I think it's very rare in Silicon Valley that an otherwise deserving businessman loses out because they're black. Rather, the deficiency is in the lack of deserving minority businessman in the first place. That's a social and cultural issue, and may not even be a problem. Not every culture needs to have equal representation in all fields; that's one of the ways in which cultures are different.

From over here, it certainly looks like a problem if Americans whose families have been in America for generations are still pushed into different societies and cultures according to skin color. Who says "African American" has to be the culture with quaint differences from Americans with the opportunity to succeed?

"Harmony with international trends" is a particularly insidious phrase, isn't it? Not harmony with international reality. Most countries don't have laws like this. But they're thinking about it, or will be when we send the boys round, so you'd better do what we say if you know what's good for you.

Thing is, if I were running a clandestine organization, I'd want my recruits to stay off social networking sites. I don't want the authorities to find our network mirrored on Facebook. So my ideal recruit would have the social networking trail of . . . an undercover policeman.

Libraries may close or may go fully digital. They'll be allowed to do this because nobody will care about paper books. The books might go into storage somewhere (even in the basement) or they might be trashed. The Library of Congress will still be there, and so will the city zoo, with lions.

I don't even see a cable saying the contact didn't see bloodshed. What two of them (with slightly different wording) say is "THERE WAS NO MASS FIRING INTO THE CROWD OF STUDENTS AT THE MONUMENT". These are edited by the Telegraph, but if they edited out a clearer refutation of bloodshed . . . why? "No mass firing" in the square is consistent with what I thought we thought we knew. Nothing about people not being run over by tanks or other vehicles in a part of the square this diplomat may or may not have been watching.

That's the other thing about the CLI vs GUI debate. It doesn't only ignore the fact that you can use both together, but that some applications are neither CLI nor GUI. Yes, they have GUI versions, but emacs and vim are fundamentally not GUI applications. They are, let's speak it, full screen text mode.

Full screen text mode is not a CLI. There are editors that run in a pure command line. The most famous is ed. When vi was invented, it was a big step up from ed, but it wasn't a full replacement because it required full screen text mode.

Full screen text mode is certainly not a class of GUI. It doesn't require graphics. It may borrow concepts from a GUI, like pointers, menus, even windows, but it isn't graphical because it doesn't require the operating system to have graphics capabilities.

Full screen text mode is what we were using before GUIs took off. For certain tasks, it can be as usable as a GUI. It does, however become redundant when you have a GUI, hence vim and emacs get upgraded to GUI applications. The CLI, then, is the survivor, and full screen text mode gets written out of history.

America's bloodiest war was with itself.

It is, indeed, possible to use the menu bar for other things. See View|Toolbars.

Sorry, great analysis and all, but how do you make Jim wise and intelligent? He believes in witches. He thinks touching a snake skin brings you bad luck. He lets a white boy lead him south down the Mississippi. He goes along with Tom's ridiculous escape plan, even leaving his prison to help carry the useless grindstone back, because he trusts white folks to know what's best for him. If there weren't so many white idiots in the book you'd think he was a racial stereotype.

They had the words "negro" and "slave". (And, yes, often the word "nigger" does mean "slave" as it's used in the book. I have the Gutenberg Project file here, 5 mentions of "slave" and 5 of "slavery" against 203 of "nigger" in a book about slavery.) Google says that "nigger" was always a minority term in print. Twain made a deliberate decision to use it, and not to use other offensive words (no "damn", no "bitch", and a lot of highly suspicious "blame"-ing). The language was chosen to shock. It was shocking then as it is now. That doesn't mean it should be censored, but let's call a spade a spade.