And Asia one day will be where we are.

Don't forget your history. In the 40s, 50s, and 60s, scientists and technicians were practically revered in this country. We valued the idea(l) of progress, and were convinced that we could improve our lives through the application of knowledge. And we did. Learning was valued, and science was respected.

That's all changed now, of course. But respect for learning isn't a uniquely Asian cultural phenomenon: rather, it's what you see in a society after it's become prosperous, but before it's become decadent.

You claimed that Ruby kept most of the syntax of Perl, but not the 'semantics' whatever that means in this context.

You gave a great example yourself:

[In Ruby,] you don't have to declare variables with a prefix....

That tiny syntactic change -- which you describe as line noise -- moves variable scoping out of the realm of heuristics you have to guess about because they depend highly on containing context. You can still make a mess of lexical scoping in Perl, but at least you have syntactic hints about what people expect to happen as well as a compiler which can tell you if you've gone wrong.

Or perhaps we should go for IVM (in-vitro meat)?

I bet that the first commercial use for IVM will be feeding tuna, and other carnivorous livestock. That will fund the technology until it's ready for actually eating. As a bonus, we could clone rare (or maybe even extinct) species, and eat them too!

If you are going to do virtualization, the only benefit comes when you invest in a cluster otherwise don't do it at all.

This is not true at all. Indeed, the benefits of virtualisation are such that even for a single service on a single server, it's generally better to make it a VM.

When I used the word "campaigning" I was quoting from Jenny Hockings "Lional Murphy: a political biography".

Cheers, thanks for the reference (sorry didn't see earlier that you had responded). Reading the statement he made as AG, which she quotes, there's a sentence which seems particularly topical. My emphasis.

IMDB > Actor biographies
Google Images > Special Artwork
YouTube & Movies Sites > Deleted Scenes and Behind the Scenes Documentaries
Blogs > Director's commentaries
Apple/Youtube > Upcoming releases
Ripping Disc to cleanse the movie > FBI Warning
Watching mold grow > Overdone menus
Surfing the net on my own > Launching my browser with your dumpy "special access" software.
Root Canal > DVD Quizzes

And now...

Downloading Demos > Having them bundled

Hooray, I love more garbage that will make my movies seem even more dated when I watch them 10 years later.

Who am I kidding? They probably won't even put the demos on the disks...they'll just waste your bandwidth by using BD Live to download the demo.

Why did they choose Go for a name anyway? Sounds like it would be very hard to search for information about it.

Did that for my mom 2 years ago, tech support dropped from serious Windows problems every month and minor ones every week to trivial 'support' for the Mac once a month when firefox/thuderbird updates, and says 'do you want to update?' - and the answer is Yes.

Tech support for Mac's rule!

Tech support for Ubuntu/Fedora/Debian rules too (a little more complex sometimes than for a Mac).

The tech people in love with MS really confuse me.

...on average one computer goes with one monitor but the exact configuration changes. Also they are distributed over more than one desk, you insensitive clod.

It's an L-shaped desk (thanks, Ikea!). For work (full time telecommuting) a laptop running the corporate overlords' XP image with its own screen, plus an external LCD. For play, a 21" 1600x900 on a Linux dual-core AMD64. I haven't tried dual monitors on a Linux box yet, I hear it's painful. But with a big-ass monitor and multiple desktops, don't really need it.

I acknowledge the explanation - and truly appreciate your clarification of it.

I've always seen slums as something that holds over from the past, and couldn't really understand how they got them in a new space station. It was a bias on my part.

But seeing it occur in fairly new tech (per this article / thread), kinda opened the door for me to begin to accept how that worked.

Whenever I get a new gadget, the first thing I do is always to write its name with a permanent pen on its power supply (usually black on black but it's still legible enough).

Spoilsport !
Doing things like that takes all the fun out of it.

The concept of Timed Exclusives is clearly lost on the article writer.

Quote from the link you gave:

Answer: at least one. ODF.

Did you have a point?

Quick update: after about 4 hours, my Kill-o-Watt is reporting average usage of 0.05 KWh, consistent with what I saw over the first 5-10 minutes after I put it on the meter and booted it up.