That would be my point.

that they reached space.

Sending a balloon to 80,000 ft is not "into space". So far, no one has actually managed to get a weather balloon to exit the atmosphere. Actually doing so would be much, much more impressive than "kids stuck camera, gps logger, and random object in a styrofoam box and brought back pretty pictures".

You know there are large sections of this country where you do not have to register your firearms, right? And large areas where there is no legal obligation to report them lost or stolen, or sold, for that matter.

The whole country doesn't operate like Law & Order's version of New York.

Well, that would certainly put and end to global warming.

For quick hack-it-together devices, I'd rather have a cheap linux computer with some gpio pins that I can access via something like /dev/port0 than an arduino. I'm not sure that this Raspberry Pi is the perfect solution to that, but it's closer to what I want than a arduino is, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to deal with than hacking something together out of an old laptop or mini-itx board.

If I'm going to go back to playing with microcontrollers, I'm going to be working from a bare chip, custom boards, and assembly language, because to me, that was fun.

Arduinos have their place. This thing has its place. There might be some overlap, but there's a lot of situations where you'd pick one over the other. Choice is good, right?

My first thought was "higher", "lower", "lower", "higher", etc.

Really, who cares?

These days, even small banks have internet banking. I'm far from rich, but I have no problem not having a "local" branch. My bank is nearly 300 miles away from me, has been for years, and has not been an issue, even when purchasing a house. Internet banking and old-school fax machines solve any need to actually set foot in a bank.

As for minimum balances and fees.....again, small banks often don't have those. Get away from the "big" national banks and one can avoid the nonsense.

That's not even considering the idea of small credit unions -- I've never dealt with them, so I can't claim to know anything about them or their practices.

Home page of my personal web space is well under 1k. "This space intentionally left blank."

Yeah, that would be why I specified a version of Winamp. XMMS was decent the last time I could be bothered to use linux on the desktop. Now the desktop is either windows (games) or osx (most everything else) depending on what i'm working on, and the linux machines are remote command line shells.

I don't care about finding lyrics, or album artwork, or "visualizations" or anything else. I just want a music player to play music.

I'm not worried about remote code execution through mp3s since the vast majority of the music I've got is stuff I've ripped from my cd collection. Everything else came from a source I trust (Amazon's store).

This. There's still a hell of a lot to be said for a simple, minimal mp3 player. I'll keep using 2.9.5 as long as it still runs.

You haven't seen what they can charge for updates.

Do you really think people buy 20+ books per order?

Yes. I do, two or three times per year, and have for the last 6 years or so, and a 20+ book order is a hell of a lot more than $25.

I also don't buy ebooks, mostly because the books I want to read aren't available in ebook form.