Not sure what you're saying, but I think you're making my point. When peaceful protests don't work, and only result in you being arrested, put on various "watch lists" or just being outright "disappeared", riots are just your way of saying "I'm so mad I'm going to burn my own house down to teach you a lesson". Soap, ballot, jury, ammo. The 4 boxes of meaningful change. I suspect that some people are getting dangerously close to realizing that the first 3 aren't working. I certainly don't condone violence, but I was just saying that taking any kind of non-violent action without at least expecting that you could end up dead is foolish.

Well, if you're trying to improve your country without lethal force, when it's clearly a given that the people who want to maintain the status quo have no qualms whatsoever about killing you to maintain it, then yes, that's crazy. Unless you specifically want to become a martyr. That's why, even as a citizen of a "free" country, I don't try to organize any kind of change, because I totally suck with ranged weapons.

Maybe it's where we are. I'm in Canada, and I'm in the same boat. As I said above in this thread, everyone I know with an iPhone has problems with it. Dozens of people. For some reason they all want to tell me about it, but I don't have any clue about supporting Apple products.

You know, the odd thing is, every single person I know with an iPhone (too many to count, dozens perhaps?) has all kinds of strange problems with it that they feel compelled to tell me about, I guess because I'm "IT guy". They all say the same thing. It must be just them, because otherwise, everybody would be screaming. My assumption is that there is something severely wrong with iPhone owners.

Amen. I've had a Blackberry Q10 for 1.5 years now. This one time, it crashed, and I had to reboot it. Once. I was shocked when it happened.

I had one of these, so there's at least one example of marketing tape drives for home use. I had a few of the 2GB tapes, and used them for backing up data from my audio projects, during the short span before CD-ROM burning was a thing. But generally speaking, you're right. Tapes for home use have never been a marketable "thing"... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

Off the top of my head..

- Slacking off is alright, if you balance it with a healthy dose of all-nighters of work to make up for it. Meeting deadlines is all that matters, not pacing.
- Cheating and plagiarization have value, as long as there's a fair balance, and you do it properly. One person can't attend all the classes and do all the assignments, as there aren't enough hours in the day. Early lessons in crowdsourcing, before that was a word.
- Money management. Do I use my pocket change to photocopy those pages from the textbook (I couldn't afford) that I need to study, or do I use it for bus fare so I can get home and get some sleep for the first time in 72 hours?
- Learning how to learn, as others have said.
- Women will only care about how tall, rich, and physically attractive you are, for many, many years to come. Plan on being shunned for the next couple decades (in my personal case, at least)
- Bureaucratic bullshit is a fact of life. Deal with it.

I'm sure there's more, but there's my top handful.

I don't know about online, since I haven't tried it, but I'll tell you, there's nothing like sitting at a dinner party, having three women arrive and sit across from you, have an engaging 2+ hour conversation with all three of them practically competing for your attention, all but ignoring the other men at the table...and then when it's time to leave, you all stand up, and you see their smiles fade just the slightest bit, and know that none of them will be calling you. I can't even count the number of times something like that had happened. I did manage, after many years, to find a woman who doesn't care that I'm short, but to say that it's an invalid point, well...I'm glad you think so, but I beg to differ.

Glad somebody came here to say this, as I was going to point out the same obvious fact. Even being relatively well off, a "nice" guy with a diversity of interests, etc. matters little when you're 5'5". I know this from +40 years of experience. I have so many amazing lifelong friends who think I'm an awesome guy, but during the periods where I was single for years, I was very cognizant of what the "deal-breaker" was. Study after study after study has proven this.

I know this to be true. I have a Fiio X3, and I notice that for a couple of the particularly cheap micro-SD cards I put in it, I can hear some weird noise that sounds a little like cell phone interference when I'm playing files off them. Of course, I have to have it cranked, and only notice it during the extremely quiet parts sections of my music. So there is something to this, as I can imagine it's hard to properly shield the output of the DAC properly on small hardware like this. Still, I'm not about to make a case for spending a lot of extra money, since most of my decent (ie. Sandisk and Kingston) micro-SD cards are fine.

That's an interesting view. Me, I find that most of the stuff I find online is useful. The stock quotes, commodities prices and weather reports I find are always more up-to-date and accurate than what I find in any other media. The white papers I read often help me get stuff working properly, and when I'm looking for info to help me fix code, machines, or systems, there always seems to be someone out there with good info. Manuals for just about every second-hand-missing-manual item I've ever bought. Even slashdot is worth at least a couple percentage points of non-crap. Are you just reading american mainstream media and social media sites or something?

Season 2 of LOST was on 10 years ago, and torrents for it were notoriously badly encoded and slow to download, so that was something I went over to a friend's place to watch every week, since I didn't own my own TV. Now I watch nothing whatsoever, so I picked "decreased significantly".

Uh, ok. I bought a CD-ROM drive in mid 1993. I was a pretty heavy gamer at the time, and so when I got it, I bought a new CD-ROM game almost every week throughout 1994. I just looked at my shelf, and I'd love to know which games you think from any time around that era looked as good as B5. In case anyone's memory needs to be jogged (mine did, and boy do I ever remember these games looking far better at the time): https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I have a 1080p projector that I'm projecting onto a 116" screen. At 1080p, the results are acceptable to me, and it's the only video I ever look at that would really get much of a noticeable benefit from being 4K. So, when 4K projectors drop under $1600 CAD, I'll start to be interested.

I will attempt to answer. I went through a period over the last 3 or 4 years where I read a dozen PKD novels, and all 4 of the short stories collections. I have to say that MitHC was my least favorite of all of that. It was extremely bland for the most part, drawn out, and lacking in plot. The one idea it had that was interesting was the "alternate history where real history is a subversive work of alternate history fiction". But that certainly didn't carry the story through 275 pages. I read it under 2 years ago, and I've already forgotten most of it, as have most people I've talked to about it. Even his really obscure works like "Eye in the Sky" were far more memorable and interesting.