I resent that...

That's just despicable...

Your Christmas sounds pretty shitty, well except for the love part... That sounds kinky.

That's because you equate Christmas and consuming.

Let me tell you how my family and I stopped buying stuff for Christmas: we used to rush downtown to buy each other presents, before the 24th, just like you. Then we figured we could buy more shit for our money if we exchanged promises at xmas eve, and actually bought said shit after mid-january, when the unsold articles would be discounted. We did that for several years, and ended up realizing we has just as much fun without the shit on xmas eve, and we could perhaps do without buying the shit at all. And that's what we've been doing ever since.

It works, you should give it a try. If you, your wife or your kids end up unhappy, you can always promise to buy the shit later when it's cheaper.

It's not the number of pixels that represents my car, or the danger (or lack thereof) for my liberties, it's the fact that those who want to sell us things treat us like cattle: our consuming habits are under intense scrutiny all of the time, and we are fed a form of brainwashing called "advertising" as a result of the marketing studies. And the worst is, it works: people consume, consume and consume all the time, and start consuming even more when certain dates come (like Black Friday).

I chose to stop consuming whenever possible, to not be a cattle.

to stay away from the mindless consumerism that defines today's society.

My immediate family and I don't buy presents for any of the "holiday seasons". We offer ourselves things of no merchant value, such as poems, good time and love.

Whenever I go to town, I see people moving from shop to shop like drones, trying hard to figure out what they're going to buy next. We used to be like that, but we aren't anymore. We use money to live (food, basic transportation, reasonable housing) and our hands and heads for entertainment.

As a QA engineer, I only use Office 95% of the time really :) Remember, my work is to produce ISO-9001 documents, which doesn't require much more than a word processor.
Now of course, we have a content management tool to organize all the junk we produce (we use Alfresco), and other services like QM, purchasing, marketing, R&D and production all have specialized software to carry out their work, but I can't tell you which because my employer forbids me to.

A dedication to process is a substitute for thinking.

If I didn't work as a QA engineer for a huge ISO-9001 company that absolutely looooves paperwork and red tape, I would print your sentence in huge letters and tack it above my desk at work. This is so true.

The problem with processes is, you need them to interface with customers that require it. Otherwise you miss contracts and opportunities. Unfortunately, QA of the kind I do (and the kind the OP seems to want) is a surefire way of turning a nimble, reactive, cheap small company into a stuffed up, slow, expensive and impossibly non-competitive one.

I hope the OP has a good reason to want more of that shit for his small company, because otherwise he'll be well on his way to hiring a lot of overpaid people who spend their days writing QA documents, norms, purchase specs, acceptance specs, procedures, test reports, waste kajillion reams of paper every day printing all that shit, travel all over the country to attend meetings with others of their ilk to discuss more forms, and generally waste everybody's time and money. I should know, that's what I do for a living...

What happens when the beamer is hit by a micro meteor nocking out the com and pointing the sat at SF?

Then San Francisco residents finally get to be warm.

Nevermind, nevermind, TFA was posted on Apr 1. It's just an april's fool joke with Slashdot lag.

relativity prevents faster-than-light travel relative to the fabric of spacetime, it places no restriction on the speed at which regions of spacetime may move relative to each other. So a small bubble of spacetime containing a spacecraft could travel faster than the speed of light

This whole proposition seems like flawed logic to me. It's like saying "air is odorless, so let's wrap a fart in a small bubble of air, so it won't stink up the room".

I have trouble believing the concept of a bubble of spacetime that moves relative to another without any interaction between the two, especially with mass inside the bubble. The other thing is, the whole idea seems to forget that everyday notions of relative speed (the "speed of a bullet shot inside a moving train" logic) don't work at relativistic speeds.

Or is this a late april fool?

my mini-van full of 9-track can hold 3 TB

Is that 8-track + parity?

Wow, I went to that Youtube page, and cared to read the comments. It's "go windows", "I love windows", "Windows rocks" all the way for pages after pages!

Not one comment pointing out the disgusting exploitation of a child's image of innocent to further a corporation's agenda. Either that or it was the deleted comments that dot the discussion.

Does this scream "astroturfing" or what?

But with the initial cost over $1000, and ongoing yearly fees, is it worth it?"

A friend of mine lost a limb in a accident with a lathe. When he tried to get a prosthesis, Bluecross/Blueshield denied the request because he wasn't covered. He now beats himself for having wanted to save $30/year on insurance.

Same for stem cells from umbilical cords: sure it looks costly, but in the event you get leukemia or some other nasty ailment in you lifetime (unlikely probability but definitely not zero), you'd find the investment very cheap indeed.
I myself would pay without hesitation.

I'd be willing to pay money for any program that filters out adds (without making too many mistakes). I've always wondered why this doesn't exist for TV.

Isn't that what TiVo is for?

Military computers and warfare hardware running virus-prone software (from you-know-whom no doubt) is like a weight lifting champion with multiple sclerosis: most of the time he looks mighty and even wins competitions, but don't be surprised if he collapses and crushes his neck with the barbell at an awkward moment.

In short: it's not reliable, don't do it.