you're one of those gui browser wimps. real men use lynx.. silly Ping, she should never have told Marc to write that thing, think of all the man millenia squandered since the web went pointy-clicky-pickie.

I tried node on my 5 year old, but she started screaming "I want my threads back you cruel bastard, this async crap is giving me a headache" (we're working on her anger management issues) but now the social workers are involved and if I don't get her continuation passing style soon (the 70s called) I'm going to find myself in deep water.

putting aside my slashvert suspicions of the post, (hard to see how you could have chose AWS at all and be so clueless )

I've done this kind of thing a lot. Here's my approach

1. Fire up an EBS backed AMI from an existing stock version of your favorite OS ( ubuntu 12.04 for me just cos i use it on desktop and can't be bothered with differences)
2. customize it with your own shit
3. include in the /etc/rc.local a script to customize things further.. and because you don't want to faff about changing the AMI every time you change shit, have the startup script pull the latest stuff you need straight out of your source code repository and then run further initialisation stuff
4. make an image from that instance (easily done from AWS control panel)
5. learn how to use boto (python AWS api) to fire up instances, attach storeage, shutdown instances etc. Using the command line tools is fine for the simplest stuff but as soon as stuff gets a little harder you really want to use a programming language, so unless you're extremely fond of java python is best fit for this)
The boto documentation is kinda shit, so every time you need to do something just google for an example doing something similiar .. the official api documentation is last resort reference only.

Sorry, I just don't buy it.

Your speech patterns sound too much like a young native. Although I can believe that 40 years residency would leave you flawlessly bilingual, I don't believe you would *want* to sound like an angry 20 something.

This is pretty good:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Oww4Ap3YZA

but it doesnt explain why US tv, particuarly news, is so much more paranoid than in europe

Dude, if you're gonna make nice examples try to not fuck up

> Bob has 5 apples. Bob gives 3 of his apples with Alice. How many apples are there?

I can tell you how many bob has *left* but how many are there, presumably you mean in this story, well fucked if I know. Bob had 5, but there's a hint that Alice gave some apples away too since she gave them *with* Bob ( I don't know who to, or how many Alice donated), you're not a whole lot less confusing that the original.

> Obama didn't want "Obamacare" either. I think the ideal would have been a single-payer system.

That's a bunch of crap. He did not end up with a single republican vote, so what exactly was the point of making the bill anything other than what he wanted ?

Obama has always loudly proclaimed he is a centrist. Somehow progressives are still trying to persuade themselves he would be more left wing if only those pesky republicans would let him. Democrats are as dependent on donations from wealthy corporations as the republicans so their focus was on doing things that would leave them popular with those corporations rather than trying to actually serve the population.

You don't get it.

There was no stupidity involved.

The federal government has a bunch of restrictions imposed on it that
[a] force it to use external contractors
[b] hamstring it's ability to negotiate with those contractors in a sane fashion (eg in a way that gives the contractors a serious incentive to deliver a working product).

This is because those restrictions were written by thinktanks paid for by the companies liable to get the contracting work and then passed through congress by their pet legislators.

> Russia was never a threat to Europe

Really !?

Germany and Czechoslovakia might disagree just for starters. I mean, Russia sure had their reasons to be nervous, but "never a threat" is a bizarre statement.

If the only way to monetise the invention is to sell it to a patent troll then it does not deserve any money.

The only way a patent troll makes money is if someone willing to actually make the thing has the same (usually pretty obvious) idea so the original 'invention' offered zero value to society.

Said as someone with a few patents ( http://www.patentmaps.com/inventor/Jocelyn_M_Earl_1.html )

> I don't think that I dare hope for a setup that cute, though.

What do you think the entire DEA is for ?

We've been through this a few times. Once upon a time portable stereos were cool, they made them as small as possible. Then people realised the really tiny ones sounded like shit so they got bigger, and bigger until 'portable' needed quotes.

Being quite anti-mobile I'm quite keen on this new trend as quite a few people who use them run out of battery so often they end up giving up and getting over their mobile phone habit so you can engage them in conversation again. It's progress.

oh, that's assuming shitty resolution of around 340p

oh, my bad.. make that 30.. its only 6000 minutes per minute.. could be a lot worse

Thanks for that, fascinating. Also, wtf are we going to do when david attenborough retires ? I can't stand watching nature documentaries narrated by anyone else. We'll need need some software to talk in his voice at the very least.