Have fun watching YouTube in Lynx.

I personally make a distinction between "using" and "administering" a machine, and as a user, I tend to run X11 (these days often with a tiling window manager). When I want to perform some administrative tasks, I'll often just run a terminal emulator within that environment. Face it, while great for many things, the command line--especially in its raw, no-X11 form, is pretty limited in many areas from the point of view of a typical user.

Don't get me wrong though; I'll often use wget instead of Firefox to download files, do basic file system operations in a terminal, even play an occasional podcast in mplayer. But really, it is not optimal to use the CLI 100% for everyday use for semi-normal people.

"One choice is to do without."

And *that* is exactly the choice I made. I refuse to pay a monthly bill for a garbage service that acts as a medium for ad delivery more than anything. And an overpriced service at that. Not to mention the shitty programming, I'd rather watch paint dry (and as a bonus, that would be a much cheaper form of entertainment).

I think that's your problem right now. If you're sitting there getting increasingly screwed by AT&T over the cost of their telephone service since around 1997, then why the hell are you still with them? What are you waiting for, the two-decade mark?

Then again, the same could be said of cable TV subscribers. They've been getting reamed for decades, they know they're getting fucked, but they keep bending over more and more every time the company raises their already ridiculous rates. I never even hear many complaints anymore, people are just so damn used to the prices going up. But they never tell the cable companies to go fuck themselves and take their business elsewhere, to an entertainment provider that has more fair pricing and service. So the cycle continues... indefinitely.

Doubt it. It's more likely that they believe in a "let's make something that does every fucking thing you can imagine, but do none of it well" in a similar way as Sony, which they've proven with the Xbox 360, and especially made obvious with its dashboard replacement. That device? The cell phone, with their own OS on it. They didn't buy Nokia for nothing...

By... removing it? That's an improvement? If it's poor code, why not just, you know... rewrite or improve it, instead of gutting it completely? Oh yeah, because only the clueless matter to Mozilla anymore.

Meanwhile, I despise the lack of the ability to use small icons any more. It allowed me to see more of the page, since the beginning of Firefox's existance. And now, Mozilla seems to feel the need that smaller icons and many other customization features are unnecessary, and as a result I can't fucking do shit with this atrocious release. Just when you think Firefox can't possibly get any worse, that Mozilla's mastered the art of turning their browser to shit, they impress yet again with feature removal after feature removal, all while still saying, "go find an add-on!" Seriously, there needs to be a Mozilla equivalent to RTFM; how about go "FAFE" (Find A Fucking Extension)?

No amount of patches will fix XP... it is broken to the core.

And that is the point. Is this really the final time? Based on the fact that they acted as wimps who, after all these years *still* can't keep their word on XP's EOL and, in fact, shat all over what "end-of-life" is even supposed to mean, I refuse to believe that this will be the "last" update. Yet, it needs to be (or better yet, it should never have happened). They originally pulled off something similar, bringing XP back from the virtual grave *three* Windows versions ago for OEMs, during the time of the dud that was Vista and the Linux-based netbook's rise in popularity.

And I would say that XP is beyond aging--it was "aging" years ago. At this point it is an old, rotten, foul-smelling binary corpse decomposing, and has been for quite a while now.

I used Virgin Mobile originally; no contracts there. But I was paying for "Unlimited" everything-I-don't-need (text and data) and getting barely any real talk minutes (hey, ain't that the whole god damn point of a phone in the first place?) unless I started blowing 50-60 bucks a month on the service. That was unacceptable, so in my quest to find a) a phone that doesn't suck (too bad) and b) a service that will screw me the least (face it, they all do, in some way) while c) being cheap, I settled on Zact. You get what you pay for, literally, and you get no excessive garbage (like unlimited data, when you're already paying for home Internet) that you don't want. Contract? Nah, if I want to, I could buy a Republic Wireless Moto X, move my number to them, and switch to their service tomorrow. Fuck contracts.

I currently run openSUSE for its relatively up-to-date programs, working wireless drivers (especially for my previous system with a POS Broadcom chip), etc. I now have a system with slightly more Linux-friendly drivers (Intel wireless), I just have to wait for the major distros to support it because it's so new (Debian Testing supposedly does, I just don't want to run Testing...). I might then switch to another distro, but I'm staying with Linux. I primarily use the i3 window manager, except on occasion when I want to play a game on Steam (which doesn't seem to get along too well with i3, so I temporarily switch to KDE).

Ironically, after "upgrading" from the crap that is Windows 8 that the laptop came with to Windows 8.1, the damn operating system can't even boot half the time without locking up. Not that big of a deal, since I rarely need it... but god damn, does it get annoying when I would like to reboot into it for whatever reason. Even worse is when I spend 5 reboots and 15 minutes just to spend 2 or 3 minutes actually doing something in the OS.

All I got out of that was, "blah blah blah, been using it for a decade, don't want to change." Tough. Maybe I should mention that I was using Windows since Windows 95 (first computer: 1997), so when I finally pulled the plug in 2006 it was not a light move. I had dozens of programs that I was so used to I felt almost as if I couldn't function without them. The landscape was slightly different back then, but yet eerily similar to what people are dealing with these days... just replace a couple OS names and the stories could probably be interchanged. The only difference is, the Linux world is lightyears away from even where it was when I first used it. NTFS-3G? Hah, highly experimental. X11? It was only beginning to truly get simplified. Now it's mostly a cakewalk, I really don't see much room for excuse. Either put up with Microsoft's shit, or get up and do something about it. It's as simple as that.

Really. XP's future was looking a bit bleak about 8-10 years ago, why the fuck would anyone want put up with the torture this long... and then *STILL* (!) not want to let it go even at the official end of its life? Which, I might as well add, was continually put off by Microsoft due to their own failures (Vista) and the unexpected success of their competition (Linux) in markets that they themselves weren't quite a part of. Now it's such a crusty old turd, you have to be a masochist to keep wanting to use it. If that's the case... have at it. Cut away.

I will never know why people have such a reliance on such an antiquated operating system, but then, I don't really care, because I jumped ship back in 2006 for Linux, just in time for the V-Bomb. It's been much better ever since. The simple solution is to get a new, "modern" computer; or if you're cheap, switch to a different operating system. It's not rocket science.

Meh... I don't think that list does each variety justice. If you consider the garbage they bred the heat out of specifically to sell off to the masses as "jalapeno" peppers, then yeah... it's not much hotter than a banana pepper, so your positioning of it right after the bell pepper is accurate. However... if you consider some of the untamed, real deal, original varieties, the heat is surprising. I've had some Jalapeno M peppers that blew the shit out of anything labeled "Serrano" or even "Cayenne" that I tried.

The hotter the better, and preferably of the C. chinense species, of practically any color (except unripe/green). There are some decent C. baccatum varieties though and Rocotos are pretty good and unique. Not a fan of Tabasco peppers other than ground into powder, and most C. annuum varieties are for pussies. The Bhut Jolokia, Fatalli, Trinidad Scorpion and 7 Pod are all pretty damn good superhots.

...

Exactly. For, like, ever, in fact. I have actually been a Firefox user since before it was even *called* Firefox, and I heavily recommended it to everyone I knew for years starting sometime around its official 1.0 release. Anyone remember Phoenix? Any time there was a virus conversation, one of the key things I always said (aside from basic common sense) was DO NOT USE IE... use, you guessed it, Firefox. Those people listened to what I said, and in turn told people *they* knew to do the same thing. Most of the people I know have, as a direct result, been users of Firefox.

Now, Mozilla seems like it doesn't even want Firefox to be Firefox anymore; they want it to be Chrome. So why should a user who has been there praising the browser from the beginning, who used it in large part *for* those design choices that made Firefox what it was, have to shut up and take it up the ass while Mozilla competes with Google on their race to get the first Chrome version 100 out the door?

In recent years, I have been more hesitant to recommend Firefox. Hell, Mozilla wouldn't even be where they are today if it wasn't for people like me. And now, I'm considering abandoning it. I think I have the right to show my dissatisfaction with Mozilla, which started happening little by little with the 3 series, and then went into overdrive starting with 4.0.