The difference between 'human' and 'person'

I was asked a question in another entry about books that might have influenced my development, and that reminded me of an insight that I had some time back about my own thinking about the world.

I think that growing up reading fantasy and science fiction helped me to something important that I think most people in our culture don't understand: "human" and "person" are not synonyms. ( Read more... )

Oh my GOD this thing is slow

I bought my current home computer about 2.5 years ago, and at the time, I wasn't doing much at home except surfing the Internet, so I bought a low-end machine. It's a 600 MHz Celeron, with 128MB RAM.

Today, I installed the Java SDK and Eclipse, the platform I'm using right now at work. I wrote a very simple test program, and went to run it. It took at least a minute for the program to come up on the screen -- where it would have taken no more than 2 seconds on my work machine. Needless to say, it was unusable.

I've been feeling the pain of my too-slow machine every time I try to do anything with the pictures I've been taking, but today's experience is going to push me harder in the direction of buying a new machine.