They screwed up my year of birth for my SSAN for a few years. I found out when I tried to efile my taxes several years ago. Rather than go through the hassle of digging up birth certificate and spending lots of time at the social security office, I figured out what they wanted and gave it to them on my tax form. They had one of the digits as a 7 and it should have been a 1. Probably an OCR error I would guess. I eventually went in and got it fixed. Had to waste a 40 mile round trip, and 3 hours of my time to fix their fuck up.

I did too, and signed up online. It went into a black hole as far as I can tell. Nothing has been done.

Yes, I am an idiot, and I was going to correct the message immediately. Unfortunately Slashdot is a harsh mistress and won't allow you to correct typos after you hit submit.

Exactly! If you did nothing but backup a TB of data and then power it of and through it in a closet, you are ahead. Not only that, it is private. I would only see this for completely innocuous data that you have to access somewhat frequently through the internet.

Don't worry, scrote. There are plenty of 'tards out there living really kick-ass lives. My first wife was 'tarded. She's a pilot now.

Yep, that sounds familiar. I get those forwarded to me a few times a month, though most of the time they are military and not cute as he is an old Marine.

Live CD's and USB keys will run too slow on old hardware (USB 1). Not a bad idea otherwise.
I will be converting my Dad's old laptop next week. Probably some flavor of Ubuntu as that is what my wife runs (kubuntu 12.04 LTS) and what I am most familiar with.

I just talked to my 78 year old father on the phone about this last night. He was not aware of MS dropping support for XP. His older laptop works fine for what he does, email and web, and he doesn't want to spend money on a new one. He is going to mail the machine to me so I can back up his data and settings, install and configure linux, and then ship it back to him. I'll try kde first, since I am more familiar with it, but if it is too slow on his hardware, I'll try something more lightweight.

Cheeses before Jesus.

Aye, there's the rub. I never get emails from my sister anymore, and if I email her, usually no response. Dad still emails me, even though he's on facebook. Most of them are forwards from his pals though. Best response from both is to pick up the phone and call.

Unless you are Jamacian.

That's harsh.

They paid me $18k to get out in '95. Sometimes I think I should have put my 20 in, and then I remember I would have had to do Bush's dirty war.

My first thought with this headline is what did Snowden do to kill Nuance, the speech recognition company?
Then I realized they capitalized a wrong word.

He delivered pizzas for a while.