it's not even a talking head, just little more than an animated wax dummy, able to blink and sigh but incapable of a decent conversation

So at least it could be a high-school teacher then.

Or as Dawkins said, "Of course we must be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out."

Except of course rent and real estate prices have been going up pretty steadily as a proportion of income. A hundred years ago most of a single man or woman's income went on food. Rent was provided by the employer, subsidised, or cheap. Today we spend much less on food. If we're thrifty we can live for practically free and still eat a balanced diet. Progress, eh? Instead, most of our money goes on rent. In fact, most of our money still goes down the drain. If you take into account things like more people paying student loans and doctor's fees, we end up being able to buy even less with our disposable income today than a hundred years ago. (I'm not originally from this country, so my look back a hundred years isn't to the same situation as yours would be, but the basics remain true).

They have those in most hospitals I've worked at in the US, just next to all the other machines -- change, drinks, candy, coffee, etc -- and I'm pretty sure I've seen them at other places too. Trouble is it's still expensive to have to replace the food each morning, throw out the waste, not know how many you need to deliver to it in the first place, and then refrigerate it all day. And as far as I'm concerned it's cold.

No, the CLI appeals primarily to people who like to focus on memorising semantic minutiae and believe that doing so is, in and of itself, a productive endeavour.

BS. Have you ever compared people who use vim or emacs with people who use TextMate or notepad++ or Eclipse? People don't learn the former two for the hell of it, they learn them because it makes them faster and less stressed.

You find people who learn to manually configure their Gentoo driver settings and build flags and whatnot. But personally I've seen more people who trick out their Windows desktop to look like a Mac, replete with window decorations and docks, or for that matter, a hell of a lot of people who decorate their monitors with little dolls and paper their offices with printouts of cartoons or trite sayings. People waste their time and it has nothing to do with CLI vs GUI.

Fundamentally, given a GUI and CLI that are equally good at a specific task, the CLI is likely to be more automatable and is less likely to get in the way of an expert user: partly due to the inherently different design and partly due to the different philosophy of the people who write each kind of tool.

I couldn't parse that correctly for a minute, as I kept thinking: why is he trying to say we need to set the "poly" option and to what metaphorical command? Yes, Unix gets into your head...

The fact is, whenever any group of people at each other's throats kiss and make up, they get the pace prize. Whenever someone makes a credible threat to the world and then recants it, he gets a prize. I mean just take a look at the list and see what slimeballs get it. It's a political prize, it's meaningless, get over it. (And before you cite the Dalai Lama, look at the actual system he stands for.) There have been a few deserving recipients over the years, especially further back, but they would probably feel ashamed to be in such company.

I think of current computers as things that employers pay for.

Agreed. I have been working in tech for nearly ten years and have never bought a laptop. I have got several depreciated-to-zero freebies and my employers have paid for laptops. I just switched to broadband a year ago as my employer pays for it, but before that I used to get by on 56k. (A screen session isn't slow over a 56k link, especially with ssh compression.) My phone's a free phone that just does calls and pictures. I've played around with the iphones and ipads that are de rigeur here in the Valley and I don't miss a thing.

I understand that's what you meant to say, and I didn't counsel a decision either way -- I just wanted to point out that when playing that kind of future game, you're calculating probabilities with people's lives, so that needs to weigh on your calculations. For instance, I think it's better to go with the devil you know (in this case, intervention). But it's really hard to predict, so that's just my opinion. Remember how wrong many of us were about the "surge" in Iraq, for instance?

I haven't looked at each battle, but I consider the siege of Yorktown with the naval action in the Chesapeake to be the key engagement. It's been a while since I looked at an actual source about this, but according to Wikipedia if you add up the American militia and regulars you get about 2,500 less than the French troops on the ground, and I'm pretty sure that 26 French ships of the line had more sailors than that. Of course, we're arguing trivialities here -- the actual forces were roughly the same size, within an error margin anyway. Undeniably the majority of the ships, guns and cash were French, and in a modern parallel, that's what the West would mostly be providing in Libya if we intervened....

The people of Libya haven't asked for outside aid.

Oh, right, good point! Wait, except they have. Their UN delegation (and if their representatives at the United Nations don't represent them to the international community, then remind me again whom we should listen to) has asked the West to intervene, repeatedly.

A truly insightful analogy, except for the actual facts... the US received help in 1776, quite a lot of it. More French troops and more French ships were fighting that war by the end of it than American troops and American ships. The conclusion from your analogy would be: let's go right in.

It may end the killing a little sooner, but then what?

Please don't forget these aren't numbers, they're people. It's really easy to forget, but please, please, don't.

(Actual human lives sometimes conflict with ideals and ideas down there in the thick of it.)

No. I'd give a reasoned argument but examples and quotes are more memorable, so here's a quote from Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons":

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

Stick by the law, protest within the law, try to change the law.

I've RTFA, though not the research paper. I don't understand what prevents someone from compiling some C with a malicious nacl compiler (one that makes no bones about, say, jumping to evil memory locations) and serving it up?

Regardless, what worries me about the transition from a VM to native code is that every implementor has to get it really right. Securing interpreted code is really easy: you can just restrict the API. Securing a VM is harder (witness Flash) but still doable (witness Java). But securing native code means you have to have a really good team and be really careful, and almost certainly at some point some bug will slip through (witness the remote root in OpenBSD of all things). I like the stupid solution because it's reliable and secure and they can do wonders with optimising it these days anyway...