*LOL*

The funny thing about paranoia is while you're in the throws of it, no one can convince you you're over-reacting. As someone who suffers from bi-polar, I know this first hand.

If you think a satellite TV provider filling in the coverage gap for a land/fiber line based provider is a "bad thing", you need to go see a shrink, get diagnosed, and start taking your meds. Especially considering how long these two companies have already had a service-provider partnership in place.

Hey! Stop being rational! You're supposed to rant and scream about the potential for abuse by big corporations -- this IS Slashdot, after all, land of the paranoid schizophrenics...

In the SuperNES era, a game also used to provide several days worth of play-through, not 10-12 hours of content.

But I was under the mistaken impression that one could only burn an FPGA once. Thanks for clarifying that they can be reused.

You burn an EEPROM so I was using the same terminology. It's still usually called "burning" even though you can re-burn the same device with different code.

...cannot build it into silicon.

Isn't the whole point of an FPGA being able to "burn" a design into a chip rather than "building" it? Are they saying you can only run your modifications through a simulator instead of burning an FPGA to test it?

If so, what's the point of the exercise? Wouldn't it make more sense to have students play with an open sourced or freeware design that they can actually implement and test?

I'm stunned at how many sports channels I had to block even with basic IPTV from SaskTel here in Saskatchewan, Canada. I have ZERO interest in sports, and I'm kind of pissed off that some of the money I pay is going to support that crap, which I do not and will never watch.

I'd much rather have something like BBC News or BBC1 than a bazillion sports channels.

Given a choice, more is always better.

Even though my Lenovo Z580 has four USB ports, I often find myself wishing I had a couple more so I wouldn't have to swap devices. In particular, I'd appreciate another USB 3.0 port for an SSD (seeing as the "second" hard drive tray slot is occupied by the DVD drive, which I *do* use.) Sure USB 3.0 isn't as fast as I'd get with SATA, but it'd be a darned sight faster than the 5400RPM drive that's built in to the unit.

Normally I have the printer, mouse, and external HDD plugged in. That leaves one slot for a keyboard (I have no room for another one on my desk, though, so I rely on the built-in keyboard), camera, MP3 player, and charging the ole' eCig.

It also happens to give me a wicked case of the shits.

"Searching and reading are left as an exercise for the extremely fucking lazy student."

What's the matter? You too fucking stupid to Google for yourself?

You are incorrect. At the time of the Amiga, the Apple II, the Commodore 64, and other such machines, only the IBM PC was a "Personal Computer." It was a brand, not a generic term. The "generic" term was "micro computer".

PC only became a generic term when there was a flood of PC-compatible machines from other vendors on the market. And in response to the genericization of that brand, IBM tried to rebrand their next iteration of machines "Personal System/2", or PS/2, and this time lock things down to prevent competition.

You kids really need to read some old Byte magazines from the period before you go opening your bullshit-spewing mouths.

Yes, because doing something along the lines of "apt-get install kde-full" is such an onerous task that I couldn't even think of using an OS that would force me to do that. :P

Some people see everything in life as being politics, and Slashdot has enough of a population that there will always be a few such people showing up to post on every article/topic, so, yes, every story has to be a political trollfest.

Myself, I find it sad that this one person is being singled out for discussion while 1799 equally worthy human beings are being ignored and forgotten because they weren't "in tech."