As a sysadmin in the late 80s/early 90s I remember the joy I felt when I first installed DNS on our Sun network and could forget bang paths. For the next year or two I enjoyed the extra income I made as a consultant setting up other people with DNS. It was all a word of mouth thing (well, word of email more like), I never advertised or looked for the work (I was still in school part time, free time wasn't in my lexicon).

If Java ever gets true garbage collection, 90% of the programs would delete themselves.

My main internet concern is latency, as the time critical thing I do is gaming. 8 ms sounds good, but if caching adds 100 ms to it then I lose.

OTOH, if you're saving me 5 ms when seeing the /. homepage, I really don't care.

My laundry decisions are basically: Am I out of shirts/undies/pants? If yes then haul the dirty clothes bin to the laundry room, dump them into 2 washers, both washers are set for hot/cold and permanent press, install money and detergent, wait 30 minutes, put all clothes into 1 dryer, insert money, haul clothes home, hang/fold/whatever.

Not seeing 14 decision points here. I'm seeing pretty much 1: do I need to do laundry?

A robot chef would end up on ebay pretty much immediately, I enjoy cooking. My robot of choice would be one that would dust and vacuum. I farking hate doing those.

My path through the grocery store is pretty consistent. Wander through produce looking for what I need. Beeline to the back wall, where the meat is. Head to eggs/dairy, next to the meat. Hang a 180, down the frozen foods aisle, hang a left, where the deli is for my meat and cheese for the week. Do a 180, head to the checkout.

Every other month or so I need something like fish sauce, olive oil, etc, and then they can track me wandering aimlessly down the aisles, if they had microphones they'd hear me muttering "dammit, why don't they label the aisles better" and "dammit, where's the damned kimchi"

Staples like tomato sauce, chicken stock, etc are bought a couple times a year at Costco.

I've got 2 grandkids, twins, 8 years old. I've never played Minecraft. 2 questions: Is Minecraft appropriate for 8 y/o kids who, so far, have never been allowed to play video games? And 2) can kids really learn to program Java via Minecraft?

The older I get the longer it takes me to re-adjust my internal clock. Pick one or the other and stick to it.

Figuring out who will give them the most money now, who will give them the most money in the future, and figuring out how to maximize that income.

/cynical?
// not me
/// nosirree bob
//// Re: Jeb Bush and Terry Shiavo

I cook pretty much every night (other nights being leftovers or dinner out with a friend), and never make things like ravioli because I hate spending an hour making the damn things for 5 minutes of eating pleasure.

Give me a printer that can make me some ravioli, lasagna, etc, and then pop a couple pieces into the dishwasher and HurryUpAndTakeMyMoney.jpg.

The top half of it is static info that not only doesn't interest me, it doesn't change nor scroll. The scrollable article is on the bottom half. I assume it was the whole article, I scrolled a bit, saw the top wasn't gonna move, and left.

the lips to the audio. Unless I'm watching a DVD my lipsync is off maybe 50% of the time. Sometimes by a lot. I don't know if it's the source, the cable, my router (I have Uverse, my TV comes through my router), my DVR, my TV, or some combination.

Me too. Having the new tab be on top would drive me nuts.

For every "terrorist" they track through the mall, how many ordinary Joes like me who like their privacy are also tracked and stored in huge databases for all time?

So order the NSA to quit figuring out how to attack us and have them figure out how to protect us.