I assume that when you say "writing code", you mean, "cobbling together cargo cult code snippets invoking jquery/prototype that were harvested from the first Stack Overflow result that Google crapped out." Your version is definitely more concise, though.

...Turing complete?

Sure. We'll sell to pretty much anybody, from a garage hobbyist, to a global corporation.

Great Lakes Computer

We've got a pretty sizeable warehouse full of previous-gen (and current gen) goodies, which is why I can throw together a test rig on very short notice, and for comparatively little cost. I think our sales and purchasing guys can track down REALLY old stuff, if you've got some ancient Sun gear you need to keep running.

Disclaimer: I work for them, but I'm not an official company spokesperson. All of this rambling is purely my own views and opinions.

Just remember that you're going to also have to figure out how to handle all the marketing, capital investments, accounting, collections, legal, HR benefits (health, retirement), etc. that your employer would have previously handled for you. If you can figure out how to do it more efficiently and effectively than them, then you'll end up with a bigger take-away from that billing rate, but either way you'll be dealing with a LOT more than you are now.

I work for an IT hardware reseller (mostly; we do some new stuff too), so scrounging up some lab boxes or test beds usually isn't a problem. I've got one in our rack right now that I fire up to mess with VMs via Hyper-V, rather than adding a bunch of extra load to our ESX cluster. And we mostly deal with smaller development projects, not spending months building huge software packages, so it's generally not too hard to grab a few hours of downtime here and there to read and experiment with stuff. Our dev team (a whole two of us) have MSDN subscriptions, so it's open season on learning MS products and figuring out what might be useful to us.

Thus, I don't have a ton of experimental IT gear at home, nor do I feel all that compelled to continue doing at home what I do all day at work. I've got a desktop that does a few light server duties, and which is mostly just a means to and end. I do have a growing pile of assorted tablets, though...

Gotcha. We had a C64 and subscribed to Gazette for a while. I didn't realize (or had forgotten) there were multiple variations.

The IT world suddenly seems to be under the impression that "compute" can be used as a noun. Either that or they were referring to the old '80s C64 magazine and forgot to capitalize the C.

And MS has had loads of practice throwing good money after bad, so what's another go at it here and there?

Their argument is basically, "Everybody is going to pirate the new software anyway, so please continue to sink money into supporting the old software that we've already pirated." Is that how I should be interpreting this?

Hobbies like working for a company that's not in a nosedive.

The kind of people and activities that need TOR to provide extreme anonymity need significantly more than just TOR alone to do it effectively. This seems like it could lull people into assuming otherwise.

Personally, I think the answer might be a hybrid situation. EG. Offer physical DVD rentals out of an existing establishment that's already successful on its own - like a gas station, bar or grocery store.

So Redbox machines, basically? I see quite a few of them around here.

This is a great way to make your Wii collect less dust (what with the reduced surface area and all).

They're used to microing from all that Starcraft.