If you allow children to watch movies like the Expendables, you're part of the problem.

My kids didn't get to see much in the way of action/violent films or shows until they were in their mid to late teens. As I often say "Why the taboos on sex, and not on violence? I hope my children have sex some day, and I hope they never have to kill anyone".
Not that I let them watch porn, either ;)

Mostly they grew up with mythbusters, documentaries, science shows, and a freaking ton of books.

Great dad, in my opinion. My kids grew up involved in hunting, fishing, and shooting sports - but a trip to a refugee camp would probably have cured them of the FPS BS faster than anything.

Fortunately, they were never really into videogames.

Exactly. This has been the goal of NASA from day 1. To inspire people to actually go *DO* this stuff.

NASA was ever only a way to encourage private industry to make these leaps themselves. Well, and probably to be the FAA for LEO

I use vim almost exclusively (windows or linux), and use it for PHP, Perl, and C++.

It just works, why get all fancy?

I'm just happy to hear other people had those issues and found a solution.
Nearly every person I see now with a Mac is so rabid, I don't know if the problems have been fixed, or just glossed over.

I constantly feel bad when the future I hoped and dreamed of as a kid becomes a shabby second-hand sort of reality.

This new UX fashion is like skinny jeans - it's not something I want, it's not something I get, and I just want everyone off my lawn :D

You can replace the batteries - I bought a little wrench off amazon to re-do the batteries in my Gameboy carts - worked great.
I think you can have it done to them for like $10 if you're not handy with solder.

The 12" Powerbook G4 was the end of my love affair with Apple. Every time I got an MBP, the dang thing would have some mechanical issue (catch fire, lose DVD inside, you name it). That G4 laptop though, it's still going strong with one simple keyboard replacement.

My wife wrote 5 books on the dang thing, too!

The one I use is gray, has a tiny bump connecting a mouse/keyboard PS/2 port, and cost like $20 at Fry's. No brand name, but it works like a champ.

Same here. I have three of these - the one I'm using right now I've used it daily since 1994. Got a 1997 at home, and a 1990 model in the closet waiting for one to die.

I find the poll trend disturbing, because I'm in the same boat as you.

I depends on what length you consider a "book", but with tech manuals in the 100+ page range, I would count those as well.

I probably read almost book a day, sometimes a book every few. Not all of these are massive Tolstoy scale books, lots are shorts (under 50 pages), some are in the 100-150 page range, and a few are enormous (and take a few days).

Probably better to say "How many pages do you read a day" - since for me on average that's probably 70.

As for *new* books - well, Feedbooks feeds my addiction. I have had a great consuming everything written by specific authors, in order.

Got a pile of AIX servers here like that:
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/780/index.html

I was kind of wondering about the "modern operating systems" comment... I think he meant "desktop operating systems".
Many of the big OS vendors (IBM, DEC (now HP), CRAY, etc) are well beyond this point. Even OS/2 could scale to 1024 processors if I recall correctly.