That it does. Ditto Chromecasts and a lot of "smart" Blu-ray players; I just meant for typical PCs.

As far as I know Hulu and Amazon Prime won't work without it for now. Otherwise it's basically flushable.

It's galling, isn't it? "We know our software's as safe on the unprotected web as a Craigslist hookup, so be sure to keep this software rubber handy." And it might not be so insulting if McAfee was good at anything besides eating hardware resources...

It's a problem born from software bloat. It was originally intended to be a means of drawing vector graphics and simple animations, but there was a void in functionality in the days before PCs were fast enough to handle Javascript (or even had browsers that could cope with the highly abstracted pages written now). So more functionality was added, and with that came layer after layer of gooey, exploitable cruft. Now Flash doesn't just offer vector graphics. It's a multimedia environment with DRM, a method of offering rich internet applications, a video player, and a buttload more besides. All that bloat's been encouraged because Adobe wants Flash to be used by as many people as possible - it's publicly traded, you've got to show investors and stockholders where all that money's going - and we've now arrived at the point where it's a suppurating pile of vulnerabilities and patched-together functionality with legacy support, far more trouble than it's worth for most users.

That's CMOS resetting, my bad. *cough*

You can still occasionally find a DIP switch on overclocker-friendly motherboards to ratchet up clock speeds and apply a corresponding voltage bump; the vagaries of that are handled by the BIOS/UEFI. But the only jumpers I ever see are for CMOS flashing, and maybe once in a blue moon to enable or disable an integrated component. It's definitely not 1995 any more.

Yes, for the time being i486 support's still maintained. Debian and Slackware both nominally support it, and I suppose a very patient person could also flog their 486 nearly to death with Gentoo. Though I'd think a sane person would cross-compile...

I'm not wasting any more time chasing your moving goal posts. I could point out that you can pretty easily find cheap, working computers on Craigslist, and frequently for well under $100, but then you'd quail that those aren't new. You've clearly made an ideological commitment to this position. Who would I be to unmoor you?

OK, fine; I'll concede that point. But let's remember the inflation that's occurred since the time around my birth: $200 in 1980 would be just over $600 now. Even if we knock 20% off the effective buying power of that money, $500 in 2014 will buy a computer that's 100% ready to connect to a television and run an overwhelming majority of applications, including Visual Studio Express.

So look on Amazon for a Raspberry Pi kit, with case, (micro)SD card, and a few other various & sundries. Once it's arrived in the mail, put it together, sit down with the kids, and figure out how to shoehorn an OS onto the thing. I can't imagine setting up and effectively using a ZX Spectrum would be easier than a Raspberry Pi or Banana Pi.

In my experience one doesn't regularly spend hours in an enclosed, pressurized space thousands of feet above ground with fast food workers...

What a way to view the people in your world - as an endless series of economic actors to whom you feel superior or against whom you rationalize your lower standing. I hope I never work for you.

As you board the plane. It's always greeted with a little surprise, but they're always grateful.

Seriously - bring a package of cookies for the flight crew. The flight attendants will leave you alone except to check on you, and will probably sneak you a non-alcoholic treat at some point during the flight. And it's not a job that's appreciated terribly much - look at the comments in this thread, just for starters - so it goes a long way.

It's even weirder than that. For reference:

.mp1 = MPEG-1 Layer 1 Audio, used by no one and basically a historical footnote

.mp2 = MPEG-1 Layer 2 Audio, used by the radio broadcast industry for archival above 224 kbps and the audio format of VideoCDs

.mp3 = MPEG-1 Layer 3 Audio, the most familiar and widely used consumer audio format in the world

.mp4 = Advanced Audio Codec, AKA MPEG-2 Layer 7 Audio, later updated to MPEG-4 Layer 3 Audio

And that concludes today's installment of worthless trivia.