... or someone's brother-in-law sells open office furniture.

Actually, Government Motors is a pension plan with a car making problem.

>I recall a Chinese proverb from some exotic cooking show. It was something like "if its feet are on the ground and its back to the sun, you can eat it"
In heaven you have American House, Japanese wife and Chinese food............

Don't forget Pacifica, and they are on the web and have a nice iOS app.

>Having a second vehicle in the house for long trips is nice too. But I've probably traded cars with my wife out of necessity 2 or 3 times in a year.
That is why I have a Volt. When I need to drive 600 miles I just go. During the week I make it to work and back with a little to spare on nuclear and dirty coal.

And the point about shifting and noise is *RIGHT ON* I had forgotton how nice classical music was but now that I can listen to it again it is really a great bonus.

Another plus is the Voilt makes the Prius look like a mud fence. I know because my son-in-law parked his Prius next to my Volt one day and made that comment.

Issue is really Regulators vs Lawyers.

I use LabVIEW every day. I started with Fortran on mainframes and mini, then basic on the C= 64, then basic on PCs and a stint with IDL on Solaris. Fifteen years ago I worked in a lab that had Labview 2 on Mac, and followed it on to the PC. I struggled with LabVIEW at first but when I discovered that I could highlight execution and figure out where the 'off by 1' logic was killing me I was hooked. When I learned how to scoop up a bunch of code and turn that into an icon with inputs and outputs I realized I could never go back. While I started off controlling instruments I now use it for everything including processing images or just simple filters.

All of your criticism have faded over time except the legitimate criticism that it is too expensive. That price makes the barrier to entry way too high and the number of users available to ask help from below critical mass. National Instruments gives the hardware drivers away free and charges for programming

>NASA: We are all praying for you. Better repent of your sins while you still have a time. It is God's hands now.
Pretty much sums it up for the crew of the Challenger.

"Because administrators by and large are politically conservative, and..."
Actually, the position of Administrator is a roach-motel for psychopaths. That is the number one reason for tenure.

Somebody's Law states that Management ends up with the Union it deserves.

And just how fast do they need to be able to download pr0n?

I have converted over to Neat. I have both their sheet feed scanner and also it imports from the Fujitsu. I hate that it is closed source trap but it works very well. I put the scanned documents in a plastic box, when it is full I put the end date on the box, put in some moth balls, tape it shut, and bury it in the back pasture (I suffer from the hoarding gene and this lets me cope.)

In the mid 70's someone gave me a stack of punched cards that were a fortran version of the text based Startrek game. I loaded it onto the what ever I had an account on, probably a 360/370 system, and got something less intellegable than ROT13. The swami of the department told me I needed a Hollerith to EBCDIC converter. Somehow I got a hard copy listing of the thing.

The math department had a "calculator" made by HP that had a 32 char led dot matrix display, a casette storage and 8k ram that had been hopped up to 16k. Also, there was an attached typewriter that was fed fanfold greenbar. It was a typewriter that whopped one key at a time and every so often the ribbon had to be replaced. While it was on the books as a "calculator" it spoke basic and they left it unlocked at night. After a while we had it killing klingons and I had figured out how to program.

I still have the deck of cards somewhere. I suppose I could load it 50 cards at a time with the Fujitsy scansnap. Also, I have some old DEC system stuff on paper tape. Maybe I should feed that to the Neat scanner...

Next lest squabble about whether Hollerith is better than ebcdic.
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>hand the students a piece of paper at the start of the semester and say keep track of it
I remember back when Nixon was compeeting with Carter to be the worst president ever and we had shortages not just of motor fuel but also paper. Not handing a student a peice of paper is a good goal. My wife who is a high school teacher routinely has paper shortages.

I wish it wasn't so [our family raises pine plantation timber and so everyone should use all the paper the want, we will grow more for you to use] but the facts on the ground are that institutions are always skimping on paper to hand out.