Hmm, my browser failed to render your sarcasm tags.

Sometimes you have a need for a minimal terminal interface.

For me it's usually because I managed to break X playing with new drivers (again!) and I need something to fix it in.

So I should be crippled to 80x24 while I do that when better could be available?

Older than that. A bit of research shows that it goes back millenia, and a bit of thought behind "what would move a person to such a hypothesis?" suggests that it is as old as men trying to justify rape.

Statistical analysis is a biggie for math usage, and it applies across many business domains.

It's not glamorous, but it needs to be done.

TCP/IP is transport neutral. There were plenty of token ring networks back in the day, and quite a few multi-user internet nodes at smaller schools were single minicomputers connected by "high-speed" modem to larger schools that had real networks.

But it was still "The Internet".

Methinks the gentleman doth protest too vehemently.

Take it fron an old-school conservative and veteran: what we have out there on the "political right" are a bunch of authoritarian extremists that mainly serve as the "tick" to the not-quite-so-right-wing "tock" of the other side.

Nixon would have been branded a raving communist fascist by this bunch, too "liberal" to even run as a Democrat in many parts of the country.

Misquote and wrong amendment.

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights.html
Amendment II

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

There were probably quite a few guns in the audience, this being Colorado and all.

But consider the tactical situation and that he was reportedly wearing a ballistic vest and riot helmet.

How do we know that nobody tried to shoot him?

Giving up liberty for safety is a fool's bargain, because you are *never* guaranteed safety.

Anybody who tells you that they can guarantee your safety just wants control over you.

It was a movie theater.

The mass murder weapon of choice is gasoline and a match.

This guy was after notoriety.

Death is the only thing that is certain.

This sounds like an opportunity to *live*.

Actually, due to changes in the underlying system even a perfectly flawless piece of software can fail over time.

There are broad swaths of hardware failures that look like software bugs, just for starters.

Since the simplest of those options is "it just is that way", I'm afraid your army of invisible pink unicorns will have to return to the stable.

We can only test our own universe, though if we can detect edge interactions where it appears to be being acted upon by something undetectable that *might* be evidence for parallel universes (or even evidence for gods if the data points that way). We are definitely working at the edge of what can be known when looking at that sort of thing, though, so I wouldn't expect positive results any time soon.

Indeed, it does continue to this very day.

There's a lot of music that happens that will never be commercially successful, but is quite enjoyable for the people making and hearing it.

To quote a Duane Elms song (Threes: Rev. 2.0):
Three things you should be wary of,
A new kid in his prime,
A man with all the answers,
And a code that runs first time.

Strictly speaking the Wiffleball device is distinct from a Farnsworth Fusor, though it is related.

The fusor has a problem in that grid losses from a classic electrostatic confinement device are inevitable and will always prevent breakeven operation.

The Bussard Wiffleball avoids this problem (in theory) by eliminating the physical grid and replacing it with magnetic fields (which is why you'll see them referred to as "magrid" devices by some as well).

Promising work, and with more teams working on it now I hope that we will see published work in the not too distant future.

Potential side benefits include many additional data points on magnetic confinement of plasma in regimes not currently covered by Tokamak research, so even if the wiffleball configuration proves to be a bust the results can still be useful.