Forces that are beyond your control will reach your children, and your children will grow to be what they want to be, not what you want them to be.

They might even choose paths of wisdom that cause them to dislike what you tried to do to them.

The Islamists in isis are a front. The core leadership and power behind isis are the Bathist former generals from Sadaam Hussein's Iraq. It's the folks who were thrown from power after the Iraq invasion. They use the islamist front as cover.

Charismatic. Very different word.

Really, the most disappointing people to talk to about Herbert and Dune are the people with a throwaway attitude. They say 'That movie really sucked' and you can't get them to think about the matter further. I've tried to read Herbert more widely. Just last week I picked up a second copy of 'Whipping Star' to reread it. He wrote a lot of books besides the Dune series.

Mostly you're just talking about California, and arid regions where people just shouldn't congregate to live.

Here, I am using electricity to pump excess water off a corner of my land and to the railroad drainage ditch.

Low government interference? Again, you're just talking about a California problem.

Ah, so you accept a definition of the practice as 'gaslighting'.

That's very cynical of you. But all that matters to you is the end result. There is no room for discussion. You have it all figured out and there is no reason to engage your opponents. You need only impose your view. It's good we were able to come to an understanding.

So you are saying: "Pay no attention to those imbeciles over there claiming to be atheists. They are false and wrong. I espouse the One True Atheism."

Bread and Circuses, to keep the masses from fighting.

Feeling upset and angry? Don't go to a protest rally. Here, download some music and movies. You're such a rebel!

2003? Usenet archives should go back about 15 years earlier than that.

People don't want to hear it today, but Microsoft played a big part in the early growth of the Macintosh. It was a threadbare platform without Microsoft Word and Excel. Excel, in particular, was a Macintosh program for quite awhile before Microsoft had a Windows environment good enough to run it on.

And Apple, especially in the early years, was a Pascal shop. With some Smalltalk and other stuff thrown in there. The whole Apple culture was way too baroque and niche-ridden for anything as utilitarian and clean as C. Apple spent hundreds of millions on failed attempts at a new 'elite-unique' OS before giving up and just buying in NeXT Step, which is based in Unix/C legacy code.

I fear that something like this is too bulky to be practical. Besides, when I need multiple monitors, I'm at a desk.

Perhaps a better option would be a 19 or 21-inch laptop; or VR glasses?

Microsoft is already working towards less java visibility. The Windows installer from Microsoft is now an .msi file, and when you install it, it installs and uses it's own embedded Java runtime.

When I noticed this last week (after a disk problem caused me to roll back my Windows install) I uninstalled the troublesome and always nagging-for-updates JVM on my system. If you don't use Java for anything else, you're certainly better off using the embedded runtime.

So any new installer of Minecraft on the Windows platform will not need to know about the JRE at all.

BTW, one of the neat things about the BBC Micro is that they shipped with a complete circuit diagram for the main board in the back of the manual.

They provide a small but complete schematic of the C64 in the back of the thick ring-bound manual that came with that system, too.

For that matter, you could buy Technical Reference manuals for the IBM-PC product lines and many of us have them. It has schematics of the mainboard and all the IBM-brand expansion boards, along with commented source code listings for the BIOS and the BIOS extensions on expansion boards.

Providing lots of information about the hardware used to be a priority. Not just for repair, but so that programmers could get right down to the signal paths and I/O scheme.

Solder wick has a lot of uses, though. It's more useful for medium-pitch surface mount rework, where you're trying to remove as much of the solder off the tiny pins. Once you have the solder wicked out of the fillets, the terminals can be popped loose one at a time. I used to pride myself on being able to remove an SO-8 package and be able to put it back on.

For through-hole rework a spring loaded solder sucker is better, or if you're wealthy or for professional work, a powered desoldering tool with a vacuum pump.