Nice attempt at diversion, alas I'm all too used to your kind.

Know what most 'gun deaths' stats like yours have in common? They include suicide, which is a bit of a misnomer when trying to prevent 'gun violence' and including those who harmed no one but themselves... or do we also include those who use pills or sharp objects in the statics for 'sleeping pills violence' & 'knife violence'?

Know what happens when you subtract suicides where a gun was used from broader 'gun death' statics... you know, when looking at crime? You end up with quite a few less gun deaths. Don't believe me? Go back to GP's Wikipedia links, here in the US we have a gun related suicide rate that is nearly 70% of all gun related deaths.

I'd ask you to stay on topic... but you are an AC so hardly worth the effort.

I'll tell you one thing that's got worse though: the hours.

Haven't you ever heard of male privilege? Dulce et decorum est pro nauarchus mori.

I've taught tree identification to scouts and scout leaders. I can say from experience that people do not consciously see details, even if they're looking at a specimen right in front of them. It's as if their conscious perception stops as soon as their brain dredges up the word "tree". You can tell a typical person to look at a tree for a minute, then have them turn their back and describe it. What you get, even after you instructed them to look *carefully* at the tree, isn't much more specific than "green blob on a brown stick", and sometimes the stick is is really gray, not brown.

The power of verbal labels to shut down observation is profound. Anything that isn't broadleaf tends to be a "pine", even though pine, fir, spruce, etc. look a heck of a lot less like each other than a oak and Norway maple. It's like someone could't tell the difference between an opossum and a house cat. Most peoples' sense for the shape of a tree is extremely crude; they'll recall extreme shape like an arbor vitae, but they won't see the shape difference between a red maple (globular) and a Japanese maple (spreading).

You have to train yourself to actually see things. It takes conscious effort at first. Sketching or writing detailed verbal descriptions helps.

Since Windows 7 is not actively developed anymore and is in extended security only support does this mean office 2016 will require an OS designed for tablets?

Luxury!

When I was a lad me mum fed us bowls of computer dots and we didn't crap a valid Fortran deck by teatime she'd beat us about the head with an RS-232 cable -- if we were lucky.

Right here is the solid fact.

it's not about skill, It's about how cheap can we get the whores for, and how hard can we abuse them.

20 somethings tend to be too stupid to stand up for themselves and accept a 60 hour workweek as normal. They also buy the bullshit of "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" and keep accepting more and more workload.

I not only sent emails with bang path routing, at one point I actually figured out Sendmail.cf -- the Brainfuck of configuration files.

I'm an "old fart" and more of a digital native than any 20 something.. I have been in the internet since 1987 in a legit form.. Was a part of it in other forms for 2 years previous... Running Unix and managing dial up nodes for UUnet access. I have been active in usenet at that time as well as not only living the digital world, but I have done more in networking and computing hardware than any 10 of the new kiddies from college put together. How many of them have actually licked a cray?

In fact most old farts I know that are still in the business can still work circles around the new turds on the block. We just work smart using that experience we have instead of being over caffeinated lost puppies sniffing and peeing on every server rack they can find.

My teething ring was loop of 10Base5 cable. My see-and-say was a circular slide rule.

The bell bottoms and sideburns are a dead giveaway.

What I think is weird is her defense of her dismal performance at HP, which is that the company did really well after she left.

I mean, hole-ee cow, there's a woman who's away to see the fairies.

How much more "native" could I be?

By this I mean if you asked a typical person to picture a tree in his mind, he'd picture a green blob on a brown stick sticking up out of flat green space. Tolkien is the kind of person who'd picture an individual specimen of a specific species of tree growing in a place with unique and describable topography. And the concreteness with which he imagines this kind of thing shows in his writing.

When I was young I read and re-read Lord of the Rings for the magic. Forty years later, I re-read Lord of the Rings for the landscape. You can often orient yourself in a Tolkien scene; do a mental walk through imagining the slope of the land and smell kicked up by the damp grass and heather. There's nobody who writes landscape like Tolkien.

If you're a careful reader -- alright, an obsessive reader -- you can correlate scenes in different plot threads in time by the appearance of the sky and particularly by the phase of the moon. So you know what's happening to Merry and Pippin when we're in a Three Hunters scene, or how far along Frodo and Sam are inMordor during the Battle of the Pellenor Fields. That's a degree of attention lavished on detail beyond any reasonable marketing justification; it must have added years to the drafting of the manuscript. It's not even apparent until you've read the book a half dozen times or more.

That sense of exploring the details of a real scene in space and time would be familiar to any naturalist.

Scientists are in fact capable of liking and enjoying works of fiction and fantasy, such as Lord of the Rings, or the Bible.