Which also meant you had to code to the lowest possible denominator.

Solaris has a kick-ass new feature in it's shell? Too bad; can't touch it. IRIX has a neat library to do something? Too bad, can't touch it. You can code to C-89, maybe POSIX, and that's that.

Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages.

The other day, I booted up a new-in-the-box Acer laptop (or Asus, maybe) and was pleasantly surprised that it was already set to boot to desktop.

There's a fuckton of good stuff under the hood of Win8; the start menu just went fullscreen.

So, basically you're saying that you Love the Power Glove?

It's so bad.

Through means of what was, essentially, boot-sector malware, if I recall correctly.

This should be standard for quite a few things. Call it the 'eat your own dogfood' provision.

Easier to just slap on term limits, though. Members of Congress (or Parliament or any other elected representative) are supposed to be representatives, not an aristocratic subclass.

Well, if you want to get technical, the Constitution, as both 'law of the land' and 'guiding principle' lasted until the Alien and Sedition act, which was, what, less than a decade?

But the whole point of the project was to use cheaper, more off-the-shelf parts and components. Given that it's now ten years past it's 'guaranteed' lifespan, I don't think they did anything wrong.

Did FRAM even exist ten years ago?

The problem with the constitution was that it was largely a theoretical document. The Framers didn't have a lot of real-world examples to draw upon.

For example, the idea that all voting members would vote individually on each issue, and that nobody would ever form voting blocs or parties.

Or the idea that the loser in the presidential election should be VP.

Relevent but site is incredibly NSFW.

How do you deal with, say, NTP update fixing your clock drift?

Personally, I like the idea of a 'second' being of variable length far better than shoehorning a '60' into a field that's clearly defined as '0 to 59'.

Time to get cracking on that new constitutional amendment. "The necessity of the people to get faded, turnt up, high, or otherwise funky, being essential to the maintenance of the state, the right to make drugs shall not be infringed."

Your job should have some sort of flag set, indicating completion, simply to avoid bog-standard clock issues.

"We shall spread rational inquiry by the sword!," said no atheist ever.

Ok, so which omnipotent sky wizard do you then believe? Yahweh? El? The composite Jehova? Yeshua? Allah? Baal? Vishnu? Shiva? Buddha? Flying Spaghetti Monster? One of the ascended Emperors of Rome? The living Emperor of Japan, directly descended from Amaterasu? Amon-re? Tezcatlipoca? I can keep coming up with names that entire populations have fervently believed, with all their hearts and souls, were divine beings.

How many planets with liquid water, an atmosphere and a magnetosphere?

It's not even as simple as this. Even now, my kids public schools have material on the shelf that says 'all life gains energy from the sun, or via a linear chain of eating something that did,' but then have to point out that this is now proven wrong. Like the man said, 'It's life, Jim, but not as we know it.'

The odds that an individual sperm containing half of your DNA would be the one to fertilize an egg are so long that you can not possible exist. (Anybody got a car analogy?)

In Ontario, a license plate consists of seven alphanumerics. Call it 36 options per slot.

Tell me a license plate you saw on the way to work. Well, that's bullshit. There's a 1 in 36x36x36x36x36x36x36, or 1 in 78,364,164,096 chance you could have seen that license plate. Therefore, an omnipotent being MUST have put that exact license plate there.

That's the argument a lot of creationists try to put forward. 'The human genome is blah blah long, with blah blah possible combinations, so you personally couldn't have 'evolved,' the chances are too slim.' It's reductio ad absurdum.