But that's not even as big of deal as it was a few years ago when most homes had 1 computer. Today our home has 8 computers, two tablets, and two smart phones. And right now it's just me and my wife. (I do IT stuff and she's a geeky lawyer who likes tech stuff)

If one of our machines are doing a back up, chances are we just go to another room and use a different one.

That being said, I installed a 16TB FreeNAS system on the home network last year and that's now how we keep track of most things these days.

I'm starting to car shop. Mine is 10 years old, 150k miles and hers is 5 years old and 50k miles. Currently I drive a Chevy and she has a Nissan. Her daily commute is about 35 miles round trip. Could be less if she takes a new job closer to the house. And I work from home 3 days a week, but I can travel upwards of 60 miles for meetings or if I need to go help my Dad with something (40 miles one way).

We are seriously looking at the Volt. With the current tax credits, the price of the Volt is in line with say a Cruse Eco or Malibu Eco. Plus most days we probably wouldn't need to use the gas engine, but if we did it would go the extra distance no problem.

I gave it up about 2005. I had a start up at the time that was 70 - 80 hours a week. I sold it in 2010 and made out pretty well. After a few months of "going out" all the time I and seeing how much I was spending I actually got back into gaming. But I was never one to buy a lot of games. I just tended to play the ones I liked a lot. For instance I bought an Xbox 360 in 2010. Bought the Halo Reach edition. Between then and now the list of 360 titles I own: Halo Reach and Battlefield 3 Premium. In fact ended up using the Xbox more for streaming Netflix and Amazon Prime than gaming.

Instead of getting a new console I elected to buy my first "gaming pc" since 2003 ($850 rig) as well as I got a new set of CH Joystick/Pedals/Throttle and TrackIR like I had in the late 1990's for flight sims. Ironically the flight sim I'm playing is Falcon 4 BMS, an updated version of the game I bought back in 1998. Then I spent $40 on a pledge for this Star Citizen, which I suspect I'll spend a lot of time playing over these next few years given the hours I spent in my teen years playing Wing Commander Privateer.

We really missed the boat with not having local governments at the city/county level build the infrastructure. Where I grew up we had an electric coop. My Dad still lives there. Other than the main lines, it was all buried cables. Power outages were extreme rarities. His rates have been between $.08 - .11 per kilowatt hour. Hell a few years ago the rates went DOWN after the coop paid off some debt. In the city our rates are about .145 per kilowatt hour and increasing to .16 per kilowatt hour here soon. Last state I lived in started to force Utilities to open up their lines to competitors. My electric rates there went down from $0.18 per KW/hr to $.12 when that happened.

When I moved into the city, it was a major utility company, overhead wires, and if we got some ice or wind the power would go out.

Where my Dad lives, water & sewer is maintained by the city, and now contracts out with the county for water. His bill is about 1/3rd less than what our bill is closer to the city and our water is owned by a private utility.

Where it made sense we should have had cities or counties putting in fibre and allowed rural areas to form wireless coops. Then lease out service to whomever at a fixed cost per line.

What about places like where my family farms are located? The costs to lay fibre down all those roads would be prohibitive since you maybe would serve .5 homes per mile. Maybe even less. Hell my grandmother didn't have a private line until 1991. I remember going down there in the 1980's and she had a party line still.

Microsoft used to sell "points" to buy stuff over Xbox Live. Interestingly enough last year they stopped and went to a currency based system. So instead of "rent a movie on demand for 600 points" it became "Rent Movie for $2.99" or whatever the real dollars equivalent were. And I much prefer the new system.

Well, be sure to turn out the lights then. Because once the "Just Another Wordpress" site theme is launched and the comments section, the unique feature that makes Slashdot, as we know it is gone. At that point I'll wait and see where the community migrates to and follow suite. Maybe someone will download Slashcode and attempt to launch a new site. Hell it was a good run. But all good things...

Honestly. That's what I think when I see the new beta is "What the fuck? Did they just replace Slashcode with wordpress?"

Actually, at least in the United States, all the rivers that can be used for hydro electric are being used for hydro power.

What we need to do is get over "proliferation" and rewrite some of the damn treaties to allow the reprocessing of spent fuel as well as change our reactor designs over to ones that will burn the spent fuel. I know the Thorium cycle reactors are a lifetime away, for me anyway, from being commercially ready. But you burn up all those bombs and spent fuel rods already created over the next 500 years and what's left is only hot for a few hundred years, not 10,000 years.

An Intelligence Officer is a criminal with a badge that makes it "ok". Seriously, it is their job to go into other countries and break their laws in order to gain information.

Here locally we had a judge who actually tossed out every single red-light camera ticket if you went before him and requested to face your accuser. The city promptly changed the law making running a red light a civil infraction (fine).

I just recently bought it again for $1.99 from GOG.

Last two companies most of the dev staffs have worked from home. Some have been in other states. But it was software and we could track things like did we make milestones, how often and what did they check into the repository, etc.. They were, however, all salaried. Frankly I never cared if it took them 4 hours or 8 hours to solve a problem or add feature so long as it was delivered on time according to what the project needed.

The other rule was quite simple: If the phone rings between 9AM and 5PM office time you'd better damn well answer it. I'm not calling you to chat I'm calling you because something is broke and needs to be urgently fixed. And I stuck to that. if I wanted a status update I'd send an email.

Wife and I are shopping for a new carrier and new phones. I'm getting another iPhone. I've had one since the 3G and like other Apple products I own, it stays out of my way and lets me get work done.

But she has Samsung devices, Tablet & Phone, but every time we went in to ask questions there was someone in front of us returning a Samsung S4. Well we noticed something. We've gone to 6 different stores and every time we waited the person in front of us was returning a Samsung device, less than 30 days old, and requesting a swap for something different. Some seemed to get a HTC phone, other elected to dump Android and go to Apple.

When we asked sales people about it, more than one told us right now to get the HTC or even Motorola over Samsung at the moment. Apparently while Samsung has a since marketing campaign, their quality control has suffered. As result they are seeing a lot of returns because the phones don't work.

The other thing with the S3 and S4 is that the phones are frankly larger than what she wants to carry. They have an S4 Mini, but she is afraid it will be like her SII and suffer from lack of updates.

I believe she had an early HTC and had problems with it before her Samsung. It's enough that she's now debating switching to an iPhone 5S.