This thing is like a pavement grinder 57 feet in diameter, it would go through a waterlogged wood hull like it was wet tissue paper; even a steel hull would only slow it down a bit. Bertha just had the bad luck of hitting a large boulders that was too round and too close to the center of rotation for the cutters to bite without the whole thing spinning in the mud.

I actually RTFA, one fellow said he wished that was what they would find but it's incredibly unlikely because "bertha would cut through it like it was made out of paper." The most likely theory is that it's a big rock the glaciers brought down that spins with the blade.

I'm really interested to know how you've got IE7 running on Win7 when it ships with IE8 and Win7 doesn't support IE7, according to the 2nd post (from an MS employee) on that page.

I have no idea, I'm not the one who imaged them. I just do databases these days.

You may be right about it being an attention getting stunt. I'd never heard of Duck Dynasty before the uproar.

You don't use 3rd party (e.g. not in your distro's repo) software or upgrade to new releases often, do you?

Nope, haven't yet had the need to with either kubuntu or Mandriva. I only upgrade when I read that there is a performance boost or a new feature that looks interesting. Of course, I'd have to if I had a task that nothing in the repo could supply.

Which distro can I go to and grab a release from 2000 that still has a year of support left?

No need, modern distros run just fine on ancient hardware. Some kind soul pointed me to a fix for an issue that was keeping one old machine of mine running XP (Audacity has a feature I thought it lacked) so I'll be slapping kubuntu on it next April. No way that ancient clunker would run W8 (which I wouldn't use unless I was well paid to but W7 is OK).

Hell, I collect old computers, fix any hardware problems, slap Linux on them and give them to poor people, it's a hobby. Some of those old machines are running W95 yet run fine with Linux.

You've given so many EOL requirements that it's no wonder MS can't meet your demands.

Microsoft can't meet many of my demands at all, that's only one.

I was really hoping you'd comment on why you're okay with running software that has not received updates in years

? I'm not. But the reality is people do, usually out of ignorance. A third of the world's computers are running XP and Microsoft is the only one who can fix that problem.

Maybe I'm just biased against it because I know when it dies I don't have to support IE8 anymore.

That's a very good reason. However, we got W7 computers at work last year and they're running IE7 so you may still have that headache for a while.

It looks like that may work, thanks. I wonder if Aramok can handle higher rates? I'll have to do a little testing.

While China and India are sending spacecraft there, our government can't even build a working website

"Truthiness" much? Do you have any idea how fucking many perfectly functional web sites the US Government has? Starting with NASA's? Ever register a copyright? copyright.gov. Want to see how many people live in your town? Census.gov. And guess what? Even the Obamacare site is working now.

How the hell did that completely inaccurate comment get modded up? Twice! I'm glad they were overruled by smarter moderators.

our finest minds are squandered on ways to get people to click links

Jeff Bezos is our finest mind? I think you'll find that the "finest minds" aren't greedsters, but scientists working at universities and yes, at NASA.

This week's This Modern World explains it well. Unfortunately I can't find it on the internet, the most recent cartoon is from March and the Illinois Times only runs it in its print edition, not the web rag. You might find it in one of your own left-leaning weeklies.

You pompous British git, Legos are Danish, not British. The plural of Lego is legoklodser. Now, Legos are a recent thing, what rule of the English language do you think says that the plural of lego is lego? What's he plural of tomato? Potato? Tornado? Frito? Cheeto?

Sheesh...

That price is arbitrary. It's that high because these guns are actually working, limited edition art pieces. They made guns to show how much stress the final product can withstand. I'd bet actual manufacturing costs (except the printing equipment) were far less than a gun bought from a gunsmith would cost.

I wish you'd have written TFA, because I thought TFA sucked. Buffy the Vampire Slayer? That is NOT science fiction, nor Batman, nor Ghostbusters. The "lesson" from the STNG episode? "Think outside the box."

Lame article, I'll bet the comments here are a lot better (just started reading them)

It's a bit complex to squeeze into a slashdot summary. Here's what has to say about it. This article, written by Theoretical Physicist Matt Strassler, does a better job of explaining it in layman's terms, I found it to be an excellent article. I'd had only the vaguest idea what it was about before reading it.

Now I have a much less vague idea, but reading an article by a physicist doesn't magically turn you into one.

Which brings me to my next point... Throughout the history of Windows, software vendors have found and used "undocumented features" (you and I might call them exploits) in their software. Most of what wan on 3.1 also ran on 95; a lot that ran on 95 did *not* run on 98 because Microsoft had fixed the brokenness that the now non-working applications were exploiting.

Why did FoxPro 6, a Microsoft W98 program, not run in XP?

Plenty of software written for XP exploits a number of security vulnerabilities in the name of user convenience and Microsoft knows they'd be pissing a lot more people off by making their computers not work anymore by patching those than they'll piss off by dropping support.

See above, do you think MS cares about their rivals? It was their own shoddy software they were protecting from user wrath. I'm old enough to remember "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run." You really think they give two shits about any other vendor??

Which patch broke my software? Oops, my backup's hosed; how long will it take me to reinstall, reconfigure, and repatch? Which future patches will also break my software?

Hilarious that those problems are nonexistent in the Linux distros I've used. But that's besides the point -- I said nothing about backwards compatibility, just that MS should support their OSes for a reasonable time, and a few years is NOT reasonable.

Which patch broke my software? Oops, my backup's hosed; how long will it take me to reinstall, reconfigure, and repatch? Which future patches will also break my software?

The copy of XP Home Edition I had (I've lost the CD but not everyone does) cost $125. That's plenty for a fifteen year support period, especially considering that Linux distros do it for free. Plus, I don't have those "Which patch broke my software? Oops, my backup's hosed; how long will it take me to reinstall, reconfigure, and repatch?" problems with the Linux box.

Also, I'd love to know how you use EAC to sample LPs and cassettes; last I checked (a while after the last patch was released, over 2 years ago), it just reads CDs and doesn't touch audio devices at all. Can you point me to a writeup?

I wish I would have had a writeup, it wouldn't have been such a pain in the ass to learn how to use. Once you get past the funky learning curve it's easy. It's a matter of "what does this menu item do?" and I agree, its interface sucks. But I've been using it for years, haven't lately so I couldn't tell you which menu does "record". But you can record a CD or LP, delete the silences between sides and before and after, mark where the tracks change and burn to CD in ten or fifteen minutes. The track marking is what Audacity lacks (AFAIK, maybe it can but I haven't found it).

I used to be a fan of MS, twenty years ago when the kids had those shitty Apples at school. No longer.

+5 funny

Not any more, W8 surpassed it. Yet another triumph for Microsoft!

I'm surprised that nobody thought "aliterate" was a misspelling of "illiterate". I usually get chuckles from that one, although the last time I did it somebody actually looked it up.

Aliterates at a nerd site annoy me. You're a nerd, you read books. But these guys that don't know their from there from they're, well, to paraphrase Twain, an aliterate has no advantage over an illiterate."

I think I'll make that my sig after Christmas.