The last 3-5 years of Slashdot have been pretty painful. I find the insightful posts to be less and less insightful, and the humorous comments to be more and more predictable. I have sworn I was leaving several times, only to come back out of habit and boredom. It is no longer "News for Nerds, stuff that matters.", it is "Easily explained subsets of news for wannabe nerds, and pointless articles that are rarely interesting and often old". It saddens me, as I learned a lot of technical knowledge on this site.

I generally don't let these types of things affect the CPU I use for work. I have found that in order for a system to be fast, all components much be equally matched. When the CPU is overclocked by a factor of 2, and the memory is not, the amount of time spent waiting on memory will increase significantly. If a designer knew the chip would be run at the higher speed, more cache would generally be included to make up for the disparity between CPU speed and memory speed. A good rule for buying new systems is to upgrade in two halves. I generally buy motherboard, RAM, CPU, and power supply at the same time for compatibility reasons. A year or two later, I will update my storage and video card. I buy a motherboard that supports the fastest memory made, I buy a lot of memory, and I buy a CPU that is at a point on the price to performance curve where spending more doesn't yield much more performance. In a year or two when software starts to actually use this capacity, Ill upgrade storage and video for a bit of a boast. Unfortunately, faster hard drives only make a bit of difference.

We don't know. Many people call Obama a savior, and think he will magically fix problems. He is inheriting a difficult situation. Both sides are so biased into thinking their point of view is correct. I wish people would just say "We don't know how big of a help his programs will be" or "We are optimistically hopeful" He does not have enough experience to show how effective he will be. I am not a fan of many of his programs, but I agree we need to try some new solutions. I think it is important that we, as citizens, remember that this is our government, and therefore we need to write our representatives at all levels often on issues of all types.

Let's be fair here: $400 jacket and $15,000 machine with engines that are a 50 year old design. Hopefully a $100 helmet too. I think it would take only a small number of things to displace Harley in the motorcycle market. 1.) Their competitors do not have the paint quality and style that they do. 2.) Many people buy Harley's because they are American made. All of their serious competitors are foreign made. 3.) Let's stop fighting this crotch rocket vs. cruiser thing. Give me an easy chair with the power of a crotch rocket. A ridiculous amount of chrome wouldn't hurt either. With that said, there are several groups of Harley riders. Some of them just love motorcycles and ride a million miles on theirs. Some are rich doctors and lawyers who want to look cool, and generally sit around at gas stations trying to act natural and failing. The final group of people is the dumb people, who I think you identified. These are the people riding their bikes to bars and trying to act like badasses with tatoos and skulls and crap. Don't base perception of a manufacturer's quality based upon one of the stereotypes of their riders. I ride an '81 Yamaha Maxim XJ550, which is an inline 4 with 4 carbs feeding dual exhaust. It is very simple with no frills, and I have personally rebuilt pretty much everything on the bike. Many people do not understand the appeal of older Japanese bikes, their simplicity, and knowing every detail inside and out is pretty cool. It is one of the few blends of early ricer / cafe racer with some cruiser style. Id love to buy a Harley, I dig their styling, but I just cant seem to bring myself to spend the amount of money they cost. When I pull up somewhere, I know I'll (almost) never see anyone else on my model of bike, and I constantly get asked questions, get pictures taken, get smiles, etc, and that beats trying to look cool on a shiny Harley.

I played that game with my iBook G3. Eventually I got fed up with it and bought an iMac G5 20". I paid $2200 for it. My iMac G5 failed after two years, Apple replaced the logic board + power supply due to bad caps. Another two years later, the exact same failures. Apple washed their hands of it, as it was past the 3 year warranty. They openly acknowledge this is a systemic problem, but have no plans to correct it. I was a very loyal customer, with the iBook G3, the iMac G5, a Macbook, 3 iPods and an AppleTV. Having gotten the run around several times from them, I have vowed to not buy Apple again after this.

And we sell iPods in vending machines. We drive pickup trucks that get 12 MPG. We eat big macs like there is no tomorrow. We have shitty beer that you buy in 30 packs. Go on and criticize, but as long as people will spend their money on it, there is someone out there making money by selling them what they want. When it gets too expensive, this over-consumption will stop. In the meantime, there must be people who like to go to bars with lots of TVs. Personally, I prefer to eat somewhere with a TV when I am by myself instead of hearing people criticize what I consider normal.