Lizzie: "Mommy, can I go play outside?" Mommy: "Go axe your father."

More importantly: Whatever happened to Slashcode, which is what [cue the In Soviet Russia jokes] drives Slashdot?The last version seems to date from nearly a decade ago now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J... In Javelin, you defined a variable (like Electric Usage or Product X Sales) as having a period (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly...), you had a screen for entering values into a variable at any time period, and you could use those variables in functions that automatically split or combined values appropriately. Then you'd lay out a worksheet (not a spreadsheet!) for whatever combination of variables and time periods you liked. Charts and graphs existed independently, and would automatically adjust to data and dates. Javelin won over the (then) new Excel as Infoworld's best Software Product of the Year 1985. It is a great mystery why no-one in the last 30 years has replicated this functionality. Instead all we get are Lotus 1-2-3 clones like Multiplan, err, Excel.

Who took the "personal" out of "personal computer" --? The whole point of personal computers was putting the users in control. How is anyone supposed to get anything done without being able to control their tools? Ludicrous.

vBulletin is a proprietary forum software.

No, vBulletin is a software package, or a program, or even "vBulletin is software" -- but never "a software." You don't have "a hardware" or "an information" or "a clothing" -- you have a piece of hardware, a piece of information, a piece of clothing, and a piece of software. Grammar check, please.

Yea, verily.

I like to wander the stacks, looking for unusual shape books, interesting covers... pull a book out, read a few random paragraphs in the middle, maybe peek at the beginning or end, leaf through looking for photos and illustrations... How would you browse that way with a database of e-books?

If I wanted to read the Internet, I could stay home. Print on paper is an utterly different experience. You know -- Tactile, spatial (how far into the book you are, what side of the page) -- not to mention, you can slip bookmarks into pages, photocopy them, and pass them around between several people.

When I check half a dozen books out of the library, I read one, I pass it along to Mom while she's reading another, and to Dad, and my brother... How do you propose doing that with a bunch of e-books?

A library without books is... pointless. Why not just build a Starbucks or a McDonalds. Or, actually, an empty room. What a waste.

Dido, the British singer-songwriter ("White Flag," "Life for Rent")? -- or did you mean, "ditto" </grammarpolice>

So... this is para-dice? Not quite what I thought it would be.

Enacting "zero tolerance playground rules" will not make school bullies vanish from the Universe. Why would diplomacy make tyrants obsolete? If your opponent is going to use force, are you going to wimp out?

When working at home, Snowden covered his head and screen with a hood so that his girlfriend couldn't see what he was doing.

Sounds like he was channeling Joseph Smith.

"Write (Hopefully) Once, Run Everywhere" just did not make a good acronym.

Back in 1993 there was Microsoft at Work, "a short-lived effort promoted by Microsoft to tie together common business machinery, like fax machines and photocopiers, with a common communications protocol allowing control and status information to be shared with computers running Microsoft Windows..."

Bad idea then, ... bad idea now?

How do you send text messages that are not associated with a telephone number? (confused)