You're right. I'm not. I'm both serious and sincere.

In any case, Rodriguez and Sanchez are both already among the top 20 surnames in the US already. IIRC Rodriguez is in the top 10. Mohammed is in the top 50; top 30 if you same-rooted lump variants together: Smith/Smythe, Mohammed/Mohamet/Muhamad, Johnson/Johnsen/Jonson, etc.

And of course "Lee" is a pretty common Anglo-Saxon surname as well. My Vietnamese cousin (adopted, surname Morris) married blond, blue-eyed "Southern boy" Jeremy Lee. Now everyone who meets her husband is shocked (it is the US South after all) because they assumed her hubby was an "Chinese" Lee.

And then, one day, the nerd's robot football team beats the best "jock" football team head-to-head. It's inevitable.

All wonderful American names, just like "Barack Obama". God how I love my "melting pot" country.

I honestly don't know.

But riddle me this: How can you call a game where no one rubs their hind legs together to make a chirping noise "Cricket"? After all, sports are all about their names, right?

Or maybe this: If the purity of "football" is in the name, why are you allowed to touch the ball with head, chest, rump, knee, etc.? If hands are off-limits because of the name of the game, then why aren't other body parts?

Or maybe let's just call the whole conversation ridiculous and be done with it.

Nah actually I love to nitpick.

In any case Ken Thompson was not the originator of C (the programming language), he was the originator of UNIX (the operating system). So it would have been more accurate (and slightly more impressive) to have called him Ken 'UNIX' Thompson.

Ken's Bell Labs colleague Dennis Ritchie was the originator of the C programming language.

At the risk of dating myself: "Right now a spinning wheel of death is poised to come crashing down on this restaurant!... Would you believe an abnormally large truck tire?... Would you believe a large pie with anchovies and feta?"

Seymour ran refrigerant (fleurinert?) through coldplates on all his designs (and their descendants) up through the Cray-2. I am told that he used to call himself "the best refrigerator repair man in the industry". His downfall came when he abandoned coldplates for the full refrigerant emmersion that gave the Cray-2 its distinctive "aquarium" look. Unfortunately, in later designs he had to run refrigerant across the emmersed boards so fast that it actually caused friction corrosion.

But, yeah, you have a point. Coldplates are old hat in the supercomputing industry. BTW, RISC is too. We used to joke that it stood for "Really Invented by Seymour Cray".

XML is a W3C recommendation (not an open standard; W3C makes that distinction for a reason). It is based on SGML (not UML). XML is a meta-markup language like SGML; it is a means of specifying markup languages such as HTML or WML (not a markup language like HTML). Being a W3C recommendation, XML is copyrighted... by the W3C (not it cannot be copyrighted). Patenting and licensing of XML schemas or DTDs (which is what Microsoft did) is not the same thing as copyrighting anything (tools, formats used by tools, whatever) As for You can write anything on paper but it still doesn't make it true? I couldn't agree more. In fact that statement is as true of Slashdot comments as it is of paper. Jeez, I hate Microsoft as much as any Slashdotter, but at least get your facts straight!