Yeah.... my usual reaction to people who suggest I should be/act/think/feel more like the societal norm is to ask "Why would I want to?"

LOL That usually ends the conversation.

It's 2012 equivalent to a shut-in or recluse.

I think it's more like the "loner" or "lone wolf" label which seems to have always been a pejorative label (unless it leads to you becoming a billionaire).

If I were hiring I'd be more likely to think "+1 this guy has better things to do with his time".

No I'm not "in denial" nor am I extremely lucky. You have nothing to base your supposition on except that you apparently want to believe that people everywhere are getting bitten by dogs with great frequency.

Since you're engaging in uninformed armchair psychiatry let me return the favor - you sound like someone who has a neurotic fear of dogs and imagines attacks occurring at a rate all out of proportion to the reality; I think you need to get some counselling to help you with your phobia and with your delusion that people just magically "forget" about being bitten by dogs.

I have to wonder how you managed to get bitten 4 times.

I've been around dogs all my life and have never been bitten even once. In fact I had one wolf-dog hybrid that I used to play tug of war with - I'd hook my index fingers behind her canines and we'd each be pulling away. I've had a big Rottweiler wrap his jaws around my skull while we were playing... yet I've never gotten so much as a scrape. In fact if our kitten was misbehaving the same Rotti would put the kitten's head completely in his mouth for a few seconds then open his jaws and let her go... no harm, just some non-verbal communication from one species to another.

I don't think I even know anybody who has been bitten even once.

Nonsense about the dogs - dogs have a natural instinct both to protect and to work as a team.

I had a pair of dogs that had not been professionally trained (although a trainer of prison dogs told me the mother would be an excellent candidate) and twice saw them take on somebody who was where they shouldn't be. The first time the guy made it to the fence.

The second time they just circled the intruder until they saw their chance - then they both lunged at the same instant and each took an ankle and held him until I got there. The guy just froze like a popsicle. And they didn't even break the skin although you could see the tooth marks... if the guy had struggled I'm pretty sure he would have lost his tendons.

That was my experience on the farm as well. I routinely carried a semi-auto 22 with just iron sights (much faster aiming)... however that mostly got used for obtaining dinner since my dogs proved to be a much bigger deterrent to animal raiders :)

Whew that's good - because you apparently don't know the difference between a GUI button and a keyboard key.

Yup the constant changes to FireFox, which invariably disable some add-on I like, are rapidly driving me to find an alternative. Particularly irritating is when this is accompanied by some pointless UI change. Too bad, so sad.

As for TBird my prediction is that it won't be killed off by webmail but by SMS - average attention spans seem to be getting shorter and shorter as time goes by ;)

Yeah I ended up with TBird after trying various email clients over the years. I had always liked PMMAIL on OS2 and then Windows and TBird resembled it. All I really wanted was a decent client that would run on any operating system I happened to want to use. I don't see anything wrong with "Cloud based" mail - as long as it is your own cloud managed on your own machine(s) and not something served up by 3rd parties. I want as complete control over my mail as it is possible to get.

My ISP forces me to use a webmail interface if I want to read my mail from an IP not on their network. So finally this summer I'm going to take some time out and install a mail server on my filer server. Then I will have a central store, routinely backed up, for all the messages and can use TBird or any pop3/smtp/etc. client to access from anywhere.

Seems to me the bug is not in Windows but in Unix/Linux/etc. operating systems that insist on treating "AlllI" and "Allli" as different names for a file. Why on earth would you ever design software that depended on two filenames being interpreted as different just because there are case differences? I mean this sort of implies that you are going to design an application that deliberately uses a case difference between two otherwise identical filenames to accomplish some useful goal. Maybe I haven't thought about it enough but if I ever had a student turn in an assignment that did that I would like not be impressed. I use Linux almost exclusively, and before that various flavors of Unix, but this has always seemed like a real blunder to me.

"Skippus, the current government we have up here was elected by fraudulent means."

Great headline, if only it were true.

For the sake of argument let's say the claims (and that is all they are) turned out to be true. How many fewer seats would the government have? Enough that it wouldn't have formed the government? No.

Your guys lost. It happens. Get over it.

Shouldn't that be "Free and Accurate News Unsustainable"?

I realise Ontario thinks it is Canada but there are other parts. The NDP managed to screw things up royally in BC more than once. "It's like we're shovelling money off the back of a truck..." to quote NDP ex-Premier Glen Clark. Of course that was after a previous NDP administration was found to have been siphoning charity gambling money to the party.

Interestingly once he was thrown out of office Clark then went to work for the richest man in the province...

"We certainly don't like Harper & the conservative government"

Amazingly enough polls show that Beerdood does not actually represent all Canadians. Who woulda thunk it?

It's worse than that - copyright extends to translations and derivative works. All programming languages are derivatives works of Turing Machines... the Turing estate must be jumping up and down waiting for this one...