As long as they keep the Vangelis intro theme....

Algae actually belongs to the Protist kingdom.

Ah, you must be one of those "self-made, pulled-themselves-up-by-the-bootstraps" people I keep hearing so much about, the kind they would trot out on stage at the republican national convention. You spent lots of time stereotyping and insulting me but I can't help but notice you neglected to elaborate on how you single-handedly escaped poverty with nothing but your own two hands. I'm sure lots of people would love to know. Secondly, I have no idea how old you are (or how much of what you said is true) but it's gotten a lot harder to climb the ladder these last few decades. Do you feel confident that if you lost everything today, you would be able to rebuild if you had zero resources at your disposal? That's where society comes in. However, the pull-themselves-up-by-the-bootstraps people tend to be hypocrites, kind of like how Ted Cruz is asking for FEMA money after that fertilizer plant blew up that town (all due to a lack of safety regulation) a few weeks ago. Of course, a self-sufficient person like you would refuse help no matter how bad your situation was, right?

Where exactly did I ask for a handout? All I want is a society that fosters social mobility and has a decent safety net for when things go wrong.

You'd rather live in a society where there is no escape from poverty if you weren't talented^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hlucky enough to be born a millionaire? That's where we're headed if what TFA is about becomes commonplace. The idea is that everyone pays for it through taxes. This inherent selfishness of "I've got mine so fuck everybody else" is what is destroying my country and I'm sick of it! All the conservatives who bitch about taking care of other people have benefited far more from society than they can fathom and yet they can't see it. Taxes are the price we pay for civilization and part of civilization is making sure that everyone has a decent standard of living. Yes, you're paying for other people, but guess what? Other people are paying for you at the same time so it all works out. If you don't want to pay taxes you clearly don't want to live in a civilized country either.

What you're describing is fascism, not progressivism. Ever since Reagan, the USA has been going balls-out towards fascism. Lots of people would say that we're already there. Us progressives want to create a society that cares about its people instead of just the very rich and where it's possible for everyone to achieve a decent standard of living regardless of where they start at on the socioeconomic ladder.

Yes, that's what I meant. Sorry, I should have been more clear.

How well does MariaDB work with Qt 4.x? I haven't had a chance to test it for myself yet.

Oh please. Reagan was the death knell for the middle class. It's all been downhill since that idiot got elected. Even his fellow republicans thought his economic policies were bullshit. Open your mouth and catch some of that nice warm golden trickle-down. Tastes good, doesn't it?

It's already institutionalized to the point where I'm ashamed of this country. Any society where the rich can steal everything that's not nailed down with utter impunity is an absolute shithole to live in at best and doomed to fail at the worst. How many wall street bankers have been prosecuted? If it were up to me they would be dragged out and literally crucified. There are more than enough resources to go around; the problem is the rich don't want to share. Income inequality in the USA is at the highest level it's been since the gilded age.

And you truly think the rich don't steal and redistribute? Their actions are what made the economy shit the bed in the first place.

Nowadays we have proper source control so it's easy to commit changes and revert to a prior iteration if you break something. As far as backup goes, I use Github as my first line of defense because it's accessable from everywhere and cloning/syncing the latest codebase between machines is trivial. Github isn't going away anytime soon so it's relatively safe to rely on but I still create tarball backups and store them on my computer and offsite. The only downside of using old-fashioned tarballs as backup is that you eventually end up with a directory full of redundant archives (containing ancient code) that you're probably never going to use again. Source control is just better.

Back when I was a kid I remember seeing a Highlander cartoon on several occasions. It was kind of a wierd show b/c at that point I hadn't seen the movies yet so it took a few episodes before I figured out WTF was going on. The animation quality wasn't as bad as some kids' shows were back in the day but they made Highlander more kid-friendly; characters didn't have to behead each other to absorb a quickening anymore--they just held a sword and a beam of light shot up into the sky or something like that (it's been awhile since I've seen it).

If that person wanted to read on the beach, a dead-tree book might be the best option in such a hostile environment. Abrasive sand will get everywhere just from the wind (probably scratching the screen) but she could just shake the sand out of the book without harming it. Even if the book falls in the water it will probably still be good after it dries out. Try that with a Kindle.. salt water will fry every circuit it has. I've seen Kindles survive being dropped in fresh water (granted, they were immediately rescued and stowed in bags of rice to dry out) but salt water is a way better conductor than fresh so fatal shorting is practically guaranteed.

Mod parent up.

To compare the Romans to cavemen is an insult. Romans were extremely advanced for the time. The legions (when not fighting) could build damn near anything and could build it to last. Roman roads survived the middle ages with little to no maintenance and are still servicable today. Meanwhile, our roads quickly crumble and deteriorate without yearly maintenance. Roman aquaducts and sewers meant that cities had running water and decent sanitation (including flush toilets), something not seen again until the late 19th-20th century. After the collapse of Rome, Europe would spend the next 1800 years shitting in a bucket. Romans even had a primitive steam engine. It wasn't deployed much (if at all) outside of design drawings but a steam-powered vehicle could have been possible if the empire had lasted a bit longer.

Does Windows 95 even run on modern hardware? I remember that getting Windows 98 SE to work in a virtual machine was a pain in the ass even after I found a floppy image that worked (b/c Microsoft in their infinite wisdom didn't or couldn't make a bootable CD image back in the day) because it didn't recognize any of the VM hardware and everything barely worked at the lowest-common-denominator level. For instance, the best video support I could get was 16-color 640x480 (i.e. absolute shit). Forget about sound or network access. I'm guessing the only reason why the Win98 installer found the blank hard disk file at all is because VMware was propping everything up and making it work behind the scenes. Hell, you couldn't install Win95 on a brand new PC without resorting to some kind of USB boot disk trickery because most new machines don't even have floppy drives anymore.