Musk announced plans, at the same time as the charging stations, for a 30,000 dollar hatchback/ family car. I just paid 29,000 for my Hyundai hybrid last year, I could have gome to 30 for a full electric like Tesla is bringing. But then my lil' brother bought a Nissan Leaf a month or so after me, and he loves that car to, which should be similar to Tesla's plans. All good, all good.
Funny that you mention Phillips and Edison in the same passage, but have the story all screwed up. This makes me think that in 50 years or so we will all be believing that Steve Jobs and Apple created/ invented the PC and Bill Gates invented the operating system.
What? The first person to successfully create an electric light bulb that used a filament (an incandescent bulb) was Mr Phillips, the founder of Phillips Electric company. The problem with his invention was that the filament didn't last long, it was essentially a piece of carbon that burned up while producing light. Edison took that idea and found other filaments that lasted longer. Actually he didn't, his team of people who brute-forced the problem by trying everything they could think of.
Where does Jobs come in: Today everybody thinks Edison created the light bulb because he used his marketing ability to convince everyone to electrify their houses so they would have electric lights. Now, because his marketing worked, we glorify him as an inventor, when he was mostly a marketer, just like ole' SJ. ANd BG as well of course.
Interesting that this comes at the same time that Tesla is rolling out "S" models, announcing a hatchback and aiming at the $30,000 sedan market AND announcing a push into super fast charging stations (45 minutes to a full charge). Is Toyota afraid of the competition, or do they not want to move into a niche market (what? after the success of the Prius???) It really makes no sense for them.
Yeah, from an AC no less. Reminder: Raleigh is one of the sides of research triangle park, where are you from? London? New york? San Fran? Oh yeah those are real tech centers, oh yeah.
I don't even live in those places, but anyone who knows tech knows Raleigh and Austin.
WTF are you talking about? the courier was developed while SJ was still with NEXT. MS just didn't release it because the market didn't exist and they didn't know how to create it.
I have watched it, in China, you can get it by satellite here if you want it, but you would like CCTV9 more, it is the channel for foreigners, soft-core propaganda. The military channel is for the military and people who want to feel military, like the guy on the bus last year (or was it 2 years ago) with an over the shoulder purse sized loudspeaker who was reminding all the bus denizens (including moi, of course) of how they should act if they are going to be considered "good citizens". China is kind of a different place from the post-modern west. It is on a different time scale because on the bus was me, and a host of younger people who were truly embarrassed by the haranguer in the back. The bus driver finally asked him (politely) to stop. This is the new China, and you really don't have any clue about it, so just give up trying to understand it.
Well, I was complaining about this shit a few years ago and was a voice crying in the wilderness. To me, damn near every news or pseudo-news article with iSomeshit in the title was two things: first a shill piece for Apple and second using the Apple name to drive readers to the article thinking it really had something to do with an Apple product.
In other words, it was a cannibalistic orgy where was used to both drive readers in and build the company rep because people read articles with Apple in the title. This has all the trimmings of a bubble, where the bubble is pumped full of hot air by both the company promoting the bubble product and the buyers together with the media. Here is an idea for you, Apple shares just jumped to $700 a share on the iPhone5 pre-sales. Why don't you go and short them, expecting that it will drop rapidly if the actual numbers don't match up?
Well, I'm not gonna, cause I expect that we will never see those real figures, and in fact that even if they got published no one will give a damn. This stuff is messed up man, this is not capitalism, it is fashionalism.
Young man, come to Florida to see the mutant fish and shellfish that have resulted from the pollution of the Gulf. Come walk our beaches where there is still a black layer of crude oil an inch or two below the surface as you walk. Parents won't let their kids play in the sand now. Oh yes, I must be a wacko enviro-crazy for telling you what we see every day hundreds of miles away. That we know came ashore here because we saw it.
You, my friend, are sadly mistaken. You have been brainwashed by the people who are willing to trde their environement, their air and water and food, for money. And I bet they aren't giving you any of it.
No, not really (raspberry pi that is) once it is finished as an electronics kit, the rest would be too hard for the kid.
When I was 8 I built a Knight kit shortwave receiver, from a kit. It was hard, took me some time with a soldering gun and pliers and all that good stuff. The closest equivalent today would be building a computer from parts. There are plenty of instructions to print out, along with the manuals, and then when they are done with the physical part they get to install their own operating system, there are a very few kid centered ones and many that are bare-bones and could be, with the proper parental focus and direction, made kid-centric.
And, like my radio, when it was done it would be usable in a way that the kid could understand.
I did this, on the same basic level, with my 16 year old daughter for her 16th birthday, she did the whole thing from manuals and built a pretty nice quad-core AMD rig with all bells and whistles and kubuntu (her choice after weeks of searching and trying to find what she really liked... but really not my choice at all) she is now considered a geek (by her peers) and feels it that way herself. It changed her sense of who she is, so I can't recommend it more than that.
And you are forgetting that the people who want to drive the fastest AND think they are really good at it actually are a bunch of fools who shouldn't be given keys to a tricycle. Oh, my creds? 5 Years as an over the road trucker back when the speed limits were 60 mph and the roads were less congested with raving lunatics calling themselves drivers. I got out to stay alive, still living and avoid driving whenever I can.
Have to agree, the key issue is that the citizens approve of the move.
BTW, I could help to solve this mystery easily. Clearly it is a basement dwelling geek who committed the crime, just look at the number of men that they are going to check (8080), obviously they already know this as well! Too much internet pron
Yeah, my dad grew up in a single parent family (his dad died in the 1918 flu epidemic) and when we built a cabin together when I was a teen -ager he had me straightening nails he had been saving for years and pulling out of boards that he was re-using. I was telling my son about it the other day and showed him how to straighten a nail, now he refuses to throw nails away, he likes to straighten them.
I don't get the need for an external slot, my wife's Samsung has an internal and my Sony-E has an external micro slot: the internal is easier to deal with and less trouble. We don't generally take the card out, in truth if they just gave us 32-64 GB of on board storage it would serve just as well.
Hey folks, I would love to have this citizen offer to reveal his tax returns, and I believe he does not do so because he has something to hide that his opponents would use against his candidacy. However, for whatever reasons, we have laws that protect his tax documents as private and personal within a certain framework laid down by law and mandate (as in "manadatory"). To reveal that private and personal data is wrong, until such time as the mandates and laws are changed. If we begin to take to law into our personal control then we devolve to "fort au main" (power based on physical strength) rather than power and control based in law.
Now, we can, and probably will, argue ad nauseum about whether those with money have greater power and control over the legal and mandate process (I believe they do and that this hurts the body politic and the body personal and individual) and so Mr Romney, being one of them is more powerful and has more control over our world than you or I, but that doesn't change the problems that occur when we start breaking the laws with the intention of thwarting the wishes of someone in what amounts to a personal vendetta.
Some will argue that this calls for revolution. I hope not since revolution always and without exception destroys more than it repairs and leaves a nasty stinky mess behind. But everyone is entitled to an opinion.
Speaking of which, as a son of Virginia, and an alumni of The University, I think of myself as someone who knows a little bit about Mr Jefferson and his ideas that helped form the constitution. Our system of voting was a negotiated solution that came about in the ferment of thought of which Mr Jefferson's idea that "we need a revolution every 25 years" was one of the sparking thoughts. Voting was meant to be "the revolution". For that reason it was, originally, allowed only to educated landholding men who had a lot to lose if they voted the wrong way, or rather in a way that didn't move the country forward and into greater strength and safety. This is not to say that we should return to something closer to the original, only that the original was trying to consider the need to keep a ferment of ideas, of change and of a change in leadership in order to avoid the calls for revolution that we hear today. Consideration of how to mandate changes in salary and benefit structures for legislative and executive branch employees and elected officials, together with reform of the electoral process do seem important topics for the next president and legislature, but they are completely under the radar in a world where the top news items have to do with the workout regimen of a VP candidate.
We need change, more change than anyone is willing to risk right now. Too bad, because most voters woul;d reward the legislature for that change, only their moneybag friends would try to hurt them.
Yes Homeopathy, as defined by the practice of dilutions etc. is crap. But in much of Europe, Homeopathy has gotten itself entangled with Naturopathy, which uses traditional folk remedies (mostly herbal) to treat non-life threatening chronic problems, sometimes with success, often with slow recoveries, but seldom with damage to other organs (oh yes I know big Pharm has tried to make a play against the simple herbalist medications, but the truth is that the big pharm prescriptions are prescriptions because they are dangerous).
Disclaimer: my wife is a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, with a great deal of skill, practice and success with chronic disorders by using acupuncture, Chinese herbal teas and pills and massage based in acupressure. Plus a number of other treatment options that you have probably never heard of but which can help in specific types of illness.
With that disclaimer finished, when you are dying of something that is moving fast to kill you, you really ought to use western medicine, yes it is harsh and strong and....dangerous. But it can get you through some really bad spots where you might die or have life changing organic problems otherwise. For example, A little over 2 years ago I had a nasty problem that she was trying to treat, but it was just moving too fast for her, she said "screw it, lets go to the clinic. They pumped me full of intrvenous antibiotics for a few days and I came right out of it. Then she went back to work on me to aid my recovery and most people at work didn't even know that I was so sick that I was hearing audio-hallucinations.
The Chinese recognize that the two systems can work together, which is a good approach. They have 4 thousand years of experimental data and practice for their system, so there is something to it.
But homeopathy, in the pure sense has never had any experimental proof behind it and acts as a easy target if someone wants to disparage any non-conventional practice. That is why, for me, it needs to be put to a quick death.
Sorry folks but the notice google sent to me was that they were ending support in November of 2013. And my weather stuff still works on iGoogle. What exactly is the fuss?
Look, he should have had backup, either remote or onsite with a USB hard disk, if he really cared about the data. At this point whatever he does is risky. I have worked with situations like this and never successfully gotten anywhere with it. The old guy has, probably, in my experience and I would expect in most everyone else's, made other mistakes like this before this. The computer is probably a seething mess of malware. In fact, you must assume it is so if you don't want to be back in a few months with the same problems again.
It was problems like this that helped lead me to Linux, the ability to separate parts of the OS, separation of home folder from OS and boot folder, all these things make this kind of recovery much easier as well as making detailed and deep AV inspection faster and easier. If I want to do a fast scan of my wife's laptop, I scan the home folder thoroughly and let it go from there. In 5 years of linux use on her part (and she is a serial downloader of any crap anybody wants to send her) the only infections have been there, usually in the.cache files of the browsers.
Having lived in Holland, where there is a top tax of 65%, I have to say that the world can be pretty damn great if people accept that kind of tax rate. It is because we don't want to pay for the first world stuff for anybody but ourselves (our single individual self, not the US body politic) we end up not getting it for anybody, ourselves included. We can't see past the end of our noses, and our political leaders are blinded because their noses are rectally inserted in the fundament of big business. So, the US is screwed by our choices both for leaders and for the political world in general.
Welcome to the other side, and welcome to the world where there is no real, 100% certainty. I hope you come to embrace this uncertainty in the long run. To give some credit to people who attack science as "just a bunch of theories dreamed up by unbelieving people" we are unbelieving people who have created a bunch of theories to try to understand the universe. And we are still working at it, and will be for the forseeable future. I apologize for it, but certainty is not part of our world. One story though, that shows the power of our uncertainty, the power of our search for reality and the power of the mind in both shining light on reality and being deceived by it:
Robert Anton Wilson, who was both a wacko, a prophet and a keen observer who often had his facts only loosely under control (notice the quantum use of the word "both") tells about how, for many years, he was convinced that he was in telepathic communication with a group of highly "evolved" beings on a spaceship traveling to Earth from a planet orbiting Sirius. He had long and complicated telepathic discussions with them, they gave him personal direction on difficult philosophical and psychological questions and helped him to "evolve" as a human in order to prepare for their coming. He used this training indirectly to influence people in his areas of interest: recreational drugs, personal growth, community organization and his own loose brand of general wackiness.
In his later years he came to realize, and admit, that he had deceived himself and it had all been something that he made up for deeply personal, psychological reasons. That, my new friend, is the power of science. Even in Wilson's drug-adddled, confused and uncertain world he was able to use science to cut through his beliefs to reach the truth. And to use that process to open to people, admit his mistakes and show how to grow from that point. THAT IS SCIENCE. Not the set of theories or beliefs, but the process of approaching the world with curiosity, confusion, and mistaken belief, applying a controlled set of questions as carefully chosen as possible, and using the results of those elements to grow a better understanding of reality.
OK limey POMs, roll yourself up in a dooner (what, you don't know what a dooner is, darn, I thought the rest of the world spoke only POMlish?) and hide under the bed, cause the rest of the world all started with one or another of the various Britishes from one of the wide variety of types of spoken English on that tiny little island. But we have all GROWN UP, unlike you poor sodden wrecks. English, International English as you want to term it, is not the property of England, India, South Africa, Liberia, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Australia, New Zealand or even Guam or Papua New Guinea (where they speak a pidgin of English that you probably couldn't understand any better that you can understand broad Kentish-- just a guess that oneBTW). In fact international English doesn't really exist at all, it was a failed attempt by Americans and British English teachers to make something that would be teachable as "English" without the stupiud shite you have stuffed into this discussion.
While I'm a self-confessed Fedora fanboi, Arch is the one distro I would happily change to if things went nasty. I like a lot of stuff about Arch, and the idea that it reamins cutting edge and therefore edgy (not necessarily ready for prime time) but still very solid and powerful is all good to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Musk announced plans, at the same time as the charging stations, for a 30,000 dollar hatchback/ family car. I just paid 29,000 for my Hyundai hybrid last year, I could have gome to 30 for a full electric like Tesla is bringing. But then my lil' brother bought a Nissan Leaf a month or so after me, and he loves that car to, which should be similar to Tesla's plans. All good, all good.
Funny that you mention Phillips and Edison in the same passage, but have the story all screwed up. This makes me think that in 50 years or so we will all be believing that Steve Jobs and Apple created/ invented the PC and Bill Gates invented the operating system.
What? The first person to successfully create an electric light bulb that used a filament (an incandescent bulb) was Mr Phillips, the founder of Phillips Electric company. The problem with his invention was that the filament didn't last long, it was essentially a piece of carbon that burned up while producing light. Edison took that idea and found other filaments that lasted longer. Actually he didn't, his team of people who brute-forced the problem by trying everything they could think of.
Where does Jobs come in: Today everybody thinks Edison created the light bulb because he used his marketing ability to convince everyone to electrify their houses so they would have electric lights. Now, because his marketing worked, we glorify him as an inventor, when he was mostly a marketer, just like ole' SJ. ANd BG as well of course.
Interesting that this comes at the same time that Tesla is rolling out "S" models, announcing a hatchback and aiming at the $30,000 sedan market AND announcing a push into super fast charging stations (45 minutes to a full charge). Is Toyota afraid of the competition, or do they not want to move into a niche market (what? after the success of the Prius???) It really makes no sense for them.
Yeah, from an AC no less. Reminder: Raleigh is one of the sides of research triangle park, where are you from? London? New york? San Fran? Oh yeah those are real tech centers, oh yeah.
I don't even live in those places, but anyone who knows tech knows Raleigh and Austin.
10 years ago in Virginia
WTF are you talking about? the courier was developed while SJ was still with NEXT. MS just didn't release it because the market didn't exist and they didn't know how to create it.
I have watched it, in China, you can get it by satellite here if you want it, but you would like CCTV9 more, it is the channel for foreigners, soft-core propaganda. The military channel is for the military and people who want to feel military, like the guy on the bus last year (or was it 2 years ago) with an over the shoulder purse sized loudspeaker who was reminding all the bus denizens (including moi, of course) of how they should act if they are going to be considered "good citizens". China is kind of a different place from the post-modern west. It is on a different time scale because on the bus was me, and a host of younger people who were truly embarrassed by the haranguer in the back. The bus driver finally asked him (politely) to stop. This is the new China, and you really don't have any clue about it, so just give up trying to understand it.
Well, I was complaining about this shit a few years ago and was a voice crying in the wilderness. To me, damn near every news or pseudo-news article with iSomeshit in the title was two things: first a shill piece for Apple and second using the Apple name to drive readers to the article thinking it really had something to do with an Apple product.
In other words, it was a cannibalistic orgy where was used to both drive readers in and build the company rep because people read articles with Apple in the title. This has all the trimmings of a bubble, where the bubble is pumped full of hot air by both the company promoting the bubble product and the buyers together with the media. Here is an idea for you, Apple shares just jumped to $700 a share on the iPhone5 pre-sales. Why don't you go and short them, expecting that it will drop rapidly if the actual numbers don't match up?
Well, I'm not gonna, cause I expect that we will never see those real figures, and in fact that even if they got published no one will give a damn. This stuff is messed up man, this is not capitalism, it is fashionalism.
Young man, come to Florida to see the mutant fish and shellfish that have resulted from the pollution of the Gulf. Come walk our beaches where there is still a black layer of crude oil an inch or two below the surface as you walk. Parents won't let their kids play in the sand now. Oh yes, I must be a wacko enviro-crazy for telling you what we see every day hundreds of miles away. That we know came ashore here because we saw it.
You, my friend, are sadly mistaken. You have been brainwashed by the people who are willing to trde their environement, their air and water and food, for money. And I bet they aren't giving you any of it.
No, not really (raspberry pi that is) once it is finished as an electronics kit, the rest would be too hard for the kid.
When I was 8 I built a Knight kit shortwave receiver, from a kit. It was hard, took me some time with a soldering gun and pliers and all that good stuff. The closest equivalent today would be building a computer from parts. There are plenty of instructions to print out, along with the manuals, and then when they are done with the physical part they get to install their own operating system, there are a very few kid centered ones and many that are bare-bones and could be, with the proper parental focus and direction, made kid-centric.
And, like my radio, when it was done it would be usable in a way that the kid could understand.
I did this, on the same basic level, with my 16 year old daughter for her 16th birthday, she did the whole thing from manuals and built a pretty nice quad-core AMD rig with all bells and whistles and kubuntu (her choice after weeks of searching and trying to find what she really liked... but really not my choice at all) she is now considered a geek (by her peers) and feels it that way herself. It changed her sense of who she is, so I can't recommend it more than that.
I do just fine without a microwave oven, hate the things actually, prefer to do it the old fashioned way, the one they call "cooking"
And you are forgetting that the people who want to drive the fastest AND think they are really good at it actually are a bunch of fools who shouldn't be given keys to a tricycle.
Oh, my creds? 5 Years as an over the road trucker back when the speed limits were 60 mph and the roads were less congested with raving lunatics calling themselves drivers. I got out to stay alive, still living and avoid driving whenever I can.
Have to agree, the key issue is that the citizens approve of the move.
BTW, I could help to solve this mystery easily. Clearly it is a basement dwelling geek who committed the crime, just look at the number of men that they are going to check (8080), obviously they already know this as well! Too much internet pron
Yeah, my dad grew up in a single parent family (his dad died in the 1918 flu epidemic) and when we built a cabin together when I was a teen -ager he had me straightening nails he had been saving for years and pulling out of boards that he was re-using. I was telling my son about it the other day and showed him how to straighten a nail, now he refuses to throw nails away, he likes to straighten them.
I don't get the need for an external slot, my wife's Samsung has an internal and my Sony-E has an external micro slot: the internal is easier to deal with and less trouble. We don't generally take the card out, in truth if they just gave us 32-64 GB of on board storage it would serve just as well.
Hear!Hear!
Hey folks,
I would love to have this citizen offer to reveal his tax returns, and I believe he does not do so because he has something to hide that his opponents would use against his candidacy. However, for whatever reasons, we have laws that protect his tax documents as private and personal within a certain framework laid down by law and mandate (as in "manadatory"). To reveal that private and personal data is wrong, until such time as the mandates and laws are changed. If we begin to take to law into our personal control then we devolve to "fort au main" (power based on physical strength) rather than power and control based in law.
Now, we can, and probably will, argue ad nauseum about whether those with money have greater power and control over the legal and mandate process (I believe they do and that this hurts the body politic and the body personal and individual) and so Mr Romney, being one of them is more powerful and has more control over our world than you or I, but that doesn't change the problems that occur when we start breaking the laws with the intention of thwarting the wishes of someone in what amounts to a personal vendetta.
Some will argue that this calls for revolution. I hope not since revolution always and without exception destroys more than it repairs and leaves a nasty stinky mess behind. But everyone is entitled to an opinion.
Speaking of which, as a son of Virginia, and an alumni of The University, I think of myself as someone who knows a little bit about Mr Jefferson and his ideas that helped form the constitution. Our system of voting was a negotiated solution that came about in the ferment of thought of which Mr Jefferson's idea that "we need a revolution every 25 years" was one of the sparking thoughts. Voting was meant to be "the revolution". For that reason it was, originally, allowed only to educated landholding men who had a lot to lose if they voted the wrong way, or rather in a way that didn't move the country forward and into greater strength and safety.
This is not to say that we should return to something closer to the original, only that the original was trying to consider the need to keep a ferment of ideas, of change and of a change in leadership in order to avoid the calls for revolution that we hear today. Consideration of how to mandate changes in salary and benefit structures for legislative and executive branch employees and elected officials, together with reform of the electoral process do seem important topics for the next president and legislature, but they are completely under the radar in a world where the top news items have to do with the workout regimen of a VP candidate.
We need change, more change than anyone is willing to risk right now. Too bad, because most voters woul;d reward the legislature for that change, only their moneybag friends would try to hurt them.
Yes Homeopathy, as defined by the practice of dilutions etc. is crap. But in much of Europe, Homeopathy has gotten itself entangled with Naturopathy, which uses traditional folk remedies (mostly herbal) to treat non-life threatening chronic problems, sometimes with success, often with slow recoveries, but seldom with damage to other organs (oh yes I know big Pharm has tried to make a play against the simple herbalist medications, but the truth is that the big pharm prescriptions are prescriptions because they are dangerous).
Disclaimer: my wife is a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, with a great deal of skill, practice and success with chronic disorders by using acupuncture, Chinese herbal teas and pills and massage based in acupressure. Plus a number of other treatment options that you have probably never heard of but which can help in specific types of illness.
With that disclaimer finished, when you are dying of something that is moving fast to kill you, you really ought to use western medicine, yes it is harsh and strong and ....dangerous. But it can get you through some really bad spots where you might die or have life changing organic problems otherwise. For example, A little over 2 years ago I had a nasty problem that she was trying to treat, but it was just moving too fast for her, she said "screw it, lets go to the clinic. They pumped me full of intrvenous antibiotics for a few days and I came right out of it. Then she went back to work on me to aid my recovery and most people at work didn't even know that I was so sick that I was hearing audio-hallucinations.
The Chinese recognize that the two systems can work together, which is a good approach. They have 4 thousand years of experimental data and practice for their system, so there is something to it.
But homeopathy, in the pure sense has never had any experimental proof behind it and acts as a easy target if someone wants to disparage any non-conventional practice. That is why, for me, it needs to be put to a quick death.
Sorry folks but the notice google sent to me was that they were ending support in November of 2013. And my weather stuff still works on iGoogle. What exactly is the fuss?
I read with an ebook reader every night, it is light as a phone and with e-ink is not backlit. Win-win-win
Look, he should have had backup, either remote or onsite with a USB hard disk, if he really cared about the data. At this point whatever he does is risky. I have worked with situations like this and never successfully gotten anywhere with it. The old guy has, probably, in my experience and I would expect in most everyone else's, made other mistakes like this before this. The computer is probably a seething mess of malware. In fact, you must assume it is so if you don't want to be back in a few months with the same problems again.
It was problems like this that helped lead me to Linux, the ability to separate parts of the OS, separation of home folder from OS and boot folder, all these things make this kind of recovery much easier as well as making detailed and deep AV inspection faster and easier. If I want to do a fast scan of my wife's laptop, I scan the home folder thoroughly and let it go from there. In 5 years of linux use on her part (and she is a serial downloader of any crap anybody wants to send her) the only infections have been there, usually in the .cache files of the browsers.
Having lived in Holland, where there is a top tax of 65%, I have to say that the world can be pretty damn great if people accept that kind of tax rate. It is because we don't want to pay for the first world stuff for anybody but ourselves (our single individual self, not the US body politic) we end up not getting it for anybody, ourselves included. We can't see past the end of our noses, and our political leaders are blinded because their noses are rectally inserted in the fundament of big business. So, the US is screwed by our choices both for leaders and for the political world in general.
Welcome to the other side, and welcome to the world where there is no real, 100% certainty. I hope you come to embrace this uncertainty in the long run. To give some credit to people who attack science as "just a bunch of theories dreamed up by unbelieving people" we are unbelieving people who have created a bunch of theories to try to understand the universe. And we are still working at it, and will be for the forseeable future. I apologize for it, but certainty is not part of our world.
One story though, that shows the power of our uncertainty, the power of our search for reality and the power of the mind in both shining light on reality and being deceived by it:
Robert Anton Wilson, who was both a wacko, a prophet and a keen observer who often had his facts only loosely under control (notice the quantum use of the word "both") tells about how, for many years, he was convinced that he was in telepathic communication with a group of highly "evolved" beings on a spaceship traveling to Earth from a planet orbiting Sirius. He had long and complicated telepathic discussions with them, they gave him personal direction on difficult philosophical and psychological questions and helped him to "evolve" as a human in order to prepare for their coming. He used this training indirectly to influence people in his areas of interest: recreational drugs, personal growth, community organization and his own loose brand of general wackiness.
In his later years he came to realize, and admit, that he had deceived himself and it had all been something that he made up for deeply personal, psychological reasons. That, my new friend, is the power of science. Even in Wilson's drug-adddled, confused and uncertain world he was able to use science to cut through his beliefs to reach the truth. And to use that process to open to people, admit his mistakes and show how to grow from that point. THAT IS SCIENCE. Not the set of theories or beliefs, but the process of approaching the world with curiosity, confusion, and mistaken belief, applying a controlled set of questions as carefully chosen as possible, and using the results of those elements to grow a better understanding of reality.
Welcome to the search for reality
OK limey POMs, roll yourself up in a dooner (what, you don't know what a dooner is, darn, I thought the rest of the world spoke only POMlish?) and hide under the bed, cause the rest of the world all started with one or another of the various Britishes from one of the wide variety of types of spoken English on that tiny little island. But we have all GROWN UP, unlike you poor sodden wrecks. English, International English as you want to term it, is not the property of England, India, South Africa, Liberia, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Australia, New Zealand or even Guam or Papua New Guinea (where they speak a pidgin of English that you probably couldn't understand any better that you can understand broad Kentish-- just a guess that oneBTW). In fact international English doesn't really exist at all, it was a failed attempt by Americans and British English teachers to make something that would be teachable as "English" without the stupiud shite you have stuffed into this discussion.
So, stuff it limey
Bloody hell
While I'm a self-confessed Fedora fanboi, Arch is the one distro I would happily change to if things went nasty. I like a lot of stuff about Arch, and the idea that it reamins cutting edge and therefore edgy (not necessarily ready for prime time) but still very solid and powerful is all good to me.