Just don't mention the war!

What if I told you I was the Emperor of Andromeda and that my farts didn't stink and every time I touched a dollar bill, it turned into a bar of gold?

Talk is cheap, mate, and even if, on the outside chance you aren't some stupid antivaccer trying to make your objections sound the least bit rational, then I'd say the weight of your fellow biologists outweighs any particular claim you may make, and it is them you would have to debate, and it is them you would most likely get used to.

Oh, and stay the fuck away from my kids, you arrogant asshole.

It goes without saying that the moronic get what they deserve, though sadly, when herd immunity is compromised, sometimes the innocent (those who cannot be inoculated) pay the price too.

Besides, we all know those Neanderthals mean were the one's hitting our ancestral women on the heads, dragging them back their caves, and spreading their DNA. :P

I thought that was Congressman. Evolution is spool confusing.

I love a log of Niven's writing, and try very very hard to ignore the whole Pak Protector aspects of his stories, though it is awfully bloody hard with the Ring World material.

As much as I loathe guys like Mark Zuckerberg, I'll wager giving some of his script monkeys a few months to come up with a functional ACA website, and they'd probably do it, using largely open source tools to pull it off.

I can verify this. My suppliers are hitting me with emails and sales calls, and when we talk about new PCs, the first words out of their mouths are about how they will happily ship with Windows 7 licenses.

Yes, that would help, but because PCs now have smart devices as competition, software companies are being forced to code with an eye on limited resources.

We're still running mainly Windows Vista workstations at work. We are making a move to replace the last XP machines (about eight or nine of them), but other than that it's basically going to be playing the attrition game. Most of the computers are dual core processor systems with 2 or 3gb of RAM and 200gb hard drives, more than enough to run browsers and Microsoft Office. Most of my suppliers are desperate to get me to buy new systems, and one of their carrots is they'll ship them out with Windows 7, not exactly boding well for Windows 8 future.

On the other hand, I did do the upgrade to Exchange 2010 to get better support for all the iOS and Android smart devices the staff are using. I get more requests these days to set up smart phones and tablets than I do to configure workstations. It's not that the PC is dying in our organization. Quite the opposite, they're still getting used, but feature-wise they really all plateaued about three or four years ago, and short of a motherboard smoking, I really won't get any bang for our buck by buying replacements.

I know that the suppliers I usually deal with are pestering me a lot, desperate to get sales up. They're just not moving PCs in the enterprise market any more. Even worse, some of the manufacturers are literally competing against themselves. I can buy HP and Dell refurb Windows 7 machines that are a couple of years old for like $150, with Windows 7 Pro license included. The last three computers I bought to replace failed hardware were Dell refurbs. At $150, if they last a year, I figure I've done pretty well, and the oldest of them is sitting at about 18 or 19 months.

Where we once looked at about a three, maybe four year cycle of PC replacement, we're now talking of pushing well past the halfway mark of this decade. Notebooks and laptops will probably have a shorter lifespan simply due to the rigors they go through, but still, we have four year old laptops still in the field.

We can't be the only ones pondering such a replacement cycle, and that's just got to be freaking manufacturers out.

I call BS on this. I highly doubt there has been a major push towards build-your-own PCs. Frankly, I think we all have to deal with the fact that smartdevices have kicked the piss out of PCs.

Case in point. We have a three year old laptop which we turn on maybe a couple of times of week. Both the wife and I have 7" tablets (I have a Nexus 7 and the wife has a Kobo Arc). These little critters do the bulk of the surfing and email at home.

It depends on the optical disc. If you fork out the money for an archival media like gold CDs or DVDs, then you can probably expect something like 20 to 40 years. All in all, from what I've read, tape still is king in long term storage.

I don't think "cheapness" is the problem being solved. More important for an organization like the LHC is archival reliability. Tapes can lost a long time while retaining their data integrity. I honestly doubt even high end hard drives can make that claim.

I've always insisted on a tape backup system. Hard drive backups certainly have their place, but tape cannot be beat for long-term archival storage. One of our weekly offsight backups goes into a safety deposit box, where sits a duplicate tape drive. I don't want to be searching around for a replacement while my organization is down and out due to some cataclysmic failure.

That's because Metallica are a bunch of whining undertalented primadonas. Metallica, the original Nickelback.

One wonders if the beast is an inevitability of technically advanced civilizations. You look at what the people of North Korea or a Belarus tolerate, when all logic says that those regimes are so awful and incompetent that the people should rise up and cast down the tyrants.

As much as I like to think humanity is on an upward course, I'm truly beginning to think the Enlightenment was a brief, anomalous period that, if its effects haven't ended, are on a continuing decline. Science has been brought into disrepute because it disagrees with the the money men. Liberties have been compromised at every turn with excuses that range from "Oh God, Terrorists" or "But what about the children!!!" to the more naked "We do it because we can." Our art has been dumbed down to the point where culture is defined by the latest Lady Gaga wig or some guy throwing his own excrement at at a wall is called art. Sure we have lots of technical advancements, but even there, the drive to fund basic research is dying in the West as short-sighted politicians try direct funding towards limited and specified goals; in no small part, I think, because the money men that own them don't like it when basic research turns up the error of their ways.

I feel like the West is declining, even as Asia and Latin America, however haltingly and unsteadily, are literally shooting for the stars. Sure, they may be a half century behind us in some respects, but they're closing the gap rapidly and seem to have the drive that the West once had. Look at geopolitics. The West decolonized Africa, and now China is recolonizing it.

Maybe that's the natural order. One civilization fades and another takes its place. The West has had its time in the sun, as the Song, Romans, Akkadians, Egyptians and Athenians did in their day, but those outside the walls are quick to learn and have the hunger to use it.