You also get tax breaks for the marriage thing

Standard deduction, single: $6300
Standard deduction, married filing jointly: $12600

The only tax break you get is if your wife is a stay-at-home mom where you can double your tax deduction. Of course, then she runs the risk of losing all her credits etc from having no income.

if you have kids, you get those breaks too

You get those breaks as a single parent too.

Why? The Home and Pro versions are almost identical, except for a small handful of few features that home users would never miss and limits that would never bother a home user*. It's really just a way for Microsoft to extract more money out of businesses for Windows while providing an almost identical product. It's actually pretty clever (or evil, depending on your perspective) if you think about it.

*I realize that Windows 7 Home has a 16GB limit which is pretty easy to run up against nowadays, but it's 5 years old now and Windows 8.1 Home has a 128GB limit which would be hard to hit with "consumer level" hardware.

It's very intentional, as Thinkpads have changed very little in appearance since the first ones came out in the mid 1990's years ago sporting 486 processors. That's over 20 years of laptops that are pretty much instantly recognizable as a Thinkpad by anyone familiar with them.

I for one like their simple, clean, no nonsense styling, and functional design (though Lenovo has been mucking with that a bit more than I like). But each to their own.

Most new laptops now are omitting the optical drive. It's getting to the point where if you require an optical drive your options are starting to look pretty limited, especially since the remaining models with optical drives tend to be the larger workstation/desktop replacement models. This is understandable, as I rarely use an optical drive anymore. On the other hand, the lack of USB ports is baffling.

After being in "Offline" mode all day yesterday, who knows what's going on today.

I expect that what's happening is that Dice has given slashdot a budget of $0 and expects it to crawl into a corner and die on its own.

Given that it's Oregon, there will be plenty of water just "dropping" in. I would invest in some large sheets of plastic and/or some tarps, and some buckets myself. Get a bunch of those chlorinated tablets that treat water, and while it may taste terrible, should be perfectly safe to drink. Now, things like food/gasoline might be a bit tougher to come by.

Don't forget IE for the ActiveX!

You do realize that Chrome comes bundled with its own built-in Flash plug-in, right? Unless you meant you installed one of the Chrome alternatives that strip it out (Opera, Comodo Dragon, etc.).

Come on, folks, let's cheer with the AC "We're number one better than China! We're number one better than China!"

it's not possible for an honest person to have need of the 5th amendment

Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.

Remember that next time you talk to a cop and they don't feel you were "concerned" enough about the situation and use that fact against you in a court of law: http://reason.com/blog/2014/08...

The retroactive immunity came much later.

nothing you can't have in perl today, with a relational database, and a table or two to track relationships between objects.

Sure, and there have been written entire books and essays and algorithms on how to get your relational database to store and return a hierarchy. It reminds me of those highschool programming challenges where you implement a binary tree in a single array because why the fuck not?

But instead, it's a whole new opportunity to create problems!

Every language invented in the 60's was a whole new opportunity to create problems. The problem now is continuing to use it without fixing the problems. Even PHP has made improvements to the language.

Nope, right on time and everything starts freezing again.

If you buy/lease a new car every few years, it will add up as you'll be paying $300-$500/mo indefinitely. If you buy a new car and drive it for 15-20 years until it's basically fully depreciated out, the cost spread out over all those years isn't that much more than the string of beaters you would have gone through in the same time span.

because the choice is between Government enslavement and anarchy.

You seem to believe the choice is between ignoring laws because it suits you and ignoring laws because it suits me. The third option, which respects the rule of law: working within the framework of government to change the laws.

As you pick and choose what laws you think you should bother to follow, keep in mind that whatever moral high ground you claim to possess that gives you this power will also be claimed by others.