Delphi had their "internet portal." My first taste of the "wider world," in text of course, in '94.

But then QWorst/Centurylink has dropped my connection four times in the last nine hours. Not that unusual days after a storm. If I didn't have _so_ many reasons I don't want Comcast.....

Maybe. But an awful lot of news sites I visit seem to feel obligated to leap at the latest release like a snake on a rat before I'm aware of an update.

That said, on the the "stupid me" category, a year+ ago I happened to have both Gnash and Flash installed and I _thought_ Firefox was using Flash. Was wondering why videos weren't working so well -- but the interesting thing was that more than half _were_ working well enough. Might be promising.
   

I think the horrible speakers are an important factor in Minneapolis as well.

Except that people don't eat and excrete microchips and we have perpetual growth of the population. Perhaps innovative creations can improve the standard of living of a _stable_ and _sustainable_ population.

Obama never wants to prosecute anything past (oh, say: war crimes, torture, murder) because it's, like, so "yesterday." Let's just get all hopey and come together for a brighter future instead of being gloomy old negative gusses. I"m sure Mr. Happy President wants us all to sing "Kumbaya" and see happy faces all around, OK? OK?

Or we're _really_ going to have to sue Toyota for gaming the mpg indicator.

"To get a steady 40 MPG (let alone 50 MPG) out of any hybrid -- and I have driven all of them, extensively -- you must keep your speed under 50 MPH and treat the accelerator as if it were a Fabergé egg. "

Seems like nonsense. To get an average summed FIFTY on something like a 400 mile three-day weekend trip last year of city, 2-lane, and Freeway with the Prius, I _did_ do 55 and play at driving to the hybrid's strengths. To average _below_ 40, it'd have to be below zero F with SNOW TIRES and over 60 mph. Mid- to upper- 40s on the freeway for hundreds of miles just this New Year's in not-so-warm Minnesota going a legal 70. With the snow tires.

Actually the president can send out the hounds when there's "lawlessness" and "insurrection." I look forward to our new definition of "micro-lawlessness" that includes groups of two or more people. There's also the "inadequacy" clause and, gosh don't you know, local police just don't have the expertise of the TSA to handle the threats of Terra that lurk on every corner.

All the rain forests are being razed anyway. When the Population Bomb came out around 1970, the central thesis was correct. There are _way_ too many people on earth. Ways of exploiting the planet blunted the impact for several decades, but it's clear that GM foods, _if_ they are a good thing, are a short-term fix. Like steroids or meth, they are not without their own problems. People as a herd are stupid and love to breed, so should we let them starve instead of employing this short-term Band-Aid? Rock/hard place.

I would question the term "nutritionally equivalent." Do they mean "chock full of the same vitamins and minerals discounting the innate low-level pesticide."

He,he. What I find funny about the venom from some people is that Gnome 3 without a touch screen _forces_ me to use 2 or 3 times more hot key combinations and quick loads than I'm used to. Stuff people have been _telling_ us would be great for ages if we would just _use_ it. And they were right. Sometimes, it is almost like the speed and freedom of being back at a terminal.

I suspect part of the venom is that it's a bit like making a commitment to the Dvorak keyboard and if you work in an environment that requires you to switch back and forth between a Windows scheme and a Gnome 3 scheme, that can be disconcerting.

That explains a lot about 21st century America.

Frankly, I'm atrocious at maintaining numbers in visualization even if I do realize that (47*75) is half of 7500 minus three 75s. But, good god man, with a calculator? Maybe every kid should be required to use a slide rule to get a feel for the idea that this "weightiness" of a number times that "weightiness" of a number gives this approximate result because with those multiple choice options you really can just guess at the nearest answer.

Reminds me of Microsoft using their money to offer Office 97 at a near liquidation special to kill the then dominant WordPerfect -- in my opinion far superior at the time to Word.

And is "tools" why I have to update Nook for PC every couple weeks? I'm OK with the back light of the Aspire One I'm using, with the weight, even with the battery life. But I'm really getting annoyed with the "Do you want to update your Nook" window that comes around like a bad friend (and takes focus). So far, the program works great with WINE but with the mandatory fortnightly updates, I'm just waiting for the moment when a spokesman says, "Linux? People are using Nook for PC on linux? We never intended that so if our latest, improved version broke compatibility, it isn't our problem." What are the odds I'll see that in the future?

I guess that's why I'm neither encouraged nor discouraged by OWS at this point. This is their "Summer of Love." Last time the young people got uppity, they started shooting them. We'll see where this is a few years from now. Will that guy watching TV in rural Kansas care if they're shooting people in the streets, because, you know, it isn't just FOX. The mainstream media can always pull up a clip of a protester looking ugly, so people need to get over their Jesus complex of creating images of glorious suffering for the cause. People remember that photo of the woman in shock kneeling over the body at Kent State? She got inundated with death threats and it crushed her. And mostly what the 60's got us was the Neocon counter-revolution that has so successfully destroyed this country. Will OWS help crank that up to a new level? Just saying, if this uprising doesn't coalesce into a movement that succeeds in changing the country, the price of failure could be a murderously crazy backlash. As if this country weren't crazy enough already. So we'll see whether this becomes a grass-roots movement or fails miserably as media performance.