago.
Dude, you read too much sci-fi and not enough sci-fu. A thousand years ago it was impossible for anyone to visit the Earth's poles, but even they had 1G of gravity and breathable air. No other planet or satellite in the solar system does. We're not talking about thousands of miles to the new world, we're talking millions of miles, in a vacuum, surrounded by intense radiation. And no planet or satellite in the solar system has breathable air.
And other stars? As impossible for us as going to the moon was for Columbus. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, takes light four years to reach, and you can't go faster than light. And the faster you go the more relative mass you have and the more killing radiation you encounter.
People wonder why I set "Nobots" ten million years in the future, that's why. We're not terraforming Mars or Venus any time soon, nor are we going to visit other stars. It's still an impossibility, as impossible as it was for Columbus to fly his ship to the moon.
Slashdot Mirror
You've just got this article prefect and some mayfly comes along and *changes it*. You'd got it the prefect mix of concise...
A prefect is a chief officer or government official who is responsible for a particular area in some countries (such as Japan and France). Is that really what you meant to say? Perhaps that's why they gave you grief. If I were editing and saw that kind of blatant error (really, dude, you spelled the same word the wrong way twice and what's worse, the misspelling changed the meaning of the sentence) I'd pull your shit out, too.
Yes I stopped editing pages
Thank you for that. I wouldn't want you near anything I wrote.
I wear glasses (near-sighted and have astigmatism, too). It would be *so* nice if there were a way to correct for that in software so I could wear VR goggles without my glasses.
If you have $15,000 you can have your vision fixed completely, but it involves surgery and each eye costs about $7k. It's a mechanical replacement for your eyes' natural focusing lenses, and if you get the surgery you not only won't need glasses, because it cures both your myopia and your astigmatism, but you won't need reading glasses when you get old, because age-related presbyopia is caused by the natural lens getting stiff and it's removed during the surgery.
It's called a CrystaLens, and insurance will pay all but $1000 for each eye, provided you have cataracts. You can get the surgery without cataracts but insurance won't cover it. If you have access to steroid eyedrops, that will give you cataracts.
I have one in my left eye. Best $1000 I ever spent (cataract came from prescription drops for a painful infection). I'm looking forward to getting a cataract in the other eye now... resistance is futile.
Indeed. I tried to edit Wikipedia exactly once, way back in 2006, and never will again.
I'd just had eye surgery, a CrystaLens implant. It had been approved by the FDA in 2003 but there was no mention in wikipedia's cataract article (I'd had a cataract caused by steroid eyedrops that had been prescribed for a painful infection). This new type of replacement lens is called an "accommodating lens". It sits on struts and will focus like a young person's natural lens. Better, even.
Wikipedia spoke of the problems with single-focus lenses (you need reading glasses with them) and multifocal lenses (which are like bifocal glasses so make stuff look weird) and stated that there was no way to focus once you've had the surgery.
Well, the new lens cures not only cataracts, but myopia, presbyopia (including age-related), and astigmatism and most patients need no corrective lenses at all after surgery. So I edited it to add the new type of lens and linked to Bauch and Lomb's description (they invented it) as a citation.
It was gone the next day. One of Bauch and Lomb's competitors probably took it out, I figured.
I probably spent all of twenty minutes on that edit -- wasted time and effort. Fuck 'em, I'll look shit up on wilipedia but I'm not going to go through the futility of trying to improve it, and I'm not sending them any money. That little incident soured me completely on wikipedia.
Yes, and not just in security or even in IT. If you can't find enough qualified employees, you're not offering enough salary or good enough benefits. It's like crying that nobody sells Teslas for $20k. You want a Tesla, you pay the asking price. If you can't get goods (in this case the goods being labor) for your offering price, you're not offering enough.
Um, lets see... filthy air, filthy water, the draft, college kids getting shot by the national Guard, the Vietnam war, the cold war, Nixon's war on drugs, society's war on homosexuals, institutional racial discrimination, twenty five inch CRT TV's (the biggest on the market then), being scorned for being a nerd (you young nerds are lucky), lack of things we take for granted like microwaves, computers, cell phones... oh yeah, life was paradise when I was sixteen (rolls eyes)
Could be one of those things where you just had to be alive during that era to appreciate it
You hit the nail on the head. TV was even more prudish then than when you were young, and all the things you already had like cell phones, self-opening doors, personal computers, less primitive hospital facilities were all fantasies from the future in 1966. The Star Trek you saw was not the Star Trek I saw.
That said, I like TNG better, too, even though I was rooting for Lore to throw Wesley out the airlock before Data threw Lore out.
I saw part of the new episodes and some of it was close, some wasn't. The new Spock sucked, the new Scotty hit the nail on the head (of course, he was played by James Doohan's son). The guy who played Kirk nailed Shatner even if he didn't look much like him. And Uhura, sheesh, Nichols was hot, the new Uhura is a plain Jane.
Like icebike said, this is about batteries. Your caps are leaking and exploding because they're cheap bottom of the barrel shit. Voltages are the same in today's computers as 1990's, but you didn't have the capacitors exploding because they simply used better components.
AND, the capacitors on your motherboard are for circuits that tie different chips together; the chips themselves have caps on silicone (and resistors and other components).
The subject we're discussing isn't more reliable capacitors; that's not what supercapacitors are.
The capacitors on your motherboard store small amounts of energy for tiny periods of time. They're used for various purposes, like oscillation circuits for modulating or demodulating, timing circuits, and as frequency filters. An AC current passes right through it (or appears to -- 60 Hz AC runs one way, then the other. The charge builds up on the plate until the polarity is reversed, then discharges. The higher the capacitance, the more low frequencies are filtered. They're usually used in conjunction with coils, which do the opposite of what capacitors do.
Supercapacitors are used for storing large amounts of power quickly and discharging that power slower and at a lower power. Their advantage over batteries is the speed that they can be charged. They should also last a lot longer than batteries, since batteries are chemical devices (depending on how the supercapacitors are made).
Lawmakers have a tendency to pass laws that would crush private industries unless they intervened.
Can you give some examples? And remember, we're talking Federal government here, not state or local. And if your examples include keeping food products safe, the environment clean, ensuring a safe workplace, etc, I say tough shit. If you can't obey the law and stay in business, you're in the wrong damned business.
You sound like a friend of mine who was born about the time TOS was cancelled. He hated TNG until an episode with the Borg aired while he was at a friend's house, and he was hooked after that.
I liked DS9. It was different not only from other Star Treks, but other TV sci-fi... and Avery Brooks impressed me as an actor. He'd had a regular role in "Spencer For Hire" as a pimp/gangster and the Sisko character was completely different, down to the speech (ebonics in Spencer, Starfleet in DS9).
I got a kick out of Doctor Johnnycab in "Voyager".
Because smart people, who think stuff up, ought to be able to get paid for their ideas.
Thinking stuff up is easy. Implementation is what's hard.
What does making it a municipal service get you? In return for ditching the profit motive, you get the traditional problems of government-run services: delayed maintenance, DMV-grade service, and political interference. Only this time, it's going to be that the mayor snoops on who's downloading porn, or the cops snooping on who posts under the name fourtwenty4eva, or they'll implement filters on everything "for the children". My water is municipal; the price I pay isn't markedly lower than what people who have privately-supplied water pay in my area, and the system needs over $100M in upgrades and repairs.
You're either voting for the wrong candidates or living in the wrong city. In Springfield, IL the city owns the power company. We have the lowest rates, lowest downtime, and best customer service in the state. Why? The CEO of Amerin (who most folks in the area have) is only beholden to the stockholders, which means as few repairs and as little maintenance as possible, as high as rates are possible, and why care about customer service? It isn't like the customer can go down the street for a different electric company (I have Amerin for gas service). OTOH if the power's out too much, the rates go up too far, or the customer service staff gets lazy and surly, the Mayor loses his job next election.
I have to agree with you about the Catholics. That's one of many things I disagree with them about. To the new Pope's credit, though, at least he evicted the "Bishop of Bling".
I also say that Pat Robertson has converted more Christians to atheism than Richard Dawkins ever dreamed of.
My church is a non-denominational church on the rich side of town. It's popular; they fill the pews four times each Sunday despite actually preaching what Jesus preached (even admonitions about wealth; Lazarus and the rich man has been brought up more than once).
The money goes all over; they send millions to Africa and Haiti and places like that every year. Cash is shoveled to places in the US that have disasters, like Hurricane Sandy, and to poorer churches. For the last couple of years they've been picking the worst public school in town and completely refurbishing them, paying for materials and the labor coming from volunteers. They buy two weeks worth of groceries for every family who has children in Harvard Park and McClernand over Christmas break, because school breakfasts and lunches are most of many of these kids' diets and they go hungry over Christmas break. Christmas is hard on a poor child.
The church's budget is voted on by all members of the congregation each year.
But you are right about many churches; a lesbian friend once told me that she wished she wasn't gay because she didn't want to go to hell. It seems her preacher was blasting homosexuality. I pointed out that her sins were no worse than mine, that everybody sins, that that's what Christ died for.
I took her to my church the next Sunday and coincidentally, the sermon was about judgement, as in "judge not, lest you be judged yourself", how we were all sinners and why Jesus was executed.
There seems to be a lot of such coincidences there.
Illinois has thirteen million people, the US has three hundred million. You'll need 23 times as many servers, and twenty five times as robust a database that in the fed's case has to pull data from different tables in different systems and feed that data to the states' IT depts. And Illinois' problem isn't ineptness, it's corruption (although Quinn seems pretty inept).
States opting out are cutting off their noses to spite their faces, since the feds are paying for it.
It is indeed interesting. If time doesn't exist to an outside observer, neither does free will, but since time is an emergent phenomenon, free will would be, too.
Yes, I agree that it's a better situation than it was.
The main concern with regard to health records security is that health insurance companies would deny coverage to people with preexisting conditions based on evidence in medical records. That's been fixed, at least in theory, by obamacare, if they ever manage to get it up and running.
The ACA was passed and signed and gone through the courts; it's the law. Obamacare is in fact up and running, what's not is the federal web site.
Your state's isn't in place? That isn't the Feds' fault, it's your state government's. Illinois' is in place, and we have the most dysfunctional government in the US. Why isn't yours?
Of course, the real fix would have been to get the insurance companies out of the health insurance business altogether with a single payer system
I'd mod you up if I had points. The reason the US has such expensive health care is the insurance companies. They're simply parasitic middlemen who do nothing but add cost.
I think if your firm is big enough to build an online data system big enough to accommodate this kind of traffic, you're big enough to handle the paperwork.
Indeed, my Kyocera Android has the same size screen but is 720p, and the phone is waterproof. Since it's Android there are lots of apps (are there any at all on FF?).
And my phone costs half as much. Why would anybody buy this??
Like I said, lucky for me. Not necessarily everyone. But if I were collaborating I'd do it in plain ascii text and format in a word processor when it was done.
Christians tend to believe it's OK to make preaching the gospel a commercial activity, but not sex (go figure)... It's almost as if the leaders of major churches actually figure things out by looking at Jesus and doing exactly the opposite: they make churches into shops, and slam the door on women who are forced into selling sex by the shitty economy.
If your church is like that, you're attending the wrong church. My church actually gives stuff away to its members. Coffee is free there, they often pass out hardcover books with $20 price tags at no cost to the recipient, DVDs, all kinds of stuff. One Sunday they passed out envelopes with a twenty dollar bill in each, the goal being to use that money to take someone not a church member to lunch. They do have a coffee shop where you can buy pastries, but the money garnered (which isn't much because the goods are dirt cheap) go to the poor.
None of the preachers there wear ties... maybe that's your clue; the tie is the symbol of wealth and power, the useless article of clothing every banker, lawyer, and politician wears; the symbol of everything Jesus taught against.
"Beware wolves in sheep's clothing." Sometimes the wolves don't even bother slipping out of their wolves' clothing.
I had a heated discussion with a Catholic friend about the gift shop at the Our Lady of the Snows shrine in Belleville, IL once (they have a hell of a tree decoration light show) about their gift shop. Jesus would have trashed that gift shop.
"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." -- Douglas Adams
But only from the point of view of an external god-like observer.
Nope, only within this universe... and you missed it. TFA says that to an external observer, there is no time, only quantum entanglement. So to an outside observer, there is no first post; everything happens at once.
Vote positive (to even slightly pro-MS posts) and you will no more receive voting points. I have huge amount of positive karma (tens of +5 posts)
I have 2^8 +5s (you have 2^3), have had excellent karma the whole time I've been here, and I haven't had points for well over a year, and I'm certainly no MS apologist. In fact, every time somebody tries to say Windows is more useable than Linux I always pipe up and set them straight.
You can always medamoderate, and vote on stories. Hell, every time I post a comment slashdot begs me to meta-moderate.
I've gone for years without points, then gotten 15 a day for months, then none again. The FAQ says it's random, well, that's how random works. "Damn, I never win the lottery, I must be buying the wrong brand of toothpaste."
That said, and more on-topic, to reply to the AC above you, I DO hate Windows (even though I've been too lazy to install Linux on my notebook). Face it, nobody would use Linux if they weren't just thoroughly disgusted with the OS that came from the factory on their computer. MS doesn't have to make a good OS, but Linux distros do and Apple needs to even more, since they're a bit more expensive than Windows computers (I would guess that Apples would be even better than Linux computers).
I find it sad that humanity stopped expanding as soon as it became a bit hard. And I don't think it's relatively harder now for us to expand than it was a thousand years ago.
Dude, you read too much sci-fi and not enough sci-fu. A thousand years ago it was impossible for anyone to visit the Earth's poles, but even they had 1G of gravity and breathable air. No other planet or satellite in the solar system does. We're not talking about thousands of miles to the new world, we're talking millions of miles, in a vacuum, surrounded by intense radiation. And no planet or satellite in the solar system has breathable air.
And other stars? As impossible for us as going to the moon was for Columbus. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, takes light four years to reach, and you can't go faster than light. And the faster you go the more relative mass you have and the more killing radiation you encounter.
People wonder why I set "Nobots" ten million years in the future, that's why. We're not terraforming Mars or Venus any time soon, nor are we going to visit other stars. It's still an impossibility, as impossible as it was for Columbus to fly his ship to the moon.