Only violent criminals make real crimes then? You don't think monetary damage do not affect people's lives in general? I'm glad to hear you don't concern yourself over monetary necessities, but I believe most people do. I appreciate that you consider rapists and murderers worse criminals than embezzlers and fraudsters, and I imagine most people do. Yet, the gravity of their crimes comes from the fact that they affect millions of peoples lives. Most of the victims probably would get on with their lives, albeit with worse qualities of lives. Some of them even might scoff at their losses and like to throw blanket statements while acting superior to people around. Still, there will be few that would be devastated and pillaged because their livelihood would had been destroyed. Sure, you can view them as unworthy if you like, but please do a service for all of us and take time to explain the fleeting nature of materialism to them in person. Perhaps you can enlighten them before their desperation drives them to suicide or even violent crimes.

I think it still is. It had all the functions one would ever need for most students and more, it's compact, and it's intuitive in use(once you understand RPN). Why do you even need a graphing calculator for high school math or even underclass math courses?

Medfield was likely just an exercise of sort for Intel. I'm guessing they're going for a big splash with Airmont in 2014 since they're finally pulling up the Atom die size schedule along with the Core line. I'm not sure what Silvermont is going to be. If paired with Haswell graphics, Intel might be able to compete with ARM seriously, but I'm guessing they''re going to concentrate on Airmont design to create something that has a definite edge over ARM. Apple might be a wild card partner with Intel. They seem to have a cozy enough relation already, and Apple probably want to find a way to end their relation with Samsung somehow.

if I get to have health along with it of course. I don't know if my mind would be capable of processing infinite time span, but I'd rather see what's going to happen tomorrow and live it even if I have to forget the past. Immortality would be a selfish and ultimately a dead-end for for the specie as a whole since never reducing population obviously isn't sustainable. Still, even if I have to become a last remaining human in the universe, I would still choose immortality if it's an option. I just want to know.

I always find it surprising that whenever the subject of backup comes up here, there're always only a one or two posts that suggest tapes only to be ignored. In the present day, tapes are still the best archival backup method readily available. Sure, the entry cost is rather high, but I think it would be worth it in your case since your data pool is only getting larger. Keeping backup copies on HDDs are convenient, but I would keep a minimum of 4 copies, at least a pair in 2 different sites since HDDs always have a chance of failure when powered. Cloud is only an option if you have no issues with bandwidth. Even without bandwidth issue, I still don't feel completely comfortable subjecting my data to risks entirely out of my control. Here's what I do personally. All my archival data is backed up on LTO Worm tapes, and I have most of those data on RAID-z2 for availability. Every online data is backed up incrementally daily on a separate array, and I do weekly full backup on tapes on monthly rotation along with month full backup on yearly rotation. Everything that needs permanent storage goes to WORM. While I won't claim my backup strategy is the best for everyone, but I go to bed each night satisfied with the level of safety with my data personally.

Well, AOL was merely the beginning of what was probably inevitable any way. Besides, Usenet(where AOL crowd's presence were really felt) is only a small part of the internet, and I'd say the internet is overall more useful place now because of its universal access. That said, I do miss the old Usenet. There just isn't anything quite like it, and I don't think there can ever be anything like it again. /. probably comes closest but not quite.

I don't disagree that solitary confinement would suck, but for for me, it'd be because of the confinement part. Some people just does not have a problem with boredom part. Growing up as an only child, I have never really felt boredom much less any sense of loneliness. I'm not some weird anti social shut in either. I've always had friends and now a wife with a child. I don't think my social skill is terribly different from most people. I just never had a need to rely on it.

The main advantage for me is the inherent stability of tape medium over hard disks especially as an archival medium. Hard drives always have a chance for failure whenever you plug them in. Tapes are safer in that regard. It's not a significant advantage for home users, but I find it a nice luxury to have duplicate data both in always available medium (RAID6) and in archival medium (LTO3).

If you buy used at least. I bought a 16 tape LTO3 library and 20 LTO 3 tapes for around $500 used on ebay about a year ago. It might be even cheaper now. And if you don't mind changing tapes every hour or so, LTO3 stand alone drive can be had for $200. Also, if you're only going to deal with only 1TB worth of data for a while, LTO2 is more than enough, and a used LTO2 autoloader can be had for under $200. Hard drives are never a proper backup solution. The data can be lost(without paying a few thousands for recovery at least) any time you plug in the hard drive. The tape solution is just so much more stable as a data storage platform, I'd say you look into getting used LTO2 autoloader at least. They really shouldn't cost more than a couple of hard drives.

I imagine solar storm of similar magnitudes as the on in 1859 would be recorded in history around the world as it would be a visibly noticeable event around the globe. Has solar storm of similar magnitude ever been noted in the history past couple thousand years, i.e. record of observable Aurorae near equator, bright night skys, etc? Just being curious.

Actually, these are exactly the type of products that typify AMD's struggle against Intel. Something like i3-2100 is simply much more powerful AND draws less power. Of course, i3+cheap mobo cost about $50 more, and more SATA III ports and GPU performance are nice. The problem is that for general users, Intel platform just makes more sense, and AMD is forced to cater to niche markets. In fact, Sandy Bridges are so good with power draw, I recently upgraded one of my home servers from Athlon II x2 to Xeon e3-1240, and I actually almost halved the idle power draw from around 40W to 22W. The most was more than double, but it was worth it for me with the added capability and the power saving. AMD is going to have to tread very carefully in setting up their CPU/APU road map. HD4000 graphics on Ivy bridge and whatever Intel would put in Haswell can make AMD's niche even smaller.

I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying generally, but Amtrak's problem is completely different from that of USPS. Amtrak has been at least as expensive as air flight for a sometime, and it hadn't provided much of a benefit to general public, much less the poor population, for a while now. Amtrak needs a sizable influx of capital to ever hope to compete with other transportation services, and it likely won't get it as a government owned entity. I really do wish there could be a viable passenger rail system in US, but unless something like Union Pacific buys out Amtrak, I doubt it happens.

I'm guessing you're just being sarcastic as I find sifting through reviews on Amazon (whom I think has one of the better customer review system) annoying enough. I do wonder if these spam reviewers target websites in other major languages also. I mean it's fairly easy to find someone to write English semi-competently pretty much any where in the world. I'm not sure if that's true for even for a language such as Spanish.

Up to mid to late 90's, most of the internet users were mostly confined to members of academia, and the language used in internet forums were mostly kept as a particular vernacular used for net separate from their written or spoken language. Now, the internet use is ubiquitous, and I do believe there definitely is a blurring of written and spoken language especially for the younger population. Obviously, it's only natural for a language to change especially in the face of entirely new medium of communication that's used by the population at large, and I do find it fairly interesting to see the new form of written language developing from verbal language. As a personal rant, I find it a bit annoying that more and more people are completely disregarding spelling and grammar altogether. For a lot of people, texting and messaging are only forms of writing they do, and I kind of wish people put a bit more thought into their inputs at least in the internet forums. After all, writing in the internet forums is still a form of public speaking, and there should be some value in trying to accurately represent what you're trying to communicate. In that sense, I do miss the usenet of old. In a any given group, there were fairly informed representative of the topic, and the exchanges were usually thoughtful and relatively noise free. Even the flame wars were mostly entertaining. Of course, there's definite value in the sheer increase in the number of inputs, and I do think the changes in internet culture is mostly better and entirely inevitable. Still, porn just isn't the same without TIN and uudecode. I had to do a little work to see some boobies. Damn kids nowadays...

But then shouldn't you live without petroleum, cars, electricity, banking, mortgage, and so forth?