Yeah, but that doesn't stir the pot half as much, which is good for business. Better to whip all the demagogues (on either side of the argument) into a frenzy and enjoy the fireworks...apparently.

I'm glad we're not discussing noun declensions and inflection, I'd be totally out of my depth. I gave up on teaching myself latin at that point.

lol .. yes.. OMG, I forgot about the Ferengi. I knew that sounded familiar..

I would agree. In original latin, "ae" was more like "i", and "i" was more like "ee". And the C was a hard K sound only, S was S.

Thank god I'm not the only one who knows that.. where I work, one would think it's "day-mon".

Always expect the worst, that way you can never be disappointed. Life is mostly disappointment, really, and the rare exceptions are cause for joy and celebration.

Anyone ever tell you that you have a strange fixation with fapping..? :)

Well, what the gp suggests is pretty much impossible, but the truth is, software *is* the weakest link. OSes and apps are never or rarely bug free, and each new patch often introduces new bugs. Some things, like OSes, have tens of millions of lines of code, and where just a missing or misplaced semicolon can wreak random havoc, that's practically a guaranteed problem waiting to happen.
Flexibility is proportional to complexity, and inversely proportional to reliability/stability. Dedicated hardware devices are the most stable, followed by firmware driven appliances. I've been in IT (repair, then administration) for about 20 years now, which is a fair amount of time, and I've seen far fewer hardware issues than I ever have with software.
Then there are the issues of security; Windows, for one example, has been around for two and a half decades now, and there are still numerous bug fixes and security patches released on a weekly basis. It is permanently flawed.

I sometimes wonder if it's really a language thing. I'm not a developer though. High level coding (that I'm aware of anyway) is in English, yet there is a pervasive attitude these days, even here at /. among IT and science people, against "grammar nazis", with the frequent defense of "you know what I meant". Well, computers don't know. And recently I've seen a surprising number of typos in SuSE/SLES conf file comments and whatnot.. it makes me wonder if developers are screwing up in the code too, syntactically.

Yep, this is the right way to phrase it, makes more sense this way.

1) Why do teachers always rank as an all important metric? There are good teachers and bad teachers.. even lousy teachers, there's nothing that special about their profession compared to many others. They are not beneficent deities, shaping our future via our children, though the rhetoric would have you believe that. It's just another angle for the whole, "think of the children" routine.
2) My sister-in-law is a teacher for a high school in NJ, and makes over $80k a year. And that's for 9 months out of the year. I just don't see public school teachers who belong to the NJEA doing all that badly. Private catholic school teachers maybe, but public teachers in a union have it pretty good around here.

or Syndrome, defeating the Incredibles.
Anyway, I'm not aware of many other instances where particles wink in and out of existence (virtual particles)

The zero point field?

We're in agreement there, political journalism has gotten so yellow it looks like it's got a terminal case of jaundice. But when Obama stated his administration would be more transparent, it was in the context of the laws and executive orders he would sign/pass, the initiatives he would undertake regarding defense, the wars, the Patriot Act, the economy, and that's how most of us understood it. That's the important stuff of actual consquence. If the media wants to go all tabloid, that's on them, but I don't believe it absolves Obama from essentially reneging on his campaign rhetoric.

No, "explicit" counter example is a strawman. No one seriously fucking cares about the first lady's workout schedule, that has no bearing whatsoever on the running of this country. That's not the kind of transparency we're talking about and you know it.

Great, so he can tell us all about his golf score, but cover up actually significant stuff, the political shannigans? - y'know, the shit that actually matters, like he'd said he'd do when he campaigned for office. The only ones who care about pointless handwaving personal details are the tabloids.