The shiny side of the foil needs to be on the outside of the hat. The problem here isn't government intervention, rather a lack of same. The problem is corporate sociopathy and lack of standards. The standards should have been set up before anybody started building equipment. Where government fell down was not mandating that. Not a surfeit of regulations but a lack of them.

And had there been a monopoly there would have been no compatibility problems, but would have caused worse problems.

No, the Jesuit concluded that the aliens and their world must be the product of Satan because they had what appeared to be a perfectly moral society but without any knowledge of God. This directly contradicts the view that all knowledge of right and wrong comes only from knowing God.

(He was later disabused of this notion by none other than the Pope, who pointed out that this reeked of the Manichaean Heresy.)

The Lithians did not merely cease to exist: their planet exploded. Most likely due to human mining efforts, but the priest was conducting an exorcism at the time, so it's perhaps a bit ambiguous.

I don't remember the second book very well--I should really order copies of the whole tetralogy--but the last 2 books, Black Easter and The Day After Judgement, are also very thought-provoking.

Have you shared this profound insight with the Sunnis and the Shiites?

Then for any practical purpose angels do not exist.

In any case, your logic is deeply flawed.

That's a bit tragic, considering that Lewis was probably hoping to swing you the other way.

I had a similar experience after reading A Case of Conscience when I was in my early teens, BTW.

The aliens will turn out to have 3 sexes. How the Westboro mob deal with this will provide us much entertainment.

And now, in an effort to steer this thread towards something resembling topicality, I offer up the James Blish classic sci-fi series After Such Knowledge, in particular, the first volume, A Case of Conscience .

In which the aliens feel sorry for us because they know our religions are bunk, but feel ethically constrained from telling us so. Turns out they have perfect ethics and no religion, which represents something of a problem, if you're a Jesuit...

Or a long belch followed by, "You Earthlings keep any toothpicks handy?"

I tried Lo but it wouldn't do full justification, so it was a no-go for me; I need to format printed books. Oo seems to work like any other Windows program, except it loses it's "last used files" list in the start menu whenever it's upgraded (they really need to fix that).

Overrated?? Asimov wrote over 500 books, both fiction and nonfiction. His stories were between the covers of all the science fiction magazines every month. And the trilogy you rate so poorly won a Hugo award (the most respected science fiction award there is, with the possible exception of the Nebula). He, Heinlein, and Clarke are are often considered to be the "Big Three" of science fiction authors.

Sheesh, judge the author of over 500 books on three. That's pathetic.

Oh, and in case you didn't figure it out, I've been a huge Asimov fan for fifty years (as well as Heinlein and Niven and most of the rest). I didn't care for Clarke, but I'd not call him unimpressive, I just didn't care for his style. If I cared for that style I'd probably love his work, but I don't.

Couldn't agree more. Not restoring the (useful) start menu for W8, even as an option, goes to show how much they really care about it's customers.

You're not their customer unless you're buying boxed sets of their OS and apps to install on your home brew machine. Acer, Dell, etc. are their customers. You didn't buy that OS from Microsoft, the OEM did. You bought it from him, and he's the one you should complain to.

I'm hoping W7 is it for me, but I'd said that XP was it; I've been mostly using Linux for a decade. Then about 3 years ago I bought this notebook and have been too lazy to install kubuntu (which I had on the older one that had been stolen). Despite its annoyances W7's still there.

From the time I got Windows 7, and I could just press "start" type the first few characters of the program name and launch it

And then open the file you want to work on. Meanwhile, using the Start Menu, two clicks and your document is open inside the app.

Your method is extremely problematic with something like GIMP that has little or no keyboard use.

Don't like Start? Don't use it. But just because I don't have a use for something doesn't mean it should be abolished.

On my small notebook I have the file manager, Thunderbird and Firefox pinned, but I mostly use Open Office Write. Most recently opened documents are two clicks away, while if Oo was pinned a click would open a blank document, and it's a couple more clicks from Oo's interface.