Yeah, but then you have to explain what "hypergolic" means. You'd probably get more traction with non-geeks using a matter/antimatter analogy.

The fact that they came up with that name and didn't see any irony in it tells you a lot. Remember, "they hate us for our freedom".

The whole point of being the secret police is that they're the SECRET fucking police. We've allowed literally half of the government agencies to be consolidated under one uber-agency whose charter is some nebulous bullshit about "keeping the fatherland safe". And then people are SURPRISED when it follows the example of the Gestapo and the KGB.

Anyone denigrating "Oooooooh! Shiny!!" CLEARLY doesn't understand Slashdot.

Gosh, I wonder what item on YouTube THAT could point to...

That's right up there with the Windows Explorrer thing that executed arbitrary code from a bitmap file when you visited the directory it lived in. Kudos to Google for keeping up.

Yeah, and it makes this odd "whooshing" sound.

Advertised: 150/150
Actual: 112/112

As a couple of data points on the thin-skinned study, I had two different people (nicks "Libertarian_Geek" and "c5402dc53929211e1efb") go to the trouble of making me their "foe" yesterday. Try to imagine my sorrow that two random Libtards on the Internet don't like what I said.

Oh, I'm sorry. Did someone make fun of your cherished fantasies?

Damn right. People can either choose to be poor and work at Wal-Mart and mooch food stamps from the rest of us, or they can simply decide to move to New York and become hedge fund managers.

Libertardian: n. 1. An anarchist who wants to do away with government, but expects police protection from his slaves, judicial enforcement of contract law, and the free and unfettered use of a modern and magically maintained infrastructure. 2. Someone blithely unaware of the consequences and logical inconsistencies of the nonsense they're babbling.

I'll even push the analogy a little further. Once you use (or, more likely are forced to by some other project) the tweezers from the Swiss Army knife, it FORCES you to use it as your ONLY tweezers. And your ONLY knife. And your ONLY screwdriver. And your ONLY corkscrew. And your ONLY toothpick. And your ONLY scissors. And your ONLY saw...

That article is over 2 years old...

Don't you have sources that are less stale?

No. I used Bing.

Could you please speak to the bait-and-switch (i.e. changing definitions midstream) inherent in the Chinese Room argument? Can you elucidate how the program encodes/encapsulates/contains the intelligence, and how the symbols used/manipulated are immaterial? The idea that the program encodes "two-ness", irrespective of whether I use the symbol "two" or "dos" or "zwei". The word-games and verbal-sleight-of-hand inherent in the Chinese Room argument have irritated me for many years, but I lack the precision vocabulary to explain well how the program (using my term) "encodes" intelligence.

You've got that exactly backwards. The systemd lovers are more like the people who say "I don't care WHAT the Mormons believe, as long as they accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior".