Yeah, before downloading any app I google it to see what the reviewers say. No or few reviewers? I don't take the chance.

TRS-80 in the late 70s. First was Basic, written by Microsoft. Then Z-80 assembly using the Microsoft editor, assembler, and linker. Did my debugging with TASMON (The Alternate Source Monitor), which was a great debugger.

Sometime in the 80s Microsoft went from being a great company to being a group of douchebags.

Will it be able to access my Windows NAS (which coincidentally would be maybe 3 inches from the stick) to stream movies and/or music? Looking at WDTV now (http://www.wdc.com/en/products/wdtv/), but it's lack of Netflix is disturbing.

The topic: Your budget.
Skills needed: Basic math, intro to accounting, some economics to see how viable your job is in the future, home ec to show how cooking your own steak and potato as opposed to the local restaurant is much cheaper,

The topic: Global warming
Skills needed: Basic math, history, statistics, critical thinking. Bonus skills: advanced math, meteorology

The topic: ISIS
Skills needed: history, religion studies, psychology, psychiatry, social studies, George Bush cranial anal extraction surgery techniques.

What you're saying is the problem lies with the lawyers. Which somehow doesn't surprise me.

Get swatted, cops shoot your dog, toss a flash bang into your baby's crib, and scare the crap out of everyone in the family? Grand Jury decides we're cool, no cops get prosecuted.

Get 911'd, cops look into it, figure there's a good chance it's a hoax, turns out it's not a hoax. Layers sue for millions and win.

Essentially, the average citizen and common sense loses in both cases.

The problem is the police respond to everything with a huge over-reaction. They don't investigate, they don't use common sense, they just go in armed to the teeth ready to shoot anything that either moves or doesn't move fast enough and the hell with the consequences, as long as the consequences fall on the target, not the cops.

How the hell did we get such a militarized police force anyway?

Welcome our electromagnetic overlords!

/ may the non-Chinese sourced electrolytic caps capture your glory

Hate when I watch a scify movie and a character sez "fuxor", and they not only silence the word but distort the mouth of the offending character.

Double that for shows like survivor, that distort asscracks and such.

For Fark's sake, if you're going to show it, show it, don't edit it. If you're going to edit it, don't show it. I'm not a kid, I'm an adult watching an adult show. Treat me like an adult, or I swear to god I'll cut the cable and y'all can wonder why pirate's bay gets better ratings that your OTA ratings.

I guess a better name would be Microsoft iInfectu.

Several years ago I found myself in this situation. I worked night shift, getting home between 2-3 AM. One night I unlocked my door, opened it, and just had time to think "WTF, this isn't my living room" when some guy came running up with "hey, who are you!!!".

The place I was renting was WW2 era housing, a group of rectangular buildings next to each other, each with 8 apts (think | | | | | |). I had the upper unit in the back, turns out my key worked on *every* upper back unit in each building. Talked to one of my neighbors, his key also worked in every building that corresponded to his unit.

Trust me, we all had new locks within 24 hours.

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.