Well, of course! It just doesn't sound the same when one says "I wouldn't touch that with a 3-meter pole."

And, I forgot one other intersection: the INT* character type.

Old news, old news. The portrait of J. Random Hacker from way back still holds true.
http://catb.org/jargon/html/appendixb.html
I find, however, that my best understanding of programmers and other computer gurus is by visualizing them as the intersection of several descriptions:
Asperger's intersecting J. Random Hacker intersecting the local definitions of "weird", "geeky", and "nerdy". Usually, no one of us fits any one of these definitions exactly, but in that confluence of them, a very real commonality emerges.

And if a passenger in the car is on the phone, then what? If people won't make the right/safe decisions, then technology won't do much to correct that without stepping on aspects of cell phone use that aren't driver-related.

It's about equal for me. Most times, going into Canada from Alaska or Washington, they've asked if I have any produce and why I'm coming to Canada, how long I plan to stay, etc. Coming into the States, they usually ask where the driver is from, what their visit to Canada was for, etc. Last time, the US border guard talked to the driver, found out he was from Texas, and asked "are you from the capital of Texas, Dallas?" The driver blinked and said, "you mean Austin?" The border guard agreed without missing a beat and waved us on. Of course, all of these instances were more than a decade ago, before 9-11.

Well said!

What about getting whuffie to replace money? Reputations make better currency than money in small groups of people.
Insensitive clods! Maybe it's time for an ad hoc to take over /.

Faery Tale would be an interesting book of his to film too.

It was an Ameglian Major Cow, but I don't recall if it had a personal name.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/suss
*'D' means dictionary

I find that I tend to split my time evenly between Bubble Memory*, Clik! disks**, and rocks***.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_memory
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clik
*** http://xkcd.com/505/

There is another twist to this I'd like to point out. At work, when people want a laptop, we buy one with Vista on it, but I make sure it's compatible with XP. We have Corporate XP with a volume licensing key, so I just put my current XP image on the laptop and away I go. If you asked the manufacturer, they sold me a Vista install. This kind of scenario won't show up in surveys. Definitely skewed stats. FWIW, I have been steering people to HP and Dell recently, since I can still get decently-priced laptops that can run XP from them.

That's my strategy too. I find they are good for novelties, projects, and showing off to my friends. A couple times a year, I get a call from someone I know who needs a powerful small magnet for some projects. Good data security path, too: drive electronics broken and in one trash can? Check. Chassis in the aluminum recycling bin? Check. Platters hung in my cubicle for a cheap rear-view mirror OR platters lightly sanded on all surfaces with a grinder for that extra data-gone goodness? Check.

Easy. Just go talk to the Nildoror. They go back and forth from Nildoror to Sulidoror indefinitely, and the Nildoror is the Über-elephant. Just stay away from their bug juice.

Hang Head, Vandal! by Mark Clifton
'Nuff said...