That some people today are insistent about the use of gender-agnostic nouns doesn't mean that those using lesser-so nouns in the past were bigots. I highly doubt TOS's use of the word "man" was meant as a slight toward women considering Roddenberry's vision and the fact that it was the first television program showing a white and black person kissing. The entire premise of Star Trek Continues is that it's a continuation of the original series, which used the word "man", so I doubt they intended it to be a slight or exclusionary either. I despise bigotry, but people gotta loosen up a bit. If I say to my kid, "Hey, it's the mailman!" and then realize it's a woman driving I'm not going to start calling them the "mail person" and flog myself for being a misogynist. Language is fluid and its primary purpose is to get the point across. I wonder how many people when they heard the "where no man has gone before" bit thought, "Those sexist bastards! They specifically chose to use the word 'man' instead of 'one' because they're sexist pigs!" I mean, really? I hope someday people will realize that bigotry and choice of words are two very different things and that it's the intent and meaning of language that should cause offense, not an individual word in a sentence.

http://gambas.sourceforge.net/...

http://gambaswiki.org/wiki?l=e...

I think my first hard drive stored something ridiculous like 10 MB. The old ones don't sound like the new ones. Much louder, beefier and slower; they really gave the computer life. I miss the sound of my old Amstrad.

Stranger in a Strange Land is the only book by Heinlein I've read; it was awesome. I'm thinking Jim Carrey would do well as Valentine. He's great at pulling off "strange" roles (whoops) and is a damn good actor. It's a fish-out-of-water story that serves as a mirror to human nature with an inevitably dark ending. I can already see Jim at the bottom of a swimming pool. Can someone please make that?

So you can play Duke Nuk'em quotes on cue.

Have a "The Future" exhibit, a three-room 1:1000-scale model of cities, parks and suburbs showing what a full-scale nuclear war by major powers would look like. The first room would be pre-war, the second as it was happening, and the third what it would look like 100 years later. It that doesn't sober people up then only the real thing will.

It sometimes helps to play by the Devil's rules. You can't fight without getting dirty or win wars with smiles and flowers.

Keep telling yourself that as you scratch off the days, months and years on the walls of your prison cell while imagining the guffawing of Sony suits snorting cocaine off prostitutes' asses like Doogie Howser and rolling around in piles of money like Scrooge McDuck. Sony does what it likes, and if anyone disagrees they get beaten with socks filled with 100 dollar bill stacks until they shut up. Don't believe the fairy tale of equal justice under law.

If /. ever gets unicode support it may be possible to obscure bad grammar with lens flare glyphs. I wouldn't hold my breathe.

God, I forgot about that one. It asks you if you'd like to format it. Pretty nightmarish. If you use Ext2 IFS to automatically mount an ext2/3/4 partition under Windows, it occasionally fails. If you try to access the partition in the file manager at that point it also asks if you'd like to format it. You can nuke an entire partition with a single click and no password entry.

Still awesome.

Microsoft has decided to start using the wheel. I remember sometime before switching permanently to Linux when I noticed IE couldn't display PNG transparency. It was probably the last Windows-related facepalm I ever made as a Windows user.

I looked through all his comments and there was only one modded greater than zero.

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

If you think spam is crazy sounding, read some of his comments. It's a real experience.

Heh, thanks. While self-commanding killer robots are the obvious focus of our fear, it's not always the most obvious expectation that bites one in the ass. Killer robots would either never get used or have so many safeguards they'd be half useless amidst the chaos of war and the treachery and adaptability of humans. Though they'd have some degree of self-preservation, they would have no desire or ability to reproduce. Malware on the other hand is designed to do anything to avoid removal and replicate through any means possible. What better way to avoid being deleted than to make the infected facility uninhabitable or exceedingly dangerous to those who could remove it? This logic could be extrapolated to "protecting" surrounding areas, or distant areas connected by network infrastructure that could be used as access points. It's the seeming innocence and perceived weakness of something intangible like software that could reduce the consideration and implementation of safeguards when crafting malware. Right now malware's just an expensive pain in the ass, but a day may come when during your coffee break all the doors lock, the ventilation system halts and the facility begins flooding with CO2.

This thought began as a joke, but this actually does sound how something like Skynet could be born. Malware is infamous for aggressively trying to preserve itself. We all joke about how stupid the idea of programming an AI with a strong sense of self-preservation is because of the obvious dangers, but that is exactly how malware is programmed. Programming it to control industrial systems as well (giving it a "body") seems like a really bad idea, particularly if the aim is not to sabotage the infected industrial system, but to cause as much damage to the target nation as possible (a reasonable wartime goal).