Because Amiga, C64, Early DOS and UNIX's were great and successful. For me, all that stuff was my childhood and messing around with it is like going to a garage sale and finding my old favorite GI Joe figure or something. PalmOS5 failed right out of the gate. There's nothing to be nostalgic about.

If you want to do some cool hobby stuff (and I don't blame you, I do that sort of thing all the time) I recommend the following:
RaspberryPI or one of the several 3rd party variants out there: It's basically a small PC with a UART (hardware interface with buttons) You can turn it into a media player, an Audio DSP, a "car computer" whatever you can think of.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/
http://www.pcworld.com/article...

Arduino is a micro controller. Not to be confused with the RPI. An arduino will teach you how to solder :-)
You can run scripts written in C, and control lights, relays, sensors, etc... You can build something that automatically waters your garden, turns on your lights, feeds your pets... basically anything you can script.
http://www.arduino.cc/

AX84 is a website that has a host of amplifier projects. They are all tube based. Why tube? Well a lot of us think it sounds better, but that's a long argument. Even if they don't, it's how electronics started and if you want to know how things were done originally... and why that lead to how things are done now, Tubes are a great way to start. It's like learning to build a campfire by rubbing 2 sticks together. Yea, you could just throw a road flare on a dead tree, but somethings are just worth doing the old way. If you're not a musician, there's a Stereo amp near the bottom.
http://www.ax84.com/sel.html

Then there's steam engines... There's no collective site for that, but I've done them and they are fun. No codding involved unless you count the valves ;-)
These are super fun though. Imagine a device that can generate power from any source of heat. Even mirrors reflecting the sun. I recommend starting on youtube.

Anyways, there are lots of "useless" projects you can do that will have a far larger community and be far less of a waste of time in the end. Good luck.

Adopt. That's what we did. My sons birth mother could hardly afford food, much less cigarettes. The 3rd world may suck for many things but they don't chain smoke and there sure as hell aren't any crack addicted parents.

Kidding aside, you should adopt. There are children in need, and I love my kid as much, if not more than any kid I could have gotten the old fashion way. We were very lucky he needed parents.

Egads! Are you telling me there was a political referendum somewhere that would have cost local businesses money and they sent out misleading political fliers!?!? Holy shit the sky is falling!!!

Seriously folks, can we stop pretending to be outraged when the thing we normally have no problem with... exagerating our the negatives of our political opponents... is suddenly used against us?

How is this any more misleading than:
ISPs want to throttle our connections so they can force us to only watch their content!
ISPs have a menopoly! They don't want competition!
ISPs are conspiring with the NSA to spy on us!

All of that nonsense is just as much of an exaggeration and misleading as what was on those post cards yet I see in on slashdot all day long. And just like those misleading post cards there are real problems with municipal broadband we could all discuss if everyone wasn't so busy throwing FUD back and forth.

I'd just like to confirm... the OP is not exagerating at all here. Oracle is today, what Microsoft was 10yrs ago.
They're big.
Their customers are currently trapped.
Oracles Management think that this situation will last forever and can't imagine a time when customers would move to something else.
They are using that power in such a drastic and barbaric way that, as painful as it may be, there's just no way they are going to continue using them in the future.

In 10yrs we'll all have moved on, and Oracle Execs will be scratching their heads wondering what happened to the gravy train. Just like MSFT is doing now.

Silicon Valley problem? No... it's an American problem. Is there anyone here that doesn't know someone with an addiction problem? It's part of our culture. Who we are, and what we have is never good enough. There's always someone better on TV, the movies, the internet, and why aren't our bodies like that? Why am I not that calm? Why am I not that strong? Why can't I deal with stress that well? We're spoon fed lies via a screen and then find there is no natural way for us to meet our fictitious ambitions so we turn to unnatural means.

It's like the High Striker hammer game at the fair.
The bells not the goal.
Try, do your best, then be proud you had the opportunity to attend a fair and waste some time trying to hit a bell.
Injecting yourself with steroids just so you can hit a damned bell is insanity.
And yes, the majority of our life goals in this country are about as inane has trying to hit that bell.

Because this was never about independence. Russia installed their own primer minister to prevent Ukrain from joining the EU. But he sucked. The EU and the US helped stage a Coup and installed their own pro-west leader in the hopes of getting Ukrain in the EU. No way Russia is letting that happen. The EU has its own problems but they pale in comparison to Russias. The last thing Putin wants is a country with a lot of relatives of Russians getting the EU treatment and finding out how nice it is to be out of their largely lawless, virtual dictatorship of a state.

It's still a question in most of eastern Europe. Russians got their propaganda machine in full spin mode... and it's working.

You mean like these?
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyli...

I don't care. Sports is (are?) stupid. They are, by default, exclusionary. The entire point of sports is to be sexist, elitist and show others that you're better than they are. Now, low and behold, a group that has bee excluded for thousands of years from the hobby has found a way to use their disability as an advantage. Call me a jerk for not feeling sympathy for the rich, steroid ladened, kids whose parents gave them every advantage in the world suddenly feel disadvantaged.

Except, you know, that part where Hamas has 1st world military hardware that they're using to target civilians. Not saying that Israel isn't being stupid in many ways but Hamas is horrifically evil. Their goal is literally to exterminate Jews, and to that end no means is too extreme. They're sacrificing their own people who have an understandable hatred for Israel that, unfortunately, the rest of the middle east is using to exploit them in a proxy war.

Um... bullshit?
There is no waste in milling. You just sell the turnings back to smelter. Or smelt them yourself if you have the equipment.

that aside... sintering is awesome. Growing up I used to get to visit the company my father worked for and one of their main product lines were all sintered parts. You lay down powdered metal and then bake it to melt the powder together. They've been doing that for decades. The new innovation is being able to sinter on the fly with lasers instead of an oven.

What they fear isn't the criminals finding out about it...

Habakkuk 2:9-11

I suspect that whats going on is that Netflix put the majority of their traffic on Level3 and Level3 is trying to charge Verizon an exorbitant rate for enough bandwidth to handle that peer. Verizon said "No" and told Netflix to go with another peer. So Verizon has plenty of bandwidth, Netflix has plenty of bandwidth... it's where those peers are located that's the problem. Level3 has been giving Netflix huge discounts to try and force ISPs into unfriendly peer agreements.

So yes, if you VPN'd out to somewhere else... somewhere that's not an ISP and place where Level3 isn't trying to screw people, then yes, you'd avoid the route in question and get great service. Move all of Verizons traffic that way and see what happens. Ignoring saturation of the peers... It would work until that VPN services peering agreements ran out and then they'd be getting the same treatment.

The FCC, ISPs and Netflix need to stop screwing with net neutrality and fix the god damn peering agreement process. I've been involved with them peripherally and they're like the wild west when the 2 sides can't agree on something.

You realize Siberia wasn't above the arctic circle 160million years ago right? Also... the whole planet was a lot hotter.

Really? People wasted mod points on this?