Probably so, a lot of the 90's are kind of a blur now for reasons. Also, the company I was working for at the time was notoriously cheap with IT costs. They were also the only company I ever worked for that allowed smoking in the office. Around computers. That's smart. The two old guys who ran the joint both died of lung cancer a couple years after I stopped working there. So... yeah.

I had to punch an AWFUL lot of deer to progress, back in the day. That was before Trammel or any of EA's WoW-Style gear grind nonsense. I did manage to get a mage to GM mage/GM Scribe and was at different times exalted and notorious. I probably still have a couple of shots around somewhere of the ol' guy. Made bank selling filled spellbooks, recall scrolls and rune bags to people. I had runes to damn near everywhere. That was another thing that was pretty unique to UO -- you could make a rune to damn near anywhere. And despite this, the world still felt HUGE!

Now I don't want to be accused of defending the NSA, but they are not exactly the most transparent organization in the world. Just as with the FBI, CIA and DHS, we can point to their obvious screw-ups and overreaches but I for one believe that the fact that we are not being nickel-and-dimed on the terrorist front is due in part to their work.

I mean, they have the records of 8 scrillion phone calls and access to everyone's hard drives. One would hope that they are actually able to do something with all that.

I'm going to go out on a limb and hypothesize that you are not Jewish.

Iran's only way out of it is to drop the nuclear program and stop being assholes.

Unless their plan is to nuke everyone and let Allah sort it out. You can't discount the idea that the Muslim extremists _want_ to see the world burn. Does the majority of the country want this? I seriously doubt that, but the mullahs sure do.

I've like to visit your planet some day. It seems like very interesting place, and much different from mine.

Given the way the hard-core Muslims talk, I would think that their plan (i.e., Iran) is to get the nukes, take out Tel Aviv, New York, Washington, whatever, and sit back and let Allah sort it out. It's kind of built in to their religion.

That said, the people of Iran as a whole are reasonable and just looking to live their own lives, just like us, and if there was enough of a popular uprising, supported by the West, maybe Iran's mullahs could be fettered and the country be allowed to rejoin the modern world. If only... oh, wait, that happened a few years ago and we sat on our hands. Oh, well.

Agreed. We are not the country we were 50-70 years ago. Not even close.

We might be again, but it will take some real pain and hardship before we collectively choose to sack up.

I'm happy to see that you don't hate systemd. That was the last shoe to drop. I'll complete the switch to BSD now!

Dragonfly BSD works quite well on the desktop, as does Funtoo Linux, which is systemd-free. Gentoo also works and still uses OpenRC by default, although there is growing concern some of the devs are quietly preparing to push a systemd agenda (kdbus patches in the kernel, one of the devs commenting he hopes systemd would become the Gentoo default, and a habit of the moderators in the Gentoo forums to shut down any discussions critical of systemd).

Linus may not be showing good leadership in this instance, but not everyone has drunk the urine just yet, and there are others stepping up to the plate to maintain or create alternatives.

Can you live in the Bay Area taking home 42k/year?

I did for years (also working for the state). I was living here for nearly a decade before I made more than that, in fact; as a grad student my stipend was less than $20k. I have no dependents or debts to pay off, no severe medical conditions, and my benefits were always sufficient, so it was actually very easy. I lived alone for the majority of that time, but even when I shared houses or apartments it was in relatively nice neighborhoods. (All rental, of course.) Until recently I was always living very close to where I worked. I usually had at least a little disposable income and by the time I was taking home more than $30K I was saving some of it.

That said, I live in the East Bay, not SF proper, so my rents are merely extortionate but not totally unaffordable. $42K won't go very far if you want to live in the Mission - and 10 years ago, it wasn't totally unrealistic for a (childless) grad student to have that ambition.

Honestly, from what I've seen I think senior government-employed or government-funded scientists in the Bay Area mostly get paid enough already (and I would include myself in that category until very recently). It's definitely more than we'd get in another part of the country, and we/they get to play with a lot of very cool (and very expensive) toys. But the cost of living is a huge problem for recruiting; a UC Berkeley professor of my acquaintance told me they were finding it increasingly difficult to hire new faculty because they'll never be able own a home anywhere close to Berkeley itself.

How about we stop trying to make one plane do everything? Build something small, fast, and minimal for dogfights. Build something with more range and capacity for when that's needed. Don't cripple the pilot's ability to use the tool, either.

If they'd been a little less bitches, they could be like Dubai right now and dipping their balls in gold, regularly. Them and Iraq both. And yes, everyone in the world pretty much has been fucking with them for... well... ever, really. But there's a way to win against everyone in the world, and being stinky little bitches isn't it. But, you know, whatever makes them happy, I suppose.

The first computer I bought for myself was a Vector II graphics machine. It was an odd beast -- integrated computer/video, MFM 10 MB hard drive, some number of kilobytes of RAM, I forget exactly, and most oddly a dual processor machine. It had both an 8086 and a Z80 chip in it and could use either one or the other to run DOS (I want to say 2.0) or CP/M. Mine came installed with CP/M. This was in the early 90's, just before the 286 really started to catch on.

For my hardware class, I brought it in, took it apart and handed the chips around the class. At the end, I reassembled the whole thing and booted it back up. Fun little presentation. That old hardware could really stand up to a lot of abuse.

I currently have a web radio transceiver front panel application that works on Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, Amazon Kindle Fire, under Chrome, Firefox, or Opera. No porting, no software installation. See blog.algoram.com for details of what I'm writing.

The one unsupported popular platform? iOS, because Safari doesn't have the function used to acquire the microphone in the web audio API (and perhaps doesn't have other parts of that API), and Apple insists on handicapping other browsers by forcing them to use Apple's rendering engine.

I don't have any answer other than "don't buy iOS until they fix it".

Thank you so much for that interesting piece of information! It's a shame that question doesn't seem to have gotten rated highly enough for Steve to see it, but I'm fascinated by what you've shared and seeing that there's a connection between the raids on Alcor and SJGames and thus, ultimately, the EFF.