I think it's all caused by global warming.

Reminds me of a real estate transaction once where the company handling it said, if you buy title insurance for $500, we'll waive our $500 processing fee.

Our condo building provides "basic" cable as part of the maintenance fee. I'd be all for dropping even that to save a little money. Over the air TV still exists, after all, even if the choices are limited. But given that I don't even watch what I have available now, I doubt that I'd care.

I've been waiting for someone to blame it on global climate change.

A blown power transistor? You whippersnappers don't remember the "good old days" of vaccuum tubes! Seriously, though, monolithic circuitry has lowered costs immensely, at the price of non-fixability. But then, a chip will last much longer than a vaccuum tube.

The trans-Pacific bridge isn't quite done yet, so in Hawai`i we have limited options.

But the real point, I think, is that even if everyone/most users can't fix a bug in open source code (similar to the prior poster, I've also fixed small and medium ones, but waited for fixes on complex stuff), there are people who can, and will, and do. Even though, for the really obscure things, that group may be small, there is no absolute dependence on some group that has access to closed source code. This seems like rather an advantage for open source.

I always find that interesting. The high-end hotels, charging hundreds of dollars per night, also charge outrageous fees such as $20 for 24 hours of internet access, two dollars for a local phone call, etc. The $50 motels give you all of that for no extra charge. The only explanation I can come up with is that the high rollers just expense it all and don't care about the cost.

I am an "old guy" and in "my day" (don't you love these geezer expressions?) the library was all there was. If you lived in a big city the amount of information and knowledge available to you was much greater than if you lived in a small town with a small library. Up to date reference books? Most of them were a decade or more old.

It all had a certain quaint charm to it--- I always loved visiting the library--- but it was unbelievably ineffective. It is so much better today, when incredible amounts of information and knowledge are available to just about anyone, anywhere. And if you want an honest to goodness up to date reference book, Amazon and the Amazon marketplace will have it and can get it to you quickly, and, at least much of the time, affordabley.

(As alluded to in posts above, sometimes too much --- sorting through the chaff is the issue now.)

I'm neither an Apple nor a Microsoft user. There is no need for me to criticize either of them (especially from a standpoint of a non-user with limited knowledge). I just ignore them and go on my own way. I'll leave the complaining to people who actually use their products.

On the other hand, I can see complaints from non-users on the basis of compatibility. I do get tired of people saying "send me a Word document" and the like, but they just get whatever LibreOffice puts out and that will have to do. It generally becomes a non-issue. (I don't deal often with complex formats that use every feature on the menu.)

I left my iPod Shuffle in a pants pocket and put in through a wash and dry cycle. It didn't survive[1]. Am I better off or worse off? I certainly never used iTunes, though; I managed it with a Linux application.

[1] Apple's hardware is pretty solid, but this was a little too much.

I was made to learn cursive back in the 50s and hated every second of it. I was told I was a "bad person" because my cursive wasn't neat enough.

$200 for the 40-year old paper includes membership. Non-members get the paper for $15. Can you please not misrepresent?

Not that I'm defending this. The article should be free, and $15 is way too much (even the 24-hour "rental" for $3 is too much). But it isn't $200.

It also has a certain meaning of "like" in Hawaiian, as in "Makemake au e he`enalu" -- "I like to surf"

Linux will likely always have a miniscule desktop share, but I will still always use it. I do recognize that there will not be a "year of the Linux desktop."