I enjoy your comics and like most of those you cite. Will check on the others.

I'm not sure using one of the most stupid and brutish sport in existence as an analogy on the subject of education really goes in the right direction...

Errr... it's usually quite simple: if you don't know something you are ignorant. If you do, then you aren't. It's not a relative concept.

Oh, you must be one of those 'idiots' I keep hearing about on the Internet. It's OK to be ignorant. It's not OK to wear your ignorance as a badge and hit others on the head with it.

I currently live in Europe and tried to get a Linux Laptop about 2 years ago. I tried several barebone sellers, but there were always problems: either they wouldn't ship to my country, or they'd force the local keyboard upon me, but I wanted a standard US qwerty. In the end, the ONLY seller of Linux laptops that had what I wanted was... Dell ! And that's what I got for home, work and wife. Works fine with Ubuntu.

Or what if your work actually FORBIDS you to reveal your password to anyone, under various penalties ? I'd like to see a high US official pass through customs and watch a random rent-a-cop get his password and copy all his files. Right, like this is gonna happen.

In Italy the elections last two days: sunday and monday, this way whether you are away on WE or need to work on monday, you don't have an excuse to not show at the booth. And incidentally it gives the mafia the entire night to stuff the ballot boxes...

Don't forget that Dell also sells Linux laptops, even if the options are really well hidden on their websites. We have plenty at work and I'm typing this one one. Though, as many have pointed out here, increasingly more colleagues use Macs.

In Pohl's Gateway series of books, there are AI assistants that are created this way. The 'hero' of the story has one based on Einstein. And then when computer power increases and those get more and more input and larger decision trees, things get... interesting. Anyway it's an awesome SF series.

Ever heard of soap and water ?

And even if it lowers your chances of contracting an std by 5% (which is about the most seriously verified number I've seen so far), I certainly hope you don't ever have a daughter, because you are sure to cut off her tits to keep her from ever having breast cancer, right ?

I don't understand why a lot of people claim that circumcision is sometimes necessary for medical reasons. It's not: look up preputioplasty. They have really ill-informed doctors. This being said, sorry for your loss.

I did some Forth back in... ohhh... 1983 on an ORIC-1. I found it hardly easier than assembly at the time. But since then don't they have a huge trove of libraries and whatnot, like other languages, to do most things ? Has it stayed 'bare metal' so much ? Hell, even in C you can load a webserver library with one #include and one call.

And how does that contradict my point ?

Let me Godwin that discussion fast... Just remember that Hitler, with a few Hollerith machines, which aren't even considered computers by any definitions of the term, managed to classify, sort and exterminate millions of people, just imagine what a malevolent dictatorship could bring today. Think we are past that ? Well, it looks like the Front National, France's extremist and racist party, is posed to win the next election due to the usual two main parties being full of shit and full of themselves (not sure there's a difference there).

Now the million dollar question is: do you really want to give the keys to (in this case, french equivalent to) the NSA to such a party, even if democratically elected ?!? Really ? The best solution is to never build a mass listening aparatus in the first place. Pass laws making it impossible. Buid an anti-NSA whose life work is to search, target, disrupt or destroy by whatever means any mass spying operations.

I won't touch a language that does this for the simple reason that anybody writes his own 'language' with it and nobody can read what anybody else does. And while I'm at it, the whole "there's more than one way to do it" is totally counter productive since 10 programmers would produce 10 different codes and few would understand the logic of the others easily. Gimme a strict language with only one way to do it and my code will be the same as my neighbor and that's great for readability.