The 'purists' who spend their time harping on The True Rules, or replying purely to note that somebody has used 'there' instead of 'their' or the reverse, are an utter waste of time.

Yep, because spending a few minutes learning some basic grammar rules is too damn difficult.

Seriously, in what other domain is ignorance of a subject celebrated as much as with a language's grammar? Can you name even one?

For example, on the economic situation, this guy was made the US's top accountant for over a decade, and appointed to posts by both R and D presidents and yet he makes videos that can barely garner 2k views about the situation (since September):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]

I'd have voted it up if they hadn't disabled comments.

Their broke what?

Trust me, you have no idea what "revenue generation" is.

Here in Australia, a personalised number plate will set you back anywhere from $400-odd to a few grand. And that's before even getting into "rare" plates that people already own.

XFCE may look superficially like XP but actually has all sorts of differences that make it irritating as hell to use. Just off the top of my head:

- No decent file explorer. Thunar is abysmal compared to XP's.
- Window borders too small, like 1px. Resizing windows is a pain.
- Window maximize behaviour is annoying, because you can still drag the window out of fullscreen after it's been maximized, yet dragging it to the top of the screen doesn't automatically fullscreen the window again.
- The 2 clipboards, one of which is a "mouse buffer", is so unintuative I would classify it as a bug. Linux desperately needs a unified clipboard.
- The start menu (yeah Win8 did away with it but it's bringing it back) is a nightmare. On Windows, its contents can be organized by easily drag/dropping, and generally the programs listing reflects somewhere on the file system. On Linux, no drag/drop, .desktop files all over the place to edit if you want to modify stuff, and the menu editor is broken (like "move up" and "move down" don't work)

Cinnamon or KDE might be better.

There are certain parts of the Starcraft community that are absolutely shitty. It's not just the people who spout BM or make pre-emptive GGs, it's the snobs on the forum/chat channels who immediately flame anyone who isn't a pro who dares to mention even the slightest something to do with strategy as being a "noob" or "you can't talk about that, you're not in the top 100 of GMs" etc. We even have that going on in a chat channel *specifically* for low level (mainly bronze) players.

I thought it was just SC2 that was that snobby, but looking around it's pretty much the same everywhere. It's in complete contrast to the community of RTCW:ET players a few years ago which was pretty polite and friendly by comparison.

Actually, I think the low point was the final episode. The idea of the Borg, a massive hive mind responsible for the destruction of hundreds of civilizations, being defeated by one fucking human woman by infecting them with some virus? What complete and utter BS. Nobody in any of the other civilizations had that idea?

There are some good versions of BASIC, even from years ago.

Consider BBC BASIC for the BBC Microcomputer (a very common computer in the 1980s in British education and schools). BBC BASIC supports named procedures and local variables so you can write BBC BASIC programs just as structured as pretty much any other language. It's one of the few BASICs where you can easily write recursive routines (since it has local variables).

Then there are BASICs that are just awful, like the excuse for a language interpreter that Commodore put on the C64.

Then stop buying computer monitors that are designed for viewing Hollywood movies and start buying ones that are designed for general-purpose computing.

Weird... I don't understand the problem they're describing in that blog post. Surely JS code can detect when viewport size is modified, and change images accordingly.

Or, future generations will be even lazier than we are and won't think of privacy and true freedom as really desirable things, so they won't mind what we did(n't) do.

So you're saying they may have been dying out from our gun bullets before we met them?

Nope. A panel mount certified GPS isn't standard equipment because of the cost.

While many people have a handheld GPS, the typical VFR pilot into IMC type of accident the pilot is maxed out simply keeping control of the aircraft, and has nothing left over to interpret much more than their rough track from even the nicest GPS display. If you've never experienced spatial disorientation you may believe the mantra "Oh just look at the artificial horizon" as if it were easy. While training for my instrument rating I did actually experience spatial disorientation for real. By then I was very close to taking the checkride so I had a good instrument scan but even so the feeling of your brain screaming at you "You're in an 80 degree bank, you're gonna die!" when actually you're straight and level is immensely distracting - it literally took every scrap of willpower to maintain instrument scan and fly according to the instruments, and every time I had to look away to do something like tune a radio I would find I would have started banking the plane towards what my senses were erroneously telling me. A pilot with little experience flying in the clouds will quickly become overwhelmed. You've been alive for however many years and your senses have never failed you, so it's incredibly difficult to ignore them when they are actually flat out wrong and trying to overwhelm you with their opinion of what the situation is. Of course you get better at avoiding spatial disorientation the more experience you have flying in the clouds or at night, but you have to get that experience in the first place.

Distracted pilots have forgotten to put the wheels down for landing despite an obnoxious warning buzzer going off for the last two minutes. A pilot being distracted by incredibly powerful feelings of spatial disorientation while trying to simply maintain the aircraft on an even keel may not even notice a fancy EGPWS system yelling "Too low! Terrain! Pull up!"

I highly doubt Obama evolved his actual attitude on gay marriage. As with most things, we'll never know what Obama really thinks about it. What he evolved was, as you said, his position on it after seeing the way the political wind was blowing. Eich was merely more honest and stuck to his guns instead of pretending he now believed the popular thing.

Qualified and licensed isn't equal to proficient.

Further upthread someone was overblowing the risk of engine failure so I picked a reasonably recent month from the NTSB accident list and found this. Out of the 20 fatal aviation accidents in the US in April 2011, every single one was fatal due to either pilot misjudgement (flight into instrument weather conditions when not equipped and colliding with terrain) or simple loss of control of the aircraft (in other words, a lack of basic stick and rudder skills). In only four was mechanical failure was a factor, but subsequently the pilot just lost control of an aircraft that was perfectly capable of gliding to a positive outcome.

I knew the owner of a flight school/aircraft rental when I lived in Houston, and the maintenance standards of his aircraft fleet was pretty awful to say the least (it was all done very much on the cheap). Yet despite the fact he sailed awfully close to the wind maintenance-wise, and everyone predicting his fleet would start falling out the sky due to mechanical or airframe maintenance problems, none of the incidents involving his aircraft were mechanical in nature - every single incident was caused by judgement errors or basic lack of stick and rudder skills.