I love on-line support chats. HP is really good at this (okay, I'm a business customer with a few hundred desktops and a rack of servers, YMMV.) Chat allows me to cut-n-paste serial numbers or diag info directly to them. It allows me to get other work done while support is processing the request, and I'm sure it allows support to work other cases when I have to dig for info.

The main thing is that I don't have to work through understanding the accent of a non-native speaker. The support folks are often bright and knowledgeable but my internal wiring doesn't always make the translation the first try. This gets old quickly for both ends of the conversation.

Or just an LM339 comparator chip and a cap or two for hysteresis.

Sure, until display tech gets so cheap that even dollar store duct tape has moving ads on it. Good luck then, brother!

Exactly. The car doesn't even know what a person is other than maybe "that other system that sometimes moves the car."

Exactly. There is fuck else to do in the Tri-Cities but farm, and if you don't speak Spanish, you can't get hired for even that. Without the cleanup Richland and Kennewick will look like Pasco. It's not a cleanup, it's a jobs program to keep Doc Hastings in the 4th.

I'm doing the same thing for work builds now. Because the Boeing and Airbus catalogs require IE8 or less I've taken the E off of the taskbar and put Firefox in with an adblocker. They have to click on the desktop icon that will take them to the exact site. Our GPO only lets IE visit the sites that we have vetted, and most of those are password protected sites to other vendors and manufacturers.

Since rolling out that image I've had quite a few cow-orkers ask how to adblock at home. I'm only too glad to show them.

Or is this site supported by the Bandwidth Pixies?

At one point, yes. I was one of them. I worked at an ISP and we gave Rob Malda a Pentium Linux box (slackware, IIRC) to host images.slashdot.org when his T1 started getting full. We gave Slashdot free hosting and bandwidth for about 2-3 years, until he moved on to other servers.

Please keep us updated on that. I never did the facebook thing, could see where it was going.

Let's burn it!

You just gave every lawyer a giant woody, even the ladies.

After Washington jacked up the taxes on booze I would think that would mean stopping to pick up a fifth.

Go Cougs!

Exactly. Show me another way I can watch Masterchef Australia in the US (which is produced by Murdock's wife's company, Shine, but still the best of the Masterchef shows.) Most of our viewing is BBC, CBC or PBS. I could get my PBS with an antenna (I donate each year) and if I put up another high gain yagi pointing northwestish I should be able to pull in CBC from Victoria to grab Doc Zone, but why bother? The few US show that I watch are streamed anyway so I'm just saving them bandwidth.

You could bust me for Hot in Cleveland but I haven't found a way to send TV-Land money for that yet. Oh, and Deadliest Catch. But since one of the deckhands burnt down a friends house while shooting up and we had to give him a room for six months, I think that one is paid for. (Looking at you Matt.)

Anyway, my ISP is owned by an American Native Sovereign Tribal Government. Good luck sending them a letter.
Ok, I've about run out of justification here. But as far as felony theft , I've been busted for that back in 1987 (18USC1029). Millions of dollars of long distance calling on Sprint. (did it with a C64) and did 6 years in Club Fed. These days offering unlimited long distance for $100/month would just get you laughed out of the room. I've got a $6/month VoIP line that gives me that, not to speak of the four cell lines I pay under $100/month for. I hope in the not too distant future that we can get the show we want without having to pay for the whole package. Give us the infrastructure and let us pay for and download what show we want to pay for. I'd be more that happy with that.

Until then, well, I'm a felon... again.

Computer LCD screen, old Core2 box running Mint Linux, set of old speakers with sub-woofer, VLC, thepiratebay for content. Has served our house well for the last two years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

Bootstrap is a free collection of tools for creating websites and web applications. It contains HTML and CSS-based design templates for typography, forms, buttons, navigation and other interface components, as well as optional JavaScript extensions. It is the No.1 project on GitHub with 65,000+ stars and 23,800 forks (as of March 2014) and has been used by NASA and MSNBC, among many others

So it's not how to get your 8080 to see the 8250 UART so you can load a Microsoft BASIC from paper tape from your Model 33 ASR.

Hah! Fancy toggle switches. We had momentary contact switches for both the data bus and the address bus. Took three hearty men and a coxswain to load the code for the paper-tape reader. One man on the data bus, two on the address bus (though the man on the most significant byte had it pretty easy) and the coxswain would call out the bits and hit the load button. One year our team loaded a 3548 byte moon lander program in just under three minutes and twelve seconds. Made state finals that year only to be bested by a nine man team that touched pull-down resistors directly to the CPU pins. Boy those guys had dainty but quick fingers.