No, but as mature western democracies very similar to our own, I would not just haughtily dismiss out of hand the possibility they may have gotten something right, or better.

"Oh, I get it, after it turns out that his research didn't back up your "beliefs", he must never have been a skeptic to begin with, right?"

Nor was he much of a Scotsman.

I'm sure that makes you feel better, but there's no evidence to support that assertion. Since at least the time of Bill Clinton, and probably further back than that, the Democratic party main stream has been intensely friendly to business.

I had Ubuntu running on my touchpad last year (LXDE based DE, full GUI).

No, man, I have no idea what this "sonar" thing is. I don't know what to tell you... maybe they were constrained from using active pings, or something. I was a nuke, so it's not really an area I was heavy on. All I can tell you is, on multiple occasions, the EWS told the MM's out in the spaces to rustle up some tools and start banging on the hull. I can't imagine that was one retarded dude going rogue.

IME we had to break out the heavy wrenches and hammers and start banging on the hull[1] in order to give the surface guys a chance, so they could get a little practice targeting something. Somebody else's mileage may vary, of course, and I'm sure there's differences between 637's, 688's, Tridents, etc.

[1] The more disgruntled among us *might've* chosen to bang out "F-T-N" in morse, but I can't say for sure if that ever happened.

I suppose if you amplify what I was trying to say to 100%, total, fanatical "screech" you might conclude that. I thought the point I was making, packed full of caveats as it was, was more qualified and moderate. But I take your point, you caught a whiff of something you didn't like and decided to talk to that caricature rather than me. *yawn*

I thought I addressed this type of question with my reference to the Prime Minister. I was thinking less of "what movie was that guy in" and more solving novel problems. You know, making new knowledge more so than just recalling existing knowledge.

"was that thinking lead to questions, and the questions necessitated answers. Not having reference material around me, or other sources to query, I could never get an answer to whatever I was pondering."

I do not mean this in a snarky way, because I certainly while away time standing in lines with my own smartphone. This is just the thought your comment elicited in me... maybe you'd think of an answer yourself? It depends on the subject matter you're pondering of course. "Who's the Prime Minister of England?" isn't really what I'm talking about. But if it's a novel problem, maybe *not* having reference materials at hand would actually prod your brain in a direction nobody's thought of yet?

You should have moved on to V:TES (or Jyhad, as the old time players still call it). It was Garfield's second game, which he explicitly designed from the ground up as multiplayer instead of 1 on 1.

A) Card rarity is linked to how many copies you'd likely want in your deck, regardless of the strength of the card (and there are no card limits).

B) As a less mechanistic and more social game by its nature, it's quite conducive to drinking while playing, on many levels.

I understand that "bioinformatics" is a broad field, but I worked in that for about 10 years at my last job. I had a lot of fun doing it, but I do recall fighting a hard slog with the hospital-wide PACS system and my roll-your-own dicom server-client setup. The fact that I eventually got it to do everything I wanted more supports your statement than refutes it, I guess.

The kicker for me in moving from Linux to Mac (macbooks are what work issues us) is the lack of an option to pin a window to the foreground. There's a 3rd party tool called Stay Afloat, IIRC, that sort of does it, but it works with some programs but not others, i.e. sub-par.

There is also http://code.google.com/p/rtgui/, which is what I use.

Perhaps the "*to* small groups" is not quite accurate, but there is still a mechanism of choice and control which seems to be absolutely essential to them. Contrast with chipping your bit of tax money into a vast pile and trusting some democratic institution to operate on a scale far vaster than what individuals and small groups can accomplish. I'm not particularly trying to paint Republicans as meanies, but the question of evolutionary adaptation and how that relates to, broadly, conservative and progressive sensibilities does interest me.

The parent is accurate because the attributed Republican view is myopic. Conservatives are, well, conservative. We evolved in small groups of 50 - 100 people. The idea of any kind of genuine concern for broad swaths like "society" is evolutionarily novel. Nonetheless, in the world we live in, it is probably a necessary adaptation. Republican propensity for charity to small groups of their choosing is consistent with our behavior over hundreds of thousands of years, though.