I always thought Pascal was better for most purposes than C and its offspring.

Ok, has anyone ever written an OS kernel in Pascal? How about bare-metal code which tweaks registers?

Nope, Beta was not far, far superior. You're totally forgetting that Betas could only store 1 hour of video. (They later fixed this, but by then it was far too late.) Who wants to change tapes in the middle of a movie? VHS tapes could store a whole 2-hour movie, so they easily took over. Not having Sony's stupid licensing costs helped too. And by the time Beta was on the way out, VHS had caught up to it video-quality-wise too.

But there are a number of times where explicit copy/paste is much nicer.

I don't know what DE you're using, but in KDE, both modes work, and they go into different buffers. So if you feel the need to do the explicit copy/paste with Ctrl-C/V, it works fine, and you can even highlight something else afterwards, then paste the two separately with middle-click and Ctrl-V.

No, having one buffer is not better in any way. It's stupid in fact. Better is KDE's Klipper, which keeps a history for this buffer and lets me choose things I previously highlighted or copied.

Yes. For people who use real computers, middle button = "paste selected text".

Yep, that's exactly what I use it for too. I make very frequent use of this function.

However, I have no problem just pressing on my mouse's scroll wheel to do this. I'm using a Dell laser mouse I picked up on Ebay for $6 and it works just fine this way. My previous Logitech G5 worked fine this way too (unfortunately I had to stop using it because the laser part stopped working for some reason).

IMO, the *real* reason for commercial licenses was the concept that commercial drivers are driving much larger vehicles that require special training/skills to operate safely on the roadways. (Your average licensed driver can't just hop into an 18-wheeler and operate it.

Exactly. That's the same reason people should be required to have commercial licenses to drive pickup trucks. They're much larger vehicles than regular cars, and need more training to drive properly. From what I've seen of most pickup truck drivers, they obviously lack the necessary training and skills for driving 6000-pound vehicles, especially ones with dual rear wheels.

A vehicle anyone buys at a regular car dealership and uses as a "daily driver" for things like commuting or trips to the grocery store should NOT require a commercial license.

Yes, it should, if it's a large vehicle. If someone buys a Kenworth and uses it for grocery runs, should they not be required to get a commercial license? It's no different for a Hummer. If you want a vehicle for getting groceries and commuting, get a 4-door sedan like everyone else.

This is an idiotic comment.

C, C++, and PHP are still very popular languages. Perl is not; it's largely faded away except for a few niches, for various reasons, and has been replaced mostly by Python.

Pascal has been mostly dead for a long time. However Python (which you obviously favor as "clean") is hugely popular these days, and Java is still holding its own in the enterprise space.

Obviously, your opinion of what is "ugly and unreadable" or "clean" has absolutely nothing to do with which languages are popular.

People gave up on Pascal and moved to C++ back then for a reason. Now you're asking people to go back to something which was abandoned in the past, for presumably good reasons. You need to have a **really** good reason for this, instead of just moving to a more modern language.

If your automatic dies in the middle of an intersection, can you put it in gear and crank the starter to move it? Didn't think so.

You don't need to do that. Put it in neutral and push it, fat-ass.

If your car is dying in the middle of an intersection, it's time to take it to the junkyard and buy something newer than a 1985 model.

Can you get an automatic with a dead battery rolling down a hill, pop the clutch, and start it? Didn't think so.

Try that in any manual-transmission car made in the last 15 years and get back to me. It won't work.

Plus, manual transmissions serve as an anti-theft device. There are numerous accounts of theives breaking into cars, finding a stick shift there, and not being able to drive it, fleeing the scene on-foot.

If the car they're stealing is a model which is hot and frequently comes with a manual (i.e. any sports car, "sport compact", etc.), this isn't a problem for the thief. Thieves targeting those cars know how to drive them.

Nope. Automatics have had lock-up torque converters for most of my life; I remember them being in cars in the 80s. According to Wikipedia, they first appeared in 1949, but only saw widespread use in the late 70s due to fuel economy concerns. But only recently have automatics gotten better highway fuel economy (or even equal) than manuals.

Hmm, it'd be interesting to see what the problem was. Was it the horrible MSC7120 chip in the ONU, or something on the OLT side? Did they go around and replace a lot of ONUs (the boxes on the residential side) at some point?

Romania is a backwater as far as population density and industrialization and such, yet they have much faster and cheaper ISP service than America.

UK isn't really Europe. I'm talking about *real* European countries like Germany, Finland, and even Romania, where internet service is fast and cheap. UK might geographically be in Europe (sorta, they're an island), but politically they don't act like it at all. After all, you're talking about a country even more prudish than the USA, by a long shot: they've banned all kinds of things in porn movies, such as female squirting (WTF?), a perfectly natural act. We Americans are made fun of for our prudish and religious ways, but you can film porn here with face-sitting and squirting all you want.

Yeah, I really don't get it either. I know someone from that generation (now 25) who loves the Prequels (esp. #3) because she was young when they came out. She seems reasonably intelligent otherwise, she's not a complete moron or anything, so I really don't get it. She acknowledges that the dialog wasn't great but that doesn't seem to be deal-breaker for her. It's weird. Like you said, they were rotten, boring, and racist, and the VFX (which were admittedly amazing for the time) simply weren't enough to make up for that.

How long ago were you using FiOS? I wonder if they were using the Freescale MSC7120 chip for the residential side, or if they still are in many places. I had the "privilege" of working on that chip, and it was a complete disaster. Most of the code written to support that chip at the driver level was there for the sole purpose of detecting when a hardware bug locked the chip up, and resetting it. A book could be written about what a management fuck-up the creation of that chip was.

I lived for a couple years recently on a duplex property; I had ComCrap and the other resident had FiOS. He was constantly having to go reset the outside box for his connection, while my cable connection almost never had problems.

But somehow, over in Europe where most stuff seems outrageously expensive to us Americans, people can get high-speed internet connections to their homes for a fraction of the price we Americans are paying.