You need to check your history again. It was German mercenaries, 400 ships full of them on England's side, not the Colonial side. They were just off of Long Island on July 4, 1776. Do you know about that date? They were aware of that as well and knew signing that piece of paper could serve as their death warrant. You also forget we were not getting our asses kicked in a fair fight. Only when we were outnumbered and more importantly, out supplied. France helped us with supplies and some troops. Never the less, it is very clear that an unarmed America would still be British right now. Do yourself a big favor, get the movie 1776.
The way that ended by the way is we kicked the Germans asses as well. 400 boats worth.
It is also a fact that in WWII the Japanese knew they could never take the Continental US because of private ownership of guns. The Russians came to the same conclusion in the 1950s.
Your best bet is to claim insurance, if you have any that covers the flood. If you don't, let them dry out real good. Some things can be immersed in water again. Clean water. When I was in college... over 20 years ago we used to wash keyboards in the dish washer. Of course, no dry cycle and no soap. SUN keyboards were toast after that, because they used capacitor keys. Seems to me they were $350 a pop. After washing let them dry very well, I'd use the sun outside. You usually only get one try. Plug them in and they either work or not. If they don't, they probably never will again unless you can find out what broke. Usually it is cheaper to buy a new one. Better yet, move stuff to higher ground next time. A minute and that flat panel display would have been upstairs. Within like 5 minutes most of your stuff would have been out of reach of the water.
I've had good luck using the water trick. Even with equipment that went through a fire and got really wet from the fire department. Some of it looked like hell but it worked. Good luck.
Wanna give that bug to someone that likes to screw with your computer? Don't do anything. Let 'em get infected! Some bugs can live on your keyboard for over a week. Depends on what it was and what is on your keys.
OTOH if you allow others to use your machine, please do periodically wipe it with clorox wipes or one of the many other disinfecting wipes. They also help get that crap off the keys too. Get a screw driver to wedge it down in between and remember keys do pop off as well. Just be firm but gentle. They pop right back on again.
While I haven't done it myself, I understand you can even put them in the dish washer. Just make sure it is dry before plugging it in again. I do know this won't work with the SUN capacitive keyboards. This also won't fix a keyboard that Coke has been spilled into. At least with the keyboards around 20+ years ago.
I propose that they use this to charge HOV users. Before you lamb baste me, where I would use it is on the route 95 HOV-3 lanes in Virginia. They are mostly un-used. There are times where I could literally change the oil in my car in the middle of that road and I'd be fine. No cars in 5 minutes. Those that use it get max speed. They also tend to be big vans. Why not suck some money from them? They would be defenseless to stop it. Maybe that would give them incentive to move it from HOV-3 to HOV-2. Something long overdue.
I'm a Democratic Republic of Maryland citizen and I don't drive on those roads. I've flown over them, however. I can tell it really sucks. We have our own stupidity in Maryland like the HOV-2 rule on Route 50 that is 24 hours.
short answer is yes, in some cases. For example jobs that are in the field where there is a supervisor that decides who works and who doesn't. This gives way to "favorites." You could be the best electrician around, if the boss doesn't like you there is no work for you. OTOH, you could be a typical guy that can do the work competently and that is all you do. He may give all the jobs to the other guy that has a chick that comes around to service him. Unions can stop that. Not that they do, they can do it.
For nearly everything else they are way outdated and should go away. They exist mostly to bleed the workers to support themselves. They also live very well considering. I know of a union with personnel in the office that have IQs in the low double digits. Since I know they won't read this, they are retards. They collect money, pay themselves very well and do nothing. If something is done, it is done by the national part of the union, not the people there. It is a work fair project for stupid people.
The writers strike is a good example. Fuck them, they should get back to work or they should be replaced. They shouldn't collect 5 cents for every download forever. They are paid well. I wish I could get paid forever for code I wrote 25 years ago. Even stuff I wrote last week. They pay me and that is that. Amazing how people feel they should have entitlements forever. What next, is General Motors going to send me a bill because my 1994 vehicle has over 150,000 miles on it and has passed the expected service time?
Maybe we should send the writers bills for the crap they write. Look at TV lately? Send bills to the music industry for the trash they are putting out. I used to buy around 100 CDs a year. Last year I bought none. I didn't have a desire to buy one single CD. Even if I could have one for free from last year, I wouldn't know what to ask for. I hope 2008 is much better.
Come on guys, I have a big load of vinyl records my wife wants me to unload. So keep saying it is great long enough for me to dump them on Ebay. I've got a lot of the nice ones - Eagles, Beetles, Styx, even some very old records that date to the 1940s. Otherwise these albums will go into the trash. Curious about Puff the Magic Dragon? I have that too. I was way to young to understand what it was about when I got the record...
I always thought it would have been excellent if they had put Linux under the apple interface. Still do as BSD isn't there yet. In fact they had to make all kinds of patches and changes to BSD to meet the minimum specification and get the apple interface to work at all. Even now, it is way behind Linux. Before you mac fanboys say anything - where is VM support? Shared disk? Clustering support? C2 compliance or as it is under linux - SE linux. It isn't there, nor will it be there anytime in the forseeable future. They are billions of dollars behind. So much is missing.
Still, I've been tempted to switch. I've owned Mac in the past, back when they had the sucky OS underneath of it. I just haven't gotten back to it. Linux and Windows does everything I need it to. Unfortunately I have stuff that only works with windows.
Where I work nearly every machine is either 100% idle or 100% busy. Not much in between. Most buttheads think they need a separate machine for their application that only gets 5 hits a day (4 from them). So I've been able to stack these suckers up. You also get around the other political BS of them having their own accounts and no other site is on their machine. Suck it up, it really is their bad application and not the apache server virtual statement. Most of us do the same job we have been doing for almost a decade and work with the same people we have worked with for a decade.
The one thing I have been able to rip from users is certain services. Like an oracle/mysql/postgress server. In the past the users felt they had to maintain it. Now we have one server and they use it as a service. The cluster handles keeping it up. This only works well with RedHat and only if you know what you are doing. Now the end users are relieved. They don't have to worry about the database, server configuration and maintenance that used to dog them with Solaris, Windows, BSD and SUSE boxes. Windows being the biggest PIA because Microsoft does things to you if you update it. Then the other issues the/. crowd is used to.
To me I have a load balancer that is managed by a gang of web servers as a clustered service so it never goes down. The web servers are highly available so I can reboot whenever I want. The database is also highly available. People just upload stuff to a virtual address and a different port and it is just there. It gets updated very quickly when a patch comes out. In short I don't have to even schedule down time anymore unless we have a power outage. Just be sure you have a place to test updates first. If something goes wrong with the clustering software, it can really go wrong. Then it is like having 100 dishes up in the air. Instead of dropping one dish, you drop 100.
The thing I hate about it is trying to explain it to end users and even guys I used to think were technical. They just don't grasp the concept of a gang of servers, virtual servers and virtual databases. They think that if someone gets a form from one machine, it must return the data to that machine. As of the server is like a logon session. Maybe it is that "logon to www.sitename" bullshit they put out there in the news. They should say "visit site www.sitename", leave "logon" out of it entirely. Anyhow, eyes gloss over and it's a bitch to get them back. Sometimes now I just tell them we are moving them off of their old machine and let it go at that. They don't have a need to know. MUCH easier that way. The only PIA is when they ask what the serial number is of "their" machine.
Still, there are some people that just don't want to give anything up. I do agree that this environment requires more cognitive abilities from the IT staff. I don't think you can be average and get by anymore. The IT staff needs to have bright people now. People that can learn. Otherwise they are left behind and it can be brutal.
You see, it's just a billion dollar FARCE and a WASTE OF TAXPAYERS MONEY for the *feeling* of safety when there really isn't any.
(posted anon and through a couple anon proxies)
Mighty tough behind proxies. If it is such a farce (as if you know what a farce is that is, get a dictionary), why not post it from your account? As for it being a waste of money which is what I think you are trying to say, who would have bet even a dime that there wouldn't be another terrorist attack in the next 4 years after 9/11. Here we are 6 years and counting. It is not that you could stop any conceivable bad thing from being on an aircraft. It is that you stop those that want to bring one down from taking the chance. They know if they are caught that bad things will happen to them. Get caught yourself and find out what bad things are, though they are likely to not be as bad as they would get. What you will later consider a big lapse in good judgement will follow you for the rest of your life. You got a thrill, congratulations for what it was which isn't much (that mission was very possible). I have to file what you did in the "big deal, yawn" pile. So what is next, rob a bank? The FBI last I knew has a 99% solve rate for those. You could become one of America's latest guests of the state. Easy to get in, tough to get out. That mission is much closer to being impossible.
As for your claim about safety, do you have any doubt that if you take an airliner to fly someplace that you will get to where you are flying to? I fly both commercial and private aircraft. Being blown out of the sky or crashing at the hands of a hijacker isn't even a consideration I bet for anyone in America reading this. I wouldn't even bet on something happening in a given year, unless you want to lose money. You would be better off betting on Lotto. You may think what they are doing is silly, however it is working. Like it or not. I don't like it either, that is why I own my own airplane. It is always there waiting for me, ready to go.
I will say that you do have guts to pull that off. You may make a good CIA or FBI agent one day. You want a thrill, they have it. They need people with guts.
But the people of Maryland will keep voting the same bozos into office that will continue this spiral. Watching the election ads there was hilarious -- they catered to imbeciles like I've never seen -- and it worked.
No so. We had Rob Erlich, a Republican for the past 6 years. He left us with almost a 2 billion dollar surplus erasing the terrible situation Democrat Glendenning left us with. Already O'Malley spent that surplus and brought us nearly 2 billion in the hole. I think they had a fair election after they switched to electronic voting. That is how a Republican got in for the first time since the 1960s. The dead weren't able to vote either. After they figured out how to rig the machines, O'Malley was a sure bet. O'Malley also just raised our sales tax to 6%. Seems to me he also moved the residency down from 181 days to just 90. I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm being mugged by the state and I don't think I can do anything about it. Other than buy lube for the hell of a screwing I'm getting. Worse, a lot of people don't even know it yet.
Why don't people tell Microsoft that this is unacceptable? For changing something as simple as a video card you have to call Microsoft? What a PIA. Why do we put up with it? Where is the Government? If Toyota decided that we have to call them to get permission to continue to drive the car if we change a tire, change the oil, etc., what crap. Why should this be any different? If microsoft wants to deal in the real world and use things like patents, they should have to play by the same rules. In the automotive world you could say simply by another make of car. By their own admission they control over 90% of the desktops so they are a monopoly. Treat them like one. Stick it to them.
They also now recommend that you don`t change the banner, despite previously recommending that you do for security reasons and providing a tool to do so easily (search for urlscan).
I'm actually in the Internet Security biz and I'd love to see where they say to leave the headers the heck alone. I have left them alone with the logic that it hurts me and won't have any effect on a cracker. The reason being the exploits go out and don't seem to care what you are running anyhow. I get a ton of IIS hacks on my Apache machines. Over and over and over again. So obviously it didn't matter. I still feel like I'm holding the only candle for my cause though. Recently yet another government questionaire asked me about it. OTOH I can do a simple script to suck down the headers and see what is really running on my machines. I have a lot of machines to maintain and some of them are Solaris and are more than a PIA to maintain.
I was wondering about that. I know that Microsoft has an interest in netcraft and I wondered if they would fudge the numbers as time went on. I think that is the case. Otherwise I'd know people that actually use IIS and they seem to be very difficult to find. My experience is about what securityspace shows or roughly at least 3 out of 4 servers are running Linux at least. Some places it is almost entirely Linux/apache.
When the police think you have done something wrong, then come hell or high water they will try to find something they can charge you with.
Welcome to the world of trail lawyers. If they charge you with something then you can't sue them for false arrest. Otherwise they could be bait for an ambulance chaser. Guys like Senator Edwards fits into this category. Only he made his money from made up liability that we now know was BS. Never the less he isn't required to give the money he took from companies back for his ill gotten gains. Check out his house sometime.
What we need is a reform in law that prohibits charges like that. I'm sure mail fraud wasn't anywhere near the charges they originally considering. They should be required to drop the charges, admit their mistake and pay his attorney's fees.
It is looking more and more like if you need help, don't call 911. They are here to hurt us. How terrible to do this to him after he just lost his wife. Where is the press, they should have this on the front page to show just how stupid the police department is. Maybe their budget can be adjusted way down next year unless they comply.
I never did understand why companies make stuff for the Mac and not Linux. They used to claim there were more users, clearly that isn't true now. They need to move on from the Mac.
Publish in the newspaper the big stuff and don't get into much of the details except where you have to and then so even an freshman scientist could understand it. In your regular paper on the subject, go into the details well. What seems obvious to you may not be so obvious to the rest of us. More importantly, not obvious to some of my colleagues. Sometimes they get a bad idea and it sticks like glue. It can take years to get rid of that bad idea.
Only thing is, with Circuit City, you aren't a "member" of anything. You are a customer, that's all, and not bound to any of their arbitrary store policies, E.I., you don't agree to anything when you enter that store and are therefore not required to show shit to them on the way out!
We were talking about BJs, not Circuit City. He was asking about BJs and I have wondered the same thing while I'm waiting for what is usually a handicapped individual to go over the receipt and punch it. I'm well aware of the laws concerning retail places. If I were that guy, I'd go after Circuit City now.
Your last statement worries me, however. If they think you have stolen something, you are required to show them a receipt. That is the whole problem, they just wanted him to anyhow as if it were a right and then the cop wanted to see his ID even though that isn't required. The cop part of this incident is closed, now to go back after the store.
I shop there and I wondered about it too. Apparently as part of the agreement to be a member, they are allowed to do that. At least that is what the manager told me. He didn't have that handy at the time. I plan on pressing him on that later. As I recall, that is supposed to be one of the attractions to a members store. They can keep thieves at bay and therefore don't have to pass that cost along to those of us who don't steal.
I remember one of my black employees asking me about why it has to be black if it is bad or does work and white if it is good. Black boxes do work. Being on a black list is bad, a white list is good.
Why can't we call it an authorized or approved list? If it is bad, call it an unapproved list.
Darn, another e-mail from Nigeria about another dead relative.... Let me add him to the black list.
If you've used EDIT on VMS since V5.x (IIRC), you've used EVE, which is TPU with a layer on top.
I used VMS a lot running 3.8 and a bit of 4.0. Then I lost that job and didn't use VMS again until about 10 years ago. Even then I didn't do much with it. Just enough to get ftp to fire up so I could get stuff off of it onto a linux machine. Looks like it may have used TPU when I used it. If I did, I never knew it.
My basic problem with Emacs, other than the resources it gobbles up, is the fact that it requires LISP.
This is why I don't use emacs all the time. VI is quick and is great for small jobs. As time goes on, the resources are less of a consideration. Even 10 years ago, 1 gig of main memory was very rare. Today I wouldn't be surprised if a video card has that. I'm installing machines with 64 gig of main memory now. Huge pipes to disk. Then they add more stuff to it. I'm amazed at what just one IBM blade can to today. Mix virtual machines and it gets very interesting.
Lisp definitely takes getting used to. If you have a list to process it is still a very good choice for it. I haven't written lisp for emacs I bet in over 10 years. I think the best way to learn it is to look at how others did it. That is how I learned and the old emacs code was VERY useful for learning how to do really cool stuff. Keyins that I still use today and people go "WA!!!!" Installation, how it builds itself, things like that. I was going to paste in my old college.emacs stuff... but it looks like I put that out to CD long ago. I don't even know where it is anymore.
TPU??? You don't mean the DEC Text Processing Utility, do you? Never used it. I used either edit or edt for vms. They were cool editors for their time. I certainly would prefer them to vi.
The way I did it was to get a listing of commands in emacs and use emacs to write stuff increasing the capabilities each time. Normal, next split screen, next add a bit of lisp... well this may not be necessary any more, next command lines, compiling and building, and so on. Before you know it, you will have the entire set memorized and wonder why anyone would use anything else. I'm often criticized by some of the people I have shown emacs to because I still use things like vi. They say I should use emacs all the time and nothing else. Like I said, whatever is comfortable to you. Maybe it is just too much power for some people.
I used to like Emacs for simple things, but for anything complex, I used other technology. Emacs' interface is not what I would call particularly "designed". It seems more like it grew and the result is incoherent. It'd be a very good idea for Stallman or whoever is maintaining Emacs these days to rip out the interface and start over.
OMG! What did I ever do to you? That would be like sending me to Iraq. Easy for you to say I suspect. They rip that interface out and they might as well rearrange all of the keys on my keyboard or... something else that is ground shaking totally different. I've been using it for over 20 years. Back in the 1990s they did that with a program called word perfect. Man, people were getting pitchforks and torches ready. We all wanted to storm the castle and burn them alive... but we didn't know where they were so nothing happened. I blame that as the reason MS Word owns that market today. I know I stopped using WP about a month after the change and haven't looked back. There is a method to the madness of emacs and if you know what you are doing it is extremely powerful. New language? No problem, just come up with the lisp to handle it. It is like the swiss army knife of editors. I still use things like vi (just a one blade simple folding knife.. used to be a fixed knife), for quick things. Even editors I have no clue what their name is. However home is in emacs. Use whatever you are comfortable with.
If you really do want a different interface, you can do that too. Emacs was changed with lisp years ago to make it emulate VI. That is how we showed emacs is better. It was so powerful it could emulate vi and therefore became a superset of vi. Like I said, the swiss army knife of editors.
That and no-one in their right mind uses emacs willingly.
Obviously you don't know what emacs can do. Yea, quicky things I still use vi. For anything else, no one in their right mind uses something other than emacs. It is sort of like saying no one in their right mind would fly in a Jet, the jet being like emacs and something like Vi is a bicycle. Instead you prefer to use your bicycle. Yes, it will get you there eventually. Emacs is way faster and better if you know how to use it.
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The way that ended by the way is we kicked the Germans asses as well. 400 boats worth.
It is also a fact that in WWII the Japanese knew they could never take the Continental US because of private ownership of guns. The Russians came to the same conclusion in the 1950s.
I've had good luck using the water trick. Even with equipment that went through a fire and got really wet from the fire department. Some of it looked like hell but it worked. Good luck.
OTOH if you allow others to use your machine, please do periodically wipe it with clorox wipes or one of the many other disinfecting wipes. They also help get that crap off the keys too. Get a screw driver to wedge it down in between and remember keys do pop off as well. Just be firm but gentle. They pop right back on again.
While I haven't done it myself, I understand you can even put them in the dish washer. Just make sure it is dry before plugging it in again. I do know this won't work with the SUN capacitive keyboards. This also won't fix a keyboard that Coke has been spilled into. At least with the keyboards around 20+ years ago.
I'm a Democratic Republic of Maryland citizen and I don't drive on those roads. I've flown over them, however. I can tell it really sucks. We have our own stupidity in Maryland like the HOV-2 rule on Route 50 that is 24 hours.
For nearly everything else they are way outdated and should go away. They exist mostly to bleed the workers to support themselves. They also live very well considering. I know of a union with personnel in the office that have IQs in the low double digits. Since I know they won't read this, they are retards. They collect money, pay themselves very well and do nothing. If something is done, it is done by the national part of the union, not the people there. It is a work fair project for stupid people.
The writers strike is a good example. Fuck them, they should get back to work or they should be replaced. They shouldn't collect 5 cents for every download forever. They are paid well. I wish I could get paid forever for code I wrote 25 years ago. Even stuff I wrote last week. They pay me and that is that. Amazing how people feel they should have entitlements forever. What next, is General Motors going to send me a bill because my 1994 vehicle has over 150,000 miles on it and has passed the expected service time?
Maybe we should send the writers bills for the crap they write. Look at TV lately? Send bills to the music industry for the trash they are putting out. I used to buy around 100 CDs a year. Last year I bought none. I didn't have a desire to buy one single CD. Even if I could have one for free from last year, I wouldn't know what to ask for. I hope 2008 is much better.
Come on guys, I have a big load of vinyl records my wife wants me to unload. So keep saying it is great long enough for me to dump them on Ebay. I've got a lot of the nice ones - Eagles, Beetles, Styx, even some very old records that date to the 1940s. Otherwise these albums will go into the trash. Curious about Puff the Magic Dragon? I have that too. I was way to young to understand what it was about when I got the record...
Still, I've been tempted to switch. I've owned Mac in the past, back when they had the sucky OS underneath of it. I just haven't gotten back to it. Linux and Windows does everything I need it to. Unfortunately I have stuff that only works with windows.
The one thing I have been able to rip from users is certain services. Like an oracle/mysql/postgress server. In the past the users felt they had to maintain it. Now we have one server and they use it as a service. The cluster handles keeping it up. This only works well with RedHat and only if you know what you are doing. Now the end users are relieved. They don't have to worry about the database, server configuration and maintenance that used to dog them with Solaris, Windows, BSD and SUSE boxes. Windows being the biggest PIA because Microsoft does things to you if you update it. Then the other issues the /. crowd is used to.
To me I have a load balancer that is managed by a gang of web servers as a clustered service so it never goes down. The web servers are highly available so I can reboot whenever I want. The database is also highly available. People just upload stuff to a virtual address and a different port and it is just there. It gets updated very quickly when a patch comes out. In short I don't have to even schedule down time anymore unless we have a power outage. Just be sure you have a place to test updates first. If something goes wrong with the clustering software, it can really go wrong. Then it is like having 100 dishes up in the air. Instead of dropping one dish, you drop 100.
The thing I hate about it is trying to explain it to end users and even guys I used to think were technical. They just don't grasp the concept of a gang of servers, virtual servers and virtual databases. They think that if someone gets a form from one machine, it must return the data to that machine. As of the server is like a logon session. Maybe it is that "logon to www.sitename" bullshit they put out there in the news. They should say "visit site www.sitename", leave "logon" out of it entirely. Anyhow, eyes gloss over and it's a bitch to get them back. Sometimes now I just tell them we are moving them off of their old machine and let it go at that. They don't have a need to know. MUCH easier that way. The only PIA is when they ask what the serial number is of "their" machine.
Still, there are some people that just don't want to give anything up. I do agree that this environment requires more cognitive abilities from the IT staff. I don't think you can be average and get by anymore. The IT staff needs to have bright people now. People that can learn. Otherwise they are left behind and it can be brutal.
As for your claim about safety, do you have any doubt that if you take an airliner to fly someplace that you will get to where you are flying to? I fly both commercial and private aircraft. Being blown out of the sky or crashing at the hands of a hijacker isn't even a consideration I bet for anyone in America reading this. I wouldn't even bet on something happening in a given year, unless you want to lose money. You would be better off betting on Lotto. You may think what they are doing is silly, however it is working. Like it or not. I don't like it either, that is why I own my own airplane. It is always there waiting for me, ready to go.
I will say that you do have guts to pull that off. You may make a good CIA or FBI agent one day. You want a thrill, they have it. They need people with guts.
Why don't people tell Microsoft that this is unacceptable? For changing something as simple as a video card you have to call Microsoft? What a PIA. Why do we put up with it? Where is the Government? If Toyota decided that we have to call them to get permission to continue to drive the car if we change a tire, change the oil, etc., what crap. Why should this be any different? If microsoft wants to deal in the real world and use things like patents, they should have to play by the same rules. In the automotive world you could say simply by another make of car. By their own admission they control over 90% of the desktops so they are a monopoly. Treat them like one. Stick it to them.
What we need is a reform in law that prohibits charges like that. I'm sure mail fraud wasn't anywhere near the charges they originally considering. They should be required to drop the charges, admit their mistake and pay his attorney's fees.
It is looking more and more like if you need help, don't call 911. They are here to hurt us. How terrible to do this to him after he just lost his wife. Where is the press, they should have this on the front page to show just how stupid the police department is. Maybe their budget can be adjusted way down next year unless they comply.
I never did understand why companies make stuff for the Mac and not Linux. They used to claim there were more users, clearly that isn't true now. They need to move on from the Mac.
Publish in the newspaper the big stuff and don't get into much of the details except where you have to and then so even an freshman scientist could understand it. In your regular paper on the subject, go into the details well. What seems obvious to you may not be so obvious to the rest of us. More importantly, not obvious to some of my colleagues. Sometimes they get a bad idea and it sticks like glue. It can take years to get rid of that bad idea.
Your last statement worries me, however. If they think you have stolen something, you are required to show them a receipt. That is the whole problem, they just wanted him to anyhow as if it were a right and then the cop wanted to see his ID even though that isn't required. The cop part of this incident is closed, now to go back after the store.
I shop there and I wondered about it too. Apparently as part of the agreement to be a member, they are allowed to do that. At least that is what the manager told me. He didn't have that handy at the time. I plan on pressing him on that later. As I recall, that is supposed to be one of the attractions to a members store. They can keep thieves at bay and therefore don't have to pass that cost along to those of us who don't steal.
Why can't we call it an authorized or approved list? If it is bad, call it an unapproved list.
Darn, another e-mail from Nigeria about another dead relative.... Let me add him to the black list.
I expected to hear someone say "Ha ha" in the background as he is being zapped. Especially in a college crowd.
Lisp definitely takes getting used to. If you have a list to process it is still a very good choice for it. I haven't written lisp for emacs I bet in over 10 years. I think the best way to learn it is to look at how others did it. That is how I learned and the old emacs code was VERY useful for learning how to do really cool stuff. Keyins that I still use today and people go "WA!!!!" Installation, how it builds itself, things like that. I was going to paste in my old college .emacs stuff... but it looks like I put that out to CD long ago. I don't even know where it is anymore.
The way I did it was to get a listing of commands in emacs and use emacs to write stuff increasing the capabilities each time. Normal, next split screen, next add a bit of lisp... well this may not be necessary any more, next command lines, compiling and building, and so on. Before you know it, you will have the entire set memorized and wonder why anyone would use anything else. I'm often criticized by some of the people I have shown emacs to because I still use things like vi. They say I should use emacs all the time and nothing else. Like I said, whatever is comfortable to you. Maybe it is just too much power for some people.
If you really do want a different interface, you can do that too. Emacs was changed with lisp years ago to make it emulate VI. That is how we showed emacs is better. It was so powerful it could emulate vi and therefore became a superset of vi. Like I said, the swiss army knife of editors.