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Comment Re:What do you expect .. (Score 2) 196

The a/an rule of thumb is to use "a" if the next word sounds like it starts with a consonant, and "an" if it sounds like it starts with a vowel.

To English ears, a German speaker says "ooh ess bay", while an English speaker says "you ess bee". The y sound in this case is a consonant, so a native English speaker will say "a you ess bee stick".

All bets are off when the word following a/an starts with an h, since the letter can be silent or verbalized depending on the word and where you grew up.

Comment Re:Let's face it (Score 1) 381

Avatar's 3D was far from awesome. There were dozens of frames in the movie where post-production, or CGI, or something, left objects out of either the left eye or right eye frame. The object was usually replaced with a white blob the same shape as the missing object. Every time this happened it was as if someone stuck their thumb into my eye.

I'm one of those people who had to crank old style monitor refresh speed up to around 90 Hz to avoid flicker induced headaches. Apparently I have low persistence eyeballs. Oddly the 24 Hz of film has never been a problem for me (until 3D). I don't know why the two technologies affect me so differently.

After watching two 3D movies, Up (which irritated me because most scenes had infinite depth of focus) and then Avatar, I am not prepared to repeat the experience. If a movie is only available in 3D, I won't be buying a ticket.

Comment I want software freedom instead. (Score 2, Insightful) 646

Opera is also proprietary; users give up their software freedom, something all computer users deserve. As a practical matter you apparently can't get the better addon system or the rich addon library Firefox enjoys without also having software freedom. I'll take the free software and the verifiable level of trust I enjoy with Firefox knowing lots of skilled hackers work on that program in a way where hackers can vet each other's work (including me, should I so decide to engage in that way).

Comment Re:Excellent (Score 0, Offtopic) 268

Not only am I good at what I do (seriously, how many system administrators even take their time to compile custom kernels nowadays for maximum performance?), but a very close relative is also the CEO. I bet people here even use us for their hosting :)

Hopefully not, as a competent administrator knows that data integrity is far more important that a fractional improvement in performance.

but this must have triggered a hardware bug because the kernel worked fine on my work laptop

Exactly. A competent admin would have tested the config on identical hardware as what is running in production. That you consider a laptop to be sufficient testing demonstrates either a lack of funding for your "the CEO and I share DNA" company or that you suffer from a lack of training.

Sadly... it looks like my company is looking at going with Windoze for a few important servers because of a few outtages.

Had you properly designed your system for redundancy, you wouldn't have experienced those issues. Or if you weren't dicking around with kernels that should not be used in production, you similarly would not have experienced the outages. I take it you're going to be running the latest Windows Server alpha and beta releases from Microsoft in order to get maximum performance?

Comment Re:Pretty .. (Score 0, Troll) 526

What if the person you try to return it to refuses to claim it's theirs?

"People who've had valuable items stolen from them are not deserving of the police investigating?
not when someone who has the item is willing to give it back if the person they are tlaking to won't say it's theirs.

oh, and FUCK your morality.

Your morality says it's ok to not confirm something is yours and then waste tax payers money going after the people who tried to give the item back to you.

I think apple is paying people to astroturf this issue. in ANY other situation, this would be a no brainer. say it's your and take your property back. out know, this is Apple so you don't claim it's your and then destroy peoples lives.

really fucking awesome, dickwad

Comment Here's a quote (Score 1, Insightful) 1046

Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers, are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence

I agree with this quote. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true: climate change promoters are doing the same thing. Here's one example, and it was against a guy (Lomborg) who actually accepted the climate change thesis: he was only disagreeing on what should be done about it.

Unfortunately asking a politicized field to not act political is like asking a river to run in reverse up the Himalayas. Nice try, but won't accomplish much: especially if you are demanding it from only one side.

Comment Re:Wow (Score 0) 177

> Scribd has traditionally been a candidate for the worst designed site on the Internet

Worse than StackOverflow? That requires Javascript, for some reason, and the screen is just littered with meaningless blobs, arrows and other images. Slashdot doesn't have any of that (well, something like 2% of it) nor does it require javascript.

Comment Re:Retarded bible belt morons (Score 2, Insightful) 372

Stop treating women like sex objects.

Incidentally, your basic argument, on the "bible belt moron" side is one that I have never, ever heard in my life. And I am someone who considers sex to be something that should be in marriage, and someone who thinks that the porn industry is immoral and highly degrading; first degrading to women, who are turned into sex objects simply to be used for pleasure, and secondly degrading to society, who turn sex into the end-goal of life.

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