There are so many concepts nowadays, which could be taught to our "oh, the poor kids, won't somebody teach them real IT concepts, we need more girls as IT students" children, through some clever presentation.

We could Reboot or TRON so many things. I'd hoped the new TRON movie would try to be clever about things. The British SF magazine whose reviewer labelled the new movie's director as having no balls was right on the money, though - a closed system that hailed from the 1980s (and still ran, no less?). In an era with the Internet, Wi-Fi, virtual machines...

Sigh.

... 7.0 started locking up (consistently, 100% of the time) within 2 minutes on a workplace VirtualBox VM (under the same distribution I run at home). And I need a browser with a pop-up window due to the way our workplace allows access to the outside world.

8.0 didn't fix the lockup and started rendering text-fields in black so I've had to remove that from home.

My partner said she hated the black text fields so I took us back to the 6.0 still archived in /usr/lib. In the workplace VM I went back to 3.6.24.

On the up side, I can check 9.0 by the time I get a coffee and 10.0 probably by the time I finish my news read.

On the down sides, they'll probably both be broken too. I don't know if I can make the jump to Chrome or something else, I've been there since the Netscape days, damnit.

According to the bible, we're not allowed to know about good and evil. Which a) is pretty shoddy and b) how did this suddenly turn into being about "judging"?

Don't you mean "disobedience to Jehovah"?

Why not?

What about those who think the whole story of Jehovah is a shoddily-written piece of nonsensical D-grade fiction?

... you mean, like you did just there?

... Satan, the Lucifer, the Light-Bringer, the one who stood up to The God who keeps humanity down?
... wow. You almost make me wish the whole thing wasn't a poorly written, inconsistent fantasy like "Twilight" or the Harry Potter stuff.(*)


*: to all the HP fans about to downmod me into oblivion - I waited 20 years for the TRON sequel and the Green Lantern movies to come out. Broke my heart that they were badly written too. To all the Twilight fans - well, I really couldn't care less without surgical intervention.

There's a third side you've missed - the people who see the bible as having so much contradictory nonsense in it, we'd have to be a pack of mindless, attention-deficit-ridden intellectual-children to treat it as anything more than an historical and sociological curiosity.

Have I seen where it's led us? Communication satellites in space. The computer you're using to read this text. Vaccines and medical treatments so we don't die in childbirth or by the age of 30. (I don't drink myself, but) Wines and beers invented a couple of thousand years before Creationists claim our planet even existed.

The lesson of biblical history is that if you believe and act according to this stuff, you won't have much of a history. Nor, perhaps, do you deserve to.

Sorry, are you saying that your bible isn't the direct, unambiguous word of your god and other people need to add things and spin it so it comes out sounding better?

Let us not forget also - the LateArthurDent's analysis, while quite right, misses the part where the serpent says that your god's words are untrue and THEN your god's admitting everything the serpent said.

Y'all might wanna go back and do some careful reading yourself.

... but before the first post, there must've been an article for him to respond to.

... but, a God you would want to love, worship and sing hosannas to forevermore after you die?

A "literal interpretation of Genesis" tells the reader that God lied to Adam and Eve; punished them for disobedience; and then chose to throw them out because their disobedience had made them more like God, so they had to be prevented from living forever and becoming even more like God.

(Chapters 2 and 3, if you want to cross-check that for yourself.)

You really sure you want Genesis to be literally interpretable? Because it makes your God out to be evil, selfish and kinda insecure.

Huh. Very clearly, I need to do a re-pricing. The last time was several years ago.

Of course, the other problem is that I'm in Australia. The pharmacies here just don't stock it. Bad enough I'd have to import it, but a few years ago Piracetam was put on our Prescribed list.

I'd have to convince a doctor to put me on a prescription for it. Seeing as I'm already diabetic and have slightly high blood pressure, it's not looking great.

IT is more than just knowing how to kick a piece of hardware. If he's taken aback at a standard IT policy, then he doesn't know it. On top of that, there's the whole issue of being "taken aback" at a standard policy and the emotional implications of that anyway.

In other words, as everybody you're criticising here already knows - he doesn't know what he's doing and is being arrogant to the people who do.

Bad news: I'm afraid there's only one post in this locality that's really coming off as pompous. Sorry.

... as TFA says "which still remains mostly hazy and inchoate"?

... unless it's imposed on the entire planet? What makes your government think it owns the collective which is now the Internet?

I think it's time for people to revisit John Perry Barlow's 1996 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

Yes, I know I'm not American. Yes, I'm sure someone will get all righteous and downmod me for this. But hey, people who got rid of Bush: regardless of that (and my gratitude to you for doing so) and putting Obama in his place, I'd like to suggest that maybe there's a problem slightly deeper in your system. How's those lyrics for the "Defence of Fort McHenry" working out for you?

Reality check: there are more bodies than ME installations; the bodies keep going (or at least supporting the brain) in all but the most severe of crashes; the bodies have self-repair mechanisms.

I'd also like to think I can stay alive long enough to get on the Kurzweil boat.

And there's a reason MS-DOS is hardly used even in electrical engineering labs anymore (although, when I was studying electrical engineering around '93 we DID have a CP/M machine).

You neglect to mention that TSRs (which were fun to code once you got the hang of interrupts) still ran in Real Mode, consumed precious Base Memory, left memory unprotected and were all DEPRECATED in FAVOUR of multitasking operating systems.

You go ahead and run your autonomic biological processes over DOS. I'll just leave a process here waiting until you have a page fault and emergency transport to a hospital.

640k should be enough for any body?

a) Multi-user is a subset of multi-task.

b) Multi-task is a fake unless you have multiple cores or CPUs.

c) In humans especially, conscious multi-tasking is detrimental to overall performance. What would happen if your single-core single-user machine, analogising to a person, hangs on one of your tasks? Your heart and lungs seize up.

d) You mis-spell in the same post calling me a "tard".

Mods: please don't bother modding the parent down any further. Their life must be hell enough as it is, apparently.