Most little fiddly metal parts were long made of pot metal anyway. You could maybe TIG them if you had all the pieces and they were in the right size range, or braze them back together. But you're right, it's offensive how much these plastic parts cost. If you have one good one, or can get the original back into intact condition with glue, you can sometimes mold a replacement. Some of the resins available are pretty fancy now.

Or perhaps I just know how to use sed to rename files. I like it when my MP3s have spaces in the filenames, for times when the metadata is ignored.

I used to have a Kaypro 4, though. Its terminal was quite crap, adm3a equivalent IIRC. Watching the screen redraw was horrible.

Display:block doesn't actually work. It's a vestige from my first pass (long ago) that I forgot to remove when it proved impotent.

The script just adds an angry red banner at the top of every page served.

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("sugarstring.com") {

body:before {
  content: "Forbidden from covering American spying or net neutrality by Verizon's corporate sponsorship";
  color: #FF0000;
  display: block;
  text-align: center;
  font-size: 3vmax;
  padding-top: 10vh !important;
  padding-bottom: 10vh !important;
}

}

He could have been born into a species which exists at a more advanced level than we do, with a different physical basis. But let's go ahead and assume that's true.

Who is this "we"? You and I, or descendants of today's humanity? If it's the latter, then awe at least still might apply.

Yes, this is the part that bothers me, too. But lots of parents do this, and lie to their offspring thinking it's for their children's own good when it's really for theirs.

Well, not all forms of Christian believe that the book is The Word Of God. At least some of them just think it contains interpretations of a few things he said, and a lot of other stuff people wrote about the faith. A lot of Christians believe that Jesus was basically human, and didn't have foreknowledge, so he had to deal with stuff as it happened to him, and he wasn't really God at the time so anything he supposedly said which is in the book is not the word of God either, not precisely.

This is part of what's so fun about arguing with Christians, you have to figure out what they believe every single time.

Well, the obvious counterargument is that this planet is fine-tuned for us, that it's all we need, and the rest is irrelevant to us. Or perhaps that by the time we decide to leave this planet, the rest will also be ideal for our purposes. (Like maybe we'll discover some means of FTL that doesn't work near large masses, so all that empty space will be useful to us just as a means of getting around rapidly.)

I don't believe anything in particular, just saw that there was an obvious counterargument.

While that's true, it's something of a misrepresentation of the situation. Catholics (and many other religious people, and most Christians) believe that everything is influenced by their God. Depending on how excited they are about this, they may insist that God is capable of producing any individual result, or that he is responsible for every outcome, but His Hand is supposed to be everywhere, or at the very least, everywhere necessary for His Plan. With All Appropriate Capital Letters, of course.

Sometimes god is delivering instructions. Sometimes someone is claiming that god delivered instructions. The bible is unclear as to which the author felt was the case in each situation, probably not least because of the centuries of translation, adaptation, and manipulation. Some of those apparent contradictions probably aren't supposed to be contradictions at all, but they are now.

That depends on how literally you read the bible, and how well you assume it was translated between the first writings (or probably, oral retellings of prior traditions) and the first writings which we have today. There has been substantial drift since those writings, why not before? If you just read "day" as "period" in the Christian creation myth, it becomes less ludicrous. It could be valid enough, then, from the right viewpoint. Maybe night is defined by sleep. And it leaves out whole stories of how things were done, but that's not surprising.

I'm not putting forth any theories here, but if the Earth were "created" (made over) by a superior being (alien with technology we have yet to develop) and seeded with life forms which evolved into what we see today, a few retellings slanted towards particular political aims could have resulted in the Holy Bible that we know and, uh, love, today.

I don't believe that there's necessarily any validity to Christian mythology, but there's no particular reason to believe that it's completely wrong either. The parts which seem to correspond to known historic events don't support the rest of the material, but at least it shows that some of what's in there isn't bullshit. Sadly, the parts which clearly are certainly make it much more difficult to take any of it seriously, when examined objectively. Each claim has to be examined individually, which makes it basically worthless.

Yes, that was the only part of the entire affair which gave me pause. Wait, what? Isn't God's infallibility and omnipotence kind of central to the religion? Everything which happens is according to A Plan which guides us to an inevitable conclusion? That does everything but throw the whole schmeer out the window. If God can't do anything, then he's not infallible, and if the Pope's authority is derived from his connection to God... well, you see where this is going.

Why is that more likely?

Like likes like.

Says the coward who can't read?

Back when I ran obsd I had panics and problems with network card drivers that almost cost me a job. The machine was rock solid under Linux and the NICs were bog-standard eepro100s. Now I have a netbook and a laptop I can't use because of a lack of NIC support. Linux supports both NICs without ndiswrapper. I want to use these machines for low-end servers, but I can't without adding a NIC (dongle hell) or in one case, swapping out minipci. And I could do that, but it was cheaper to install Linux.

obsd lacks support for common hardware which everyone else supports. That's simply not arguable.

UPS and Fedex have to hand packages off to USPS because they don't have regular rural routes. But UPS and Fedex don't have regular rural routes because of the USPS monopoly on delivery to your post box. Catch 22.

What about Dubai, the city built almost entirely by slavery? That's a libertarian paradise right there. As long as you have money you can do pretty much anything you like and get away with it. Well, money and a penis.