I believe it's pronounced "azz-WEE-pay."

\begin{snark}

If we're unable to reproduce and dying off from testicular cancer, there will be less pressure on the food supply that will be dwindling as the pesticides kill off the bee population and the plant pollenation function they perform. The humans that are left can do that pollenation by hand when the bees are all gone.

See... it's all good!

\end{snark}

I can recall when an entire Linux -- not "pared down" -- ran in "as little as" 16MB. (No X Windows; server only.) It was the Anaconda installer that forced me to upgrade systems to 32MB. (At least temporarily; after getting Linux installed I could pull out that extra memory.) Of course, this was a "few" years ago. Nowadays, I have more memory than that in my old Laserjet. What's limiting these devices to have only 32MB? Power?

That's actually a rather good analogy because in the early days of automobiling, you had to know how to fix and maintain a car in order to operate one, either for work or for pleasure. And they were very simple machines that had a rather low barrier to learning how to maintain.

Then later on, as cars got more complex, it became a pleasure to work on them, partly because overcoming the growing barrier was itself rewarding, and it came with a social cache.

Gradually, though, we've come to the point where even the most technically gifted people have to take their car to a mechanic for anything but basic maintenance, and the barrier to being a mechanic is now so high that few people do it as a hobby.

For the automobile, this process took over a century. Personal computers and programming have progressed this entire gamut since I first sat down at a computer in 1977. (A DEC printer terminal in a high school janitor closet, connected to the city hall mainframe. The account I had access to had a program called STARTREK.BAS. You can guess the rest... and remember, it was a printer terminal.)

Sounds like the GP's assessment was rather accurate then. Both the part you emphasized and the final modifying clause.

Dammit, man. I was eating lunch.

[puts away carnitas and rice bowl]

Try taking that with you to the bank when you try applying for a loan after your credit has been trashed by an identity thief. See how far along the loan approval process that letter gets you.

WTF are you supposed to do with a damned letter? Feel all warm and fuzzy that they care?

``...they might wonder if the sheet is upright or upside down.''

Um... surely you're thinking of APL.

Yeah... Let's make "security through obscurity" the law of the land.

That'll help so much.

Effin' idiots.

When's the last time it was every six months?

Hint: It was probably sometime back when the release was two CDs, and not 6 CDs and 2 double-sided DVDs.

...I have a key to an old Sun 6-drive desktop disk enclosure on my keychain though I'm not sure why. (I do still use two of those boxes but I haven't needed to get inside them for a few years.) It just seems like I won't lose it if I keep it with the rest of my keys.

I still use a "solar" powered calculator, although most of the time the light comes from an electric lamp.

Yes, I have several smartphone calculator apps. But only physical keys are suitable for fast, repeated, accurate calculations.

The SEC is going after them for things they did to the investment market.

Exactly. The SEC couldn't care less about the students. But if enough investors make sufficient noise, they act. Next we'll hear how ITT was an isolated example.

There's plenty more scam schools where ITT came from.