I learned quite a bit about the Amiga 2000 from this article, but what on earth was going on with the writing? Using apostrophes with plurals, needlessly enclosing terms in double quotes, random capital letters; it was a mess. It was very hard to read because of this craziness.

She seems to be telling us that when technology finally becomes useful enough to be mainstream, it's boring. OK, fine, I can accept that, somewhat. But the point of developing something new and "exciting" is so that someday it will be mundane and boring. And when Google spends all their time on the new, that makes more room for others to innovate with the "old".

I find most self-proclaimed "professional audiophiles" will suck up any cable techno-speak a company will throw at them. Lamp cord will make perfectly fine speaker wire. Also, most "professional audiophiles" are unwilling to perform blind or double-blind listening tests.

This is a problematic piece because it confuses an extended warranty and accident protection/insurance. Most extended warranties do not include accident protection, and that option tends to cost extra and require the base extended warranty, which is the problematic part. If FourSquare wants to offer cheaper, better extended warranties paired with accident protection, more power to them, but that's a very different thing than an extended warranty alone.

Trying to fight globalization on the whole is ineffective, but fighting the demand for more H1B visas with factual data isn't. Recent studies show that companies have been lying about their inability to find domestic talent AND about how much they pay their H1B visa employees. The long and short of it is, the experts exist within the US but the companies want to save money on H1B visas, so they lie to congress, all the while, claiming we need more tech-savvy Americans. When we produce the appropriately educated Americans, the companies won't hire them because they are too expensive compared to their H1B shortcut. All this fight is doing is creating over-educated Americans who will have lots of education debt and no jobs.

This may indeed be valid, but I rarely run anything right out of the box : )

I found that getting on to a year my entire XP system would operate a lot more slowly. Everything took longer, and I was a lot more likely to run into error. I did a lot of program installation/uninstallation. That, and XP's constant update cycle actually caused it to bog down. I've a feeling Microsoft's update install process for XP left a lot of cruft lying around.

I found that doing a data backup, clean reinstall, installing the latest service pack and round of updates, and then installing all the latest version of my regular programs resulted in a system that took up a lot less disk space and ran smoothly and quickly again like it was almost new.

Agree. I was very negative on Vista when it came out based on what I read. Then, when I went to build a desktop, it was the only current MS OS available for me to put on it, so I did. And it turns out that after a tweaked it a bit it's been a breeze to deal with (for the most part - there's always some random MS behavior that pisses me off). I have Windows 7 on my laptop and, frankly, I don't find Win7 to be significantly better from the perspective of regular, normal interactions. Vista had some growing pains, but it mostly sorted those out later in its market life.

Though I enjoy Windows 7 on my laptop, I find that Vista is actually decent on my desktop. Certainly better than I expected. I didn't pick up Vista until later in the life cycle, and by then they had sorted out some of the most problematic bits. I haven't had to reinstall Windows for almost 3 years, which is a record for me. As much as I liked XP, there was no getting around doing a system nuke every 12 - 18 months at my usage patterns. Reinstalls were more frequent even than that for OSes earlier than WinXP, including the Classic MacOS. Say what you will about pre-OSX MacOS, it really wasn't any less stable than the competition. I didn't have to reinstall any more frequently than the folks running Win95 and Win98.

At least it slows him down. He has to find and grab an accepted MAC, and you'll know he's trying to connect as soon as you have a collision on the DHCP.

Why even do that? Simply set up a list of accepted MAC addresses and give them assigned IPs. Don't provide any service to a MAC address not matching known. Unfortunately, that only stops your router/AP from handing out IPs. They can still eavesdrop and work on listening in on traffic.

So, the real lesson here is not to accept and technological gifts from a security guru. Gee, thanks!

You are right. The executives giving themselves massive raises as the company's finances circled the drain (some amidst the bankruptcy filing) was indeed a case of short-sighted people thinking they deserved something the company couldn't afford.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/16/gregory-rayburn-raise_n_2147043.html
With corrections to some of the incorrect, inflated numbers floating around Facebook.

Hostess blames the unions, but if you look at the company's management history and how many times they've been in bankruptcy there's clearly a set of problems that runs far deeper than the unions. The union blame game is mostly a smoke screen. I can almost guarantee that, if not the Hostess brand, the individual brands like Twinkie and Ding Dong will rise again with new corporate masters and little else will change.

What "same thing"? That there are certain things that are inherent to the human condition? Sure, but what we surround ourselves with does affect that baseline. I prefer scientific studies to "history books" when it comes to analyzing human behavior in the present.