On that note, I'm moving to a teletype hooked up to a Unix server somewhere running Lynx...

Luckily for me, my old manual typewriter costs only as much as the ink and paper I put in it. :)

I have about 400 8-tracks at home, most of which probably sound just as good as the day they were taken out of the shrink wrap. My oldest is probably 40 or close to it (that's around when they superseded 4-tracks, which I also have a few of). With a little care and preliminary maintenance (if you've just bought one from a thrift store or whatnot), 8-tracks will not only play today, but remain playable for years to come. 8-tracks, like VHS, are big both in cartridge and tape; have mechanisms (internal in 8-tracks, external in VHS) that would seem to get finicky over the years; but are respectively proven and poised for longevity. CDs and DVDs might rot or get scratched and the digital data is irrecoverably gone, but analog tape can be spliced, have its playback tweaked to give the highest fidelity possible, and almost always still be *somewhat* playable, period. I'm just asking to be flamebait, but this old analog equipment is made to last, even though 8-tracks were implicitly conceived as a true throwaway format. A few of us cultists will be listening to our 8-tracks, records, and cassettes, and watching VHS movies, for years to come. :)

What kind of stuff do you use it for? Just novelty poking around, or something practical? I must admit, I only bring up my O2 to play the Tron light-cycle demo game. :P

My SGI O2 has you beat. :)

Not to nitpick, but Commodore, TI, Tandy-RadioShack, and hundreds of other, less-recognized companies helped start the very same bandwagon that Apple claimed to be leading with the II. Let's not forget that the virtually unchanged Commodore 64 sold 30 million. While the iPod dominates the portable digital media-player market, the Apple II back in the day was an expensive niche in an already-existing market. Kind of like the Macintosh today...hm...

Researchers could not be reached for further comments regarding the possibility of a zombie outbreak.

I think a direct mind-picture system would constitute a new artistic medium, with it's own advantages and drawbacks. ...

Things would get most interesting when we learn to directly pipe these experiences into another person's mind...

Once again, technology enhances the social porn-viewing experience! :D

I'd support Scheme. It's what they taught for our Intro to Programming class in high school, coupled with the How to Design Programs book. The mass of parentheses are intimidating and annoying at first, but I wound up appreciating how clear they could make "what belongs to what?" And there are all sorts of teachpacks for kids to generate drawings (and thus games).

I have three words for you: "It's a trap!"

Can't remember who precisely did the research, but I was watching an old Nova documentary yesterday about global dimming, and apparently by measuring the difference between daily highs and lows over the days surrounding 9/11, the days immediately after had a significantly smaller temperature range than the others. This was supposed to be a good indicator there was an effect on the weather, because the range trends usually change gradually. Interesting stuff.

Spam still happens, spam blasters can generate random likely-to-exist addresses and ship out all the e-mail they want in the hopes they'll hit a few that really do exist.

For example, andrew@aol.com, adam@aol.com, aardvark@aol.com...

Yeah, fiber is costly now, but if it's used en masse, it'll almost certainly be cheaper, besides providing an incentive for developing new and less-expensive ways to produce and implement it. In the meantime, why not either have the government subsidize the fiber rollout, or have them threaten to cut all the subsidies they've been providing to telcos who have done nothing but halt buildout, raise prices, and meter/shape bandwidth?

Excuse me, you make a valid point that marriage has generally been used to promote procreation, but I must take issue with your view that:

"Gays contribute nothing to the marriage equation. They are simply looking for a free ride - whatever that means. Likely that means insurance discounts, so on and so on."

One of the reasons that gay activists are pushing for legal recognization akin to heterosexual marriage is that in many places, you have to be related or married to a person to get visitation rights should your significant other be in prison, the hospital, etc. It can be fairly irksome to discover that, while you and your partner have been together for 20 years without legal recognization of that fact, you aren't allowed to visit him or her when ill because you aren't technically his or her spouse. Furthermore, the "it's not legal, it doesn't fly" attitude can also extend to deciding inheritances, if the deceased's will isn't up to par.

Granted, many will doubtless enjoy reaping the advantages of joint-filing taxes, health insurance benefits, and the like, but there's no excuse to make a bad situation worse by refusing your partner the right to see you in a time of need. Whether visitation laws themselves are the problem or not, and whatever the purpose of marriage may be, this is an obvious area of the current legal disparity between heterosexual and homosexual partnerships.

I actually installed IE 3.03 on my 386 box just because I couldn't figure out how to get TCP/IP installed and configured any other way. It's a real kick trying to find "mainstream" sites that are still compatible with it -- quite a short list. Google, thankfully, is one of them.