Actually, yes. I occasionally go on weekend trips and having to bring a charger quite sucks. Even at home, my girlfriend runs out of charge almost once a week. It really is a hassle.

the 'proud' crap is just pandering to a demographic

You're entirely missing the point. There are many people who feel that gay == shameful, the direct implication being that they want gay folk to feel ashamed. Proud is an in-their-face declaration that they are not ashamed.

That's all it is.

It's the same for any aspect of life for which there are detractors; some people think geekery is a bad thing; hence "geek and proud." Some people think prostitution is a bad thing; hence "sex worker and proud", and so on for a long list of "your prejudices do not define me" issues.

It's a very natural -- and correct -- reaction to a society where people are encouraged to coerce others into specific behavioral channels without regard for the consent or interest of those others.

Sure you can do that. They'll (kind of) accept it too. Reducing your payment amount will result in reduction of your service.

When you pay less than your bill, they'll simply reduce your service to 0.

Started a farm, moved house, moved offices, attended an elaborate southern wedding.

That's my last 6 months. How about you?

" Do I really need to track you down and dox everything I find to everyone you know? Is that really what you want? Hush up now, it's past your bedtime, junior."

You got so mad over me being right (because you're a total fool in the firt pace) that you had to resort to making threats.

You lost your entire argument.

Oh, and just for fun - I'm a global horticultural research director - four of your Fortune 50 companies DIRECTLY CONSULT WITH ME in securing their automated food production facilities, designing new internet-connected monitoring/control systems, and even down to designing the buildings, hydroponics systems, LED lighting, the entire shebang. I get paid $2500/hr for consultation work. What the fuck are you getting paid?

Oh, look, have a nice guided tour of an FTSE 100 (That's the UK equivalent to Fortune 100) facility I built and designed (and SECURED from SSL/TLS attacks.)

Amateur.

Dox me? I'm already globally known, who the fuck are you, Mr. Nobody? Go take your empty threats to your mother.

I did this for my NAS, but it was more expensive than an HP microserver with a similar form factor. The only reason that I did it was that I wanted to be able to use the machine for XBMC so I wanted a slightly better GPU. The only bit that I'm likely to upgrade is the disks, and even then I had to make some compromises (the case has 4 removable disk bays and a slimline optical drive bay, but I couldn't find a motherboard that had everything I wanted and more than 4 SATA slots, so I can't use one of the disk bays).

I used to think desktop computers were upgradable, but it's not really true. Sure, you can bump the RAM and the disk easily, but by the time a new CPU is worth the bother, the socket and chipset have changed, so you need to buy a new motherboard. The new motherboard takes a different kind of RAM. The hard disk might still work if you're lucky (although you may find that the interface type has changed) but it's probably going to be the bottleneck in the new system so you probably want to upgrade it too.

The last time I upgraded a desktop, I kept the case and optical drive (which I replaced a bit later). I kept the hard disk, but added a second one and eventually stopped using the smaller one. After the next upgrade, I had enough parts to build a completely new desktop. If two upgrade cycles means that you've replaced every single part, then it's simpler and easier to just lengthen the upgrade cycles a bit and by a completely new system.

I guess you missed the huge amount of regulation that has come in regarding pollution in waterways in the last 50 or so years then? Or do you think that this prediction would still have been wrong if factories had been allowed to keep dumping waste into rivers? In fact, maybe you should just try visiting some of the parts of India and China where they've managed to build an industrial base without such regulation and see how the water tastes. The entire point of making such predictions is so that we can avoid them happening.

Arguing the facts doesn't appear to work. Read the posts above yours. A number of them are full of assertions with no citations backing them, followed by responses citing data showing that they're wrong. In a world full of rational people wanting to have an informed debate, that would be the end. Now go back to the last story about climate change on Slashdot. You'll see the same assertions being made, by the same people, and being contradicted then too. At some point, you have to just accept that either these people have some vested interest in denying the evidence and so can't be convinced by more evidence.

It's more common in the sciences, where the convention is to provide a LaTeX stylesheet. In subjects where manuscripts are submitted in Word format, the typesetting by the authors tends to be so bad that you need to have a professional redo it.

Moore's law applies. The reason the Mac was so much cheaper than the Alto was that it was a decade later. The Alto was also heavily designed for experimentation. Programs were compiled to a bytecode with the bytecode interpreter implemented in CPU microcode. This made it very easy to change the instruction set and find one that was well suited to the requirements of the software, but for a commercial product you'd have wanted to sink a lot of that logic into the hardware.

Let me guess. You were reading at +2 back then?

Also make sure the content justifies the ad. If the content proves to be shite and stopped after going through the ad, then that is theft of time and pleasure. No ads prior to content, only after content and align the ads to the content, it is far less jarring. As for searches, the video spammers just flood their content with all kinds of popular tags, so allow users to block specific uploaders and drop them from all search returns.

In this case the whole FBI story stinks. Let see they had it down to one suspect, just one suspect, so why send out the email at all, go to a judge and get a search warrant. It sounds very much like, yes they did launch a phishing attack on the person they prosecuted but that was not the only target of that attack, there were many others and the FBI has just chosen to forget about they existed and the FBI committed a criminal actions against innocent parties, something the FBI has a track record for doing. So please explain why the phishing attack against just one person when a search warrant would have sufficed either targeted at the individual or the individuals ISP. Phishing attacks are used to target large numbers of individuals, not one because phishing attacks are too unreliable.

The soundest reasons for effective social services to support those that fail in the psychopathically competitive society of capitalism are it is cheaper than prison and it makes up for the theft of subsistence existence. The right of every living thing to gain access to and survive off the environment that is stolen by the artificial construct of ownership and exclusion.

Only fools think they are "bending over backward" because they completely fail to look out the outcomes of the various social services models around the world. Straight up and without any room for argument is the fact the greater and more supportive the social services the more stable and crime free the society that provides them. Reduce social services and you increase crime, the forced need to survive when the ability to survive off the environment has been denied and no alternatives provided. The get a job rant when there are no jobs is stupid. Just as daft is if there are no jobs become self employed, when self employed people are just as unemployed as everyone else when there is no work to contract.

Social services keep the economy ticking over while recovery occurs, else economic collapse is the result of the downward spiral of less services are required, driving greater unemployment, resulting in less services required.

The real solution to many of societies most pressing problems is not the crazy elimination of social support services but the elimination of the psychopaths and narcissist that do not see themselves as a part of their overall human society along with everyone else but see themselves as competitors or more accurately predators preying upon the rest. Remember it is not in reality dog eat dog, dogs are smart enough to cooperate and work as a pack, it is rabid dog eat rabid dog, only sick dogs seek to prey upon other dogs.