Yes, well. I was 'twilight' a bunch of places, but someone had already used that name by the time I created and account, here back around the turn-of-the-millenium, so ...

Then there was the book/movie. But that was OK. I figured it was a flash in the pan. Then there were the sequels.

But that's OK. I figure in 5-10 years I'll be able to use the name and only a few old farts will snigger.

I am sorry, where do I defend this action? I was pointing out to the AC that was calling for action that action has been taken and neither he nor I are the ones who took it. I am sorry that facts offend, but there they are.

Is it? What have you done? What are you doing? I saw a wonderful and generic call for 'action' like so many arm-chair generals do and pointed out that the 'enemy' has 'stolen the march' and have already acted. Please, offer me a suggestion of what I should be doing and I will discuss that - make generic noises about 'action' and I will gently tease.

To address your accusation more directly - I have written to my local member; I have participated in public discussions, government surveys and requests for comments and I have actively recruited people from the community to do the same with respect to legislation like this in my own country. I advise and provide assistance to friends and family on a range of technical issues and take the time and opportunity to explain why actions like this are bad for me, them and the community as a whole. If I can, I provide alternatives and workarounds.

I do not 'sit on my ass'; I strongly believe that the only change possible is that which happens individually and actively pursue exactly that.

Now, pull your head in; stop projecting and re-read what I wrote. The AC I replied to was the one calling for 'someone' to act. They offered neither useful suggestion nor, as far as I can tell, are doing anything themselves.

I don't like being 'told' anything, neither do most people. Especially not being 'told' to do something that in all probability I have been doing longer than they have even been aware of the issue.

They have. They did. It's not you. It's not me.

Add me to the list of those who use Start->Run. Regedit, iexplore, calc, winver, ntbackup, cmd, mstsc, eventvwr ... either they don't have convenient links, or it's quicker to type than play 'where's the icon on _this_ machine'.

GUI might reward exploration but you are dead wrong when you think that what most people do is _not_ repetition. People learn a pattern of movements and clicks. Change the icon's location and they are lost. They don't 'explore' to find it again. Those who are happy to poke about a GUI are also happy enough to play with a CLI if they get shown one. Of course it's going to be a bot confronting if all they have seen is a GUI, but that doesn't make it inherently more challenging than working out how to get the 'classic' control panel so you can find the link you remember from the last version of Windows.

You have a serious case of subjectivity and preconception. You hear what you want to hear - like your Linux admin's claim about new tasks.

You know Windows. I get it. You've met some obnoxious FOSS advocates. Me too. But you are ranting. You often rant. You are rude and obnoxious ... Hey, wait - all the things you claim to have experienced you, in fact, exhibit. You justify your behavior by what amounts to straw men. No one you are responding to made the claims you are attacking. Seriously mate, you come across as though some Linux user killed your dog when you were a kid.

I agree and as someone capable of the meta-cognition necessary to recognise my own preferred learning methods and to adapt to the ones being offered, I understand the value of that choice.

And also how few people are equipped to recognise it, let alone make it.

I am not sure of your educational background, but I was certainly never taught to think about thinking. That was something that a fortunate combination of aptitude and circumstance allowed me to develop on my own. I'm far from unique, but equally, I am far from common.

I'm certainly not comfortable condemning those who both lack the ability to live comfortably in the world as it is and who also lack the means to recognise how they might change that. Doubly damned, to be sure.

I acknowledge that there are those who play the victim and who demand sympathy and/or consideration for their lack of effort but that's not the whole story.

Forgive me, I didn't see anything in your initial post that addressed heritability - either genetic or cultural. I understood you to mean that ADD was a response to the increasing pace of change in society. I've seen reports of decreased attention span and what looks like a decrease in depth of thought and yes, these get lumped in with ADD and ADHD. I think there's still value in distinguishing between people who are not primarily visual/auditory learners and who don't find mono-focussing for hours at a time a natural mode of thought and people who, by dint of being exposed to a large amount of stimulation and competition for their attention have a poor ability to discriminate or focus.

Nonsense.

There's a fair bit of evidence to show that ADD is heritable. There's some that suggests that it has been around a lot longer than just the modern period, but that in the past there was a greater variety of work that allowed people who aren't comfortable with a 9-5 office routine to still be useful and productive.

Decrease access to certain types of work and increase the number of children who don't get to grow up with adult males who can teach and show them ways of using AD in useful ways (it's Y linked) and you are going to see more people who are 'disordered'. The 'attention deficit' part contains a large chunk of people who are just not suited to focusing on a single task for eight hours at a time and/or who aren't primarily audio/visual learners and thinkers.

Perhaps calling your argument 'nonsense' is going too far - social change has resulted in more people exhibiting 'symptoms', but it's not some kind of adaption or reaction to the rate of change.

The more interesting statistic is the percentage of "religious" people who think that there is conflict.

After having read the article, I am not convinced that the questions asked showed that there was common ground at all. It may well be that scientists recognise that religion and science are orthogonal and therefore do not conflict.

Please note, GP didn't say "cheaper is best".

I have two identical (or sufficiently similar) items. One is cheaper than the other. All other things being equal, cheaper is better.

The GP is making a valid point that the manufacturer _is_ attempting to make the product better by differentiating from competitors on price. One feature of many and arguably one of the more dominant.

With the caveats that none of these make it to your 5W (but get close at between 7W and 15W) and acknowledging that none of these are server grade , http://www.linuxtech.net/features/intel_atom_pineview_motherboards_overview.html has a fantastic list of Atom based boards.

Gigabyte's D525TUD offers 4xSATA, 1xIDE and PCI for a RAID card. Asus have the AT4NM10T and AT5NM10T which lose the IDE port of Gigabyte, but replaces PCI with PCIe x4. Jetway do a board with 4xSATA and ION graphics - your fileserver could double as a media center, although the power is going to jump to 30W+. Zotac have a DTX board with 6xSATA and PCIe x16.

Some of these can run passively, although if you are going to want more than 4 drives you are going to need some kind of cooling.

I have been using the D510UD as a home server in a 4RU case with some large, slow Noctua fans. It's not noiseless, but it is very quiet.

Or have a different set of needs and wants to you.

You are correct. The iPad is less open than many Android devices. Your mistake is in assuming that this is as important to everyone as it is to you. Assuming technical ineptitude says more about your own lack of imagination than it does about the use case of those who purchase Apple products.

Googling turned up the reference to Giordano Bruno crater and reference to eyewitness reports of an event on June 18, 1178.

I downloaded a torrent of World of Goo as, at the time, there was no demo available for it.

20 minutes later I was paying for and downloading an official copy. Then picked it up again as part of the Humble Indie Bundle.

I purchased a copy of Machinarium after being alerted to its existence by the author complaining about piracy - and after downloading a torrent of the game, first. Got it again with the HIB.

I know that this is anecdotal, I assume I am not typical but find it hard to believe I am unique. More, if there were some magical breakthrough that made DRM perfectly effective and prevented me from doing this, my response would not be to risk purchasing a game where all I know of it is the (paid for) 'review', it would be to not purchase it in those first few weeks but to wait until people I know can provide a report I can trust or to simply not buy at all. In my case, more effective DRM reduces the possibility of sale.

Many, maybe even most, but not all and those who do are not going to turn into customers if you can somehow prevent piracy. Quite the reverse, some of those pirates may become customers.

Perhaps, but the number of those who when unable to pirate the game pay, rather than wait, is smaller than the total number of pirates and I see very little work trying to quantify that number. More often it is assumed that all piracy represents lost sales.

I thought the same until someone pointed me at some studies that show that there is a kind of 'normalising' process that helps justify violence in some people's minds. The aggressors are convinced that their behaviour is normal, that everyone does it, it's just that people don't talk about it. Jokes about violence are then seen as a kind of sly reference to that-which-isn't-talked-about and is used to reinforce the idea that what they do is acceptable.

Yes it's an aberrant mind set. Yes it is delusional. No, I don't think that any instance is going to have a marked impact on someone's decision to commit violence but cumulatively and culturally ...

I'm a little late and dangerously offtopic, but for a list of 21stC movies that compare favourably (IMHO) to the 20th, I recommend the following;

Pitch Black
Avalon
Donnie Darko
28 Days Later
Minority Report
Solaris
Immortal
Night Watch
Primer
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
A Scanner Darkly
Children of Men
Renaissance
V for Vendetta
District 9
Moon
Watchmen
X-Men First Class

I've cribbed from the wiki pages for SF films of the 2000s and 2010s. Grain of salt. YMMV, etc.