As a former DG-er myself, I can only agree. The MicroNova *could* have been part of a real breakout for DG, but the bigger iron guys shuddered at the lower price of it so it remained a red-headed stepchild, clearing the way for TI and Intel. After that, its 63077 for DG. :-)

More "Gummint givin way free money to deadbeats" rhetoric sure to come despite the facts that the size/cost of the program (tiny) compared to the benefits derived to society are, by any empirical measure, shown to be tremendously beneficial. But, as usual, the loutish barroom stool rantings will usually win the discussion. Sigh.....

OK, fit this scenario into your argument. I was raised by Jehovah's Witnesses (true!). JWs do not believe in accepting any blood transfution as it's against their religious beliefs. Now, say, I - as a a 10-year-old child of said JWs - was shot through the finger by his brother (also true, sadly) - and needed a blood transfusion to survive (NOT true). Should the parent's religious belief trump the medical necessity to save said child (me)? Being a little bit closer to this stuff can give you a whole different perspective.

You're right - most spewage that we hear from most media (I use PBS NewsHour and The Economist magazine myself) is "eristic" dialogue such as one would hear on talk radio, a lawyer trying to win a case, etc where the goal is to "win" the argument by convincing the other that they are wrong and you are right. True dialogue is "dialectic" where the goal is to - as you said - truly try to reach a deeper understanding of the underlying issue and most crucually, be willing to alter your belief if that deeper discovery brings new information to light. It's a truly wonderful thing to not be mentally bound by belief based on nothing but feelings/opinions.

While working at Intel, we had a large Linux conference with Linus and a few other noteworthy OSS dudes. Afterwards, while we were all millng around, I found myself next to Linus Himself and asked this very question. My belief was that it was the GPL vs BSD license which forced all changes to at least be available for inclusion in the next version. Linux felt that it was more of a timing thing where Linux just kind of hit at the right time. Who really knows?

Yes - me. While I acknowledge that there are some minor discrepancies in *some* of the data, it does not negate the overwhelming consensus of current knowledge and - quite frankly - the costs of the deniers being wrong are dramatically more than the costs of (gasp!) getting cleaner air if they should happen, against all odds, to be correct. PS - you betray your political orientation by throwing out an alphabet soup of gummint agencies and then use "tyrannical" to describe the scientists working there. Rrrrriiigghhtt, big fella.....

It's even worse than that. It's one thing to demonize political groups for political gains - that's how the game is played, sadly. However, when you then take the same level of hypocrisy, bumper-sticker-thinking, and plain old crazy, paranoid delusion and apply it to science, then that's taking things jusy way too far. Of course, these boneheads have been repeating this stuff to each other for so long, they really do believe it! Now *that* is some scary shit!

Let me try....Basically, unless you live in an already heavily-wired are with several combinations of fiber, cable, and DSL it is economically unviable for anyone to expand the physical infrastructure of the internet. This leads to monopolies of the existing, legacy telecom companies. Here in North Georgia where I live, I have exactly one choice (omitting satellite because the cost and latency is horrible) which is Windstream DSL. Over the last several years, Windstream has had several lengthy outages caused by edge route rupgrades blowing up and so forth. Absent net neutrality, no other ISP can connect to Windstream's existing wires (paying for that access, of course) and offer me an alternative. Real free-market access to the physical infrastructure much like, say, a shopping center can open along a publicly built and maintained highway. Good for everyone except the companies who want to maintain their monopoly. PS - I used to gate-bang DG Nova III CPU, memory and controller cards. Fun days!

Actually, we did. Like most Americans, sadly, you know nothing of history beyond, say, 1980 or some such. If you did know some history, you would know that - before the enactment of the Constitution - most states had their dominant sect, and those not in that sect were *legally* persecuted and often killed. Check out the history of the Baptists and Quakers in early New England for one example. Or, how about the Christian justifications for the genocide against American Indians. If you want to get even more recent, check out the legal filings in Loving vs Virginia where lines of Christian preachers submitted tons of briefs, all saying that their Christian God had deemed that black people were inherently inferior and not worthy of any basic human rights. Yeah, you Christians are really, really superior to other religions....

Sorry to reply to myself, but I hit submit too soon. The last sentence should be ...drop your "tr" and "td" layout scheme...I was helping a friend on his older site and it was all hard-coded tr/td/styling intermingled with hard-coded colors, etc. I dumped the whole thing and redid it and it looks a lot better *and* is responsive.

Look, I am just starting with HTML and CSS after several decades of C and shell scripting in order to create a new website fo the small company my son and I are starting. Him, being a young stud instead of an old fart like me, convinced me to start with a design that was "responsive" in NewSpeak. Basically, all that means is: establishing the viewport; determinging several sensible breakpoints at which certain styling elements change; establishing when, say, to transition from a standard horizontal ring menu to a menu button that drops down a vertical menu; and a couple of other small things. At the end of it, it was no BFD and the site works from the exact same URL as the desktop, uses the exact same HTML code, and works on *every* device which can access the site. Finally, I ran our site through the google test tool and it came back as: Awesome! So, stop whining and drop your and layout scheme and just do it. Crikey!

Being able to say "find 'blah' when it is within X words either side of 'bleh'......"

No reason to downvote - once your argument/reasoning devolves to "BULLSHIT" in all caps and then throw in "liberals" and "regulate" as if the last two were the equivalent of the first, you identified yourself quite clearly as on of those hyper-partisan types who intellectually (and I use that term very broadly) subsist on the cargo-cult, talk-radio crowd who feel at their best when engaging in loutish, barron-stool rantings accompanied by your favorite sayings/slogans of the day. You really should consider doing this: listen-to/watch/read *only* the following for one month. 1) PBS/NesHour for real news and *sane* discussion of current events. 2) Economist magazine for world perspective, outstanding, deep-thought analysis (of which I occasionally disagree, but still respect their perspective) of current events, including America. PS - Economist magazine is the one news/analysis source that is equally respected by Ds and Rs who have a brain. The Tea Pary types like, sadly, you, I suspect, only do Fox and talk radio.

I'd once written what I thought at the time was a fairly simple C program to interface with a medical lab system, calculate the checksum (a very, very basic CRC), and pass the results to a file. For the record, I'm a self-taught programmer who started with the Data General Nova assembler, but I digress....Several years later, I happened to meet a programmer who'd inherited my code and, basically, said that it was the best commented, self-explanatory code he'd ever seen and later changes were really easy to make. At the time, I'd just written a device driver was so feeling all punky, but later I realized that what that dude had told me was the highest compliment I could ever receive. $.02 brothers and sisters....

...not having your fucking article spread across 9 pages with about one paragraph per page. That would be a great start!