You misunderstand the concept of a "protected class."

Employment law indicates that discrimination or harassment based on protected classifications is illegal. A protected classification is something like "gender," but not "being a woman." So if you discriminate against someone because she's a woman, that's illegal because you're discriminating based on a protected class (gender); and if you discriminate against someone because he's a man, that's ALSO illegal because you yet again are discriminating based on a protected class (gender).

Same thing about race, national origin, and a few other classifications (military service, in a few states sexual orientation, etc).

That doesn't mean, however, that you can't have a charity that focuses on one gender or race, or an organization focused on one gender (e.g. girl scouts or boy scouts); it also doesn't mean that an entity seeking to donate money must donate money equally to all genders -- protected classifications are an area in employment law, not every facet of life.

I agree 100%, since there have never been bugs in languages like Java.

Also, managed languages like Java and .NET are written in other managed languages running bytecode, making them extra secure. At no time do any of these languages use libraries or environments written in lower level languages such as C++, C, or assembler. So to the GP's credit, programmers who know those languages are okay to die off since we do not need them anyway.

Interestingly, I once ate McDonalds every day for a year and a half and suffered no adverse/ill effects (I was - and am - quite healthy, in fact).

Plural of anecdote is not data, blah blah blah.

Well, as I'm a Mac person these days, I've swapped out those sorts of issues for the ones that Apple produce. ;) About the only thing I really miss from Windows is the certainty of knowing when the next lot of security updates are due - at the moment, they're so slack they make Adobe look on-the-ball.

...yeah, if I've gotten a slipstreamed install disc with SP3 on it, I could have saved myself a lot of time when I did the same experiment. *shrug*

Out of interest, which version of IE did it have after install completed? I see you were prompted to upgrade to IE8, but my memory is hazy on whether IE7 was ever included on later XP install discs.

It's not squinting, it's the mental rotation. You're viewing it from a point to the south-east. The bottom edge of the rock in the photo is roughly the east coast. The notch in the lower left is roughly the Great Bight.

The distinctive northern tip of Queensland is entirely absent, and in fact the whole "north coast" of the rock is Just Plain Wrong. You really have to be kinda desperate to want to see it. But for that matter, you kinda have to be desperate to consider this news.

Yeah, I had actually intended to downplay that sentence a bit. Cremona had several great luthier families; Stradavarius got the biggest name but the others were at least in the same range. It would be fascinating to see just how Cremona came to be the center of fine instrument making.

How perfect --- the quote of the day:

Order and simplification are the first steps toward mastery of a subject -- the actual enemy is the unknown. -- Thomas Mann

I don't buy the "good today, crap tomorrow" mentality. XP still has a massive installed base. This will open the door for entrepreneurial geeks to create their own security and stability patches.

Diid Symantec or Macafee say they were dropping XP support? Nope, it's a huge cash cow for them.

I wrote up the instructions for assembling the Shapeoko (an open source / hardware CNC machine) and a recurring theme on the forums is people suggesting that such-and-such a hint / suggestion should be added to the text instructions --- and said text was already there:

http://docs.shapeoko.com/zaxis...

I did make the diagrams interactive, which at least cut eliminated the complaints that ``there are supposed to be 2 of part X in assembly Y, but only 1 is shown'':

http://docs.shapeoko.com/conte...

I'm aware you can still get XP discs second-hand or ex-stock here in the UK - Amazon lists several versions, although some look suspiciously like they may be OEM versions that are tied to specific brand/model PCs. I'm not aware of any PC maker here in the UK offering an XP options, though - maybe Windows 7, for business systems and workstations.

I recently wiped my old (2003 vintage) laptop, which originally came with XP, and installed Linux Mint - considering the machine's specs, it works fairly well.

I've read about ReactOS, but given the slow pace of progress I regard it as curiosity rather than a viable alternative.

People have some kind of innate (or maybe learned, but deep) fondness for "authentic". They'll pay for things that were touched by celebrities, as if there's some kind of magic that's transmitted through it.

These were, almost surely, the best violins available. The Stradavari family had extraordinary skill, surpassing anybody else at the time. It's remarkable and amazing that it should take us centuries to make other instruments with similar precision, balance, and quality.

But it's not amazing that we should eventually do so. There was no magic to these instruments, just tremendous hard work and a commitment to quality. These are rare, but hardly unique, especially over the course of centuries.

Let us appreciate these for what they are: remarkable artifacts of history, hand-made to extreme precision, durable enough to stand the test of time and be selected for their quality. There's no point in adding an additional layer of BS about some magic, unattainable extra that can't possibly be reproduced. It doesn't diminish the instrument, nor does it make every hack a great musician. Great instruments and great musicians will continue to make great music; surely that should be enough without sullying it with gullibility.

The service they provide is worth about £1 or £2 a year.

How would you tell someone to prepare for their first year at Burning Man?

It's absolutely identical to the Gathering of the Juggalos, but hugely more pretentious.