From your 88 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 8,594 items, clicked 518 items, starred 1 items, and emailed 0 items.
Since March 28, 2012 you have read a total of 92,192 items.

How about this: sometimes we actually **want** to feel like kids again and watch guys in rubber costumes chase a guy wearing a bow tie until he turns around, spouts off some silly time-wimey BS in a near-unintelligible British accent, waves a Harry Potter wand with a green crystal on the end, and saves the day. And we want to be able to watch that with our kids, too. Sometimes we want to escape the pressures of our boring lives and imagine hopping into a big blue box, pulling a few levers and twisting a few dials and going on adventures with a crazy person from the future.

When I feel like it, I pull out a good, thought-provoking novel, and when I don't, I pull out some "brain-candy" and just get lost. It's that simple.

I enjoy a good hard-SF novel as much as the rest of us here, but seriously, if you ever A) expected Doctor Who to be anything close to hard SF or B) ever expected *any* show of TV to be anything close to hard SF then you are on crack. Hell, the only channel to ever focus on even mildly good SciFi is now called SyFy and it has a 2 hour block of wrestling on every night.

As a geek, I was intrigued at the programming behind his response tree, but he is clearly a robot, albeit a very well-programmed one.

I do the exact same thing. A "billpay" checking account where my direct deposit goes, a "spending" checking account with a debit card, and a savings account. I rarely keep more than $20 in the spending account and when I buy something I transfer what I need using the bank app on my phone.

Hear, hear!! How about anyone under 2^10 since we're all geeks here??

I like being in the "less than 2^10 club". ;-)

Me, too. Perhaps we should get more of a discount the lower our ID is. ;-)

But we are not freeloaders, we are people who have paid (A LOT, at the time) for a service and we expect Joyent to continue to uphold the spirit of that agreement. The 3 domains that I host on my server at Joyent are a personal website that hasn't been updated in years, my band's website, and a website for a friend of mine where he can upload his music for people to listen to. All in all I get a few hundred page views a month. Are you telling me that my little sites are really costing Joyent enough money to justify the bad PR that this will earn them? We were the early adopters and the "investors" in Textdrive. Textdrive might not have existed if it weren't for the $500 chunks of money that they got at just the right time back in 2005 and 2006, so where is the reciprocity???

But they chose to continue to honor the Mixed Grill offer when they morphed from TextDrive to Joyent. Not knowing what went on in the board room during the TextDrive->Joyent migration, I really couldn't say that "they" don't exist any more, but it seems to me that they do. They even worked a deal with the group that bought the rights to their Strongspace technology to continue the lifetime Strongspace plans after that part of the company had been spun off. So far they have been very accepting of their Mixed Grill users. To me this shows intent to honor the agreements.

This is my response, I just sent this back to the CEO.

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I am understandably upset by this particular turn of events, since the terms that I signed up for stated that this service would be available for "as long as we exist" http://web.archive.org/web/20060203030930/http://www.textdrive.com/mixedgrill. That's pretty cut and dried as far as I'm concerned.

I'm not usually someone to make waves, but is my single little shared server with 2-3 domains pointed to it (that receive a few hundred hits a month) really impacting your bottom line enough to justify breaching the deal that we agreed to way back in the beginning?? If anything it costs you significantly less to maintain that service for my one account now than it did in 2006.

The goodwill that offers like the Mixed Grill and your excellent service and customer support have earned you have been reciprocated by me (and other Mixed Grill customers) over the years in the glowing reviews that we have given you, increasing your customer base. If the other Mixed Grill users have been anything like me, they have recommended you to friends, coworkers, and business associates. They have probably enjoyed watching your company become the leading company to use Solaris and OpenSolaris technologies and they have probably been in awe of your advances with ZFS (as Strongspace), zones (with Shared Accelerators and now SmartOS), and they have been your biggest fans. I will bet that you have made a lot more money off of the Mixed Grill users than we have cost you. If the experience of Oracle with OpenSolaris has taught you anything, keeping the goodwill of your long-term fans and supporters is the most important resource that you have. Oracle learned the hard way that alienating your die-hard fans for short-term profit will probably hurt you in the long run.

I urge you to rethink this decision, and approach the original Mixed Grill customers as fans and supporters, and let us keep our little Shared Accelerators, or just migrate us to SmartOS instances without charge and let us continue to enjoy the great service that you are known for, all under the spirit of the original agreement.

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An overwhelmingly large portion (83.3% according to 2007 study reported on here: http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2012-02-14/home-schools-secular/53095020/1 ) of the home-schooling crowd does it due to religious reasons, so I don't think it is a stretch to assume that this was the reason in this case.

I don't appreciate the condescending "sheeple" comment, by the way.

Public schooling did actually do me good. I was a bright child who read a couple of grades above level in elementary school and took AP classes in high school. I got A's without having to work too hard at it while still being challenged intellectually. I learn quickly. I am also lucky enough to have a mother (single mother at that!) who raised me well and encouraged me to read and learn on my own, as well as to think for myself.

Doesn't shock me at all, since the statement "half of all children that attend school perform below average" is THE DEFINITION OF AVERAGE. I'll even bet you that the other half of all school children perform above average. Ever seen a bell curve??

I agree with the GP, if you're school sucks in your area, do something about it! Saying "our nation's schools are horrible, let's all homeschool or send everyone to private schools" only moves the problem around and shits on all of the good work that public school teachers have been doing for decades (my mother retired from teaching your kids after 40 years). There are definitely real problems in public education, but scrapping the system completely and starting over is not a solution, nor is bleeding it dry financially and "standardized testing" our kids into little Scantron-bubbling morons.

2006 called, and it's pissed that MS stole all those features from ZFS....