I get at least one call a day on my landline from Verizon, trying to sell me FIOS. Not to mention numerous calls soliciting for various charities. At this point I just use my landline as a spam trap. I'd consider dumping it altogether but I'm not completely comfortable with not having a phone that'll work in a power outage.

I have my resume up on Monster and Dice, with my cell phone number on it. That gets at least one call a day from someone with some short-term contract gig in a location far away. (No, I'm not relocating. I live near a big city with plenty of work opportunities for people in my field, my SO isn't about to relocate, and I have tons of awesome friends.)

I also get robotexts on my cell phone from various payday loan scammers. And phone calls on my cell phone from "lower your credit card interest rate" scammers.

What I'd love to see is a piece of software that does automatic lookup on 800notes.com or whocallsme.com and blocks calls from known scam/spam numbers.

Came here for this, leaving satisfied.

(Return of the Living Dead, 1985.)

Yeah, most long-term-useful class I took in high school as well, in the early 1980s. Although we were a rich school district and had the luxury of IBM Selectrics. (Which probably accounts for my love of the IBM Model M buckling-spring keyboard.)

I do know that if 20 year old "me" could have seen the current, 45 year old "me", I would have taken much better care of my body, and spent more money and effort on upgrading and maintaining my appearance, rather than looking at the people who did do that as vain and shallow. Hindsight is always 20/20.

You might want to avoid the "In a cave, with a box of scraps" part.

Actually, you can't. That's illegal under the Gun Control Act of 1968.

I think at least in the United States, we've also hit the maximum commute times people are willing to tolerate. For a long time "drive till you qualify" (i.e. "drive outward from the city until you find a house you can afford") was the motto of the real estate industry. People found out how much the quality of life suffered when they were spending two hours in each direction behind the wheel of a car. They're now willing to make sacrifices in other areas (less living space, smaller yard, schools not as good) for more reasonable commute times.

I've been looking for a house to buy recently and there's a maximum commute time I'm willing to tolerate. Beyond that, I'll keep renting, thank you.

Many of the people who bought houses in far-flung exurbs "because it's where I can afford to buy" were also stretched pretty thin financially to afford those houses. The recent recession, with its layoffs and real estate bust, was not kind to those people. Many of them are not commuting long distances to work because they simply don't have a job anymore. Or they've lost their home and have moved back into a rental closer to the city.

I want to keep my Boston-area job, and friends, and especially my SO...while buying a house somewhere where mere mortals can actually afford to buy a house. Preferably where it doesn't snow, because I hate this whole "New England Winter" thing.

Does anyone remember asking for most of this stuff? Because I sure didn't. I think the major "feature" of Vista and W7 is that they removed the Playskool "My First Computer" window-dressing they used in XP. That stuff was just tacky.

At least with previous versions of Windows, upgrading added significant functionality. 3.1 -> 95 got you a whole new user interface, and removed the clunkiness, for the most part, of having to work with DOS directly. 95 -> 98 got you FAT32, which allowed you to use bigger hard drives, and USB support, both of which were missing from most versions of 95. 98 -> XP got you CD burning native to the OS, plus it got you off the 16-bit code base, adding stability. XP -> Vista or W7 doesn't get you anything on that level. I think probably the biggest advantage is that with 64-bit versions of Vista or W7 you're able to use more than 4GB of RAM but how many computers ship with that configuration right now? (Yes, I'm aware there was a 64-bit version of XP, but it was largely ignored by both computer manufacturers and the public.)

News flash: Many of the engineers who design things like the iPad, "flip" cell phones, etc., are Star Trek fans, and probably designed those things in either conscious or unconscious imitation of fictional technologies they'd seen on the show. Film at 11:00. Seriously, Star Trek in its various incarnations has been a pretty big influence on pop culture. Characters like Mr. Spock (cold, rational) and Captain Kirk (swaggering, arrogant, yet having plenty of competence to back up the braggadocio) have become archetypes. "Beam me up, Scotty", "Engage!", "Make it so", and so on have become catchphrases in mainstream culture. The first space shuttle was named Enterprise because thousands of Star Trek fans wrote letters to NASA, their Congressperson, etc. I bet when our culture finally does design a starship, it'll end up looking as much like the Enterprise as engineering considerations will allow: saucer-shaped hull + a cigar-shaped hull + 2 engine nacelles out on pylons.

"Snails on Speed" is a card in the game Munchkin. Life imitates art.

Yeah, there's a lot of the USA where there's either no broadband access at all, or the only broadband provider is the local franchised cable monopoly. What are those people going to do?