This a thousand times over. Run this equipment with World Community Grid or Folding@Home, might lead to curing cancer or AIDS. Fuck, just donate it to some medical research effort and maybe in 20 years a cure will come out and save your ass.

Bitcoin? Megawattage flushed down the entropy hole. Wouldn't it suck for all the bitcoiners if a talented mathematician found a way to trivially circumvent the bitcoin exchange system or if someone came up with a new cryptocurrency that people just liked better (I think both are just a matter of time), leaving Bitcoiners with worthless data stored on hard drives. Maybe all that fine computing equipment won't end up in the landfill, but that's a lot of heat and fossil fuel gone for nothing.

You make me smile, my friend. But your cable company is not like the police who have to stop questioning you when you invoke your rights to remain silent and ask for a lawyer. Unless an ambitious attorney-general is riding up their ass over some consumer-protection clause, your cable company can keep on shilling until they (not you) become convinced they are wasting their time.

Tell them you're moving out of town (to a location that's not served by the company). Tell them you're broke and destitute with no job, and your wife left you and took the TV. Tell them your cable box overheated and burned your house down. Tell them you're appeals have run out and you're going to prison.

Then they might give up.

My experience also. Would mod up if I had mod points. Everywhere I've lived, returning a cable box was like visiting a prison. Desolate white-washed cinderblock waiting rooms with strange-smelling air in a run-down part of town. The security glass makes you think you're looking out from a decompression chamber. The steel drawer you put your equipment in can take your arm clean off.

What could have happened in these places to inspire this much security? I wanna know!

Agreed. The article is MBA-speak, with no vision, ideas, or anticipation. You hear this kind of shit, irrelevance is coming.

I'm sad to see it come to this, but the rumors have been persistent that MS had become more and more of an un-fun drudgery politics look-over-your-shoulder shit-hole to work at, and that can only lead to brain-drain, loss of morale, and a black-hole sucking away product ideas that might make the company worthwhile again, leaving only the suits and bean-counters steering the ship.

Pffft. Who's requiring you to be honest? It's politics. Fuck being honest about that shit. It ain't nobody's business.
(besides, if religious nuts would just keep it as their business, instead of always making it everyone else's business, religion wouldn't be such a fucking problem)

Yep. And that's how shit keeps happening, the circle jerk goes round and round.
But just imagine if a bunch of non-nimrods stepped up, put cooler heads together, start chipping away at the nimrods.
Might go slow at first, but man, how cool would it be if our legislatures were nimrod-free.

Nimrod-free
(how nice it would be)

Yeah, like limos. So where's the feature that lets the kids raise the privacy partition to cut their parent off?

Well... by this thinking, the mob continued because prohibition didn't end. They moved from one prohibited product to another, but always a product the people wanted, but couldn't get because of a prohibition, and the mob was in a particularly good position (with their organization and international reach) to supply.

What might happen if the cartels' market dried up is, at best, speculation. Could be risky, change is scary. But doing nothing and maintaining the status quo is worse. The cartels continue to get better and better at smuggling (they got submarines for fuck sake) and much, much richer while turning Central and South American countries into murderous hell-holes from which children flee to the U.S. on foot, and that ain't no shit.

I'm also nervous about cocaine and meth easily getting around (like, more than it already is). But the fact is, drug addiction and mental illness is just gonna have to be something that this country has to shut up, knuckle-down and deal with. It's not going away, and prohibition doesn't help. Prohibition only has power to do one thing... throw people in jail. It doesn't cure addiction (drugs make their way into prisons all the time), and distracts everyone from the larger issue of mental illness. It's like taking out the garbage: nobody wants to do it, nobody gets credit for doing it, but it's gotta be done or shit just piles up and gets worse.

The poster is saying what's typically said. You would think that selling a highly addictive substances for recreational purposes would make you rich and invincible, entire nations hopelessly enslaved by your product. Addict-zombie attack. But you'd be wrong.

Sometimes, the answer isn't the easy one. The lesson painfully learned from prohibition is that prohibition raises demand, not lowers it.

On the other hand, education and regulation, not out-and-out bans, really work. Tobacco smoking in the U.S. used to be around 50% in the Don Draper years. Now it's under 20 and still dropping. Tobacco companies are having to merge to maintain market share.

The difference is between people politely, but firmly, told to take their habit outside or into a (dirty) designated area or else you'll get a fine, and police breaking down doors and throwing flash-bombs that kill your grandma with a heart attack (because the Informant lied, and the Chief gave the green-light because the Politician wanted to go on the news that evening with pictures of drugs on the table.

The great thing about D&D (that's often lost on people) is that it was a social thing. All your friends get together, kinda like college poker nights (except you're NOT trying to drain the sucker next to you). Best campaign I ever had we were ten kids in a room (on a rainy day), working together, hashing things out. The DM was really prepared, and we got completely immersed and the hours flew by like they do when you're really having fun. It was great.

The fact is, it's just damn hard to get a good campaign together, get a lot of people interested. Probably much harder now because D&D has that (false) anti-social stigma these days, and who needs a DM when you got a computer? D&D takes a lot more work than just firing up WoW (or, for that matter, Zork) by yourself in the basement. Even in the day, if your friends weren't into it, role-playing games kinda suck. On the flip side, if your friends are stoked, your DM puts in the prep-time, and you're all keen to cooperate and work with each other, D&D can make some of the best memories you'll ever have. 'cause it's with your friends.

Most people I know who shit on D&D either never played it, or had a lame experience in a lame campaign. That's a shame, but that's life. Anything involving people, from drama club to Boy Scouts to playing football can leave a bad taste in your mouth if the people in it don't care or are uncooperative assholes.

In order for "we" to rewrite the tax codes, better people need to be elected to Congress and state legislatures. Today, to a great extent, that means PACs, because PACs raise the money for campaigns that make the difference between someone wanting to get elected and someone having a real chance of getting elected.

The weak link of democracy is... democracy. First, the voting public needs to know who you are, and second, the voting public needs to get off their asses and vote. Seriously. There's a mid-term election coming up... pay attention to the turn-out.

"We" will continue to elect puppets and pawns, owned by and obligated to the "secret" donors to the PACs (and who will continue to twist the tax code for their benefit), until "we" start coming out in sufficient numbers and elect other people, and thus embarrass all the "secret" donors who sent money to the PACs but got no return on their "investment".

The machines. Fine black slabs (NeXTstations), cubes with giant NeXT Dimension monitors, and matching black 400dpi laser printers... Sun made some fine-looking Sparc pizza boxes back in the day with cute purple feet, but the NeXTs were a joy to use for anything from research to productivity. I recall Mathematica, Webster's Dictionary, and WriteNow were bundled for free!

As to OS X, I appreciate the underlying NeXTStep framework, which is particularly evident from Xcode. But the display is something new (not Display Postscript), and ever since version 1 "cheetah" I have wondered why the performance seemed so poor, when NeXTStep ran just fine on Motorola 68030's and 68040's and 16 MBytes RAM.

I mean, OS X performs fine now, but it's running on Intel hardware that's not even in the same sport as what NeXTStep was running on in the early 90's. In view of that, I would expect something based on NeXTStep to be absolutely stunning quick on modern Mac Intel hardware, but it's just ok.
 

X11 was available, both commercial and free (e.g. CoXist), as an app that ran on NeXT's Display Postscript. I miss NeXT computers, looked good, performed well, easy to service, easy to program, good networking, good documentation, sported floppies that could write DOS disks which came in handy so many many times in those days before thumb drives. And I remember Display Postscript having some X-like network capability (but I didn't use it much). Besides, both the WWW and Doom, and who knows what else, started life on a NeXT. I wish them well, wherever they be.

True.

Easy, there, big fella. Posting a link to a datasheet would have sufficed. Ain't right to call a man incompetent for asking a question. Truly, an incompetent is one who don't never ask the question assuming he already knows. Credit is due for seeking to learn something.

Any experience with M-discs as archival media? Newer cd and dvd burners are compatible with them, but do they deliver?