But, if being tracked on a card bothers you so much, then simply get some people together and use the same card....

Because over time, especially if enough people do it, - and everyone should - they will make it harder, and harder, and even eventually illegal for you to do this.

And by shopping at places like this you are still saying it is OK for them to tack you and others, even if you have quietly fudged your data a bit.

Also don't be so sure that they will never have the techniques to see through your obfuscation.

"Grocer cards"? "Loyalty cards"? "Discount cards"? Let's call them what they are. TRACKING cards.

Sure, they may not turn the information over to your health insurance provider... yet. But they do use the cards to track purchases in aggregate. That is the entire reason for their existence.

Microsoft usually can see the train coming long before it arrives.

In my reading of its history, Microsoft has spent a good deal of its existence catching up with one train or another. Two notable examples: GUIs and the internet.

That is what it looks like in retrospect, but to put it metaphorically, Microsoft was already on a different train hoping it would take them where THEY wanted to go.

In the case of the Internet, they were on the train headed for making their proprietary MSN service the one true ultimate information service. I think they kind of hoped the Internet would just go away, but that didn't happen. :)

In the case of the GUI, they were already on the train of supporting and enhancing existing DOS software. It wasn't even entirely in their hands as they weren't the ones producing the hardware (How would you do a GUI when you were expected to support IBM monotext video cards?)

And now they are on they are on the tablet craze train, when outside of Apple, that is not where the rest of the world is going.

I'd say never. Why? Because driving on random roads and locations in varying conditions requires *intelligence*.

Most attempts at computer-driven cars so far basically just put cars on an electronic track and throw in a little bit of sensor data and pre-programmed logic.

Yes, 99.9% of driving is just dull "stay between the lines" but it's that .1% of unexpected shit that requires a brain. (not that too many people these days have those)

What happens when some crap falls off a truck and the sensors don't quite pick it up? What happens when someone runs out in the road in front of it? Can it tell the difference between a rectangular dark black flat piece of dangerous metal on the road and dark shadow from an overhead roadway sign? Would a computer even realize you might need to drive off the road in the event of an emergency or special circumstances? There are an almost infinite number of possibilities that you just can't pre-program in or plan for.

Throwing control back to the user probably wouldn't work well in practice, because once a car can drive itself sometimes, people will expect it to drive itself ALL the time.

And when something does go wrong, who will people sue? Right now it is the individual driver of the vehicle. I think car manufacturers would prefer to avoid the risk of being sued and leave responsibility where it is.

So what if someone creates a computer that is really intelligent enough to do that? Well, I'd suggest getting out of its way as it kills all humans. :P

In the modern context of computers "recycling" often means shipping to trash dumps in third world countries where they burn them down for gold.

Anything pre-VLSI can be truly recycled as parts or repaired to a functional condition in the right hands. Or even extended to do new things.

Unfortunately, since software doesn't contain gold or other valuable metals those always seem to wind up in the trash, yet can also be valuable to those operating vintage systems. (database software and manuals can go for quite a bit sometimes)

486 and Pentium 1 based systems frequently sell as retro gaming machines. There were a large number of games made for machines of this class that will not run or run acceptably on newer computers or emulators.

They also make good "tweener" systems for moving data in between newer and even older systems. They often have networking, CD drives, and USB but can handle 360k drives and ISA devices.

If anyone has "vintage" computers or software they want to know more about they should hop over to the Vintage Computing forum http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/ . Just be upfront if your intent is to sell it.

There are lots of people interested in "retro" computing for various reasons. And it is not always nostalgia. Personally I like to lean about early machines and software that I never heard of or used before.

One aspect of it is history. Each machine has it's own story. For example the other day I saw a complete IBM 5150 original IBM PC on craigslist crammed next to all the entries for iPhones and Dells. It even had a huge monitor, printer and the software - some ledger accounting software - with it. You could tell that was not used for games or looking at pictures of cats. It served a real business purpose - the kind that people spent huge sums of money on, and was what helped bring about the personal computing revolution.

That's great, but that button doesn't display in my browser.

And just watch this new design go through mostly as-is just because some really high higher up thinks it looks cool. That's the problem with something owned by a company, can't leave well enough alone and got to screw it up to make it look "new".

Taco had it right back in 1997 when it was his personal blog.

It looks like a mess in SeaMonkey 1.1 and only slightly less so in Opera 10.10. Please keep in mind that there are some OSes that the geek crowd may wish to use but do not have more recent browsers. (BeOS/Haiku and OpenVMS come to mind).

Back when Slashdot worked in HTML 3 browsers, I used to love getting screen shots of different OSes and oddball browsers viewing Slashdot. So we now have to exclusively use Mac, Linux, or Windows on a supported version of Firefox/Chrome/Opera/IE? Guess I should be glad there is still some choice out there, but why make it so much harder?

The RIAA and MPAA message to children:

"To care is not to share"

The message I hope this sends to children is that possessing music or movies, even if legally bought, is potentially dangerous and to be avoided.

Lets move towards a world that is devoid of song and stories, and forget the fact these were a part of the fabric of humanity for thousands of years.

Better yet, imagine where the "PC" would be today if IBM had tried something like this.

Imagine if you you were in the early 80s, bought an IBM PC, and the only devices you could add were from IBM?

People bought IBM PCs and clones because there was so much choice and competition. Instead of having separate serial/fdd/parallel/whatever cards from IBM you could throw in some cheap Tiwanese card that did all of that in one. IBM wouldn't support it, and you might wind up blowing up your motherboard and printer, but that is a risk you could CHOOSE to take.

The fact was, a lot of other vendors back then tried to create lock-in like that - upgrades only available from said vendor. And with really only one exception (Apple), where are they now? Long gone and forgotten to history, that is where!

It is because back in the 1990s Microsoft intermingled parts of their OS and browser and insisted their browser was "integrated" in such a way that it could not be removed.

As everyone can clearly see now, this was a dumb thing to do. They did it purely to dissuade vendors from bundling other competing browsers. But now they are committed to supporting the OS and browser as the same piece of software.

Had they not "integrated" the products, even if they had bundled them, they could have chosen to EOL the browser application version prior to the operating system.

I "use" my dial-up modem as a backup if my main internet connection goes down. It is good enough to check my e-mail and pull up Slashdot just to make sure the world hasn't ended. Last time I needed it was a few years ago during an extended outage. The backup dial up service is provided by my ISP at no extra charge.

Kids these days have their cell phones as "backup", but to me that is just not versatile enough to be the same.

And a nice thing about modems is it is still possible to connect to a remote computer without an ISP in the middle (yea, phone company, but still..)

Since you got me thinking about it, just to test, I am actually posting this from my dial-up!! (And no "no carrier" message so far, lol)

Isn't there an app so simulate arresting him? That sounds like it would have been more appropriate.