Is it, though? The formative years are critical for developing the relevant traits, and you can hardly expect children to figure this out on their own, even though perhaps you—and, for that matter, I—just happened to unlock the programmer storyline during the great Brownian motion that constitutes the formative years of most children. We really ought to make programming a mainstream subject, preferably from as young an age as possible.

A Phoenix Wright/Trauma Centre crossover would make for an awesome DS game, though.

That's odd. Last time I checked, the gender ratio in the fields of visual art—yes, even the ones working in three dimensions—was skewed womenward. Doesn't this contradict your admittedly sketchy statement?

There couldn't possibly exist a rational train of thought parsing "I've only once met a person with these two traits you happen to claim to share" as "I deny your existence".

No one's being pedantic. Being pedantic would mean pointing out how you just used the word "inferred" when you meant "implied".

It gives me hope for the geek youth that tea and soda are tied.

I'm sorry, what? My systems use rolling-release. Putting two equals signs between FOSS and Ubuntu is as silly as putting two equals signs between PC and Windows.

Or better yet: nVidia could actually make their driver open source. That way, we'll have all the bells and whistles, and when a security flaw gets known the community can patch it without nVidia's involvement.

It's not Windows hatred per se, although that certainly is a healthy attitude. It's just that everytime a Microsoft-related article pops up, a brand new user starts blindly praising whatever Microsoft's been doing this time around. It's getting old, Microsoft.

Town planning. No, really.

(I suppose not yet ancient for a decade or so, but still.)

And how do you define "good boys and girls"? Do you have to attend a mandatory course on gun safety and stress management? Do you have to pass a test to prove yourself capable of using a gun under considerable stress without incident? No, you only have to be an adult, without a record, and patient enough to wait, what, two weeks or something? This still counts as willy-nilly.

If one had to prove oneself not to be a total boob around guns before being allowed to have one, I would soften a bit on the matter. But the current regulations are ridiculous.

On the top of the e-mail list I have the refresh button, the More menu, the cogwheel menu, and two arrow buttons. No ads in sight. Oh well, I guess I shouldn't complain too loudly, eh?

It will make governments shit themselves with fear that anyone can create a hand-gun, and then there will be stupid laws, and corporations will see dollar signs and suggest some kind of DRM mechanism in place on "legal" replicators and then we're in the same mess as we are now, only with physical objects. I don't want to have to jailbreak my replicator in the future, or have to reverse-engineer some future closed-spec DRMd object format.

And you're right, I don't know anything about guns. That's kinda the point. I'm living in a country where guns aren't distributed willy-nilly, hence my total ignorance about such weaponry. And I'm quite proud of the fact.

Where are these "ads" of which you are speaking? I've never ever seen an ad in my GMail interface. Not that I'm complaining, but what gives? Now I'm curious.

How do you know it's the hair on his head they mean?