Croudsourcing might be a nice idea in general when dealing with vast problems and patterns, but what is the reward?

When I write an article for *pedia, I "scratch an itch" or increase the worlds' knowlege (well, at least the enthropy...). When I do somethink like Seti@Home, its for science.

But why should I waste my time by sifting through financial numbers? To help reducing the risk for the rich to get richer?

Well, you might call it obsolete. But it still(!) runs circles around so-called modern systems when it comes to interface responsiveness, and elegance of OS design.

Whenever I have to struggle with Pain(t)ShopPro or, even worse, GIMP, I wish for DPaint, and MaxxonCAD might not be a contender for AutoCAD, but it was way easier (and more affordable) for casual use.

And the development environment around SAS C with its blazing fast compiler that could produce ass-tight code (Try making a "Hello World!" program in less than one K of executable on a "modern" system) is still on my mind. Especially with its support back then - far superior over what I get today with the different commercial development systems I use.

Yes, it might be obsolete, because it had no memory protection, but a MMU is not the solution for for all the problems out there. No memory protection also made interprocess communication way easier, and if you consider how well Amiga programs interact with each other via a system-wide AREXX scripting engine, the lack of an MMU is neglectable.

At least editor-wise I finally found something at least comparable to the decade-old super-duper-editor CygnusEd: Notepad++. The sad part is that NP++ does not run on Linux...

As most non-native speakers have a better grasp of English than the average American, this benchmark will have its own kind of problems...

One of my first inheritances at work was about 40k lines of code. One big ass file. Assembly, so I had no chance with Doxygen. Lots of macros to build totally different things depending on definitions and phase of the moon. Half of the comments were in french, which is erm, french to me. And each and every bit of RAM in the target was in use. "You only need to add this little feature." And be quick, because the system is already sold. And it is overdue, too, because someone in sales forgot to place a development job for the "small" change.

And now tell me that 40k lines is small and easy...

And if you don't know why, you have missed this: United Breaks Guitars

Here in Germany there is an "allgemeine Schulpflicht", i.e. children have the obligation to attend school and are (generally) not allowed to be schooled at home. This is German law for about a century, and generally accepted.Exceptions, e.g. for travelling folk are very strictly regulated to ensure that the children get a decent education.

The Romeike family simply refused to obey the law and claimed "religious reasons" for doing so. In the US they (fraudulently, IMHO) claimed being prosecuted for "religious reasons", and were granted asylum. But this "prosecution for religious reasons" is totally bogus - they were simply prosecuted for breaking the law, like every common criminal. And claiming this "prosecution for religious reasons" is not only fraudulent, it is generally considered an insult in the German public, because we take religious freedom really seriously - something caused by our history.

Imagine someone would kill other people and claim religious reasons for doing so ("Kali told me to rip his heart out!"), would you agree that convicting this person for murder would be a "prosecution for religious reasons" and grant him asylum? The example might be a bit extreme, but at the end of the day both is breaking the law, and purporting religion for doing so.

And even in the US the cop would only laugh if you claimed "God told me to put the pedal to the medal!" when he pulled you over for speeding. Well, maybe not if it was a Tennessee cop, though...

"Flowers for Algernon" was the first association that popped up from the depths of my mind...

Ok, lets add up:
living room, right hand side: 5m wide, 7 stuffed shelves from floor to ceiling, about 35m
living room, left hand side: An Encyclopedia Britannica, nearly 2m
study, my wifes shelf: 6 IKEA shelves adding up to nearly 5m
study, my own shelf: loosely stacked, not really shelved, but at least 2m
bedroom, on the sideboard, nearly 2m
Total: about 45m, about 150ft for those who are still stuck in the last millennium, and prefer limbs over light speed.

And yes, they are (nearly) all read, even the Britannica.

And then there are the boxes in the attic with the text books we have decided not to unpack after the move.

You want to be elected? Ok, provide a notarized report on your brain status for the public to see!

As a (low-level) student, the working conditions were horrible: We had a small office for five students with a large window facing south onto a large flat roof covered with white, reflecting gravel. And no AC, of course, there was one for the computer rooms, for the profs and assistants and (later) even one for the room for the higler level students). In summer, our room was unbearable hot, even the fairly robust terminals gave up sometimes.

We tried to cool the room down, but they forbade us to do this after "smoke" billowed from under the rooms door into the hallway, causing someone to start a fire alarm. The "smoke" actually was mist from a bowl of water with dry ice leftovers in it...

Your opinion. My father worked in a steel mill too, and told me of sililar incidents they had over the years. Core message: Instant vaporisation before impact. Keep in mind that even the air in the furnace is way >1000ÂC. The amount of energy involved in melting tons of steel is quite high - we are talking about the energy usage of a small town here, all within a few mÂ.

That suit is only to reduce the heat to survivable levels while staying several meters away (sideways, nobody in his right mind would place himself above(!) the furnace). Where the guys in the suits are normally standing there is an "moderate" environmental temperature of about 100-250ÂC.