To paraphrase Twain, an aliterate has no advantage over an illiterate.

No, books (whether paper or e-books) count as reading. The National Enquirer and People don't count, either,

Indeed.

Of course no one wants to visit great-grandma when she just wants to scream racist gibberish about the president and homophobic crap about your cousins.

You make the very mistaken assumption that everyone dies of alzheimer's, when most geezers do not, in fact, get that disease.

Old people often have beliefs that are simply not compatible with living in a modern society.

And you make the mistake of thinking that old folks haven't seen radical change all of their lives. My grandmother was born 3 months before the Wright brothers took off, in a world where most people lived exactly like they had a thousand years earlier, and hers was the first generation of radiacl change. When she was 5 few had seen an airplane, there was no radio (except morse code), most people had never seen an automobile, and the Cubs won the world series. before she died she'd ridden on airplanes, owned cars and radios and TV sets and microwaves and all those things that simply didn't exist in her youth. Just because you're old doesn't mean you don't keep up. My mom's 84 and has a computer and a cell phone and a flat screen TV.

You can't take them into public if you fear they may call your waiter the N word or go on a tirade about the jews when you are trying to get groceries.

Again, your view of the elderly is really fucked up. Most simply aren't like that. Yes, racism was rampant in their youths and they were as racist as the rest of society when they were young, but guess what? My dad, who thought nothing of calling a man a "nigger" when he was your age stood up in court shortly before he retired and testified against his employer for a co-worker who had filed a discrimination lawsuit.

Times change and people change with them. Read this book and see how much different the world was in 1930 than in 1920.

Soooo.... He's a political mover and shaker that can get public funds funneled to his department to give his underlings a kooshier life while they... do whatever it is they do.

What does "kooshier" mean? Google has no clue, it shows Kooshier as being a brand of paint and suggests that I may have misspelled "kosher", which doesn't fit in the context of your sentence. Is it some sort of British slang?

Try landing a well-paying corporate gig if you are over 60, no matter your skill set.

I'm 61, I retire next year. I don't WANT to work, a young guy can have my job. That said, I do know guys older than me who were working under the table (not paying taxes) and will have to work until they're dead.

Of course, this doesn't eliminate the fact that very senior individuals - some with excess money to burn, use that money to fill the ever-increasing, yawning gap of boredom and disconnection in their lives brought on by the social isolation of the elderly in our culture.

What social isolation? Even my parents aren't socially isolated. Geezers aren't treated as pariahs in our culture, what are you blabbering on about? If you're infirm you may be socially isolated, but that has nothing to do with age.

I looked at it at work not logged in... apparently whoever designed that mess doesn't realize that screens have different sizes and aspect ratios. Everything on my monitor was stretched vertically and squashed horizontally. What's with all those giant photographs of nothing, anyway?

Sorry, slashdot, I absolutely HATE your new design. It looks like I'm far from alone, did you guys hire Balmer and Shuttleworth?

Neither you, nor the submitter, nor the editor actually bothered to RTFA apparently. Rather than making riskier decisions, TFA says we geezers are risk-averse, and part of the reason is so many of us are fucking BROKE. Haven't you seen that bumper sticker "RETIRED... no food, no gas, no money. Haven't you heard the phrase "why do they call it a fixed income when I'm always broke"?

By the time you've lived over half a century and been crushed like a bug under a shoe numerous times, you're going to be more careful, too.

That said, of I have more money than I did when I was 25. You've never gotten a raise?

If they were Christians, they'd both still fit the description of "rich right-wing religious crazy guy".

Nope, neither one even TRIES to be a Christian; it takes more than lip service, going to church, and tithing so that you can say you paid taxes. Read the bible, Christ lambasted both Romney and Obama. Luke 16:19-31 damns Romney, and Luke 11:46 damns Obama. All the men who Romney threw out of work during his corporate piracy at Bain Capital are Lazarus, and Obama is a lawyer. Both worship money and power, and No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Oh, you'll loath some of the bullshit that gets added to math curricula to pad out the vocab lists...

Hey kids, because it's fucking pointless, we are going to be learning about 'proper fractions', 'improper fractions' and 'mixed numbers'!... All of these are basically just division problems that are being left unevaluated for reasons of convenience, or because the resulting decimal representation may not be entirely well behaved, so this shit is pointless; but it will be on the quiz.

Getting added? I learned that in the third grade fifty years ago, it isn't something new that they're adding now. We learned fractions before learning division; it makes division much easier to learn if you understand breaking groups into fractions of a group first. Also, back then first you learned addition and subtraction, then fractions, then multiplication and dividion, THEN decimals.

Oh, and you missed one.
2/3 proper fraction
3/2 improper fraction
1 2/3 mixed number
1 3/2 retarded number

WTF, an AC links to the urban dictionary rather than Webster's or wikipedia, and gets modded informative? It's offtopic, racist, and sexist; we're talking about the candy, not ghetto slang for a black woman's nipples,

No wonder slashdot is going for the new universally hated design, they're pandering to the army of idiots from 4chan and reddit who have invaded our beloved nerd site.

For the GP, Pictures and description of a tootsie roll here. They don't export the things? Wait a minute...

Tootsie Rolls have been introduced to Canada, Mexico, Ireland, Aruba, United Kingdom, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Indonesia, Philippines, South Korea, Panama, Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, Finland, Austria, Australia, and New Zealand.

So how in the hell can someone not know what a tootsie roll is? How in the hell can someone not google for a piece of information that shouldn't have to be explained in a /. summary?

I guess I should metamoderate...

That would be me. Fittingly, the story is a humorous fantasy about corrupt cops and a corrupt mayor and an intelligent whirlwind.

More tinfoil than me... I at least carry a phone. I do use open source when possible (which is almost always when I'm not at work). A landline can be tapped, too, so unless he has no land line he hasn't thought it through. If the feds want in, they'll get in.

Except not today! The tea party shut the whole damned government down (which is always their #1 priority anyway).

Funny, but incorrect. Somewhere at the bottom is the assembler that the first compiler was written in, and the hand-assembled machine code the first assembler was written in... then you have to trust Intel and AMD to not install NSA back doors in their chips. Build your own computer out of discrete components and it will cost a fortune, take a large building to hold, and be very slow compared to chips.

We're screwed.

There is no way we can understand everything.

True, but one can understand everything about something, and enough of everything to get by. If you know how electricity and electronic components work, how logic gates and ALUs work, know assembly and higher level languages you can pretty much understand enough.

The secret is reading LOTS of books and then practicing. Unfortunately, 97% of the population are aliterate -- they can read, but don't. I don't understand those people! Probably never will.