They were lying.

Like many aspects of the DotCom bubble before it, the housing bubble was thoroughly well understood and predicted by pretty much every observer (and discussed as such by those with integrity). The only people who said otherwise were those who were participating for their own benefit, and who well understood the risk to themselves of prematurely bursting their giant Ponzi scheme.

Similar liars will crawl out of the woodwork to pump up the next bubble too, I'm sure.

I still have an Intergraph TDZ 2000 workstation that I used for 3D/video editing back in the late '90s. It cost around $15,000 new, with dual PII 300MHz CPUs, 256MB RAM and dual 80GB 10,000rpm SCSI drives in RAID 0. It's still set up to dual boot NT4 and Debian 2.2, and I occasionally fire it up (if only to to remind myself what it was like to hear the jet-engine whine as those those drives spool up to speed).

It still feels very responsive with that old OS/software combination, so an old version of Linux on a cheap SBC should perform well enough. It will need to be an x86 based box to run OP's software though, so the (ARM based) Raspberry PI is out. Some of the Vortex86 based kits could be worth trying, though I suspect they'd fall over on driver support. They can be had for less than $40, and can run contemporary Linux so worth trying just for the fun of it. It's hard to say how well it would cope with drivers though

Or harpoon them from ships and render their blubber for oil.

If the Europeans were sensible, they'd erect statues of Cap'n Ahab in every capital city, legalize chubby-hunting as a sustainable biofuel harvesting method, and watch with glee as a combination of terror fueled adrenaline and frantic waddling from danger shrunk the waistlines of all but the most irredeemable behemoths to non-disabling proportions. Better still, if manufacturers fitted the harpoons to cars, I have no doubt that the average Citroen, Peugeot, Fiat or small VW could be run for several weeks on the fruits of just one venture onto the streets of Brussels or any other large European city.

Citizens of the world, start petitions, start lobby groups. This needs to happen now, to save our environment and improve the scenery in our streets and supermarkets..

The best option for students needing cheap and versatile measuring equipment. would be the Red Pitaya. http://redpitaya.com/?skip_int...

It's not as cheap as OP wants, but it's a far better learning tool than a half-assed knock off.

In "Africa, a South American jungle, or the Arctic", that would geological-level patience...

Complicated enough...

http://adb.anu.edu.au/biograph...

Of course, if he invented it today, he and his descendants would have prosperity guaranteed for as long as they could buy lawmakers...

Or you could just not use Windows.

And if that's not an option, you could use the dev channel version of Chrome to sideload anything you want. Or use Chromium instead. You're not locked into the App store unless you want to be,

Look, you can spin it any way you want, but his is pretty obviously a step to protect non-technical Chrome users from malware. It's not aimed at people who have the know-how to manage their own plugins/apps.

http://advertising.apple.com/t...

http://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/...

http://www.courthousenews.com/...

I've just plonked down the cash for a Ninja Blocks kit. http://ninjablocks.com/collect...

It's very simple to use, based around the open Beaglebone SBC and has both free apps and open source development tools.

I'll probably upgrade to the Sphere when it's available too. https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...

I remembered the statistic from presentation at a trade conference, and don't have a direct reference.

Googling "fatal fall from a bamboo scaffold" brings up the most relevant links, and FANG1 titled link closest to my memory of the presentation,

Perceived as safer by the group of workers familiar with its use, but actually no.

According to HK accident statistics, the real probability of a fatal fall from a bamboo scaffold is close to double that of metal scaffolds.

That's been considered, and I assume the checks would already have been completed.

You can see all the known runways on this map: http://i.imgur.com/Iwa6Ali.jpg

The rest of the discussion here is interesting as well. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum...