I am no longer a graybeard. Both my beard and ponytail are now white. A lot of chicks think that's hot, so I'm happy. Retirement can be fun.

My original UID was in the high 5 digits, I don't remember it or what I used as a login name, so while slashdot would still have it on record, it has been lost since 2002. I screwed up when I moved that year. I found my backup disks about 5 years later. Lesson learned: some things you need to pack yourself, rather than relying on friends or a soon-to-be exwife.

My second account was under the name "MysticGoat" since I wanted separation between my career and my private life. That account is still around, but dormant, as #582871. I started using it in June 2002, and other than just now checking to see if it is still there, I've not done anything with it for years.

I began my current account as will.woodhull about 5 years ago when I decided that I was so close to retirement that I didn't need to protect my private life from prying cow-orkers.

Other relevant experience: first course in programming: 1972 Summer elective in Fortran. First computer: in 1980, an Apple ][+. Degree in Business, Computer Programming: in 1988, programming experience was split evenly between HP Business BASIC and COBOL, but it turns out the courses in business law and accounting have had more lasting value. Self-employment: building and supporting custom computers and small networks, 1988 to 1995 full time, then tapering part time until out of that dead-end line of work in 2002.

You really can't trust the /. UID for estimating age or experience. A lot of us who have been doing this for a quarter century or more have had reasons to abandon old /. accounts and start new ones from time to time.

Another thing: no matter how much experience you may have on your own computers, it does not compare with the experience gained from supporting other person's hardware and software.

True enough. For the kiddies who were playing games.

Those of us who were in the trenches of the computer revolution were soldiering on with workhorse computers rather than playpen hobby horses.

Win3.11 was as good as it gets, for that time and that available hardware, especially when used on top of DR-DOS. Win98 was okay. WinXP grew into becoming perhaps the best ever, though that growth took longer than it really should have. All the rest of the Win-whatever were crap. Jump from WinXP to Ubuntu, that is the natural upgrade path. For after WinXP Microsoft fail it.

Perhaps Microsoft should go make phones or something. There can be gracefulness in falling from great height; there can be elegance in descent. No way to do the final splat with grace or elegance, unfortunately. But such a long way to drop! What a trip!

No, I could not. I've got better things to do than to try to repeat the research of other people who know their subject areas better than I will ever learn them.

Your post on the other hand is flamebait. Do you have no better way to bolster your ego? Can you not think of some positive way to score points?

It would make sense to classify the Earth - Moon as a binary planet. Life-as-we-know-it is most likely to occur in binary planet situations, where large tides are the stirring rods that keep the proto-life soups from settling into non-interactive stratifications. Creating the class of binary planet with the Earth - Moon as the prototypical first pair would help focus exoplanetary studies, and also inject new considerations into Earth science studies, such as plate tectonics, geomagnetism, possibly meteorology and climate studies, etc.

As to Pluto: Yep, its a planet. Has been one all along. 260-odd astronomers at a convention of more than 2,000 astronomers have no scientific basis for saying otherwise. No matter how important their foible makes them feel.

[Is this post a good troll? I think it is a good troll. I think it is like a storm surge on top of a super tide, that would stir things up, keep the cauldron bubbling. But in a good way.]

There is a word for persons who place their idealism above what is good for the country, and that word is "Republican".

There is a word for those persons who fight so strongly for their ideals that they are willing to destroy democracy, and that word is "Tea Party".

Discuss. Do try to keep it civil.

Your monkeys are deficient in randomness.

Of course truly random monkeys would contain many random mutations many of which are not going to be viable, which means that room no matter that it is infinitely big, is going to be full of the stench of dead, decaying monkey flesh. The whole damn metaphor stinks.

Hey I want some of those moneys. I'm at a keyboard doing my bit, so where are my moneys?

Well said. If I had not already posted here, I would have given you a mod point. Probably "insightful", but "informative" would also work.

Parent post presents a reasonable argument. But the argument depends on an unstated assumption that cannot be verified and is most likely not true. The assumption being that our observational skills are so highly developed that we would recognize a break in causality if we saw it.

On every scale from the dark matter/energy that makes galaxies the way they are to the mysteries of quantum foam, there are a multitude of indications that we really are not very good observers. For if we were, there would be a lot fewer oddities that the science teachers kick into the corner and tell the students to ignore them.

You speak as if you live in a reality where there can be an objective third party point of view, and where physics has some kind of existence outside human imagination. How 19th century quaint.

The Copenhagen interpretation is the best we've got since the upsets by Heisenberg et al.. To whit: physics is our best imaginary model of what the Universe might be like. That's not only as good as it gets, by the very nature of things that's as good as it can ever get. There is no objective reality. It is all in your head.

Which is not to say that you cannot shape your imagination so that it is congruent with (but still separate from) somew of what is actually out there. Leading to things like the Apollo project, the Manhattan project, etc.

"I can't believe I used to think that what I thought was happening was really going on." --The Sugar Beats

Look, Jeb and Co. screwed up big time on this.

The best thing you can do for your hero is to STFU and hope that everyone forgets all about this mess before the campaign season starts to warm up. And pray that none of those whose identity has been compromised by this fiasco files a very loud law suit.

Another thing: I doubt very much that this was some IT guy's mistake. There cannot be anyone in IT at the level of this kind of decision who is not cognizant of the need to protect the privacy of private citizens. No, this was botched by some campaign guru who had been given a level of access to the databases that was well beyond his comprehension. JB is at serious fault for failure to manage his minions, and the proof of that is one of his minions just shot him in the foot. With a shotgun.

Where are you seeing evidence that the multiple reports of SSNs having been published are wrong? If that were the case it would have been hollered to the skies, for we are all very aware that the USA political Right scrutinizes the press very closely, and yells quite loudly over any hint of bias against their favorite sons.

And why do you feel that it is somehow not a problem for an aspiring Presidential candidate to be so incapable of managing his subordinates that this kind of stupid mistake could be made in his name? Do you really feel it is acceptable for someone claiming he's presidential material to give the wrong subordinate so much free rein that they could cause him this kind of headache?

A word of advice: The best thing JB supporters could do for him right now is to STFU about this snafu, and hope everyone forgets about it before the campaign season gets into full swing.