You're talking about Lucas, Prince of Darkness?

I'm in agreement with you. I have about 450G of flac formatted music files in my collection on an Ubuntu laptop that I play them off of. Your $1200 would be much better spent on quality audio gear. Actually, that $1200 would get you into a Linkwitz LXmini setup, which is some of the best sound money can buy, at any price. True absolute hi-end audiophile quality at a price human beings can afford.

http://www.linkwitzlab.com/LXm...

My most likely alien scenario is that part of natural evolution is that organic sentients, like humans, evolve technical civilizations that eventually create mechanical sentients. The mechanicals don't require air, water, etc to survive, and may well prefer "living" off-planet. They'd also have a much longer life-span, so to speak, and receive all the energy they require from the light-energy - photo-voltaics or such. Given this, there could well be whole mechanical civilizations existing between the stars or wherever. The Universe is a Big Place. The interests of organics like us would be of no interest to them. And of course mechanicals would rapidly evolve to become an intelligence we couldn't begin to fathom.

We haven't seen aliens because we're just the ants on this one little world.

To properly treat an Apple product, it's going to take more than 7 minutes to cook it. I'd set the over to 500 degrees F and cook it for at least 2 or 3 hours. Then I'd cut off its head, stuff garlic in its mouth and drive a steak through the CPU.

I was stationed at Eglin AFB from 1975 - 77. Of course the Florida panhandle really is just Southern Alabama. I was there just 6 weeks when we got hit by Hurricane Eloise. Major damage.

Being white and a military officer definitely had its advantages and enabled me to fly under the radar for the most part. Leaving in '77 was one of the happier days of my life.

Old Times there are not forgotten, look away, look away Dixieland.

The move to Florida will be a bit difficult for man Silicon Valley folks. Florida is a Red State. Most of you aren't old enough to remember the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Consitution, which Florida never ratified. Floridia also failed to ratify the 19th amendment to the US Constitution until 1969. Which amendment is that you ask? That's the one which gave women the right to vote. It was the Law of the Land back in the 1920's because 2/3rds of the states had ratified it, but Florida only accepted it more than 40 years after the fact.

Add in punishing heat, humidity and the fact that you're smack dab in Hurricane Alley with things only getting worse with climate change and you'll realize WHY Florida is a cheaper place to live. But if you don't care about any of that and like cheap seafood and good ol' boy values, then maybe Florida is the state for you!

Unhackable... Just as unhacakable as banks, on-line retaliers... sure...

If I'm a terrorist, what could be better than to have hundreds of thousands of networked moving vehicles I could take over from half-way around the planet? How much fun would it be to order it to make a car do a hard left turn as soon as it hits 70 mph, which would only happen on a freeway. And imagine being able to do that to many thousands of cars all across the USA and at random intervals?

Sorry. Autonomous, networked, driverless cars is waaaaaay beyond stupid.

I love Windowmaker. Fast and does everything I want. Easy to configure as well. Gnome is slow and bloated, as is KDE and Unity.

The problem with systemd is lack of competent documentation. There are plenty of good arguments for & against it, but if you want people to accept it, then they should put out docs that will enable people to readily do the things they did with good ol' init/chkconfig and so on.

Unless of course, if you're black, gay, or an undocumented immigrant...

For those who object to systemd, why not fork off your own distribution and bring back init? It's not like that sort of thing hasn't been done before.

For y'all who are systemd proponents, if you actually want it to be adopted, then spend some money on a good tech writer and document the damn thing. I've read what documentation there is and it sucks. Really.

I'm pretty agnostic when it comes to things like this. The big issue for me is whether I can get it to do what I want. Is the documentation sufficient for me to understand how to use it and how to get it to do what I want? In this case, not only do I need to know how to start/stop system services, I want to be able to add new system services. Doing so was very easy in REHL/CentOS with init and chkconfig.

Most of us really don't care two cents for the reasons y'all want systemd, and I'm sure there are good reasons. What we want is to be able to know how to use it, and that only comes from good documentation.

Of course this may be a case of some a**holes feeling they're more clever than everyone else, and because they know better, this not only gets pushed own everyone's throat, they get to feel superior because they know how it works and nobody else does. This is the same kind of ego inflating attitude that guaranteed UNIX and Linux would (and will) always take a back seat to Windows and MacOS (which is doggy doo of a different kind, but doggy doo nonetheless).

I stand by my statement that I believe the reactor to be safe. But the on-site storage of waste is quite another matter. Were there to be a major quake and tsunami, there's no telling what that would mean for waste stored on-site. That would be Very Bad.

33 years ago I was the cost analyst for the Diablo Canyon project. I've been inside the thing and earthquake safety was huge in the construction of the plant. It is VASTLY over-engineered for earthquake safety. The original spec was to survive an 8.0 earthquake on the San Andreas fault, which is 30 miles away. The Hosgri fault, which is just off-shore, was unknown at the time the plant was first sited and was only discovered later. The plant was re-engineered to withstand an 8.0 earthquake on the Hosgri fault, which hasn't moved in many thousands of years.

The real problem with Diablo Canyon, and the rest of the nuclear industry is managing the waste. There is no place to put nuclear waste in this country, so it's just stored on-site. That's crazy. You can't do that forever.

That being said, my expectation is that we'll continue to see tech advancements in solar and wind generation, and energy storage to the point where large central generation will be a thing of the past.

Eddie Jefferson was shot outside a Detroit nightclub in 1979 by a dancer who was pissed off at him. In 1972, Lee Morgan was killed on-stage in a New York night club by his jealous girlfriend. In 1988, Chet Baker died when he "fell out of a window". One of the greatest tragedies of all was when Clifford Brown died in 1956, at the age of 25, when a car he was riding in ran off a highway on-ramp in the rain. Probably the most amazing jazz musician's death was that of Buddy Rich, who somehow managed to die of natural causes.

But I can't recall any jazz players who were killed in a Chicago nightclub.

Wait until we have driverless cars on the road. But I'm sure they'll all be bullet-proof secure, don'tcha think?

What about all the older engineers who are out of work?

One of the problems in tech work is that the tools and technology we use keep changing so fast, it's very, very difficult to stay current. Companies don't provide training for their workers any more either. So workers tend to get used and thrown away when their skill sets are no longer relevant.

I used to work at macys.com. I was pidgeon-holed doing one thing - building Linux systems using kickstart. I wanted to grow my skill set at the time and get into working with puppet, but they said they instead wanted to bring in someone with puppet experience instead of giving me a chance to do the work myself. That's about the time I started my job search to go elsewhere. Got a $15k pay raise out of it too.

Age discrimination is more pervasive than even gender and race discrimination. Just you wait and see for yourself...