Pretty much. No one cares about nuclear weapons since the cold war ended. Well, no one but old, irrelevant people.

The USA should already have started a massive water engineering project on the scale of the interstate highway system. We need to be able to reclaim much more water for regions that get too much in quick bursts and move it around the country as need arises. Clean drinking water is already starting to become one of our top concerns, and it's only going to get worse. We should be planning for it now and investing in our future, but no one is even talking about it.

I Misinterpreted The Rules

Maybe we do have something in common with India, after all!

Mental floss

You mean soon the computer will be a match for me in chess AND kickboxing?!

We could put it back. It'd be easier to build a store and forward network now than it was back in the day. Hell, you can still put your hands on uucp.

Just as I was planning to move to France and buy a house with a roof made entirely of stinky cheese! Guess I'm going to have to rethink my plans!

I usually buy a fairly high end system and use it for years and years before buying a new one, and the hardware still lasts with very few problems until I'm ready to buy a new one.

I did have two video cards cook themselves to death in a MacPro desktop a few years ago. There was a lot of chatter about that particular problem happening with that machine on the forums, but I don't believe Apple ever admitted anything.

My room mate had an awesome problem with one hard drive. Some part of the write hardware had failed on it, so you couldn't write to the disk, but it would still cache writes and report them back so it looked like you had. So you could format it and start adding files and then when you rebooted it, it would have its old files from before you formatted it. Figuring out what was going on there took a while, and a boot to a Linux live CD to attempt to dd over the device with nothing else in the way.

I kind of like the low turn-out. Increases the value of my vote. As an independent voter in a swing state, all the candidates are trying to get me to vote for them. The keep knocking on my door, asking me if I want my lawn mowed or my car washed for free. They love it when I play hard to get, and pretend to be interested when I ask them about freeing Hat Mccoulough, who was improsioend for murdering 23 babies. They nod understandingly when I explain how it was entirely in self defense. Then I go to the polls and vote for that one guy who didn't have the budget to make it 'round to our state.

So you see, I'm totally against this.

Does nothing if all hardware is compromised prior to shipping. Would they be allowed to tell you if it were? Would they even be aware if it was? Has the government ever looked at their code or received a report from them about potential security vulnerabilities as part of a disclosure required for a government contract or security certification? I'm guessing if they did, that report was sent directly to the NSA.

No wonder global warming's been so bad lately!

We need a US Pirate Party. They're kind of a one-platform party, but at least it seems to be a rational platform that you can actually explain to someone. I'm guessing the average Pirate Party candidate is much less likely to be a hypocrite than some of the other parties' candidates.

That was always the advantage of owning your own company, though I've heard the IRS has started cracking down on it in recent years. My first boss owned the company, and the company basically owned all his shit. His house, his cars, his boat, everything. Car needed a repair or oil change? Business expense! Trip to Atlanta? Business expense! IRS came in and audited the shit out of him for two weeks one time. IIRC they found that they owed him $1000. He had a VERY good accountant (Business expense!)

You keep saying "quality". I'm guessing you're not talking about the $20 three-pack you can get down at the local hardware store?

Statistically the man in the middle is most likely to be The Man. If you're talking to The Man, he doesn't even need to be in the middle, but he probably will be anyway. If you're a government employee using one of those, you'll be The Man, talking to The Man while being spied on by The Man! Delicious!

EA fucked up SimCity. Because they're EA, I'd guess. You know how everything King Midas touched turned to gold? Everything EA touches turns to shit. I'm still holding a grudge about them turning UO into a WoW-style grindfest, and that was nearly a couple decades ago. It's kind of nice that they put "EA" at the front of a lot of their video game commercials so I know to just stop looking then.

So yeah, someone came along and did SimCity better than EA. Big surprise. Look for EA to acquire the company and turn it into shit within a couple of years.

By the way, if you work for EA and want the company to get back in my good graces, all they have to do is prove that they understand what makes a game "fun" and actually make one that is. I don't think they're capable, though. That would require "risk", and there are plenty of suckers out there who will gladly drop $60 on a "Madden" rehash. More and more people have been burned by AAA titles are are starting to buy indy games, though. I've sunk more time into a single sub-$20 indy game than I have the last three AAA titles combined. And if I drop $5 or $10 on an indy game, I don't have super high expectations for it and can only be happily surprised.

The big publishers talk about how piracy is destroying the industry, but there are plenty of people willing to pay for good games. The big publishers are just incapable of recognizing what makes a game good and expect consumers to just buy into every $60 turd they drop. It's not pirates killing the AAA industry, it's the publishers. And I for one will be happy to see them go.