Can we give the ribbon thing a rest? It has been out for 7 years, you should have figured it out by now.

"There's an awfully lot of overhead behind polling stations" - Not so much. Around here polling stations are some folding tables in a church hall or school gym. We use paper ballots and cardboard ballot boxes. Total cost = pennies per voter.

"Why" "is" "Paradigm" "in" "quotes"? Secular? WTF is secular decline? Is that as opposed to ecclesiastical decline?

WTF do Giraffes have to do with the second law of thermodynamics. That is what we were discussing.

"What's wrong with microchip?"

How quickly memory fades. It was regarded as a dumb-ass conflation of micro-circuit and chip. An IC should be called a chip. Just chip, no micro- in front. Micro-chip implies that there are much larger full sized chips, which is nonsense. Also a "micro" was a microprocessor, so a micro chip might be an 8085 or Z80, but not all chips were micros.

Then as now, nerds were sticklers for precision in language.

pendant - a hanging ornament. I can't tell if you are being subversively sarcastic or just can't spell pedant.

Are we still annoyed at people who say "Microchip" or have we gotten over it? I remember when it was a suitable target for nerd rage.

You are correct. Life on earth can't get more complex over time, because that would require energy and the sun doesn't exist.

Cool, you could go get real Chinese food instead of this RedOliveLobsterGarden corporate pale imitation. (Try the Xiao Long Bao)

"Scam" Do you know what that word means? A scam is a confidence trick or fraud. How exactly is uber tricking people out of their money?

I have seen a woman at an MTG tournament. Really. It was awesome. She was, from what I could see of her play, a decently skilled mid to upper level player. (Not a total random scrub like me). She was also young and very pretty, with long blond hair and a sweetly voluptuous figure. She wore a push-up bra and a super low cut top. All the nerd boys were drooling and ogling her cleavage so hard she kicked their buts right up to the semi-finals. At the semis she lost in 2 to the guy who ended up winning the tournament. He was smart enough to see through her female version of the "Jedi mind trick" and wouldn't have noticed if she had two heads.

You are exactly right.

There was a sad story on the radio the other day. A nice lady with a PHD in Art History was living in her car because she was broke and unemployed.

What struck me was how very _betrayed_ she felt. Here she had studied hard, gotten good grades, and had achieved the highest academic degree possible and yet the job she expected wasn't forthcoming. All her life she was told "you need a degree to get a good job" and she somehow interpreted that to mean that if she got a degree she would get a job. Her whole attitude was that she was all but promised a job, and that it was the university's fault that this job wasn't there, and that she should have been told by the university that there were no jobs in her chosen field "before they took her money".

She wanted to work as a museum curator, cataloging and managing the museums art collection. When asked how many such jobs existed, she was taken aback, as if she had never thought about it and then said maybe 10 or 20 in the entire province.

There is a tiny "Island" of America called Point Roberts at the extreme NW corner of Washington State. The Canadians who live right along that border are forever fighting with their cell providers to take off roaming charges because the phone will often pick up the AT&T cell tower on the US side instead of the Telus (or whatever) tower on the Canadian side. The carriers seem quite helpless to fix the problem; some people I know there have to get roaming charges taken off every month.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

"both have other official "significant others"

Blackmail is such an ugly word. But it could work in this situation.