The irony here is the timing. As poor taste as the comment was if you fast forward a year and let a comedian say the same thing or let Eminem rap about it and it'll be just fine. I guess I'm glad freedom of speech is still protected here in the States... unless you want to assault someone while also making rude comments in which case then its called a hate crime.

OM f'ing G... I remember being like 8 years old driving from LA to Victorville and hearing that song and asking my mom why they'd sing about a "bathroom on the right". She just laughed and told me it was "bad moon on the rise" and kept laughing and laughing and laughin. All these years I thought I was the only one. Thank god for this article. Now I know I'm not alone or weird. I don't have to kill myself now as all my reasons for being depressed stemmed from this one incident and now that I know others heard it too I feel so much better. Guess I can take the suicide hotline off my favorites list now...

Granted I'm in the backasswards, hick part of the country, not NYC, but I was taught the appropriate response to the "this is how we're gonna do it, boy" scenario thanks to my father driving home drunk from the bars all the time. Thankfully I was smarter than him (or at least smart enough) to realize that this was a lesson best learned by watching how he responded and then doing the opposite. To this day I've never had an issue... I just willingly accept that as long as the popo are present I have no rights or any expectations of civil liberties. Once gone, I re-evaluate things and determine if its worth my time to complain to someone

Kudos.

The first computer I built used a 6809 and ran either Flex or a homebrew monitor.

I have PLENTY of experience with AMOS on 68k systems. As Caroll Oconnor and Jean Stapleton sang: "Those were the days!"

I stopped driving 2 years ago, voluntarily. My SUV cost me around $800 a month in replacement costs. Another $200 in maintenance. I was burning through $12,000 a year in gas. I spent an average of 1000 hours a year in the car, for work, for groceries, for fun. 999 of those hours were spent focused on the road. I hate talking on the phone while driving.

Consider my annual total: about $25,000 + 1000 hours of my time. For the "privilege" to sit in Chicago traffic.

I'm a consultant. I now use UberX every day. I also use public transportation when I'm not in a rush or when someone isn't paying me to swing by.

I spent about $5000 a year on UberX. $100 a week. While I am being driven around, I can respond to emails, make phone calls. I bill for that time. When a customer wants me to visit them, I pass the UberX fee on to them plus 50%. No one scoffs at it. Some customers will realize the cost of me visiting them is more expensive than just consulting over the phone.

I figure I'm $20,000 ahead in vehicle costs, plus I've literally gained another 600-700 hours of phone and email consulting time a year. Call it $40,000 ahead.

I don't take cabs, because they don't like to come to where my HQ is (ghetto neighborhood). UberX comes 24/7, within minutes.

My little sister had an emergency surgery a few months ago. I immediately hired an UberX driver, who took me from the office, to the hospital. He waited. We then took my sister to her apartment to get her cats and clothes, then he took us to the pharmacy. After, he drove us to our dad's house to drop her off, in the suburbs of Chicago. Then he drove me back to work. 3 hours, $90. I can't get a cab to wait even 10 minutes while I drop off a package at UPS. Forget about them taking credit cards.

UberX charges my Paypal account and they're off. If they're busy, they charge a surcharge. I can pick it or take public transportation.

I know why the Chicago Taxi authorities want Uber gone. But a guy like me is their best customer. Next year I'll budget $10,000 a year for UberX, and it will make my life so much more enjoyable and profitable.

Driving yourself around is dead. It's inefficient. Ridesharing is "libertarian" because it is truly freeing.

Some of us might consider that a feature.

Ok, you just blew my mind.

I remember never quite getting the whole "empathy box" idea in the book. It seemed unlikely and quite foreign. But you're right: that's what Facebook is. People sharing their good and bad news in order to participate in some group emotion. And, just like Rick's wife was "addicted" to it, lots of people were addicted to checking Facebook (at least for a while, the interest in Facebook seems to have waned). So Philip K. Dick was prescient about that after all.

This is a bad idea.

I lived withing spitting distance of a meth house a couple of years ago, in a nice neighborhood. Wouldn't have known anything were it not for the fact that it got raided. 'Course compared to LSD, Meth is nasty.

Conversely, I didn't dabble much with cassettes. The business for which I coded, very briefly used a cassette deck to load BASIC into the Altair, but switched to 8" hard-sectored floppy drives (being a business, it had "infinite financial resources" compared to my meager means, for some value of "infinite") very quickly: fiddling with the level settings and waiting eight minutes to load BASIC (after enterring the cassette bootloader by hand from the front panel) was not practical.

I DID once write a loader for that same Altair 8800 that used a TI Silent 700 with dual digital cassette heads that recorded at 5120 bps (IIRC) on digital cassettes (or high quality cassettes with a hole punched at the right spot in the leader :-) ).

I guess the punched card thing was more of a mainframe/mini-computer thing. When I started my undergraduate degree in 1979 most programming at the university was still done on punched cards and run "batch". We did have a row of ten DecWriters, and an express CRT terminal, but there were more punch card machines available. When accounts were issued, they were in the form of orange "control" punched card (80 column) "ACCOUNT command" cards. More mainframe CRT terminals were added over time, and were covetted because they were 1) faster than the DecWriters at 1200 bps over current-loop interfaces, and 2) didn't suffer the inconvenience of having to constantly go get scrap paper (and ensure that someone didn't comandeer your DecWriter!). The downside was that they displayed 24 rows of 80 colums text. So, having got a clean compile, one of the first things one would do was request a printout from the mainframe printers.

What I would do was code on the terminals, and at the end of the term, or when I was running out of my very small disk space allotment, get special permission to have my programs punched on cards for posterity. I got "mag tape" privileges about 1980/81 but realize that the recording density was 1600 bpi (later 6250) and the longest tape real was 2400 feet, so about five megabytes on a long tape (later 22.5 MB, but the 6250 bpi tapes were "finicky"). Only recently did I get rid of about 100 pounds of punched cards.

Actually, to be accurate, I got the Honours degree in 82 and followed it up with a Master of Computer Science degree in 84. Had just a video monitor and 300 BPS Hayes "Smartmodem" at home to connect to the university Cyber 7600 and later 835 mainframes.

HP2000 timesharing computer system with remote access via teletype at 110bps and an accoustic model. I can still remember the smell of teletype ribbons and paper in the high school computer room.

Why? To be able to get the computer to compute stuff for me. Initial programs were to print trig/log tables so i wouldn't have to buy them. I was already a science geek, computing orbital parameters for fun, and adding logs was easier than multiplication.

I was 13 years old. It was 1974.

The next year the high school got a 300 bps DecWriter. OMG! That was "fast". We got a card reader and optical scan 40 column cards, so we could "program" outside of the computer room. At some point we got a 1200 bps portable thermal paper TI terminal.

By 1975 or 76, I was hacking on an Altair at a local business, writing accounting software for them in Basic.

My first computer that I actually owned was a 6809-based system running Flex around 1984. A PC clone came shortly after that. By this time I was well on my way toward an Honours Computer Science degree.

If we send the Beeb's in Zuck's place I think we could make everyone happy. Iran gets a white boy they can prosecute or just hold without cause for a really long time and the US no longer has to put up with his illegal actions or that noise he purports to call music. Considering there's a petition before the White House to have him deported back to the Canada anyway, I vote we offer this as an alternative.

Quotes like this that make me miss the defunct Forum 2000. This sounds like a great quote from The Cube SOMAD.

I agree with the GP though. I recall a guy I used to work with who used hyperbole a lot. I recall that he once referred to a so-called "fiasco" which, upon deeper inspection, translated to him trying to schedule a conference call where he couldn't get the other people to agree on a time. Once I figured out his hyperbolic tendency, I could safely moderate the "disasters" he was warning of. I shudder to think what would happen if his emails are ever discovered for a lawsuit.

As a former H1-B holder, and current lawful permanent resident ("Green Card"), here long enough to become a citizen (> five years), H1-B DO NOT work cheaper.

At least, it is ILLEGAL to pay them less than 95% of the prevailing wage in the local area (as determined by the State Dept. of Labor). Furthermore, the employer has to bear the brunt of non-immigrant related legal paperwork and the cost of sending them home at the end of their visa. H1-Bs actually cost employers MORE than citizen workers.

While it is true that contracting firms and employers themselves will often lie regarding wages, this is criminal, and strongly opposed by legal H1-B workers as much as it is opposed by citizens.