I have several SATA to IDE adapters with card, and my experience reading has been miserable. Better off if you can find an old external case, or best to cable it up like described above.

The new machines lack LPT ports? WTF kind of machine did you buy without an LPT port? A laptop, sure, a desktop? You have to look hard, even today to find a machine that doesn't have a printer port.

Pretty much anything built in the last five or so years won't have serial or parallel ports. If you're lucky, you might have some headers on the motherboard that can be brought to the slot cage with connectors in brackets like what were common before ATX, but I've run across plenty of motherboards that don't even have those. Notebooks are even less likely to have them. This Dell Inspiron E1505 I'm typing on is a bit long in the tooth...main reason I'm keeping it going is its 15" 1680x1050 screen. No serial or parallel ports on it.

When I saw a sufficiently-old notebook come through my office a while back that had a serial port on it, I hung onto it for talking to our switches and routers. I forget what model of HP it is, but it's old enough that it runs on an Athlon XP. It's probably the better part of 10 years old at this point. The last emerge -uND world took a couple of days to run, but it's fast enough to run Minicom and Firefox, and to do traffic captures from the switch: serial connection to the management port to enable SPAN, Ethernet to the SPAN port for capture, and WiFi to talk to the whole thing from my office instead of the server room.

Hey Bill. Kindly go fuck yourself. Seriously. If you believe (and apparently you do), that only Ivy League universities can provide any education of merit, then you really are more of a mindless tool than I suspected.

QFT. Consider how well the Ivy Leaguers mismanaging the executive branch of the government are doing as further proof of the uselessness of credentialism.

He's using climate change as an example to demonstrate his point. (A near-unanimous consensus among scientists maintain that climate change is happening and is a serious problem; over 50% of the US population disagrees. This demonstrates that the US population is largely science-illiterate or science-hostile.)

O RLY? (The Google link should bypass their paywall.) In addition to "consensus" being inherently unscientific (was Copernicus "science-illiterate" when he proposed his heliocentric theory of the solar system when the consensus view was in favor of a geocentric theory?), there is much to suggest that the "97%" number is as overcooked as most of the recent temperature records have been.

Exactly. The sub itself is a stealth ship, that is why it was created, purely as a stealth device.

The fuckwads are the elected officials that are allowing drones to fly over your house. Those that trade liberty for security deserve neither.

Everyone knows that the military airplane became obsolete once radar was invented. Same thing here. Must be true....

Cat and mouse, as always. Stealth subs aren't a new idea (go watch Red October, one of my all time favs) and we have only scratched the surface in that area. Even in the 80s when I was in the air force, the Navy was considered the strongest leg of the Triad. That isn't likely to change soon, although the technology they use certainly will.

I was about to say that if you are in an area where it is acceptable to use shotguns (300ft from a home, in the county is the rule in NC) then yes, excellent target practice. I keep the shorter military/police grade buckshot in my combat shotgun, holds around 9 or 10 shells. But in all seriousness, these will be getting shot down, as not everyone cares what the law is, and will just pull out a gun and shoot it down even if they live in the city.

Besides, it's PICTURES!

...and text 2-3x larger than it needs to be. Had to press Ctrl-- a few times to get it back down to roughly what every other website uses. Are they writing for the semi-blind?

The kits are still out there. This one, for instance, is nearly identical to one that Radio Shack used to sell, and that I got lots of use out of when I was a kid. (The two chips are a 7400 and another 74xx chip...a couple of flip-flops IIRC.) Beyond that, there are probably more experimenter options now than ever. Not that long ago, I picked up a kit with an Arduino, a small breadboard, LEDs, switches, sensors, and passive components for maybe $30 or so.

If there is a genuine advantage of using Windows in such a device

ISWYDT.

Are there some other core VirtualBox features I'm not aware of that keep people pinned to it?

Its support for passing USB devices through to guests is pretty good. I have a Gentoo VM on a Win7 box for the sole purpose of continuing to use a scanner that the manufacturer doesn't support on Win7. The only area where it's let me down in the past was with trying to mess with iPhone firmware (such as for jailbreaking) from a Windows VM on a Linux host...don't know if it was something weird Apple was doing with USB or something else. Have other virtualization options caught up with this?

Also, VirtualBox console windows are less of a hassle to deal with than VMware console windows. Even with their respective guest addons installed and active, VMware is still enough of an annoyance that I'd rather RDP or SSH into the VM in question. (In fairness, VirtualBox is running locally, while the VMware VMs are on a couple of ESXi 5.x boxes accessed through vSphere...maybe their desktop virtualization tools, which I've not used in eons, are better.)

Exchange client on Android isn't horrible.

This is because the ability of other apps to integrate with Exchange is getting too good.

DavMail is a nice little bit of software that allows just about anything to talk to Exchange. I have it on my computer at work so I can use Thunderbird (and Lightning) instead of Outlook. It sits in the system tray, only popping up a notification when a newer version is available. While I've not tried running it on a server so that multiple people can use it, my understanding is that you can do that with it as well.

Seconded. Season 3 just started; I'm still catching up on season 2.

Beware BD-R LTH media, which use pretty much the same type of organic dyes as are normally used for CD-R and DVD-R as a cost-cutting measure. BD-R HTL uses phase change in an inorganic alloy to record bits, which will almost certainly outlast BD-R LTH media (and probably DVD-R and CD-R, too).

I've been using these for archival recently. (I'm almost out, too...was going to put in an order, but (1) they're currently out of stock and (2) their per-disc price may have gone up substantially since my last purchase. :-P Will need to double-check once they're shipping again, but my last order was about $27 for 25 discs, shipping included.)