At age 92, her computing requirements are fairly simple. I left Office 2008 on it, the latest version that runs on the PPC, and she's just fine with it. MS Office, Mail.app, and the ability to maintain her Wordpress blog and run the writing classes she teaches. Graphics card speed is not an issue in this situation.

If any copy of VMWare is suspected of being used for an illegal purpose, the DEA has the right to swarm in and confiscate everything. The evidentiary standard for this action is "probable cause."

We recognize that a large segment of the population can't afford healthcare and need to be subsidized by the public. We realize that because the pharma and hospital lobbies are not about to allow a free market to develop (imagine if medallion cab drivers had the nationwide ability to behead people who used Uber - that's the power of the lobby we're talking about here), that is going to cost a lot more than it would if a free market did exist. What we fear is that as the costs inevitably mount, policy Twinkies like Emanuel are going to cement the "suggestion" of this article into national policy. Like the people in Isaac Asimov's "Pebble In the Sky" we will be required to be gassed at a specified age to keep the system solvent.

My hiking club in northern Arizona includes about 400 members, most of them retired. At age 75 most of them are still hiking every week, enjoying more of the outdoors than city folk half their ages. Hikes are routinely led by people in their eighties. Our oldest member recently hung up his cleats at the age of ninety-three. As time goes on we get titanium knees and hips, implanted teeth, and pacemakers, and we stay on the trail farther and farther into senescence. We're going Borg, and that's how we like it.

My case is typical. When I was a child I had to wear huge Coke-bottle eyeglasses. For high school graduation, I got contact lenses. That was already fifty years ago, and now I'm about to take the next step up, to implanted lenses. Ezekiel Emmanuel, please take your early exit option and never get to set health policy in this country.

That soon a DEA SWAT team will attack VMWare development facilities and smash everything up, using trumped-up drug charges.

But those were GOOD buses, carrying environmental activists to a protest, as opposed to those BAD buses, which carry Silicon Valley nerds to work.

Slashdot: Can we have a new downmod category, perhaps called "Burn The Witch!" It would indicate severe disagreement with the comment and would be a way of avoiding overuse of the Troll mod.

But KIckstarter, as a new financial market, has the opportunity to take the same innovative approach to the reporting area as it has to investing itself. Can it come up with a financial reporting system that investors will actually pay attention to, rather than toss in a drawer unread? THAT's what I'm looking for here.

More transparency will be a good policy for Kickstarter. It's developing what is essentially a new stock exchange, and in the process is finding out what kind of reporting investors will truly find useful.

Oops - iPad Mini Retina. My kingdom for an Edit button.

Tokyo was rolling that out when I wrapped my commercial duty tour in 1978. The recently finished Oedo Line, newest in the system, runs on linear induction motors. That means no more overhead network of catenaries to deliver power.

The hope is that Alibaba's status as a Cayman Islands shell will allow it to develop a black tulip, which will not only be significantly more valuable than all the other tulips,but will be tradable on social media. And because Alibaba owns its own credit subsidiary, you will be able to buy them on thin margin, putting up very little of your own money.

The other important fact about human colonization is that was never, at any time in history, an example of waiting until until all problems "at home" were fixed before jumping off and colonizing a new place. Corollary: there is also no instance of a person who advocated not attempting to achieve X until all current problems have been resolved either (1) solving all current problems or (2) achieving X.

When you hang yourself, please remember to do it over your compose pit, and to use the biodegradable rope so Mother Gaia will not be offended.

Those must be the airline seats we're still sitting in.

Apple devices "degrade" with OS updates in the same way that Windows updates do on PCs, gradually. But even after an Apple starts no being upgradeable to the latest OS release, it stays useful for years to come. My mother is still using my hand-me-down 2002 desk-lamp iMac, which has the old PowerPC processor.