I suppose I could offer a link to a picture of the overall summary, a cesspool. Would that enhance your nostalgie de la boue ?

I just want you to stay beautiful. Is that so wrong?

No no, the desperation is 100% on your end, I assure you.

Strong correlation with consciousness during the previous 6 years, I suppose.

Your continued desperation to attach ownership of the GOP to me is. . .quaint. The only numbers that are going to matter are the results of the November elections.

Aw, c'mon, boss: both stand for the increase of Federal power.

Oh, OW! Oh, that hurts! Oh, the suffering! Imma go cry now.

I bet you're that guy at the front of the line who misremebers the price of what you bought and makes them send the bagger sauntering to the back of the store for a price check, and then doesn't even start to open his 19th century checkbook until the final tally is rung up, and then fills the whole check out glacially topped off by a pointlessly legible signature, then finally hands the check over so that the cashier can slowly scribble the entire contents of your drivers license over it.

And you wonder why I'm so thankful for self checkouts, even though I'm not even nearly a "millenial".

Because each time we overcome a monumental challenge for the first time, we expand the frontier of human knowledge and endeavor.

As our frontier expands, that which was undone becomes possible; that which was possible, replicable; that which was replicable, automatable; that which was automatable, trivial; that which was trivial, obsolete.

Just over a century ago, tinkers managed to propel a glorified kite a few feet through the air. The tangible benefit of this flight of fancy is that today, we complain about the comfort of the seats in mass-produced aircraft that can send us around the globe for a historically infinitesimal cost in time and money.

Seventy years ago, the US government was one year into the construction of ENIAC, one of the first general-purpose digital computers ever created. Upon its completion two years later, it would occupy 680 square feet, require the power of roughly six modern households, process up to 500 operations per second, and spend roughly half its time being repaired. The tangible benefit of this monstrosity is that today you likely carry, on your person, roughly 25 million times more computing power than ENIAC. It is quite likely that use the bulk of this computing power primarily for your own personal entertainment.

45 years ago, after years of research and significant government funding, ARPANET was launched. Not many people expected it to be of any significant practical value; in fact, the first message ever sent over ARPANET only managed to deliver two characters before crashing the entire network for an hour. The tangible benefit of this boondoggle is that today, we have the Internet, the direct descendant of ARPANET.

This may sound a little bit crazy, but murdering people was recently declared illegal in Canada too. All Special Agent Scully would have to do is pick up the phone and call her counterpart with the RCMP (They recently had phone service installed at both of their igloos!) who would then search the cabin for her, looking for evidence of a crime as defined by Canadian law. Once that was found it there would be some discussions at the nearest Tim Horton's over poutine and coffee (double-double, naturally) about just who would be charged and tried under what laws and whether evidence would be canoed across the border to the USA or the suspect extradited to Canada, Eh.

It's almost as if this sort of thing has come up before. The situation gets more interesting when a US citizen does something which is only illegal in the USA but not Canada. Something like failing to volunteer to join the army, supporting an unpopular political party or copying music from CD to a tape.

I suspect he's ok with that (if not with the way you phrased it).

Be kind. He may have been on of the lucky 10,000 who just figured out where the phrase "per cent" came from.

Well, that's not quite correct as the first line of Integrities (Merced) were not OpenVMS compatible. I was part of the team that launched our company's product on Integrity back in 2004/2005, when VMS was still in beta on that platform.

I've heard of lazy, but this takes the cake. Or maybe, in your case, has the cake delivered, not to your front door, but to your sofa.

So you're a one or two-issue kind of guy, huh? I find the problems you mention with the CLI pretty small when compared to:
- Being able to abbreviate commands (SEARCH to SEA, BACKUP to BACK, etc.)
- Having commands that abbreviate means the commands can make sense in English and still be truncated by experts for speed (e.g., no commands like "ls", "rm", "tar", "man")
- CLI integrates with system calls, so you can write quick scripts for web services or to obtain system information without doing SEARCHES (excuse me, I think that's "grep" in your world) on text dumps
- ISAM databases (RMS) can be created, designed, and updated from the CLI

ODS-5 only handles 2 TB volumes (or 2 TB files) right now, but I don't see why this can't be improved. It's slower because, besides not increasing the maximum size of volumes, HP didn't bother implementing the full XFC caching. It's clear they were preparing for this rundown for some time. Files-11 volumes have been the most robust I've ever worked with. I haven't seen anyone corrupt a file from an unexpected shutdown in 15 years, which I can't say for any other file system (although recent NTFS versions are close).

Of course, someone who is learning Mandarin needs to understand that. But someone who is Chinese needs to understand the concept of "yes" and "no" in English. Why hold them to a lower standard-- are they subhuman?

Having excellent language skills does not mean you are intellectually superior any more than my being able to play many musical instruments does.

Thanks for making me feel young. My not-so-greybeard stories are about hacking Apple IIs and VIC-20s...