The book of Genesis isn't to be taken literally. The point of the "Creation Story" in a strictly religious context is that the earth was created for the purpose of God's plans; the "how" is irrelevant.

Furthermore, the careful observer will note that the book of Genesis is Moses's account. By my maths, that could be anywhere from 2,000 to 24,000* years after the fact. If you for a moment assume as a given that God did talk to Moses, then doesn't it stand to reason that God would have simply glossed over some bits of the story for brevity in order to get to more pressing matters? Perhaps the golden calf idol being constructed down in pinhead-ville?

In any event, people that interpret the Bible literally, and most specifically the OT, greatly amuse me.

* Many folks seem to think that 4,000 BCE is "the beginning," whatever the heck that is. I tend to associate the "family of Adam" with the advent of the Homo Sapien Sapien species. By my memory, our species has been around for about 26,000 years now. It also reconciles some anachronisms in the OT regarding races of giants, which I would then submit might be references to other un-evolved strains of hominids that needed to be purged to prevent interbreeding and therefore a recession in the gene pool. However, I'm not completely happy with this line of thought because it doesn't take a genius to figure out that evolutionary changes don't happen in gigantic leaps, but rather as incremental steps over periods of time.

Using a negative frustrum-exclusion algorithm to selectively render only certain parts of the view graph is really common. It's trivial to eliminate things from the render pipeline based on visibility.

President, we have ascertained the location of the hackers!

Good, where are they coming from?

They're hacking in from 192.168.0.1!

Excellent! Unleash our counterattack now!

Mod this truth up.

I think it has something to do with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. They give you 12 donuts, but then when ensuring that there are twelve, you change the state.

There's nothing lucky about building a digital lego set.

The framerate will be crap, but after a few Service Packs, yes, it will.

You know, there comes a point when your faith in Eugenics is so complete that you're still a believer in it even though it means that you'd probably have to render yourself infertile.

After sitting with their hands under their butts for soo long, W3C doesn't really deserve much of anything.

My local IT group uses the "If Sophos Enterprise console can't fix it, then we'll just re-image the machine from PXE" approach. Now, if our PXE image gets infected, we're completely screwed.

With more and more services moving towards the Cloud, re-imaging is less hassle than it used to be. Our corporate image logs in using a Novell client, and then it auto-configures Outlook; out of the box you get your corporate email with no sweat.

If you use a tool like N-nite to mass-install your favourite software, you're that much closer to your preferred computing environment with little to no extra work.

A good corporate network is very locked down as well. TDS-4 wouldn't work too well here because the only open ports (that I know of, and I've been working on these) are 80, 443, FTP, and Skype's ports. CONNECT requests from all of those are prohibited. Even if we experienced a large TDS-4 infection, the P2P aspect would become neutralised right off the bat because of local network policies. Most CC servers connect using IRC; those ports are sadly blocked (wtf grief please! Get me my Freenode back!)

Plus I run a Mac. As long as I don't do something stupid (MacDefender) I'm generally* pretty safe.

However, in the long run, I think that most would agree that most computer security can be accomplished through basic education.

(*) Knock on wood.

> Seriously why, when you could do manual labour, be an electrician, cementer, crane driver, or work in a number of other trades?

Dude, as an engineer, I still dream about being a crane operator or master welder. Those jobs are boss.

It's a known phenomenon in political-science known as "peter principle." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

If you get a Windows Phone 7, you might be more prone to do just that!

This is Slashdot. Did you honestly expect something different? Mindless wikipedia troll...

We still have professional brickmakers, binders, printers, farriers, coopers, and all kinds of now-deceased tradesmen. Calligraphic writing will pass into the annals of expert historical custodianship.

So long as there are historians nothing shall be lost in its entirety. The dainty days of Vermeer painting a woman authoring a letter as artistic in language as it is in script may be over, but the painting, the letter, and the knowledge of how it was done don't pass.

Good God man, don't you think you'll be able to find calligraphy lessons on YouTube soon enough?