Interesting. I misread "Geode", which is only one character difference. "Genocide" seems like quite a stretch, both more characters difference and requiring you to actually insert stuff that's not there rather than simply miss something. In other words, you have to overlook something to read it as "Geode" (as I did), but have to hallucinate to read it as "Genocide"...

There are dozens of desktop alternatives for GNU/Linux/*BSD/etc. That a fan of one of the dozens of minor ones is complaining that a KDE dev only mentioned the major alternatives and didn't mention his favorite of the dozens of others makes him seem slightly butthurt...

It seems Windows follows a Star Trek like release schedule -- you should skip every other version. 98 was good, ME was bad, XP was good, Vista was bad, 7 was good... waiting for 9/Blue/whatever...

I know nothing of this author, but your review makes me suspect it might be a pretty good read. The kind of jerky ad hominem attacks seen here are usually drawn out of critics when they can't seem to criticize the material itself, so going after the author makes a good alternative, and "pretentious" is usually the way anti-intellectual critics describe anything worth reading...

The line you're misquoting is only correct in the context you ripped it from. In the example program it's referring to, each line happens to contain only one statement, so the statement is true. The implication you're trying to draw from that (that in BASIC terminology, rather than simply in this example, "line" and "statement" are synonymous) is quite false.

Colons, actually. Semicolons were not used a statement separators, but as separators between items in a PRINT statement, e.g. PRINT CHR$(4);"OPEN FILE"

I doubt it. Most people would look at the result of that program and declare it a maze instantly. They would only object to the features you note if you dropped them in the middle of it...

Why would it not exist? It can't run out of money. If you think otherwise, you're terribly misinformed about exactly what it is and how it works. It currently has a surplus, and at some time down the road it's likely the surplus will be gone. At which point, either it will continue to pay, but not in excess of the amount of money it takes in, or congress will weasel out and start running it in the red. Expecting any other option to occur is ridiculous. No politician is going to eliminate it, and it can't possibly cease to exist without congress eliminating it. The worst that can happen is the benefits will be not so great. But they never were...

I'd still be curious when it was recorded as being lower, even if the record isn't reliable...

How is being the very lowest it's ever been recorded as being since we began reliably recording it "not a record low"? Which word are we disagreeing on here, "low", or "record", since it certainly qualifies as a "record low" for any definition of either of these words I'm aware of. And if it's only a record low for most of our lifetimes, do tell us when it was lower? Which year? And how and where was that record recorded?

The fact that you used the word "might" there suggests strongly that there would be a wealth of scientific information gained by doing this. If you have to use words like "might", it means you really need to run some experiments, there's stuff you don't know yet...

The reason for doing it on the lunar surface rather than in space would be that you could set up testing equipment and instruments to get measurements you wouldn't be able to reliably position and read from later if you just detonated a nuke in orbit. The kind of stuff they had been doing in deserts or on atolls.

Easily. Your failure of imagination is stunning here. I'm left wondering if you think we know a lot more than we do about this stuff (and thus would learn nothing from the experiment), or simply can't comprehend that greater knowledge is always better, even if the only thing you end up learning is "this doesn't really work well" (which is itself useful to know -- saves you from doing something useless in the future when it counts, and lets you know what sorts of things you don't have to worry about defending yourself from if you ever do have moonbases to defend or whatnot).

The amount of potentially practical information this could yield, especially in the minds of people who were seriously worried about the possibility that the Cold War was going to be extended throughout the Solar System someday, is huge. In retrospect, we certainly didn't need it, but how would they know that at the time?

Bwa ha ha! More than most of the core of a city. Do you think nothing was affected beyond the rim of the crater? If you have been twenty miles away from that impact when that crater was formed, you'd have been quite very dead within seconds of impact. But the heat generated would have insured you had a nice, all-natural cremation.

An outcome that Andrei Gromyko and others predicted in the early-to-mid 70s and were working furiously behind the scenes to try to avert. Wait, how they they know Ronald Reagan was going to do that? They didn't. There were merely aware of the coming problems leading to the (it turned out) inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union THAT HAD NOTHING AT ALL WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH anything Ronald Reagan did. Mickey Mouse could have been president throughout the 80s and the Soviet Union would have collapsed right on schedule, despite right-wing fantasies about their non-existent part in it...

Ah yes, the alleged Washington Monument Symdrome. It's hard to prove beyond the one obvious case in 1969 from which the name is derived, and it led to the firing of the person responsible, so it's questionable to what degree anyone actually does this. Most civil servants like their jobs...

But... but... they're job creators! Shouldn't we just let them do whatever they want?! Making them pay for their mistakes leaves them we less money to trickle out to us as jobs! /eyeroll