Even I, at a mere 36 am the old gnarly neckbeard compared to the young whipper snappers they bring in. Sure some of them are older than me, but when I take away their gnome and remote desktop, they get all whimpery and whiney. "Use SSH!" I admonish them gently "Hell, pipe X over it if you really want to, but you're not going to load X11 on that server!" They don't understand that even though the server has plenty of ram and CPU to be able to run a window manager, that's not what a server is supposed to do. They look at my stripped down UI, runs a clock, CPU load on that workstation, a Firefox pointing to our monitoring stuff and a shortcut to gnome-terminal. All gnome terminals are green on black. Color tells me where I am, and who I am. My .vimrc is set up to deal with my colorblindness (as are my .dircolors). I teach them about netcat, tcpdump, strace, truss, /proc - the guts of the operating system. They look at me with pity. I throw my hands up and wait for them to tender resignation.

The life of the neckbeard is lonely, frustrating, and growing old. We are the dinosaurs upon whom our organic compounds fuel the new network. Streamlined and socialized, they reinvent the wheel; 8 bit this time because realism isn't real enough.

Its a matter of want vs need. It can't do it because that's not the most critical application for the user-base.

Everyone will be skipping Windows 8. Seems like every other version of Windows is determined by boneheads with a barely functional magic 8 ball.

From another of us with low UID and remembering chips and dips, thanks for your years running the site. Good luck in the future Rob.

Sorry - that was me :P Forgot to login.

There are plenty of good projects wherever you happen to be right now. Schools (public and private), libraries, senior centers are all always looking for volunteers to help make their environments better places for those who use their services. Sure its not as impressive as going overseas to do some work, but it also has many headaches that the overseas visit will not.

Greenpeace just like any other group with a political agenda (like NRA, Sierra Club, PETA, MADD) has to provide the shock value to get its point across. How many more pieces of paper would be wasted if it weren't for the ability to send email or post on grandma's wall. Sending or writing a check is nearly extinct. Sure we have a heck of a lot plugged in, but servers are becoming exponentially more efficient as time progresses. With technologies such as cloud computing and virtualization, the peak load of infrastructure has promise to slowly decrease over the next decade. Remember the internet, as far reaching as it is, is still a relatively young technology that is getting its legs under it. Give it time, and the cost of powering all of those servers slowly moves companies to reduce their consumption or supplement with sustainable green power.

I've been paying a lot more attention to /. lately myself. Getting burned out on FB.

Phone companies have the same disconnect fees when you sign a contract now-a-days. I've switched entirely to cell phone only. I figure if I'm going to pay for the cell phone, there's no need for redundancy.

Flying saucers != religious underpinnings. Statistically speaking they're a near-certainty.

Not viable for certain locales in the US. Its far more affordable for me to live 50 miles away from DC metro and commute 100 miles a day than to live in closer with my family of five. Its not just housing that gets more expensive as you get closer to metro areas, but all of the associated things that go with it as well (groceries etc). I could work in my home town, but then I couldn't afford my home :) Pay drops about $30k over 50 miles. I'll take farmland, clear streams, beautiful views over city living any time.

VPN tunnels? Anonymous proxy services? I know to get around the great firewall of China, all one needed to do was connect to a VPN server where network services were not constrained.

I do, at least momentarily, use that little bit in the bottom to help wash the sides, then pull the plug and let it all drain down...