It's easy to say "grow up" when the biggest loan you had to take out was for a motorcycle. An education in the US can cost 10s-100s of thousands of dollars not including living expenses. Couple this with low earnings coming out of college and interest rates that capitalize (interest is added to principle) which occurs during forbearance, deferment, or even while you're still in school. For the vast majority of people, repayment is not so simple when the average wage for a US employee is $45,327 as of 2012 according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. This doesn't take into account the costs of living, healthcare, health insurance, transportation, or god-forbid entertainment.

It struck me as absurd that one could amass crippling debt as a result, not of drug addiction or reckless borrowing and spending, but of going to college>

To be fair, it's a requirement that banks report cash transactions of $10k or more (or a group of lessor transactions exceeding that threshold) to the Fed. Want to avoid this, write a check. As others have mentioned, walking around with a suitcase of cash is a little sketchy.

As, I believe the statue of limitations had expired on the alleged crime he was hushing up, Hastert could simply have told the truth about the cash withdrawals and avoided lying to the FBI.

How many years ago was the latest console designed?

You realize consoles aren't even competitive with high end graphics when they are brand new?

Build a ship with 3 or 4 hundred components and watch the frame rate crash in KSP.

All outputs are not created equal. First, most consoles target 30 FPS. Second, like the old consoles at 1080p, this output is likely just an upscale. They simply do not have the horsepower to render content at that resolution. Equivalent GPUs can be had for $100 or less in computers.

"for I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." - Thomas Jefferson - illustrates the proper attitude.

The act of owning slaves, on the other hand, not so much.

And you're playing at most 1920x1080x60 Hz, from what I understand often less. This is the kind of card you want if you're looking for 2560x1440x144 Hz or 3840x2160x60 Hz gaming on say an Acer XB270HU or XB280HK, pushing at least 4x as many pixels.

I read the article, thinking this was an incorrect claim in the summary. Nope, the article insists in several places that it was "undetectable" by the surgeons. Now, anyone who's played any online FPS knows that 50ms ping times are not only detectable, but are approaching unplayable because some punk kid that's only 10ms away from the server is always taking the head shots before you can even see him.

So I figured there has to be something else. The best hypothesis I could come up with is the current robotic surgery tools introduce their own lag such that the surgeons were unable to distinguish normal device response times from network latency. That, and the goals of a surgeon are completely different from an FPS shooter. A surgeon isn't trying to race anything or anyone - they don't have to shoot first. In a live operating theatre, they are methodical and cautious. It's not like there are sudden surprises that leap out at them that they have to instantly react to. Even a burst blood vessel takes a few moments to assess and plan a recovery from. So maybe if they're used to very slow approach, the latency doesn't impact them as much.

Given the current state of security in "smart" automobiles, who would want to be able for anyone to plug something into the USB port of the car's entertainment system and completely update the software for the car?

. Isn't that just asking for your car to be hacked?

Thanks for the info. I checked with T-Mobile, and the $50/month plan gives you 1 GB per month of 4G data. If I understand correctly, after you reach that limit, your phone continues to work at some slower data rate (how slow, they don't say) and your tethered devices stop working altogether. (Is that consistent with your understanding?)

So for that reason alone, I think this is a no-go as a replacement for my home DSL service.

Now the tethering thing would have value for me, if it would allow me to shut off the expensive DSL service to my home. Is that realistic? Who's your provider, and what kind of speed/reliability do you get?

If you're like me, it's the expense of your talk, text and data plan that you dislike, not the features of a smartphone.

I pay $20 every 90 days to Virgin Mobile (works out to $6.67 per month). I'll upgrade to a smart phone if and when the price of a plan that includes a reasonable amount of data drops to $15 per month. Until then, I'll make a mental note of what online content I'd like to consume, and wait until I get home to consume it.

Calculate the annual cost of your cell phone plan; do you find that having instant gratification of your online desires is worth that cost? Not judging; just curious.

There are a few people using their .gov email addresses for this, some of those can be verified by the IP address

No, you can't. Remember, several different court cases have stated, and people on here have wholeheartedly agreed, you can't tie an IP address to a person, even if there is only one person at a residence.

So either you can use an IP address to tie it to someone or you can't. Which is it?