Bah! They're taking jobs away from inner city kids who could benefit from a little real work experience.

Note to Newt:

Order a few crates of those collars for your youth janitorial program. You'll teach them about obedience to authority, and keep property secure from the shiftless, thieving little urchins. Win - Win -Win!

So you can cheer when they die?

You should change your nick to 'ouroboros'.

Indeed. When we turned off cable in the nineties, an eager young fellow came to the door with a proposition. He was from Nielsen, and was delighted to find a family with a TV and no cable! We signed up for a year or so, and they came in with some incredibly frowzy phone lines and dongles to automate sending data summaries at 3AM.

We drove them bonkers with long periods of watching Channel 68, which was static/snow in our area without a registered channel. They kept calling to ask to check on the health of the system, and we had to keep telling them the data was accurate - we had it on for white noise so the baby could sleep while we did housework.

Finally we bailed just to get them to shut up, since dealing with this special case seemed to be beyond their comprehension, let alone their data gathering protocol.

"Try and understand the words, they will be English: 'We don't watch TV.' "

Told them that up front, yet they still wanted our info. Except not really. Sayonara, suckers.

By definition, because they've written a law against it. That's as far as the label 'criminal' goes, notwithstanding its incorrect and loose uses in the media and other propaganda.

Many criminals have done nothing immoral or harmful, including you. (Do you know for a fact that you've never broken some Victorian-era Taliban-style law which still has force today?)

that doesn't affect^Weffect my point

Unfixed it for you.

Those materials were available in the 19th century. I wonder if anyone previously discovered this?

I remember reading about someone working on a webpage offering various services...

That was Paul Graham, working on the Yahoo Store.

So St. Jerome, after spending 20 years in a cave scribbling away at his translation, came to this part, then chucked the whole thing into the fire, right?

Or was that the scribes of James I? If you read the toadying into to the KJV, you come away pretty unsure these guys could manage any objective scholarship.

Or is it that "Everybody in history, including the Pink and Pleasant Plastic Icon Company of Del Rio, Texas, has leave to change/interpret the Bible, except you, son"?

One for his homies...

Well, fluc you Amelicans too!

Emacs does a lot, but it isn't the most user-friendly of OS's.

Your comment has broad application around here. At the same time, one does expect a certain level of competence across the board in basic life issues - which these days includes at least an acquaintance with the nature and operation of computers.

Cue car analogy in 3...2...1...
Not everyone needs to spend their weekends modifying stock engine blocks, but we do expect normal adults not to cringe timidly when faced with a steering wheel and PRNDL lever.

It's not that difficult to understand how an OS matters to a computer system. People do equivalently difficult things regularly, yet somehow the sight of a kbd and monitor conjures Jacob's ladders and mad cackling.

Techie: "No, *you* think I'm smarter than you."

And do you know why I want a cup of tea?

I see the banks have people reading Slashdot.