My understanding was that the other SimCity titles had no "victory" scenarios. I recall there were some versions (the Super NES version of SimCity comes to mind) that did have various (often amusing) failure scenarios where the game would not allow you to continue. I bought copies of SimCity 2000 and SimCity 4 through gog.com recently and started up SC2K recently in emulation and it works quite well. For some odd reason their release of SC2K installs through windows but runs through DOS.

I think I may have managed to find a copy of "Streets of Sim City" somewhere as well; I don't know if you remember that one but it lets you drive (or fly!) your city. I thought it was a clever idea but I haven't seen how good it is in execution.

And I really wish I could get RoboSport working, as well; that was a favorite of mine from the same group.

That depends. I have gotten into this discussion many times here on slashdot before. It is important to distinguish literal (or "classical") atheism from what represents atheism today. The literal definition of atheism is "without faith" or "without beliefs". However many people who call themselves atheists today explicitly demonstrate a belief in the absence of a deity.

A good way to model this is as a set of vectors. If a person rooted in their faith has a vector of magnitude 1 and a given direction, a modern atheist essentially has the same vector magnitude but the opposite direction. A classical atheist, by comparison, would have a vector of magnitude zero.

The importance of this is that many of the soviets were actually modern atheists, concerned with removing religion from their country. A classical atheist would not care about other peoples' faith(s).

Similarly your notion of atheism as

Distinguishes modern from classical. A modern atheist is often driven by their desire to remove others from their faith because they believe their faith in the absence of a god to be superior. A classical atheist would not waste time on it. An excellent example of the classical atheist in the modern society is Dr. Neill deGrasse Tyson; he simply doesn't care about other peoples' faith - yet he does not call himself an atheist either because he is aware of how loaded that term is in the current situation.

That is an excellent idea, there. One change I would make to that suggestion though is to just do an install that doesn't include an x server (ie, either a "server" linux install [ubuntu server is OK though not great for this] or FreeBSD). Then you don't have to waste time and storage space installing a service that you're not going to run.

Another possible change on it would be to use a compact flash card in a CF->IDE (or CF->SATA, depending on the age of the laptop) adapter. I like to keep things internal as much as possible to reduce the likelihood of the storage getting knocked out physically by accident.

When enough others decide to buy an app-able crockpot, you won't have any choice but too buy one as well.

Yes, for normal people, but we're nerds. We'll simply hack them, just like we jailbreak iPhones.

This story reminds me of something that happened in a bar a year or so ago. A fellow had a strange looking contraption that looked like it had something to do with a furnace. I asked him what it was, and he said it was an "obsolete" analog part that cost him twenty bucks new that he was installing in a friend's furnace to replace a burned up digital board that cost $200 used.

Look at cars, my last car had a digital circuit to control climate. If it had gone out, the replacement was $300. $300 for something that surely cost the automaker less than $5 to manufacture.

If I'm forced to buy an internet-connected toaster, you can bet its antennas will be the first parts to be removed.

That part is easy to address with dyndns or various other services.

That depends on what you need. If all you need is to host a static website, the security concerns are actually pretty minimal. If you want php and a lot of goodies plus remote login and what-have-you then your concerns grow quickly.

Perhaps I underestimated the traffic volume for your web site, then. I know if my site is down occasionally (my personal server at home pulls five nines without much effort but there are sporadic things beyond my control like power / internet losses) it isn't a big deal.

I wouldn't be so sure of that. Again, if it is just a static page you could set up a really basic box (think mini-ITX) with as few moving parts as possible and your power consumption will be less than if you go to work and forget to turn off your coffee maker on the way out the door. I can tell you that the power consumption of my web server at home (an old P4 desktop I got for free some time ago) makes no notable difference on our monthly power bill.

You may have seen some of my JEs over the years where I have mocked the various attempts to compromise my home system via ssh. If I bothered to either change my ssh port or disable ssh entirely I would have basically zero attempts - I leave it where it is primarily out of laziness and my occasional needs to check in to my system remotely for various work-related functions.

You neglected your second - and more profound - assumption.

You have to have bash installed as well in order to be vulnerable. Not every linux install installs bash by default.

In other words, you are comparing an OS that has a vulnerable shell by default (OS X) with an OS that has a vulnerable dhcp by default (Linux) and making an assumption that the Linux install has the vulnerable shell as well.

A lot of reasons. I probably don't have a fixed IP address, I'd have to keep on top of security far more closely than with a PC, and I'd have to have at least two computers running 24/7/365 in case one went down, and I usually only have one or two running when I'm awake. The electricity alone would cost more than hosting.

Yahoo's directories were like gopherhole directories for html. Web searches didn't start to mean much until infoseek came around.

I picked up an insightful and a troll on the same comment at some point today. One of the insightful mods was undone (note that it doesn't tell me if it was this one or a different one) which moves the score down to (+2, insightful).

Thank you for finding this and offering your insight.

I hadn't noticed that change, thank you for pointing it out. I find it interesting that the editor who posted the story didn't notice it before letting it loose on the front page.

I respectfully disagree with that, based on two things in particular:

• The stories that make the front page, which frequently favor the American conservative viewpoint or frequently trash any other viewpoint (and the general absence of the opposite).
• The high frequency of conservative advertisements on here (even when I view the site without being logged in, or not logged in and from a computer / device that is not mine)

I have also noticed that when I post something here that is does not favor the conservative viewpoint, it is often moderated "overrated" - which everyone knows is immune to meta-moderation and hence a permanent negative mark on a comment.

I don't recall now what your internet connection situation is like at home, but hosting your own site is becoming much more viable for a lot of people now thanks to high(er) speed connections being so very cheap. I have a basic cable modem and do my domain through dyn.org (I know, a lot of people hate them but I'm happy with them for $10 per year). Then I can host as much of whatever as I want. Granted, your site probably gets a lot more traffic than mine, so that might not be as great, but you could always try it as a mirror initially and see how it goes (or even do some clever cross-site-scripting to pull files from your home host while the main page is still hosted at your current provider).

Oh, and I think you meant to say "no scripting whatsoever" in referring to your page, rather than "no scripting whatever". :)

It looks like the firing order for an 8 cylinder engine. I thought maybe the engineer tasked with that pin out was moonlighting in a garage somewhere.

Although not every Linux distro installs bash as a shell by default. AFAIK OS X always installs bash unless the user goes back an uninstalls it.

In other words I would say the two are roughly equally vulnerable. You can't compromise bash if it isn't installed (on various other *nixes) nor can you compromise bash if you can't get to it because no public services are installed that can call upon it (OS X).

The number of replies to my more recent comments suggests that others can read my posts reasonably well. A particular example of which of my comments you find not "readable" would be useful.