i agree. unfortunately, that's "un-American".

Why is it unfortunate that an article about French employment practices should be un-American.

Oh wait - do you actually, like, live in that hell hole? Stop reading the internet and get back into the cotton fields!

It has a bit of "desert varnish" on the surface, by the looks of things.

Public transit simply doesn't work in many cases in the US.

That is a problem that US citizens need to address. But it seems that they don't have the communal balls, and would prefer to keep car manufacturing and selling industries active.

As for Linux, the CDT430 only has 16MB RAM. Most remotely recent Linux distributions will not even install with less than 256MB RAM.

The first 5 or 6 years of my experimentation with Linux I did on a 386 with 4MB of memory ; I added an IDE card and doubled the hard drive space in about 1994, using money from my first job in the Middle East.

The biggest problem these days would be finding a SIMM (remember them?) as small as that.

Sounds like you've spent some time in Africa too, where they've been honing the fine arts of being human for longer than anywhere else.

The press card is powerful, but has risks and limitations. Do not attempt this magic, for example, at a Federale checkpoint in Mexico on a desolate road late at night. You will merely create additional, and unpleasant work for the person assigned to dig the hole where they intend to place you.

You wouldn't want to be all dusty and sweaty when they put a bullet through your head, would you?

Documentation is the polite word for âoecashâ.

That is going into my fortune cookie file!

Or someone on the track next door has a track cleaning machine with bad shielding around the motor.

More-or-less random noise from intermittent contacts in a motor doesn't normally produce comprehensible signals when picked up by a digital antenna and radio de-coding system. It's pretty unlikely for analogue systems too.

I even removed the sarcasm from the above statements to ensure you wouldn't be confused.

That was a waste of effort. Some people don't actually want rational debate.

I agree, that's exactly what she did.

Blasphemy..! You mean that's what She did.

Oh goody. I'll get the bonfire started.

Sony

Nuff said.

Not quite enough said.

What is the probability of them ever improving to the point of being worth interacting with (except at the level of "it's got a Sony badge - excluded from consideration"?

And, how many years of sustained non-evil behaviour would they require to come back into any degree of consideration?

(FWIW, I'd reckon the answers to be "near zero", and at least 5 years. Yes, I do hope this sort of public discussion adversely affects Sony's share price - it's the only language they understand.)

Except, by doing that, you've ruined the whole reason we barbecue things - Because we want that thin outer layer of charring.

You may well like barbecued food to taste like that. Some of your friends and associates may like barbecued food to taste like that. That doesn't mean that everyone likes barbecued food to taste like that, or even that everyone actually likes barbecues.

Which makes it annoying when the only meal provision for the evening is a sunset barbecue on the beach. Life can be a bitch sometimes, getting paid to put up with such inconveniences.

That's because you drink cheap crap beer.

Aaah, he must be an American then.

No, actually that's evidence that he's NOT an American. If he were an American he'd be used to expensive crap beer. (Or if he drank Sam Adams, expensive but quite decent beer.)

Another choice is "How is a country full of people that believe nonsense going to survive the 21st Century?"

What makes you think that medicine isn't going to advance sufficiently that the common (say, 20% of the population) man on the Clapham Omnibus today, reading his obituary in the horoscope (or whatever they do with horoscopes), isn't going to live into the 22nd century?

There was a "Ha ha, but serious" article I read a few years ago, which proposed that the first person to live to the age of 1000 has already been born.

Then again, it's as plausible that the last human being to die has already been born, and I'm not postulating an increased average lifespan in that idea.

He thought life came from space via viruses and evolution happened subsequently.

How did he think the viruses came about?

Strangely, most people who actually think about these things, are of the opinion that virii are relatively derived parasites, descended from more complex forms of life which learned how to chop unnecessary parts of their metabolism out, for a leaner, meaner reproducing machine.

Hoyle was a damned good example of why physicists should be bloody careful about making pronouncements about biology.