No, Hitler's big mistake was invading the Soviet Union. Western Europe was a sideshow compared to the Eastern front.

I worked on the DEW line back during the late '70s and early '80s. The vacuum tubes for our comm equipment and radar (finest 1950's tech) came from Poland, which was part of the Warsaw Pact.

The terrorists do no need a successful attack, only an attempt.

I really think that there is someone orchestrating these attacks with a bizarre sense of humour. He gets some idiot to put a bomb in his shoe and now you need to take your shoes off to fly. So then he gets another idiot to put a bomb in his underwear and now full body scans. I can't wait to see what's next.

I think it was Mao who said that if your enemy is not by nature oppressive, you must force him to become so. Somebody has read the book.

Control H (0x08) is the ASCII code for backspace.

The United States offers a host of pretty compelling benefits, not among the least of which is the protection of our vast military, to our allies and friends.

It seems that what we need is protection from is the vast US military.

(Mafia Boss) Nice country you have there. It would be a shame if it got invaded.

My internet is provided by Sasktel which is a crown corporation. There are no bandwidth caps that I am aware of.

"Sort of how like in the article it wasn't just "cats sometimes have more kittens" or "cats kill a lot of birds" that got to be circulated into near impossible to debunk, but catchier stuff with numbers, like "an unspayed cat can produce 42,000 cats in 5 years" or "a cat can kill a billion birds". Sounds more scientific that way. It practically implies that you have a scientific study somewhere that backs it up to within one significant digit."

I think I can debunk the statement about cats.

I'm pretty sure that it takes two cats to produce any offspring.

I use 5 bit Baudot code on punched tape. RYRYRYRYRY....

The AM radio in my car does not have a quarter wave dipole, yet it seems to receive AM signals just fine. Impedance matching is important for transmitters, not so much for receivers.

Where is this American "freedom" I keep hearing about? It seems than Americans are free to become slaves to their corporate masters.

We have acceptable labour legislation and single payer health care where I live. I get 3 weeks vacation after a year of employment, overtime after 40 hours a week, protection from many workplace abuses and I can quit my job without losing my health care.

These are basic rights which any worker should have. Economic freedom is also freedom.

I would not take a salaried position if the work hours were not specified, and provisions for overtime laid out. Anything longer than 40 hours a week puts one in the wage slave category.

I often work overtime, but I generally take it as lieu time (at time and a half). This makes for a better work/real life balance and keeps my employer honest.

Job interviews need to go both ways. I am selling my skills to the employer, but they also need to show me why I should work for them.

I have a great deal of job security because of my hardware skills.

At my last job interview, the focus was not me selling myself to the company, but rather the opposite. This allowed me to negotiate my starting salary upward. My server and networking skills were a factor, but the main emphasis was on my skills with printers and hardware.

The company was bought by a larger company. I was high on the list of those to be retained which allowed another salary negotiation (upward).

I get a great deal of satisfaction from my work. I enjoy working with my hands, and the troubleshooting provides intellectual challenge.

And even this year, when the company had frozen salaries, I got a raise.

Ubuntu 9.04 on my Acer netbook works perfectly right after installation. No tweeks etc. required. A co-worker installed XP on his Dell netbook. He spent days getting it to work and he has multiple problems, mostly related to wireless and power management. The other day, he needed to set up a router and asked to borrow my usb to serial cable. He needed to find drivers for it, whereas I just plug it in and it is automaticly configured.

Which of these operating systems "just works"?

Maybe I'm just old and cranky, but I would tell them to piss off. They do not seem like nice people. It is counter productive to spend your valuable time enabling their bad behaviour.

I bave Windows 7 a try. The installation not only overwrote grub, it also wiped my Linux boot partition out of the partition table. Those had fairly simple work arounds, (use fdisk to recreate the partition table, reinstall grub) but this is not nice behaviour :).

Given the performance issues, I will stay with XP for the three or four Windows apps I cannot do without.