They were lying.

Like many aspects of the DotCom bubble before it, the housing bubble was thoroughly well understood and predicted by pretty much every observer (and discussed as such by those with integrity). The only people who said otherwise were those who were participating for their own benefit, and who well understood the risk to themselves of prematurely bursting their giant Ponzi scheme.

Similar liars will crawl out of the woodwork to pump up the next bubble too, I'm sure.

Pretty sure Time Warner is great at making "information unavailable or less available".

I still have an Intergraph TDZ 2000 workstation that I used for 3D/video editing back in the late '90s. It cost around $15,000 new, with dual PII 300MHz CPUs, 256MB RAM and dual 80GB 10,000rpm SCSI drives in RAID 0. It's still set up to dual boot NT4 and Debian 2.2, and I occasionally fire it up (if only to to remind myself what it was like to hear the jet-engine whine as those those drives spool up to speed).

It still feels very responsive with that old OS/software combination, so an old version of Linux on a cheap SBC should perform well enough. It will need to be an x86 based box to run OP's software though, so the (ARM based) Raspberry PI is out. Some of the Vortex86 based kits could be worth trying, though I suspect they'd fall over on driver support. They can be had for less than $40, and can run contemporary Linux so worth trying just for the fun of it. It's hard to say how well it would cope with drivers though

Yeah it's modular and a few years from now they'll upgrade the bus or tweak the dimensions or bump the battery requirements and now that modular phone is as obsolete as all the rest. Or worse, future modules are gimped to conform to the old standard and include circuitry to step down in some way. Either way users get a device which costs more and doesn't deliver something tangibly better.

citation needed

They wired the computer into Deepak Chopra's quantum consciousness and all it produced was a stream of pseudoscientific gobbledegook.

When it comes to security, one must always error on the side of caution. There are very strong signs and signals that there is a problem with Truecrypt. Those that don't heed that warning are placing themselves at risk.

The default position of everything is: insecure until proven otherwise. If there's a good chance something is insecure, then we assume it is. We don't want to error in the other direction because the implications are too great if we are wrong. This is where we are with Truecrypt. Those throwing caution to the wind - at this point - are doing themselves a disservice.

The alien pyramid of course.

People hate car dealers for a reason. They are generally deceitful, money grubbing scum who conjure all kind of fees and charges, who "negotiate" merely to upsell customers with expensive upgrades, financing and insurance policies. And then when the car needs to be serviced they'll rape the customer again for the time & parts.

That isn't to say Tesla will solve all these problems (I'd be especially worried about the cost of servicing what's essentially a computer on wheels), but at least they charge a price and you know what you're getting. No negotiations. No oily salesman pitching stuff you don't need.

Yes you could go for a poor man's scaling by bumping up the standard font sizes but that will do nothing for toolbars and other elements in the application. So you'd have big fonts and tiny toobar buttons. That's why 8.1 upscales the whole window surface and in doing so it uses some algorithm that blurs the contents.

A little reading comprehension might help. I didn't say every country that has borders with China is a threat but yes it is surrounded by potentially hostile powers with nuclear weapons. And it's easy to see why they would be worried if Japan joined those nations.

If your country was surrounded by potentially hostile countries armed with nuclear weapons then you might be worried too.

When shopping for phones I always look for one which runs a fork of Android, which is locked into Amazon services, which is tied to a phone provider and doesn't cost any less than a regular unencumbered phone.

Keep dreaming with your head in the sand. If you can't buck up and admit there's a problem here, there is no hope for you. You're a partisan and your opinion is rightly devalued.

The IRS itself has stated Lerner's emails from 2009 - 2011 have been lost. That is a problem no matter who's side you are on. It's not about "pinning" something on Obama, it's about keeping the IRS (and all government agencies) in check so they aren't abusing their power.

I'd like to try chrome instead but their high dpi support is completely broken. If I run it on my tablet it comes out upscaled in the desktop and a disassociated mess of boxes and lines in metro. Have to wait for them to get their act together.