The fucking thing looked fine in preview. Why in the HELL does it look fine when you preview it and then look like shit when posted?

This is really amateurish, slashdot. FIX YOUR GOD DAMNED CODE!

My apologies to fans, there's an unfucked version here, where preview actually matches what it looks like when you post it.

Get your act together, slashdot, and fix this ugly fucking mess. This should be an embarrassment to you, but I guess Dice is unable to express that emotion.

The next mcgrew journal will simply contain a link to a site that is less retarded. Yes, slashdot, I'm pissed off. FIX YOUR BROKEN CODE or I'm gone!!!!

I certainly did not intend to imply that Blish wrote it as he did by accident. :)

Well, I think I lowered its chances of acceptance even more by posting it.

That's the kind of nonsense that happens when you let Windows devs write Linux apps.

LK

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).