What men, in their imbecility, constantly mistake for a deficiency of intelligence in women is merely an incapacity for mastering small and trivial tricks. A man thinks that he is more intelligent than his wife because he can add up figures more accurately and because he understands the lingo of the stock market, and follows the doings of political mountebanks, and knows the minutiae of some sordid and degrading business or profession, any soap selling or the law. But these puerile talents are not really signs of intelligence; they are merely accomplishments, and the differ only in degree from the accomplishments of a trained chimpanzee.
The truth is that the capacity for mastering them is the sign of a petty mind, and Havelock Ellis, in his great study of English genius, shows that men of genius almost invariably lack it. One could not think of Shakespeare or Goethe or Beethoven multiplying 3,456,754 by 79,999 without making a mistake, nor could one think of them remembering the price of this or that stock last July, or the number of beans in a pound, or the freight rate on steel beams from Akron, Ohio, to Newport News, or concerning themselves about the cost of producing a stick of chewing gum, or the pay of street car conductors, or the credit of some obscure shopkeepr in Memphis, Tenn, Such idiotic concerns are beneath the dignity of first-rate minds.
That women always try to evade them - that they have little capacity for the childish complexity of tricks upon which men base their so-called business and professional skill and cunning - this is but one more proof of their intellectual aristocracy. They are not stumped by such enterprises because they are difficult, but because they are trivial.
- from "Meditations on the Fair," H. L. Mencken, 1917
Here's a bit of prior art which prefigures not just any number of our new Internet-era "innovations," among them Amazon's "one-click" patent and likewise rubbish, but indeed the entire toxic psychical atmosphere of this degraded, cramped, leashled era.
If Autodesk would port AutoCAD to Linux I'd buy it so fast it would make your head spin. And AutoCAD costs $2500 on the street.
But I suspect, though of course I haven't any hard evidence at all, that Autodesk has a private arrangement with Microsoft. At that time AutoCAD was supported on MS-DOS, Macintosh, and several flavors of Unix. But five or six years later that list of platforms had been whittled down to one: Win32. Just recently Microsoft assimilated Visio, but in the process, for some mysterious reason or another, as part of the deal Visio spun off its Intellicad division, which had been selling a clone of AutoCAD for about the tenth of AutoCAD's price. Now why did they do that? I'm just guessing, but I think that Microsoft long ago agreed not to gobble up Autodesk as an appetizer, as they pretty obviously have been able to do for the last decade, in return for Autodesk dropping all other platforms.
And I also suspect that it's lots of under-the-table business like this, rather than some impalpable attitude problem amongst Linux users with regard to commercial software, that explains why so few vendors of commercial software for Win32 are willing to port their products to Linux. If this is only a paranoid fantasy, then it's one I share with Judge Jackson and the DOJ antitrust division.
It seems like the US's adventure-loving spy agencies might have gone on a bit of a spree - bombs and all - in Italy, too. This hit the world news back in 1990 when the CIA's Operation Gladio was revealed in court, but since then it's kind of fallen into the oubliette, gee wonder why?
1.) Reality Master 101's comment was in no way "flamebait."
2.) One way to commit *nix advocacy is to send a reply email to the person who sent you the two megabyte Word file as follows:
"Please resend your letter of the 23rd in text format. Our mail system detected a macro virus attached to the email you sent and the antivirus program automaticallly deleted the attachment, so I got your email but the document was gone. FYI, our network manager told me that it was the particularly destructive W97M.Stand.c virus which silently installs itself in Microsoft Office and exactly two weeks later wipes out all data on infected systems all across the user's office network."
OK, so (someone will complain) that's dishonest. But it's funny too, and that's important. Anyway, in the long view, if you can help him break his habit, your little white lie could be doing a poor cruelly longsuffering MSOffice addict a big future favor. Because after all things like W97M.Stand do exist.
...as this is a precedent upon which he can shut down those awful parodists at gwbush.com. After all, there should be limits to freedom, one of them being that one should not ever make fun of a presidential candidate. We all know that the Founding Fathers composed the First Amendment in order to protect the artistic freedom of topless dancers, not to promote political speech which might discommode a think-skinned trust-fund kiddy running for national office, right?
>...our "cut the military spending" tree-hugging government...
...which spends as much on so-called "defense" as the rest of the world's armies put together. Some bunch of tree-huggers. As far as "cutting military spending," both parties in the U.S.A., this madhouse of fraud, are working up right now to flush tens and maybe hundreds of billions of dollars right down the toilet to buy a ballistic missile defense that will never ever work. You have to understand that these political gentlemen plan to get maybe one percent of that vast public subsidy back from the arms vendors as bribes, I mean campaign contributions. Even decades ago, Dwight Eisenhower was on to these con men. Go ahead and call him a tree-hugging lib'rul with an unrealistic understanding of warfare.
Damn it all. How dare they say you are "off-topic." When the topic here, as clearly advertised, is geek stuff. And what do geeks do? What act is the essence of being a geek? They, they, blush and/or shudder to mention but the truth must arise and be told, they bite the heads offa chickens. And the next question that naturally comes to mind is, what happens then? Blood spurts and runs down your chin, it can't be helped. Now look at your poster, on the wall behind the monitor. Look upon her full-whitepainted lower lip.
That's what they already do. Try talking absolutely literally and you'll be reduced to silence.
It's only over a second, unconscious and subverbal layer or channel of telepathy that anybody is able to convey any factual content at all. This is why the best of higher education is always achieved by lectures, why the college lecture by the noted scientist or the poet himself teaches so much better than the very same words recited off a script by his TA. It's also possible to pound these thoughts by main force into bound paper. However, obviously telepathy can't possibly propagate over long distances to vast crowds - think about it, if it could, then one lone man's inner thoughts could shake the cosmos - so as a result communication across the internet inevitably suffers, at least when it tries to convey notions more specific than emotions.
Jeez, haven't you ever even once used mc on a color VGA system?
mc is the coolest thing. Many a mile to Linux, let mc be your bicycle. It even has a text editor built-in for which to use it you don't first have to earn a bachelor's degree in CS. mc by default shows a real eye-pleasing blue color scheme. Surely that's the referent.
I'm afraid it must be admitted, however, that they stole, umm, copied that look-n-feel from one of the excellent Mr. Norton's proprietary programs.
My comment didn't get moderated up; for some reason inside the mysterious whirring gears of the secret slarsh-tit status script I have "earned" the semi-permanent state of automatically getting my posts entered at two goody-points. And it's not as though I'm anybody special or worthwhile, like Bruce Perens, either; over the years I've written a mess of programs but basically they all suck, I can't code my way out a wet paper sack. Even when I merely stand and applaud the alluring yet minus-one literary works of some of slarsh-tit's most eminent trolls, like 80md or spiralx, I come in at two. Gladly would I lend a point or two to 80md when he's on a roll, to help keep the troll train bouncing merrily along!
(...say, did you ever read the story about the guy who learned Latin and then later forgot it? Old, old, old. I'd pay $1.00 right now to remember which Jack Vance story it was where "slarsh-tit" was local-planet slang connoting a cute adolescent girl.)
I suspect that there may be something in the automatic scoring that looks at the length of your posts (and maybe spell-chex 'em too, I'm real good though not perfect at spelling). So maybe I get ahead because, being semi-senile, I go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on; I'm real loquacious or logorrhaeic or whatever.
> Communist Russia saw a LOT less technological improvement > than the US in the same time, Why?
Well, in 1913 the U.S.A. produced, what, five? twenty? times more factory-manufactured goods than Russia did. This could not possibly be the fault of communism, as the Tsar was not a communist. The Bolshevik revolution in Russia took place in 1918, after four years of the First World War, at which point in time the U.S.A. was already the strongest industrial economy in the world, as compared with Russia, devastated by years of ground war, so the two countries were hardly starting from the same place.
Then the Russians fought a civil war for some years, complete with invasions by several foreign expeditionary forces. The U.S.A. wasn't invaded by anybody circa 1920. The Russian civil war was followed by a general embargo through the twenties on the part of the developed capitalist nations, which severely hindered Russia's development. Nobody was embargoing the U.S.A. during the twenties. Despite these disadvantages, Soviet Russia had a greater rate of industrial growth during this period than the capitalist economies.
Skipping over the Great Depression, when the capitalist economies, for all their free-market incentives, didn't do so well to say the least, we arrive at the forties. The citizens of U.S.A. fought a hard war and sacrificed their wealth and progress to the necessities of war. But the U.S.A. was never invaded, much less demolished end-to-end as was Russia, and in terms of human losses, we lost about eight hundred thousand men, where the Russians lost at least twenty million killed by the Nazi invasion.
The catastrophe of World War II was followed immediately by the Cold War, where the Russians, who had no atomic bomb of their own, were threatened by an aggressive nuclear-armed adversary, the U.S.A., which not only possessed an arsenal of nuclear bombs but had previously used them against cities full of civilians. Keep in mind that between 1941 and 1945 the Germans had exterminated a third of the adult males in Russia; by 1948, the U.S.A. was rearming Germany. Any industrial effort that the Soviets might have devoted to building cars and TVs for its citizens was instead diverted to a decades-long crash program to counter the American atomic threat.
Do you perhaps suspect that any of the above might have had more influence than your free-market ideological metaphysics on the relative technological inefficiency of Soviet Russia as compared with the U.S.A.?
I recognize at least one of those photos from Vogue magazine, or maybe it was Glamour. I bought one of those the other day for my daughter. You know, a magazine published for and popular with millions of women readers. Of course the model didn't have the penguin tattooed on her in the orginal photo. That's an overdub or palimpsest or whatever.
Nor was it originally captioned as she was a "slut." That's rather tasteless, but jeez, you should see the rest of the site. No, maybe you shouldn't. "Good morning, I have syphilis."
No, it will not "get you burned at the stake." We care to much about our brethren to do such a cruel thing to them. No matter how foul their sins, no matter how widely they offend us. Even if they go so far as to spit upon the holy primary source code, we love them too much, though they are sore misguided, to be so merciless.
We do not shrink from physical torture. For indeed, it is the curse of mortality and the payment for our forefathers's sins that we shall endure pain all our days - cf. configuring X the first time on a new computer. But pain does not endure, nothing that is based in the flesh endures, for flesh is dust. Before and above all other issues one has to consider the fate of the immortal soul.
Would we burn an unrepentant, inconverted heretic? Would we commit him to an eternity in the blue screen of Hell? No.
No, first we will bring him back into a state of blessedness, which he can attain by simply admitting and repenting his errors, his blindness, his hamartia. We start by gently counseling our prisoner. If, as sometimes happens, verbal persuasion doesn't work, then at our command are the various goads of isolation, starvation, exposure, sleep deprivation, restraint, heat or cold therapy, infusion with hypnotic or hallucinogenic narcotics, electroshock; then if these fail, though they seldom do except for the most obdurate sinners, we (for as I said before, we to not shrink from torture) apply the harsh but necessary techniques of ********************************************** ********************************************** ********************************************** ********************************************** *********************************************.
Eventually even the most stubborn of our heretics comes around, sees and admits his fatal error and repents. And as Linus is endlessly forgiving, thus the Holy Penguin again accepts our brother, once a heretic but now one no more, back into his loving and eternal embrace.
In a film can in my desk I've got a thirty year old one that's on punched paper teletype tape. Feed it into the tape reader and it prints out a full-length standing nude at about 0.7 scale that you can hang on the wall.
Yours WD "old old old" K - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Explain to me again how the average consumer got harmed? > I can't figure it out.
Well, who is an average consumer of Microsoft products? Is this an individual user? No, most individual users don't ever buy an operating system. The end-user usually gets his operating system bundled with his computer.
Microsoft's number one customer for both OSes and applications is the OEM. Compaq, Dell, Gateway are typical Microsoft customers. Now how did they get harmed in any actionable way when Bill Gates & Co. seized control of their internal business decisions? Considering that MS had had for years and continues to have a nearly perfect monopoly in the personal computer OS market, does Compaq, for example, have any reason to complain when Microsoft says, "Sure, you can ship Netscape with all your computers, but if you do we'll charge you $95 per Win95 license as opposed to your previous price (and the one we'll continue to offer your competitors) of $45. So if you sell a million computers this year with Win95 on them, that decision will cost you fifty million dollars. How badly do you want to include Netscape in your bundle?" For that matter, keeping in mind Microsoft's monopoly, does Netscape have any right to complain?
This anti-trust case is not a battle between Microsoft and individual end-users. It is a battle between Microsoft and a number of other multi-billion dollar computer-industry companies.
On the contrary, if there's anyone in the world who will uncomplainingly put up with the kind of, um, stuff (meekly phrased for the new family-friendly/.) to which Win9x is heir, it's Grandma. They sure won't tolerate it at the office where they use NT instead. Not only will she put up with mystery crashes and no-warning lockups but best of all she still believes that Bill Gates is a "genius" who wrote all this stuff himself, and she even thinks the crashes are her fault. That's what she tells me when she brings me her hosed PC, anyway.
Say, just noticed that I'm guessing wildly there. I sort of assume, without any statistics or anything like that, that businesses in general prefer NT over Win9x , mainly because my office does. Is that true, or do companies as well as private individuals who don't know better use Win9x? Anybody got figures for corporate purchases of OSes or anything like that?
My son loves the arcade version of Tekken 3 even better than the Playstation version. He's really good at it too. When we play in the arcade, in public and all, he kicks my ass at Tekken 3. I, his old Dad, out in public. Not that I mind.
But when I was a teenager I took a lot of acid and played an uncountable number of genuine analog pinball games. How bright the colors were, and how my heart raced when I looked at them flashing! So now I have pinball nature and when I lean into one of the three pinball machines in the arcade and make the ball tremble and fly and the counter whirl I amaze my son and he admires me.
...especially if you pronounce it with the accent on the first syllable, AL-eht so it rhymes with "mallet," "ballot" or "shallot." That's the way I hear it when I read it. Immediately you think of something Ogden Nashish in trochees or anapests
This AC's so angry to hear the word ALOT He's going to knock in your head with a mallet
Slashdot Mirror
What men, in their imbecility, constantly mistake for a deficiency of intelligence in women is merely an incapacity for mastering small and trivial tricks. A man thinks that he is more intelligent than his wife because he can add up figures more accurately and because he understands the lingo of the stock market, and follows the doings of political mountebanks, and knows the minutiae of some sordid and degrading business or profession, any soap selling or the law. But these puerile talents are not really signs of intelligence; they are merely accomplishments, and the differ only in degree from the accomplishments of a trained chimpanzee.
The truth is that the capacity for mastering them is the sign of a petty mind, and Havelock Ellis, in his great study of English genius, shows that men of genius almost invariably lack it. One could not think of Shakespeare or Goethe or Beethoven multiplying 3,456,754 by 79,999 without making a mistake, nor could one think of them remembering the price of this or that stock last July, or the number of beans in a pound, or the freight rate on steel beams from Akron, Ohio, to Newport News, or concerning themselves about the cost of producing a stick of chewing gum, or the pay of street car conductors, or the credit of some obscure shopkeepr in Memphis, Tenn, Such idiotic concerns are beneath the dignity of first-rate minds.
That women always try to evade them - that they have little capacity for the childish complexity of tricks upon which men base their so-called business and professional skill and cunning - this is but one more proof of their intellectual aristocracy. They are not stumped by such enterprises because they are difficult, but because they are trivial.
- from "Meditations on the Fair," H. L. Mencken, 1917
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Here's a bit of prior art which prefigures not just any number of our new Internet-era "innovations," among them Amazon's "one-click" patent and likewise rubbish, but indeed the entire toxic psychical atmosphere of this degraded, cramped, leashled era.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
If Autodesk would port AutoCAD to Linux I'd buy it so fast it would make your head spin. And AutoCAD costs $2500 on the street.
But I suspect, though of course I haven't any hard evidence at all, that Autodesk has a private arrangement with Microsoft. At that time AutoCAD was supported on MS-DOS, Macintosh, and several flavors of Unix. But five or six years later that list of platforms had been whittled down to one: Win32. Just recently Microsoft assimilated Visio, but in the process, for some mysterious reason or another, as part of the deal Visio spun off its Intellicad division, which had been selling a clone of AutoCAD for about the tenth of AutoCAD's price. Now why did they do that? I'm just guessing, but I think that Microsoft long ago agreed not to gobble up Autodesk as an appetizer, as they pretty obviously have been able to do for the last decade, in return for Autodesk dropping all other platforms.
And I also suspect that it's lots of under-the-table business like this, rather than some impalpable attitude problem amongst Linux users with regard to commercial software, that explains why so few vendors of commercial software for Win32 are willing to port their products to Linux. If this is only a paranoid fantasy, then it's one I share with Judge Jackson and the DOJ antitrust division.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
This is the mispelling thread, right? Non sequitur, dude.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
It seems like the US's adventure-loving spy agencies might have gone on a bit of a spree - bombs and all - in Italy, too. This hit the world news back in 1990 when the CIA's Operation Gladio was revealed in court, but since then it's kind of fallen into the oubliette, gee wonder why?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
1.) Reality Master 101's comment was in no way "flamebait."
2.) One way to commit *nix advocacy is to send a reply email to the person who sent you the two megabyte Word file as follows:
"Please resend your letter of the 23rd in text format. Our mail system detected a macro virus attached to the email you sent and the antivirus program automaticallly deleted the attachment, so I got your email but the document was gone. FYI, our network manager told me that it was the particularly destructive W97M.Stand.c virus which silently installs itself in Microsoft Office and exactly two weeks later wipes out all data on infected systems all across the user's office network."
OK, so (someone will complain) that's dishonest. But it's funny too, and that's important. Anyway, in the long view, if you can help him break his habit, your little white lie could be doing a poor cruelly longsuffering MSOffice addict a big future favor. Because after all things like W97M.Stand do exist.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
...as this is a precedent upon which he can shut down those awful parodists at gwbush.com. After all, there should be limits to freedom, one of them being that one should not ever make fun of a presidential candidate. We all know that the Founding Fathers composed the First Amendment in order to protect the artistic freedom of topless dancers, not to promote political speech which might discommode a think-skinned trust-fund kiddy running for national office, right?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> ...our "cut the military spending" tree-hugging government...
...which spends as much on so-called "defense" as the rest of the world's armies put together. Some bunch of tree-huggers. As far as "cutting military spending," both parties in the U.S.A., this madhouse of fraud, are working up right now to flush tens and maybe hundreds of billions of dollars right down the toilet to buy a ballistic missile defense that will never ever work. You have to understand that these political gentlemen plan to get maybe one percent of that vast public subsidy back from the arms vendors as bribes, I mean campaign contributions. Even decades ago, Dwight Eisenhower was on to these con men. Go ahead and call him a tree-hugging lib'rul with an unrealistic understanding of warfare.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
natalie was certainly cultured.
Damn it all. How dare they say you are "off-topic." When the topic here, as clearly advertised, is geek stuff. And what do geeks do? What act is the essence of being a geek? They, they, blush and/or shudder to mention but the truth must arise and be told, they bite the heads offa chickens. And the next question that naturally comes to mind is, what happens then? Blood spurts and runs down your chin, it can't be helped. Now look at your poster, on the wall behind the monitor. Look upon her full-whitepainted lower lip.
Your fan WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
If I've got the distinction right, a haiku is a poem about nature, whereas a metrically similar poem about human nature is called a "senryu."
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
That's what they already do. Try talking absolutely literally and you'll be reduced to silence.
It's only over a second, unconscious and subverbal layer or channel of telepathy that anybody is able to convey any factual content at all. This is why the best of higher education is always achieved by lectures, why the college lecture by the noted scientist or the poet himself teaches so much better than the very same words recited off a script by his TA. It's also possible to pound these thoughts by main force into bound paper. However, obviously telepathy can't possibly propagate over long distances to vast crowds - think about it, if it could, then one lone man's inner thoughts could shake the cosmos - so as a result communication across the internet inevitably suffers, at least when it tries to convey notions more specific than emotions.
Sincerely WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Jeez, haven't you ever even once used mc on a color VGA system?
mc is the coolest thing. Many a mile to Linux, let mc be your bicycle. It even has a text editor built-in for which to use it you don't first have to earn a bachelor's degree in CS. mc by default shows a real eye-pleasing blue color scheme. Surely that's the referent.
I'm afraid it must be admitted, however, that they stole, umm, copied that look-n-feel from one of the excellent Mr. Norton's proprietary programs.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
My comment didn't get moderated up; for some reason inside the mysterious whirring gears of the secret slarsh-tit status script I have "earned" the semi-permanent state of automatically getting my posts entered at two goody-points. And it's not as though I'm anybody special or worthwhile, like Bruce Perens, either; over the years I've written a mess of programs but basically they all suck, I can't code my way out a wet paper sack. Even when I merely stand and applaud the alluring yet minus-one literary works of some of slarsh-tit's most eminent trolls, like 80md or spiralx, I come in at two. Gladly would I lend a point or two to 80md when he's on a roll, to help keep the troll train bouncing merrily along!
(...say, did you ever read the story about the guy who learned Latin and then later forgot it? Old, old, old. I'd pay $1.00 right now to remember which Jack Vance story it was where "slarsh-tit" was local-planet slang connoting a cute adolescent girl.)
I suspect that there may be something in the automatic scoring that looks at the length of your posts (and maybe spell-chex 'em too, I'm real good though not perfect at spelling). So maybe I get ahead because, being semi-senile, I go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on; I'm real loquacious or logorrhaeic or whatever.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Communist Russia saw a LOT less technological improvement
> than the US in the same time, Why?
Well, in 1913 the U.S.A. produced, what, five? twenty? times more factory-manufactured goods than Russia did. This could not possibly be the fault of communism, as the Tsar was not a communist. The Bolshevik revolution in Russia took place in 1918, after four years of the First World War, at which point in time the U.S.A. was already the strongest industrial economy in the world, as compared with Russia, devastated by years of ground war, so the two countries were hardly starting from the same place.
Then the Russians fought a civil war for some years, complete with invasions by several foreign expeditionary forces. The U.S.A. wasn't invaded by anybody circa 1920. The Russian civil war was followed by a general embargo through the twenties on the part of the developed capitalist nations, which severely hindered Russia's development. Nobody was embargoing the U.S.A. during the twenties. Despite these disadvantages, Soviet Russia had a greater rate of industrial growth during this period than the capitalist economies.
Skipping over the Great Depression, when the capitalist economies, for all their free-market incentives, didn't do so well to say the least, we arrive at the forties. The citizens of U.S.A. fought a hard war and sacrificed their wealth and progress to the necessities of war. But the U.S.A. was never invaded, much less demolished end-to-end as was Russia, and in terms of human losses, we lost about eight hundred thousand men, where the Russians lost at least twenty million killed by the Nazi invasion.
The catastrophe of World War II was followed immediately by the Cold War, where the Russians, who had no atomic bomb of their own, were threatened by an aggressive nuclear-armed adversary, the U.S.A., which not only possessed an arsenal of nuclear bombs but had previously used them against cities full of civilians. Keep in mind that between 1941 and 1945 the Germans had exterminated a third of the adult males in Russia; by 1948, the U.S.A. was rearming Germany. Any industrial effort that the Soviets might have devoted to building cars and TVs for its citizens was instead diverted to a decades-long crash program to counter the American atomic threat.
Do you perhaps suspect that any of the above might have had more influence than your free-market ideological metaphysics on the relative technological inefficiency of Soviet Russia as compared with the U.S.A.?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I recognize at least one of those photos from Vogue magazine, or maybe it was Glamour. I bought one of those the other day for my daughter. You know, a magazine published for and popular with millions of women readers. Of course the model didn't have the penguin tattooed on her in the orginal photo. That's an overdub or palimpsest or whatever.
Nor was it originally captioned as she was a "slut." That's rather tasteless, but jeez, you should see the rest of the site. No, maybe you shouldn't. "Good morning, I have syphilis."
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
No, it will not "get you burned at the stake." We care to much about our brethren to do such a cruel thing to them. No matter how foul their sins, no matter how widely they offend us. Even if they go so far as to spit upon the holy primary source code, we love them too much, though they are sore misguided, to be so merciless.
We do not shrink from physical torture. For indeed, it is the curse of mortality and the payment for our forefathers's sins that we shall endure pain all our days - cf. configuring X the first time on a new computer. But pain does not endure, nothing that is based in the flesh endures, for flesh is dust. Before and above all other issues one has to consider the fate of the immortal soul.
Would we burn an unrepentant, inconverted heretic? Would we commit him to an eternity in the blue screen of Hell? No.
No, first we will bring him back into a state of blessedness, which he can attain by simply admitting and repenting his errors, his blindness, his hamartia. We start by gently counseling our prisoner. If, as sometimes happens, verbal persuasion doesn't work, then at our command are the various goads of isolation, starvation, exposure, sleep deprivation, restraint, heat or cold therapy, infusion with hypnotic or hallucinogenic narcotics, electroshock; then if these fail, though they seldom do except for the most obdurate sinners, we (for as I said before, we to not shrink from torture) apply the harsh but necessary techniques of
**********************************************
**********************************************
**********************************************
**********************************************
*********************************************.
Eventually even the most stubborn of our heretics comes around, sees and admits his fatal error and repents. And as Linus is endlessly forgiving, thus the Holy Penguin again accepts our brother, once a heretic but now one no more, back into his loving and eternal embrace.
Only then do we burn him.
Yours Fr. WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
There you go again. I know what you're up to.
Your fan WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
ps: send me to Europe!
In a film can in my desk I've got a thirty year old one that's on punched paper teletype tape. Feed it into the tape reader and it prints out a full-length standing nude at about 0.7 scale that you can hang on the wall.
Yours WD "old old old" K - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Explain to me again how the average consumer got harmed?
> I can't figure it out.
Well, who is an average consumer of Microsoft products? Is this an individual user? No, most individual users don't ever buy an operating system. The end-user usually gets his operating system bundled with his computer.
Microsoft's number one customer for both OSes and applications is the OEM. Compaq, Dell, Gateway are typical Microsoft customers. Now how did they get harmed in any actionable way when Bill Gates & Co. seized control of their internal business decisions? Considering that MS had had for years and continues to have a nearly perfect monopoly in the personal computer OS market, does Compaq, for example, have any reason to complain when Microsoft says, "Sure, you can ship Netscape with all your computers, but if you do we'll charge you $95 per Win95 license as opposed to your previous price (and the one we'll continue to offer your competitors) of $45. So if you sell a million computers this year with Win95 on them, that decision will cost you fifty million dollars. How badly do you want to include Netscape in your bundle?" For that matter, keeping in mind Microsoft's monopoly, does Netscape have any right to complain?
This anti-trust case is not a battle between Microsoft and individual end-users. It is a battle between Microsoft and a number of other multi-billion dollar computer-industry companies.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
BSOD's are not acceptable to grandma.
On the contrary, if there's anyone in the world who will uncomplainingly put up with the kind of, um, stuff (meekly phrased for the new family-friendly /.) to which Win9x is heir, it's Grandma. They sure won't tolerate it at the office where they use NT instead. Not only will she put up with mystery crashes and no-warning lockups but best of all she still believes that Bill Gates is a "genius" who wrote all this stuff himself, and she even thinks the crashes are her fault. That's what she tells me when she brings me her hosed PC, anyway.
Say, just noticed that I'm guessing wildly there. I sort of assume, without any statistics or anything like that, that businesses in general prefer NT over Win9x , mainly because my office does. Is that true, or do companies as well as private individuals who don't know better use Win9x? Anybody got figures for corporate purchases of OSes or anything like that?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
My son loves the arcade version of Tekken 3 even better than the Playstation version. He's really good at it too. When we play in the arcade, in public and all, he kicks my ass at Tekken 3. I, his old Dad, out in public. Not that I mind.
But when I was a teenager I took a lot of acid and played an uncountable number of genuine analog pinball games. How bright the colors were, and how my heart raced when I looked at them flashing! So now I have pinball nature and when I lean into one of the three pinball machines in the arcade and make the ball tremble and fly and the counter whirl I amaze my son and he admires me.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
You're exactly right!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
...especially if you pronounce it with the accent on the first syllable, AL-eht so it rhymes with "mallet," "ballot" or "shallot." That's the way I hear it when I read it. Immediately you think of something Ogden Nashish in trochees or anapests
This AC's so angry to hear the word ALOT
He's going to knock in your head with a mallet
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Since when is Scientology a religion? It's a
> profit-oriented institution that dares call
> itself a church. For what reason, I don't know.
To elude the tax man, of course! As you know, any pack of yahoos identifying themselves as a "religion" gets a free ride, tax-wise, here in the U.S.A.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Cf. "Elron Hu" in P. K. Dick's short story "The Turning Wheel."
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net