The gold dollar was about to put a check on Lyndon Johnson's 'Great Society' crapola, but Nixon defaulted on the gold dollar, crossed the words 'I owe you' from 'I owe you X dollars' from the bank notes and called the little paper previously known as the 'Federal reserve note' into 'dollars'. This is what allowed the government to perpetuate its growth to the gargantuan size it is today and it is what killed USA economy reversing the economic growth in USA and eventually wiping out the economy completely.

As to statistics, some people compile this data, of-course unemployment rate shows some of this but the details of unemployment are much more important than the compiled averages, the poorer segment of society, the black Americans have suffered higher unemployment rate since the programs against poverty started, than ever before. Actually before the minimum wage was introduced in the 1938, unemployment among blacks youth (16-25, formative work years) was lower than among whites by 15%. Actually each 10% increase in minimum wage mandate had a disproportionate decrease in employment upon the minorities, which is counterproductive if the goal is to decrease poverty, of-course it was not, the goal was to turn people into dependants, voting for bigger and bigger government, while growing the said government.

The gold dollar was not allowing the government to carry with that goal and Nixon chose to default on the actual dollar than to abandon big government ideology.

You can drive from Baltimore to DC and back without noticing that you have a flat tire?

Actually I have done precisely that, but it was a rear tire on a front-wheel drive. Only noticed a problem when listening to AM radio and hearing a "click-click-click" when going at low speeds. That was the nail in my tire hitting the road and shorting out the static building up from the tire rubbing.

Google too tough for you?
http://nypost.com/2011/04/17/h...
"US Attorney General Eric Holder and his brother failed to pay the property taxes on their childhood home in Queens, which they inherited last August after their mother died, The Post has learned.
And because their ailing mom, Miriam, was already behind on two quarterly tax bills when she succumbed to illness on Aug. 13, the charges went unpaid for more than a year â" growing to $4,146.
It wasnâ(TM)t until The Post confronted Holder last week about the delinquency that he and younger brother William Holder finally paid up Friday..."

And as for Geithner, one might expect the man appointed TREASURY SECRETARY to be fairly careful about his taxes? Don't we kinda hope those guys are obsessive about numbers and details?

I see a lot of negativity in your post directed at Microsoft and I wonder what kind of confusion of ideas turns a person into what you are, you are absolutely on the side of governments and against the individual freedoms and liberties. What happened, did you get beat up a lot as a child or something?

"Nope, I don't work with Microsoft Technologies."

Then you admit that "Every IDE places everything you edit ultimately into files, text files to be precise" should have been "Every IDE I use".

1963 called, wondered where the imminent apocalypse was?

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.

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...

Some are still playing 'there are 400 communists in the Obama white house' card or claiming so other such nonsense and trying to use it to limit rights

Who in government is saying that? These guys, Democrat and Republican, go out to have lunch and drinks with each other. Then they pretend their polite disagreements about how many freedoms to take from their subjects are actual drag-down fights in front of the mainstream media, to suggest there's any real difference between the parties. It would be nonsense to slander the president and his staff and use such deceit as an excuse to impose restrictions on the public.

Yup. I'm pretty sure I fried a flash drive by plugging it into a port I had miswired, but Sandisk replaced it for me anyway.

Yes, but DIY instructions are readily available.

Don't be so thick.