Nah; they don't have any fossil DNA from humans or other critters known to be decent.

But we can look forward to Americans who are furry and have an extra layer of fat. And this can be exported to any other part of the world where there's a market for such people.

It's not just common; it's the standard approach that's pretty much hard-wired into the entire GUI approach. And the designers are openly proud of the fact that they did it this way. And if you managed to memorize the location of something important in the menu tree, chances are that one of those "upgrades" that you clicked on has moved it to someplace else by now. If you don't like this, you can use the CLI approach, except that most "consumer" computer systems have done a good job of hiding that from their users. We're all too stupid to understand something without pretty pictures, y'know. ;-)

I guess so; Revere, Glosta and P-town are all rather different from the town I live in - and from each other. But then, so are the towns to the west and south of this town, which are among the wealthiest in the state.

(Hmm ... It occurs to me that you might have been making a joke. Well, the funniest jokes are often the ones that have a strong reality component. ;-)

I didn't find it hard at all in my household (in a western suburb of Boston). I easily found items manufactured in places like Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and even Japan. Oh, and a couple of items from Scandinavia, too. Not much made in the US, though.

Actually, my wife makes a lot of her own clothes, partly as a hobby, but mostly out of disappointment about the crap sold in local clothing stores. She has been complaining about the slow loss of the local fabric stores. Buying online doesn't work well, because you can't feel the material before ordering it. And most of her favorite fabrics do come from outside the US, though I don't think many are from China. But the "manufacturing" is done very locally, upstairs. ;-)

Are you sure of that? There's a lot of competition for that title, y'know. Most of the wars in the last couple of decades are serious contenders.

There's yet another one ramping up in the area between Russia and the Black Sea, similar to the American Civil War, but even stupider. In the case of Iraq, Saddam was a seriously evil bastard, with lots of blood on his hands, though of course that didn't come close to justifying what the US did to the Iraqi population (and what Iraqi factions did to each other), so it's pretty far up there on the stupid-meter. But do a bit of reading about the recent history in, say, Rwanda or Kosovo or Cambodia, if you want to see some really over-the-top stupid slaughter of civilian populations for no discernible reason other than the insightful word "theater".

You can also (re-)read Jonathan Swift's tale of Gulliver's Travels, especially the section about the war between the Big-Endians and the Little-Endians, for a good explanation of how such wars get started.

Of course not; that's why they give bribes (uh, I mean campaign contributions) to Congressional candidates (or to their "unaffiliated" support groups) to get the laws passed.

By reading this post, you agree to refrain from downmodding this message or any other message that I may post here in the future.

(Lessee ... where's the font-size control here ...)

I hope you verified this before posting. ;-)

Since a reformat and reinstall was done, the permissions involved were presumably handled at a lower level (BIOS?) than the installed OS. So it could easily have hit any Intel-based machines accessible via the network. Such low-level operations are rarely done by software that understands subtleties like ownership and organizational structures.

It might be interesting to know whether non-Windows and/or non-centrally-managed machines were affected by this event. So far, comments on the topic sound like guesses or conjectures or assumptions based on reasonability; i.e., i nteresting, but probably not reliable information.

Of course, it has been occasionally pointed out that the canonical "Hello World" program (from the "C Bible") actually has a bug. Granted, it's not one that you're ever likely to observe in the wild, and good luck writing malware to exploit it. But most programmers, even expert C programmers, can't spot it despite being trivially obvious when pointed out. This is actually a fairly nice example of how difficult it can be to write bug-free software, and I'd wonder if it was done intentionally in that book "with malice aforethought". ;-)

There's another good old quip to the effect that people who don't read have no advantage over people who can't read.

I once heard it summarized as: The classroom lecture approach is the best method yet discovered for teaching people who can't read.

Reminds me of a quip I heard back in the early 1980s: We don't know what language the scientific community will be using 40 years from now, but we know it'll be called "Fortran".

We might also note that the most common implementations of Fortran are now part of a package that also contains C and several other languages. They all effectively have the same capabilities, because if something isn't "doable" in one language, you can just call a subroutine in a language that makes it easy. The first-level parsers translate into a common internal language, and the modules past that level don't care what the surface syntax was.

I've seen a number of "Fortran" programs that were 90% coded in other languages. But the top-level entry-point routine was in Fortran, so the "program" was in Fortran. I once spoofed this on a project by writing an app "in C", meaning that the entry point was a C main(ac,av) routine, but everything else was in other languages. I actually used all the languages that we had "installed" in the compiler package, including Fortran. This got me tongue-in-cheek accusations of being a major geek show-off.

While you're at it, you should also pass a law saying that government agencies must obey the laws of your country.

Good luck with that.

Yeah, and I ran across part of the explanation in an earlier form that's really similar: In high school, I took several years of German and French. The teachers all commented that most of the students wrote and (occasionally;-) spoke those languages with English word order, and were obviously doing word-at-a-time translation; I was one of the few who quickly adopted non-English phrasing from these languages and sounded more like a native speaker.

It's similarly with software. You can often identify the first programming language of the author of a piece of code, because the code is obviously structured like a "native" Fortran or Basic or whatever program, while using the surface syntax of the project's actual language. But some of us look for interesting new conceptual tools in a new programming language, and concentrate on learning to use them effectively.

Dijkstra's comments were fairly accurate for the large majority who never really learn more than one "native" language, and treat all others as a translation task. Such people will rarely learn any conceptual tools that didn't exist in their first language, and are crippled just as he claimed. A minority of us look for the interesting new things in a new language, and his comments don't much apply to us. And I there's good evidence that Dijkstra was one of us.

OTOH, I've often wished I could use the tools from Lisp or Prolog or Snobol or APL or ... in the languages that are in common use now. It's idiotic that we still have to write loops to add two arrays; all languages should implement parallel array operations by now. Similarly, imagine the things you could do in C++ or Java if you could simply resolve an expression. And we had much better parsing tools than Regular Expressions 3 decades ago. (And Cobol even had the "CORResponding" adverb. ;-)

But those things didn't exist in Fortran or Basic or Pascal or C, so they'd be inaccessible to most people who had one of those as their first language.