LOL, nah I can do without the tea or a blanket, but I could use a Newcastle. I had a pong machine, and a radio shack/tandy 16k computer as well, but my 1st machine was a heathkit I built in math class as a junior high student. I had a Atari 2600 and sadly I can still muscle memory my way through Adventure, long live the yellow Duck.
Now excuse me while I go play a game of pinball on my vintage Delta Queen, STILL 2 plays (5 balls) for .25.

As for age, it doesn't matter how old you are the phrase old-school makes you sound like a self-absorbed retard. Sadly looking at my comment I have to say the phrase douche bag isn't much better so I'll have to take the heat for that as well.

#1 STOP USING 'old school', you aren't, and you sound like a douche bag.
#2 DICE - Zilch, 10,000, liar's dice...etc
#3 A deck of cards, Canasta, Bridge, Poker, Pinochle.
#4 Risk, Stratego, Masterpiece, Chutes and Ladders for the youngsters, and of course Monotony, aka Monopoly.
#5 Dungeons & Dragons, or more preferably Gurps, but any pen and paper RPG is awesome.

If they promised not to 'steal' your contents and sell them to someone else or use them to market 'partner' services, or actually have and supply a real secure site. You know at some point Google will alter their ToS to allow them to use anything in their never-ending quest to track everything and everyone that ever touches the web in any manner.

each store is a independent computer node and not all are interconnected. That indicates to me that it almost has to be an insider/employee/contractor travelling from store to store implementing the malware ? It seems unlikely that a hacker group could/would have the organization to get around to that many states/stores.

Jenkies and Zoinks, made me laugh and almost snort OJ out my nose, thanks :)

True, my example is a wee bit over-dramatic but I do know numerous people who commute more than 250 miles each way every day here in Calizerknia. The underlying argument of scale still does apply.

I find that I have trouble concentrating on an audio book vs printed/e-book.

I can commute farther in the state of California than the entire nation of Finland. Solutions that are workable and even desirable in certain locations are not logistically feasible in others.
I was very impressed with the public transportation options in GB, but the distances there lend themselves to such.

The worst issue and the real root cause of the rule change is the 'new' association with DERP.
Fark, unlike Slashdot claims ownership of all comments and other postings and has now agreed to allow the Derp group to harvest and share all postings in whatever manner they see fit. Derp http://derp.institute/
It will likely have a measurable cooling effect on the postings at Fark.

It sounds like this transformer had its center tap grounded and was the path to ground on one side of a ground loop as the geomagnetic field moved under pressure from a CME, inducing a common-mode current in the long-distance power line. A gas pipeline in an area of poor ground conductivity in Russia was also destroyed, it is said, resulting in 500 deaths.

One can protect against this phenomenon by use of common-mode breakers and perhaps even overheat breakers. The system will not stay up but nor will it be destroyed. This is a high-current rather than high-voltage phenomenon and thus the various methods used to dissipate lightning currents might not be effective.

In March 1989 much of Quebec lost power for the same thing.

They lost power because the common-mode breakers tripped, not because their system was actually damaged.