I have a basement home office as well, with a leaky door. There's no point in keeping the house heat up since it doesn't help. I simply put pants on under my bathrobe in the winter. :-)

Count a +1 for pair networks. Reliable, solid, and not annoying. Their plan offerings were simple and easy to choose among, last I looked. (I picked one 11 years ago and haven't had to change.)

I have had interactions with them exactly twice, and once was them offering a constructive suggestion as to spam handling. That's the kind of provider I like, all walk and no talk.

Yeah, good luck with that. Have a second career ready?

I once consulted on a large program that had been written in as convoluted a manner as possible, with few or no comments. The guy who wrote it used to brag about "job security". Well, when the company finally allocated a budget to replace the program, they not only fired the guy, but made sure that as many people in that industry as possible knew about it. He was unable to find a new job in programming, and last I heard, he was trying to sell cars somewhere down south.

You might have job security for a while, but it's gonna catch up with you.

Filling the drive with helium should help; the speed of sound in helium is 3x higher than in air, and it offers less resistance.

(Hydrogen would be even better, but it has a tendency to interact with metals in unfortunate ways.)

A few hours a day - not every day, even, he takes a few off here and there - and a little longer on the weekends isn't excessive. Online gaming actually cut down my "lazy" activity time and cut costs. I wasn't plonked in front of the TV (cancelled a few cable packages, rented fewer DVDs), I decided to spend more non-game time away from the computer and/or TV (read a bit more, got out of the house), and on top of all that spent more time with the better half (playing the game together, chatting while we did, etc).

Yeah, sometimes you don't get to play or TV or whatever for a while, something more important is happening. We stopped playing for a few months last time we sold the house, we had work to do when we got home. Online gaming is only excessive when you fail to keep up with life's priorities (job, home, health, family, friends). Ditto any other gaming, TV time, internet surfing, hardware hacking, wood duck carving, drinking, drugs, food, jogging, etc etc etc. It's usually easy to keep it all in balance, and part of what WoW does well is deliver a game that you CAN walk away from, to focus on the important things, and still keep up with the game.

It's not so much that "Casual" gaming is influencing MMO's, as it is that game publishers recognize that a lot of gamers are all adult-like now, and if we can't integrate the game into our real lives, we're not giving them our money. And money - the market - is what influences MMO's.

People complain that legislation isn't written in English because people who don't have any legal training are still expected to be bound by it. Few people complain that patents aren't written in plain English, they complain that they are written in legalese and not in the relevant terminology for the field to which they apply. This means that they are understandable by lawyers and not by the people who would be implementing the inventions, which rather counters the point of granting patents in the first place (to encourage sharing of ideas).

Low orbit missions are hardly cutting edge. And there is very little the space shuttle or ISS can teach us about going to the moon or Mars (that we haven't already learned many years ago anyway). If anything, NASA needs desperately to break out of a low orbit mentality and get back into the Apollo engineering mindset (which has long since been forgotten). ISS and the shuttle are just distractions--largely pointless distractions.

Just a thought, but the presence of so much good stuff (emitting their own smells/pheromones) in your big bowl of food may overwhelm and/or mask the the negative impact of the fatty acid system. Their experiments seem to be on far more simplistic model systems free from interference.

19 years ago, I had the opportunity to take home a working KI-10 for free! I was so excited. Unfortunately, when my wife found out why I was calling to rent a van, she put a stop to it. She was probably right, given our other circumstances at the time, but I've always regretted that lost opportunity.

Foonly and SC Group (originally Systems Concepts) both made or pretended to make DEC-10 alikes. I know Foonly actually sold some; wikipedia claims that SC Group did too, although the concept of doing business with the SC Group gang was always a bit nebulous (they were archetypal hackers).

I'm pretty sure Foonly is dead and gone; SC Group existed as of recently, although their web site seems to be AWOL.

You can get a hobbyist license for TOPS-10 (dunno about -20), and an emulator on a fast PC would probably outpace a KA10, maybe even the later models.

I just remembered another gem that CMU was running: TSS-8, which ran the EDUsystem-50 variant of the PDP-8.

I wouldn't be surprised if some school out there is still running a TSS-8 instance in a dark corner.

Last CTOS systems I saw were running the backroom apps of a local drugstore chain in the 90's. They replaced N-GEN and CTOS with some sort of PC based stuff; not sure of the date, probably 98-99 or so.

I think CTOS probably counts as "dead".

TSS/360 is dead and gone. You can actually download (some of?) the source for TSS/370, which was a sort-of successor. The TSS/360 installation at Carnegie Mellon University was turned off right about the time I left there, and I think it was either the last or the next-to-last TSS/360 running.

Two simple words:

"Yes, Dear."

I've been happily married 27 years, thanks to those two little words.

Supposedly there was a study run by a bunch of marriage counselors some years back, looking to prove that couples that actively communicate have the happiest marriages. To their dismay, it turned out that the happiest marriages were the ones where the husband did pretty much whatever the wife told him to do. (One has to assume that the wife doesn't overly abuse her position here.) I don't know if the story is true or not, but it certainly matches my experience, and the experience of most of my happily married friends.

I'd say it depends on what you see yourself doing. If you want to be a deep thought thinker in an R&D department, or if you want to stay at least semi academic, get the Masters.

If you want to be a programmer, engineer, or whatever you want to call it, I'd say get the experience. I've been directly involved in any number of hiring decisions over the last 20 years, and I can't recall a single instance where the existence of a masters degree made the slightest difference in our decision.