The paper isn't mis-using religious concepts or entities or terminology for secular and negative purposes, it's using vulgar terms instead of more polite ones. People keep f******* mistaking the two concepts.

I did some work with the publishing industry back in the 80s, and one of the projects had some portrait-mode 200dpi monitors for editing. Absolutely wonderful things; we're only now starting to get that kind of resolution again.

As it was, I found it annoying enough to go from 1152x900 in 1992 down to 640x400 in 1993, and didn't get as good a monitor on my main work machine until maybe 2009 or 2010. (There were laptops with 1280 or more pixels before then, but we didn't have them; our Corporate IT department always preferred to get hardware with more color depth instead of more pixels, thinking for instance that 640x480 with 16-bit color was better than 800x600 with 8-bit color. Nope.)

Yes, it's much nicer to read portrait-mode documents on a portrait-mode or at least square display, not on landscape. It's especially the case for PDF files in multi-column formats where you otherwise have to scroll up and down and up and down to read the things.

But that's not a friendly shape for a laptop, unfortunately. I'd probably be ok with a tiltable display to get 4x3 or 16x9-10 portrait mode, though it seems manufacturers assume you're going to be using displays to watch movies on so the default position is landscape.

I'm looking for a small desktop BSD, something that runs Xorg and fits in a GB or less of disk, so I can run multiples of them as virtual machines. I need some kind of browser that can run YouTube, plus ssh, and otherwise I don't much care what it does, but small disk is good.

Yeah, there are some websites you might want to go to that still need Flash or some equally ugly support to get video to work. Right now I've been trying to get SliTaz Linux to let me watch YouTube as well as finding the right operating system and VMware settings to make the display resizeable, but I'm also trying out DragonFly BSD (still at the "installing Xorg" stage.)

If you really need computational horsepower, get yourself some kind of PC with a fast graphics card and run CUDA or one of the other GPU-based computation packages. (In my case, I went with a Raspberry Pi :-)

I hope they at least let you mount disk drives using Samba or NFS or whatever from your own file server at home, in addition to whatever walled-garden functionality they may be selling. Much of their target market is going to include people who have those, either purpose-built servers or terabyte-disk USB/Ethernet external drives or their old Windows box with file sharing turned on.

Ok, some jerk actually managed to steal enough Dogecoins a few months ago to be worth actual money, which is so not the point of Dogecoin. I mine them partly because they're worth basically zero while still being cryptographically interesting; six months of one CPU on my old lab PC might have added up to 25 cents, but it's still in the "Reddit tip jar" range, not the "So wow! Many money!" range even though I have much coins.

Once you get the rocket safely out past Earth's orbit, most of us hippies aren't too worried about it.

The problem is getting it there - what percentage of space launches fail? Way more than zero, and we don't want plutonium-powered reactors on an exploding rocket, even if ETGs really are about as safe as you can get for nuclear power generation.

Mostly Manhattan, with a few in the outer boroughs? Mostly not in poor neighborhoods, where they may not have been as widespread, and they got taken out earliest because of the War On Politically Incorrect Drugs?

Are you kidding? They couldn't even figure out how to get female characters to work.

XKCD 606

Candidate Obama gave great, inspiring speeches, but wasn't that good at real-time conversation. (President Obama not so much.) Dubya Bush always looked like a deer in the headlights, amazed that he was getting away with what he said and hoping nobody would ask questions about it.

But the guy who was really good? Bill Clinton. He was always on, always quick thinking, always had a good comeback for anything, lots of fun to listen to. Sure, he was lying through his teeth half the time, but he knew which half it was, and he did it with a smile that said that he knew that you knew he was lying, and that he'd make the game worth playing, and he usually did.

If he's 50, he was born in 1964, so he might have gone to college before Apple II's became widespread. But when I was in high school from 1972-1974, we had time-sharing access to a PDP-11 at the nearby state university (with one teletype shared for the entire school), so by 8 years later it's likely he had something a lot fancier. My wife's high school didn't have that - they used punch cards, which got batch-processed weekly.

I first encountered PLATO in college, and it had Notesfiles (which contributed significantly to the evolution of Usenet, as well as Lotus Notes), and the coolest-ever Star Trek game.