So you are implying that there is no other way to know what you are voting for than to have your freaking official ballot mailed to you? I can go to my county's elections website and get a sample of my specific ballot. Then I can figure out who/what I want to vote for before going to the voting site. Here in Texas, early voting is open Monday to Saturday for two weeks before the election (but not the day before the election), and any voting site in your county can let you vote the specific ballot for your district on an e-voting machine.

(I used to be able to download my sample ballot directly just by knowing my district number, but now they make me enter my name and address. I guess too many people were too stupid to look up the number printed on their voter card. It also used to be a PDF of the OCR ballot, even with mostly e-voting machines in use, and now it's just an HTML list, though I seem to recall that the last time it was a PDF ballot again.)

Since last summer I have Uverse voice over my DSL modem. I am curious what speed it would work at if I hooked up a USR Courier V.Everything to it. I suppose it would depend on whether it tries to make an 8kbps voice channel or a 56kbps voice channel. But I've had DSL since early 2000, so I would first have to find a number to call. And I'd also have to dig up an RS-232 to USB adapter.

I think it's been at least ten years since I last used an analog modem, and that last time was when I set one up as a dial-in on my second phone line for a few days so someone in town for the weekend could use it for a PPP connection.

I'm pretty sure that the city of Windcrest, Texas (a San Antonio suburb) still does their siren test every Monday at noon.

With a later generation of Zenith remotes (with a piezo oscillator rather than the resonant bars) the TV would change channels whenever my mom vacuumed around the room. This was also before varicaps, so the TV actually had a dozen manually-adjusted tuners selected by a solenoid-driven stepper motor, and made a noticeable thunk when changing channels.

http://idle.slashdot.org/story/12/03/22/1326213/the-sounds-of-tech-past

And I found it by accident just now while trying to see if I could find a Telebit modem sound.

The 14400+ modem connect sounds are part of standard sound effects collections now. The much simpler 300 baud sound is going to be a lot rarer to hear. And I never ever got to hear the sound of a Telebit Trailblazer, though I had heard it described as "whalesong". There is one linked on wikipedia, and it sounds pretty weird, but sadly there is no actual data transfer sound.

When I was in high school in the early '80s, the teachers would run a program that printed out pages of math problems for remedial math students, using our dial-up 300 baud DECWriter terminals. SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH chunk SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH chunk bzzz bzzz bzzz bzzz chunk SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH clack clack chunk... and they would run a lot of them.

Hey, give 'em a break. They have to launch at exactly the right moment to catch ISS, and today's moment was simply too early to have any sunlight there. The dense fog didn't help either. On the other hand, it didn't land in the water, so they can finally take the SD card out of the GoPro in the rocket!

I just want to see a picture of rocket bits on the barge, broken or not.

If driving over the ocean doesn't stop you, the Darién Gap will, after you turn north.

Who is "we"? I just read today that Elon Musk expects to get 80,000 people there by 2040. (I think that's a bit ambitious, but certainly doable in 25 years for a much smaller mission.)

And we now have the best reason ever to go back to the moon. We must build an Olympic-size swimming pool on the moon!

Also, He3 is a very stupid reason to go to the moon. It requires level 2 nuclear fusion, and we haven't reached level 1 yet. lrn2civ noob

Shuttle missions took 7 people up to swap 3 people on ISS, was that a waste too? After the initial missions, I would not be surprised if they send up extra people who stay a week and go down on the old capsule with the previous station crew. They just have to swap some seats around. (Each astronaut currently gets a custom Soyuz seat molded specifically for his or her own butt.)

If you pay for streaming, you aren't anywhere near superior enough. I only DVR from antenna broadcast TV (with occasional live watch) and download torrents (in other words, no subscriptions or streaming) of mostly current season anime from Japan. I have never seen Breaking Bad, The Wire, or Game of Thrones (I even ignored GRRM at a science fiction convention), and I only get to see Dirty Jobs, Pawn Stars, and Mythbusters when I visit my mother.

But I am still nowhere near the coveted top of the hipster scale: no TV at all. It's almost frightening to think about.

Nerval's Lobster has been the cross-submission account since the days of SlashBI. Back then, his articles were even less relevant to the /. audience.