"The overall efficiency of our society will increase if people buy more things at local stores. Less gas wasted on shipping..."

Right. Because one hybrid-powered UPS delivery truck delivering 50 packages to 50 homes on a computer generated best-path-least-turns route is less efficient than 50 people climbing into 50 SUVs and driving to and from 50 different local stores to buy 50 different items that were themselves shipped to each of those stores.

Remind me never to hire you to as an efficiency expert...

It's interesting to note that you mentioned that people place a disproportionate weight on programs that they experienced, because in many ways that exactly *is* the point.

That's why MacWrite and MacPaint were mentioned. Not many people had a chance to explore the Xerox PARC labs, or had the $80,000 or so for a Xerox Star system. (Or even a measly $10,000 to spend on a Lisa.) Macintosh popularized the WYSIWYG experience and brought it out out of the labs and before the general public at an affordable price point, much in the same way that the Apple ][ and VisiCalc brought the first PCs out of the S-100 hobbyist realm and into our homes and businesses.

Each was a watershed event, opening the door to more and more users.

As you say, we should endeavour to look past our own biases and provide an accurate image of history...

Paul Heckel was always a bit of a jerk, and the Zoomracks patent basically covered the concept of displaying a bunch of index cards such that the title of each card was visible and could be selected. In short, no relation to HyperCard, other than they both had cards and fields in which you could type data. Nor did Zoomracks have the equivalent of HyperTalk, which is what gave HyperCard its immense power and success.

"The federal government has *never* answered legitimate questions about how this will effect the environment long-term, particularly groundwater contamination."

Never answered legitimate questions? Oh, I get it. Never answered **legitimate** questions, meaning any answer to a question that differed from the answer you wanted to hear.

No true Scotsmen much?

"For the record, we are *currently* in an interglacial period of the ice age that started 2.6M years ago. When/as we exit the current ice age, it's going to warm up, period."

For the record, I'm going to repeat a cherry-picked fact that I picked up which matches all of my preconceptions on the matter, and that I will use to refute all of yours...

"The reason is components. The components are made in asia and shipping costs, export/import duties combined with labour expenses in US or Eu for that matter rises costs so much that it's not feasible to haul parts and build devices elsewhere."

Can't believe I'm responding to this but... wrong. Otherwise why Foxconn plants in Mexico and Brazil? Why does Corning make glass here and ship it to China?

I think the cheap-as-possible break-at-first-opportunity bloatware-ridden plastic pieces of **** produced by Dell and HP are indications of "total disregard for users".

Technically, the BASIC interpreter used all sorts of system variables for the program counter, evaluation stack, and so on. That said, such things would be considered metadata, and the statement is correct in that no variables were declared in the implementation language.

GOTO is a jump statement.

FOR...NEXT, LOOP...UNTIL, and WHILE...WEND are are the traditional "and more elegant" BASIC looping statements.

Well, if everyone is going to get all pedantic about it, then so will I.

In BASIC, the COLON (:) was the statement separator, not the SEMICOLON (;).

In the example code, "10 PRINT CHR$ (205.5 + RND (1)); : GOTO 10", the colon is the statement separator. The semicolon was used to suppress the automatic CRLF the PRINT statement would have generated after outputting the above expression.

"No one is trying to get rid of Medicare or Social Security."

Uh huh. Tell that to Ryan.

Yep. We need to fire all of the teachers, police, and firemen. We need to fire health and safety inspectors.

Why? Because they're on the government payroll.

But, under no circumstances, can we fire all of the people working at the defense contractors, who make weapons and develop other systems that even the Pentagon doesn't want.

Even thought those people are also paid with taxpayer dollars.