I also was a big fan of BeOS. Loved it. Used it exclusively for a couple of years. Over a decade ago. Before it died.

But why exactly do we keep having articles about a BeOS clone operating system that is still basically in a nearly useless pre-alpha state after a decade of work? How is this useful to anyone besides the people working on Haiku? Where are all the articles every other week about how well GNU HURD is progressing? Because they are both just about equally useless at this point, until some sort of significant progress is made. There are dozens of other obscure in-progress experimental operating systems out there in various states of development, and there are places to go to read about them. I know, because I used to go to those places to read about all the obscure alternative operating systems.

I'm sure Haiku OS is great fun for the people who spend time working on it, and I wish them joy of it. But I'll bet that pretty much all the people who would ever want to hear about it are already on their mailing list.

Nobody you'd want to hear about, apparently.

I think you meant: "Ermahgerd, errvelerrshun!"

Stranger in a Strange Land, of course. With Mike the Martian as Christ figure.

The Illiad and the Odyssey was BORING. Like half the book takes place AFTER the fall of Troy. It reads like a history textbook.

If you think Johnny Goodboy Tyler was perfect you and I must have read a different book. Clever, yes, and well-liked by others, but he had his share of problems and mistakes. I found all the characterizations in the book to be indicative of a strong understanding of human nature and personalities.

Perhaps it is you who are boring, or maybe you were expecting a different story when you read the book, and you were disappointed that every single page didn't involve a space opera style alien shootout. Maybe you should stick with picture books. Like the kind with six cardboard pages that don't give you a chance to get bored.

Awww, snap! Oh, no you didn't!

Oh, yes. Yes I did.

Keep modding parent up, please.

Everyone's opinion of L. Ron Hubbard today is strongly colored by the fact that he went insane at some point and took a joke way too far (by inventing Scientology as part of a casual bet with Heinlein over who could invent the best religion). I hate Scientology and all other religious cults (i.e. "religions") as much as the next rational person, but unfortunately it makes people forget the fact that LRH was actually a very good writer back in the day, including science fiction. He was contemporaries and friends with other sci-fi greats like Heinlein. People judge him now based on the craziness of the Xenu story, but I believe he specifically made the basis of Scientology as totally nonsensical as possible to demonstrate how easy it is to get people to believe in totally nonsensical made-up crap. He was making a point, originally, but then ran off the tracks with it because so many people fell for it that he convinced himself it was real (or at least worth taking advantage of to bring himself money and power).

All that aside, and this has been mentioned before a couple of times in other sci-fi discussions, the man was fully capable of writing excellent stories. I was fortunate to read _Battlefield Earth_ long before I had ever heard of Scientology, and even though I've devoured Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Herbert, Dick, Zelazny, and many other great collections of sci-fi before and since, to this day decades later _Battlefield Earth_ remains one of my favorite sci-fi novels. There's just something about it. It's incredibly well thought out logistically and filled with fascinating concepts that I've never quite seen replicated in any other sci-fi I've ever read or seen since then. There's a sort of plans-within-plans scheming aspect that strongly reminds me of _Dune_ at times. It's also very long, much longer than your typical sci-fi novel, so it's got the space to tell a very detailed and satisfying saga-type story with lots of different well-written characters. There are many concepts and scenes from the book that just pop back into my head now and then because they were just so unique and interesting. Oh, and it's just plain fun. It's a grand adventure. (One of my favorite parts was the little gray lawyer guy with the upset stomach at the end. Hilarious.)

The movie of course is a horrible joke. I was actually kind of surprised that someone with that much money to play with and who supposedly worships LRH as part of his religion would thoroughly massacre such a great book. The movie ended up containing about 1% of what made the book so good. So don't let that stop you from reading the book. If someone really did justice to a movie adaptation it could easily be one of the best blockbuster trilogies ever made.

So anyway, if you've got the balls go get yourself a copy of _Battlefield Earth_ and read it. Then when people ask why you're reading crap by "that Scientology guy" you can set them straight. My vote is definitely for L. Ron Hubbard being one of the most underappreciated sci-fi writers today.

No offense, but maybe you're a narcissistic, egotistical ignoramus who thinks he's some kind of ubermensch because he can walk and chew gum at the same time.

No offense.

Seriously, WTF are you talking about? What is there to "live with" on other platforms? You connect an external display, it gets auto-detected, you choose the settings _you_ want to apply to that display, and you're done. Those settings get remembered and applied whenever you connect that display. In my experience this works fine on both Windows (at least Windows 7) and OS X. I fail to see how you can consider it a "strength" that the most modern Linux desktop environment can't even handle remembering your external display settings across reboots. That's nuts.

I gave up on being a full time desktop Linux user about a decade ago because of BS like this that I was constantly having to fight with. I had this funny idea that I could come back in five or ten years once Linux "matured" and simple things like this were worked out and standardized, and I would then have access to a true desktop nirvana experience. Ten years later I am sorely disappointed at the crap desktop Linux users are still putting up with, and amazed at the way major flaws are rationalized into strengths. Still writing and exchanging bash scripts to make your desktop work the way you want? Are you kidding me? Nothing seems to have actually advanced in the desktop Linux world in TEN YEARS, besides some surface eye candy. That's just sad. I was hoping for so much more from desktop Linux.

Oh well. At least Android is successful and Linux is still doing well on the server side of things.

What's wrong, Amy? Did you swallow your phone again?

I think you'll find that the likelihoods of such things are not nearly as high as you perceive them to be. And how about we attack the cultural problems that cause these issues, rather than the firearm for making it slightly easier for stupidity to have a bad outcome.

There's that lovely hyperbole again. Four HUNDRED armed people who have *no* experience with the firearm they are carrying ("amateurs"), all trying to shoot at someone "on the other side of the theater"? Wow. Now that *would* certainly be scary. Except there is no reality where such a bizarrely extreme situation would ever occur. In reality, in that crowded theater containing a couple hundred people or more, there might be something like 10 people who have a concealed carry permit and bothered to bring their firearm into the theater. Maybe 2 or 3 would be close enough to the shooter to feel like they could safely open fire and have a chance of hitting the guy. But what if it were only one? It would only take one bullet from that one person near the shooter hitting a critical spot to put that shooter down or at the very least slow him down enough to allow one or more people to escape who might not otherwise have escaped. Stopping the shooter could save a dozen lives, while a stray bullet is likely to only kill or injure one or two people, if it hits anyone at all.

The alternative, the automatic bloodbath of hundreds of people shooting at each other, where ANY additional firearm in the room will *unequivocally* make things *infinitely* worse, is a paranoid fantasy that has NO connection with reality whatsoever. It is utter nonsense. Are YOU crazy and irresponsible enough to start shooting wildly across a crowded theater in the dark if somebody hands you a gun? No? Then why on Earth would you assume that literally EVERYONE ELSE in the proximity of a firearm will suddenly turn into a total nut job? There is no evidence in the real world to back such a hyperbolic conclusion.

(You should sit in a quiet room and think about this very hard. The answer to why you hold this delusion is within you. The trick is seeing that it is a delusion.)

The problem is that even a locked down police state cannot prevent a crazy person from killing people. Unless you go to the absolute extreme of putting every individual in the country in a separate metal box and feeding them through a tube, there is absolutely no way to stop this sort of thing. It just might not be a gun, but there will always be hundreds of ways to kill people en masse if one gets the inclination to do so. Humans are *very* creative, and we live in societies that are just chock full of potentially dangerous objects and chemicals.

The only difference would be that we wouldn't have any freedoms anymore. Police states have never been nor will they ever be about keeping people "safe".

Or maybe everyone in the audience who feels responsible enough to obtain a concealed carry permit and purchase and carry a firearm might, oh, I don't know, NOT shoot wildly in all directions but actually wait until they could SEE the guy who's walking around actively SHOOTING people, and THEN they might aim carefully and shoot directly at the shooter, thus having AT LEAST a 50/50 chance of actually STOPPING the shooter. Which is a hell of a lot better than just sitting there and waiting until he kills everyone in the room.

Honestly, EVERY SINGLE FUCKING COMMENT from people like you (people opposed to concealed carry) goes to the absolute extreme of assuming--no, DECLARING WITH CERTAINTY that even a SINGLE other armed person is going to turn a... bloodbath... into a... multiple bloodbath?

I really don't f**king understand you people. It's already a fucking bloodbath! People who go to the trouble of carrying legal firearms for self defense DO NOT have the tendency of just randomly and blindly shooting in all directions! I don't know where you get this idea!

No. They don't. Seriously. Only crazy people shoot wildly in all directions at things they can't see. Because that would be f**king insane.

Show me ONE account in the real world of someone wielding a firearm in self defense (outside of a Hollywood movie) where they actually just started randomly firing in the dark in a crowded room. One!

Gaaah! I don't know why I bother.

Maybe he realized that he couldn't be accurate enough in that situation at that distance with his pistol to avoid possibly hitting bystanders. Sounds like he did the right thing under the circumstances.

That doesn't mean there aren't many other shooting situations where it's much easier to be able to shoot back and stop the attack. On the other hand, if the shooter is ALWAYS the ONLY one present who is armed, the result is always bad. At least if others are armed there is a chance THAT WOULD NOT OTHERWISE EXIST. You decry the idea of an armed populace yet you provide no alternative that would be better in any way.

Never been in the military, have you? Unless you're A) a military police officer on duty or B) about to go directly to the shooting range under supervision or C) about to actually go into battle (unlikely within the US), you will find yourself in SERIOUS, deep doo-doo if you are found to have any live rounds in your possession. You MIGHT have a firearm with you for training purposes, but those are often kept locked up as well and only issued from the armory when necessary. But without the ammunition they are only useful as clubs. So... what was your point again?

You are absolutely right. What were those people thinking? They should have told her bodyguards to stay home that day. That way, everything would have turned out much better.

Wait... I don't... I'm so confused. Did you even *have* a point?

Uh...

Was he... armed?

Was he... at, or going to, a church?

Sounds like an armed churchgoer to me.

Fortunately a lot of the people who are carrying concealed personal defense firearms are actually off-duty or retired law enforcement or military. It is not the case that ALL armed citizens are clueless amateurs. Even the ones who aren't cops typically spend a significant amount of time practicing how to use their firearm effectively and safely, because most people that choose to carry firearms really do understand that having a firearm is a heavy responsibility.

Oh, and I'm about 99.999% sure that Trayvon Martin would still be alive if he hadn't seen fit to get into a brawl in the middle of the night with someone who happened to be armed. I'm also absolutely certain there are thousands of off-duty or retired cops who might have also ended up shooting Mr. Martin had they been in the same circumstances. Cops are not magically immune to making mistakes in heated circumstances. It was a very unfortunate incident, but it does not serve to prove in any way that citizens who don't happen to be members of law enforcement shouldn't be allowed to carry firearms. Doesn't matter how much training is involved, when things go down sometimes people get shot even when it may not have been absolutely necessary by the definition of someone after the fact who wasn't there when it happened.