They have no reason to hold him other than being suspected for a crime in the US. If they captured him, they'd let the world know how helpful they were being.

The problems with MySQL aren't bugs, they're decisions. Decisions that can't be reversed for the sake of backwards compatibility.

When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.

I'm sort of surprised that the $10/bottle shipping cost didn't trigger a rantfest.

Maybe if you were still running Irix on the box or using SGI-specific multimedia software, I could follow your metaphor. Running Apache & OpenBSD on the machine is more like taking the body of a '57 Chevy and replacing the interior with that of a 1992 Honda Civic and putting a trailer hitch on it.

People in this industry are pretty trusting

...sort of like how scrap metal purchasers used to be?

Have you looked at the power usage of that thing recently? It's a 15 year old system that has less processing power than my cellphone & probably draws a few hundred watts with minimal power saving features. It's probably costing you $10-15/month to run that beast - how long would it take for a modern, low-power ARM or Atom box take to pay itself off?

New? They've been pulling that shit for years.

When did you start expecting OSes to be stable, long-term investments that could be ignored and left running forever? Win 3.1 (1992)? Win95? Win98? Windows 2000/ME? Windows XP (2001)? XP SP1 (2002)? XP SP2 (2004)? Windows Vista (2006)? XP SP3 (2008)? Windows 7 (2009)?

You've done major upgrades countless times before - I remember plenty of instances where XP Service Packs broke backwards compatibility. If you've got too many things breaking, maybe it's because you've skipped over several major upgrade points already so, rather than being able to incrementally update broken shit (which, I might add, was likely shoddily done to begin with) you're forced to upgrade everything at once?

Vista and 7 can run in 32-bit mode, if you're really concerned. They also pretty amazing backwards compatibility management - have you even looked into Windows XP Mode?

As others have said, "like" is the only action on Facebook. There's no "hate" button, there's no "passively follow this page", "you have a valid argument" or "this vaguely interests me". "Like" carries a connotation, when used in day-to-day language that doesn't carry over onto Facebook .

Just the other day, a friend posted something about his father dying. Other than writing one more "sorry to hear that" response, the only option is to "like" it - that didn't mean I was happy about the news, just acknowledging that I read it & feel sympathy.

At what point would a sane person just call the cops?

Assuming you're an American, your parents grew up reaping the benefits of their parents winning WW2. Europe lay in ruins, Asia had not yet industrialized and America was making money hand over fist helping everyone rebuild, using the technology we discovered during the war.

Unfortunately, they got addicted to prosperity and, rather than work towards a long-term, sustainable situation, they were more than happy to outsource production & innovation to get cheap crap at Wal*Mart. They were more than happy to build their prosperity on the rapid consumption of non-renewable resources. They were more than happy to build sprawling suburban shitholes to create the illusion of property ownership.

Even looking at the Military Industrial complex as a source of jobs and wealth - they saw how well WW2 went for us so they wanted to replicate that. What did we get instead? The Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and countless wars nobody but those who served will remember. WW2 paid dividends - we helped modern, Industrialized nations defend themselves & made money rebuilding them. Since then, we've just been pissing money away in dirty Third World shitholes that will never pay us, as a Nation back (but definitely pad the wallets of the fat cats defense contractors).

It's not that opportunities are being taken from you, it's that we've spent the last 75 years living far beyond our means & these things you grew up expecting should never have been the norm.

McD's constantly shovels $1 cheeseburgers out the door, basically at cost, hoping to sell high-margin things like soft drinks or tempt you into buying premium items. They routinely have 2/$4 on Big Macs. Adjusted for inflation, these things have been falling through the floor for the last decade as well.

No - redundant.

Exactly. OP's first problem is that he's easily replaceable, unskilled labor. You're at a desk, but it's not really an 'office job' in the sense that you have to use any real intellectual capacity to do the job. You have to expect to get treated like shit because you're not really bringing anything more to the table than a fry jockey at a fast foot restaurant.