I know i'm going to need my Nomex underwear for this post, but...

1) IME, kids who would be 'nerds' tend to be nerds anyways. It's something that they just can't help.

2) Kids who would not be nerds will pretty much not be nerds. Either they don't have the interest, intelligence, or what. But they'll get into other things instead (not that this is bad, it's just the facts).

2) Kids who are on the fence might be brought in by Make or similar, but this percentage is going to be incredibly low.

3) Right now it is INCREDIBLY COOL to be a 'nerd' or a 'geek'. However, this definition doesn't apply to the kids in #1. The 'new' nerds or geeks aren't really nerds or geeks, just those from #2 that have found a way to apply that label to themselves so that they can do whatever they wanted to do in the first place. I'm talking the cosplay/anime types who play video games as opposed to writing them, buy Macbooks instead of building a computer themselves, and get into Rock Band instead of learning to play a real instrument. There will unfortunately be little to no talk about science, computers, scifi, Make Magazine or any of the hallmark stuff that anyone GenX or older would think of when you say "nerd" or "geek". The terms have completely new meanings.

There are many examples, but y'all get the gist.

I'm pretty sure I saw that one too. When I was 8, I had a subscription to both PS and Ranger Rick.

Maybe I've got a tendency towards odd conversation or something, but Cleverbot has never seemed very clever to me.

1) No memory prior to its last statement. As in, it may ask you a question, but it doesn't care about your response. You may ask a question, get an answer, ask a followup question, and it's as if it is a completely new subject.

2) Random tangental responses to questions: "How are you today?" "I like brown peas".

3) Constantly getting asked if I think it is human. All to frequently. In fact, it tends to get repetitious with a few concepts. I would expect something like this to be able to 'learn' from what it is fed and synthesize coherent sentences.

4) It seems to only pay attention to the first sentence you type. Dump a paragraph into it and it will ignore everything else.

In short, you can't really have an actual conversation with it- it's all just single level question/answer responses. It's about as sentient as the Infocom Text Adventures of the 1980s. And that's really pushing it.

I know a few chemical cocktails that can make people THINK they're invisible. And bulletproof.

I don't blame him. The robots sound like an awesome project, IMHO. When I was a kid (say 11 or 12, so mid-1980s) I used to dream of something similar. I drew up all kinds of plans and pictures and routes of autonomous robotic water craft that would run on sea water and traverse the Pacific ocean from my home state to Japan and back.

Were I him, I would be all up in this stuff. Just saying.

I'm pretty sure I used that spell once or twice back in the DnD days.

Around the turn of the century, I ordered cd sets of all the major distros from Cheapbytes. (This was dialup days, so I couldn't just download them).

I loved Slackware (7), but the package management (or at least dependency management) got to be a bit tedious. I remember one time getting into over 16 levels of dependencies several times just trying to build The GIMP. So I tried Mudrake and it was great, except it 1) the graphics were really corny and 2) it was slow as balls compared to Slackware.

Then I tried Debian, and that seemed to be "just right". Light on resources, and installing packages was a breeze. Debian Unstable was my main squeeze for a number of years, until I discovered FreeBSD. But that's another stowey.

I recently checked out the Mandrivel Free edition. It works and all, but there's really nothing that sets it apart. It feels like another Kubuntu.

You know when you've been playing too much Minecraft when you try to calculate how many pickaxes it would take to mine it, and how big of a diamond block castle you could construct with it.

I'm way late to this (girlfriend was over all weekend so I didn't touch a single computer. How's that for an excuse?)

Buuuut... I currently have a 300mhz K6-II from 1998 that runs a current Debian Stable. I thought I would make it a minecraft server but it turns out that it doesn't have enough ram (minecraft will refuse to even start without at least 800MB or so). Prior to this it was a FreeBSD 8.x webserver, fileserver and firewall. It replaces the 486DX2 that was running (then current) FBSD 6.x at the time the smoke came out of its power supply.

I applaud when people find uses for older hardware, but IMHO putting a similarly aged OS on an old computer isn't really much of a hack. I could get all retro and put Win95 on this machine and Slackware 5.0 in a dual-boot setup like the old days. (Still have the disks in the closet).

That said, running older hardware just isn't as fun as it sounds. Pulling up the list of fbsd software packages in sysinstall takes a full 13 minutes (from download to uncompressing the tarball to displaying the menu). I know because I've timed it. You really have to consider if you want to build a package from ports, because it can easily eat up an afternoon, and/or an evening depending upon dependencies. Rebuilding the kernel was about 4.5 hours, and a build world on just a base install is about a day and a half.

As a Debian machine, the install scripts will only install a '486' kernel. Building a new kernel from new source was a serious ordeal, much more serious than the days when this was my #1 box up to about 2002. The reason I chose Debian is because Archlinux, (the distribution that champions itself as the saviour of older systems) doesn't support anything i586 and lower. Irony.

All I initially wanted was a text-only system for software development (C and Perl). Maybe some occasional BitchX and Mutt use now and again. It does that pretty well (I want to say FreeBSD is a better choice than the Debian, in this case), but that's about *all* it does well. As a fileserver, it's pretty slow, even on the LAN. 12 year old hard drive technology and 33mhz busses, etc.

I could go on a rant about software bloat in the OSS community and how 2008 seemed like an abrupt cutoff for when I could run X or anything graphical on this machine, but I'll save it for another day.

It's been a few days, but I hope you've come back to read this...

I've used the same "last 5 people on IRC" joke myself. IRC still exists, but I think you're right in that it's slowly dying. I first connected BitchX to efnet in 1998 (on my Caldera OpenLinux system!), and it was an insane, vibrant, dangerous and beautiful experience. I later moved over to freenode but there was still a very active community. I took a break, and have come back to it recently, and all the old channels are 'dead'. Even the channels that have 150+ users in them, they're all lurkers, and all of them are lurking in 49 other channels as well. I used to log 200K of real dialogue in logs on a daily basis, but nowadays you'll get about 20K of system messages and nobody saying anything.

It's sad. I really miss being able to connect with intelligent, like-minded people on such a deep and nerdy level. The infrastructure is still there, but there's no content or people left.

This is pure marketing and "come over to our side" tactic. I doubt Apple is getting much from the value of the machine. Not even in commodity value.

They're partnering through WeRecycle, who is an e-Stewards Certified recycler. Nothing is getting dumped into a 3rd world country. No data is getting mined or leaked.

There is a huge e-waste recycling industry, and this is all pretty standard stuff. I work for one of the major recyclers (also e-Stewards Certified). I thought maybe /. denizens would know more about all this, but I guess not.

The conspiracy theories are pure gold, however. I'm not a fan of Apple (products or corporate), but this is rich. Pure comedic gold.

Fugganaye right. I shouldn't admit any of this, but I was into scrolling chat rooms* back in the mid-late 90s and it was the fucking Wild West. Winnukes and Portfloods for days and days. Javascript exploits and whatnot. People getting pWn3d for no good reason. You had to be patched and armed just to stay in the joint.

There was a guy that flexed his hax0r muscle at everyone, but especially gave me shit. Seriously unprovoked bullshit, following me from room to room, then later site to site. I could write a book on this, but basically through some elaborate social engineering of several people (including his school) I was able to determine his home address. I bribed a high school friend of mine who was going to a school in the next city over to go take a picture "of the white house at this address" and send it to me. Some low-tech scanning practices and some floppy disk work at a local Staples ensued.

The next time he fucked with me I posted the pic of his house in the chat room. I wish I had logged his responses, and the crying he did to my alt (the social engineering 'chick') over the next few days. He never messed with me or anyone else in the place again. It was a pretty good hack, and I dreamed guys like Kevin Poulsen would approve. But I actually felt pretty dirty afterwards.

*hotelchat ftw!

There are actually a lot of "Windows Kiddies" on IRC. Not a majority by far, but still some. I was surprised that a libSDL channel I recently got into was almost all Windows folks.

By my estimation, in my experience (freenode and efnet), most people on IRC are running some form of older-school Linux distribution, such as Debian or Slackware. There are some Ubuntu peeps but I think a lot of them use something more 'modern', i.e. skype or pidgin. I see BSD folks in my BSD channels, but they only barely edge out the Windows guys overall.

Now that USENET has gone down the shitter, I still enjoy IRC, and will continue to do so until it goes away.

*than.

Otherwise, true that.