I HOPE this Fascist Loser is a 1 termer and that we CHANGE the office and put Sarah Palin in it in 2012

Hmmm. As I've said before, I'm not much of an Obama fan. But you lost me at the point you said you want Palin in the oval office. I just don't get it.

Not being subjected to US news, I have no idea who is claiming that the economy is fixed. I'm assuming it's Obama, or one of his minions. If so, it's a blatantly stupid claim. That's something you can only realistically claimed after things have got better. Maybe the economy's bottomed out. Maybe not. But claiming it's fixed is just braindead.

On the other hand, whether it's fixed or not, you can hardly blame the current administration for the state of the economy right now. Unless you believe that 6 months is enough to enact policies and have them impact the economy to such a great extent, which I don't think is realistic. FWIW, nor do I blame the previous administration for the economy. I think they got many things wrong, but I don't think they contributed to the stupidity of the banks that got us to where we are now. You could argue that tighter regulation might have prevented things from getting this far, but even then, I'm doubtful. Ways to circumvent regulation will always be found where there is money at stake.

Hmmm. Not bad, but not really great IMHO. I'll give it a few more listens, though.

I won't claim I liked Lenslok, but I personally never had any problems with it. The results were always clear enough for me to read easily and enter to correct code. YMMV.

The backup strategy is the same as it's been for the past 40 years or more: keep copies of your data offsite, where you can get at them in a reasonable timeframe should anything happen to your local storage. The technology used to implement that strategy changes with time, though. Personally, I made the decision many years ago that removable media was a waste of time. The only sensible option is to have storage powered up and accessible at all times. So I rsync to a hosted server in a remote datacentre (the initial sync took forever over ADSL, but the nightly diffs are pretty quick)

Storyline? What are you smoking? Who gives a shit about the back story? Did Doom succeed because people cared about what Union Aerospace were doing on Mars, or because the gameplay was out of this world? I know where my money would be. Where's the storyline in Tetris? Yet somehow that was mindblowingly successful. Ultimately, it's all about gameplay. Nothing else matters.

No, you've got it all wrong (quite apart from the fact that vi is the One True Editor). After the introduction to vi and C, the correct direction is to head towards lower level languages. Teach him assembly language. Start with something easy like 6502. Only then is it worth moving on to higher levels like scheme. Anything else is child abuse.

... but news for nerds? I'm not seeing it.

I keep my Sparc and PPC machines around for precisely that purpose. Far too many people just assume Intel. I'm not going to be making the same mistake.

As I am, particularly when combined with restricting access via keys to only run certain commands. But be aware it's not the panacea some make it out to be. In particular, you're outsourcing your security to a third party that may not be as security conscious as you are -- you're trusting the owner of that keypair to have adequately protected their private key.

My bike is finally back on the road again now. Various things had conspired to consume all of my available free time, so I hadn't had a chance to look at what was wrong with it. In the end, I bit the bullet and took it to a local garage, who found an electrical fault that was causing a lack of spark in the rear two cylinders. So far so good. Except the clutch slave cylinder decided to commit suicide on the way back from the garage. Ho hum. A couple of weeks later, when the replacement had arrived, it was fitted and I'm now back on the road. It's been far too long...

Logic sadly has nothing to do with it. Were there a shred of logic to be found anywhere in this debate, the American public would be 100% behind trying to reduce emissions. And that has nothing whatsoever to do with whether global warming a) exists or b) is caused by human activity, and everything to do with the downsides if global warming turns out to be real.