They tried one, but the networking code proved to be such a performance drag that they abandoned it for a Wayland chip.

Definition #3 from Dictionary.com: the medical history of a patient.

Ah, that makes a lot more sense. I should have looked in dictionary instead of just googling it. And if his story is correct, he has an excellent point. If homeopaths are spending a good deal of time with their patients getting their history than doctors do and getting more accurate diagoses as a result, then they're performing a valuable service, even if their actual cures are bunk.

but it is a fact that planets and celestial objects have an effect on human behaviour and the environment.

No, it's not. The sun and the moon have effects. So does anything that actually runs into the Earth. Everything else is too damn far away.

Ask any police officer or health care provider how people act during the full moon. They will almost always tell you that they are busier and people are crazier around that time of the month - consistently - although they can't quite explain why.

And, guess what? They're wrong. They remember the weird stuff that happens during the full moon because they expect weird stuff to happen during the full moon. Numerous studies have been made looking for the so called "Lunar effect". No actual correlation between human behavior (including police calls, emergency room visits and such) and the full moon has been found,

To think that there is absolutely no basis in truth regarding astrology is simply wrong.

Is simply right. There is no known mechanism by which the planets or other stars could affect human life on Earth in this fashion. It's bunkum, pure and simple.

The practice of astrology would not have survived for thousands of years if there were no truth to it.

The evidence shows fairly conclusively that selective remembering of evidence and wishful thinking is perfectly capable of sustaining a practice with no basis in reality for several thousand years. It's happened a lot of time. People sincerely worshipped Zeus for thousands of years. Do you believe in Zeus?

Appears largely be so, yes. This muppet has held the seat continuously since 1987. Last election he won the seat by nine points (runner up was Lib Dem, not Labour, incidentally).

Anamnesis is a philosophy that we subconsciously know information from our past lives. "Anameticist" isn't a word. I have no idea what word you actually meant to use.

What if you're not working on the next Grand Theft Auto?

"This time it's different."

Of course they believe that. If the online stores make more money, that's "enhanced", isn't it?

Magic is how the average person and media assume anything technical works. Computers, cars, elevators, lighting. Hell, even plumbing.

...what I'm pondering?

Why would you use virtualization in such an environment?

I can sum it up in one phrase: No. Hardware. Downtime. Ever.

VMWare's solution enables you to move production servers at will without ever halting execution. Any hardware upgrade/replacement will have zero downtime. Even a hardware failure can be automatically migrated away from before it takes down the server and fixed without any down time.

If operator overloading is only useful for mathematical constructions, why not simply bake those things into the language and be done with it

Because there are an infinite number of possible mathematical constructions. You can't bake them all into the language; you need to provide facilities for the programmer to write his own.

There are no 40" computer monitors, not to mention 50".

I beg to disagree.

They've already done that...

I see XFCE every time I boot up my computer. They seem to be the only Linux desktop willing to maintain a working relationship with sanity.