In an alternate timeline, Keith Moon found the 21st century to be full of challenges.

I'm not saying whether it's a good idea or a bad one, but isn't the fact that it's a defacto standard, sort of the objectors' point? Yes, you're right: it's a long-established tradition, with deep roots going back to when the computer room was a total sausagefest. I can't playfully slap the secretary's ass and then get off the hook by saying, "oh c'mon, we dudes have been doing that forever! It's always been like that. Quit trying to change our culture."

Changing the culture is an explicit part of a lot of peoples' agenda, because nobody really likes the damn computer room sausagefest (we just don't know what to do about it, which is why I really have no idea whether or not the picture is really a problem).

Last I heard, nothing invalidates suing anyone for anything. As long as defense is expensive, extortion will be an option.

Install the emacs plugin.

Where do I send my check?

Send it to Larry Niven. I always wondered how his "reactionless drives" worked, and now I finally und-- actually, no, I don't understand how this works at all.

By having the user's view of your site not be "static content with no java or flash."

At our house, electricity usage goes UP in the winter -- We heat with a geothermal heat pump with resistance heat as the back-up for very cold days.

I had a heat pump once...was a bit of a shock to find my electric bills in the winter were about the same as in the summer, having moved from a condo with gas heat where the combined bills were lower in the winter than in the summer. I'll never have electric heat (whether heat pump or otherwise) again if I can avoid it. The difference in cost between it and gas heat is ridiculous.

Even if Iran had ICBMs and nukes on a scale of the US or Russia they would not attack anyone with them. That is the whole concept of M.A.D. If Iran nuked Israel the nukes from the US, UK, France and the distributed nukes of Israel would completely destroy Iran within days.

MAD only works when dealing with rational actors. The Russians were rational enough. Iran? Not so much.

What I want to know is this: how did he afford an Apple Watch on a record-store clerk's pay?

I'm a Java developer. I have a decade of experience doing that. Why are all these companies hiring .Net developers not even giving me a chance at an interview? It's all computer programming. They're discriminating against me!

That's more a function of IT outsourcing hiring to HR. HR asked for requirements. IT replied with what it's currently using. HR doesn't have the domain-specific knowledge that would indicate that most anyone worth a damn can pick up a new language fairly easily, so if your resume says C++ when they're looking for C#, it gets circular-filed by HR.

(I got lucky with my current job...was referred to the director of IT by one of his acquaintances, so HR only got involved after the decision had already been made to hire me. I went from doing streaming video/audio with C++, DirectX, and our own compression algorithms to doing business-specific web apps with C#, ASP.NET, and SQL Server...rather a different skill set, but that's the kind of adaptability that the HR droids never take into account.)

Guess the thumb-wrestling match

You know what I do to my kids when they want to thumb wrestle? I use my index finger and tell them it's "outside interference", WWF style.

There's also a lot about holding on to the traditions of the early Catholic Church. :)

Here's some.

Trust me -- I'm well aware we're on the same team. I attended a Protestant Church with my wife before she converted to Catholicism. Some of my comments are as much for others as they are for you. There's an old saying -- no one hates the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they think is the Catholic Church.

My Data = My Property.

I posted a reply to a post by SirGeek.

Is the above sentence my data or yours?

If you think that's bad, sugar causes a WingDing font.

Better that than Comic Sans MS.