That's your metric. It's a fair one, but it's not the only one.

I've got a butter-yellow WE2554, a couple of those ubiquitous beige WE2500 models, and a black WE2500-variant with a redial button.

I'd really like a red 2554. It would look cool out in the workshop where the butter-yellow one currently hangs.

Yeah, considering the VCR and all...

You know, you an upgrade from that Western Electric model 500 (the ubiquitous rotary) to a Model 1500, or if you want * and # the Model 2500, for basically free...

All but two landline phones in the house are from Western Electric. The 900MHz cordless Uniden with the overized buttons and red LED blinking call indicator and the alarmclock phone in the bedroom are the only outliers.

Back when they expected to lease the phone to you for 50 years, they built a phone that would last for 50 years.

Yep. I've had too many providers go away on me with little or no notice that I don't consider storage on someone else's equipment viable. I see it as a great way to end up screwed, and with a "free" service, absolutely no recourse.

I'm using a Gateway 2000 124-key "Anykey" macro-programmable PS/2 keyboard still, and a Kensington ExpertMouse Pro trackball.

If I could find a cheap ADB-to-something adapter I'd use the old beige Kensington ADB trackball that I've got.

I still have Western Electric trimlines, Model 2500s, and Model 2554 phones in-service on our landline. Never had caller ID, call waiting, or voicemail, still have an answering machine. Never saw a reason to pay monthly for services that I could supply for myself.

We're there too, with 800 titles on tape. Unfortunately the new projector doesn't display analog sources very well compared to the old one, so tapes and laserdiscs look like crap compared to DVDs and Blu-Ray players.

since both projectors can shine off-center and make the image look right I'm tempted to hang the old projector too, and to use it for LD and VHS.

I find it rather difficult to take notes on my phone when I'm talking on my phone. I tend to switch around between sticky notes, notepads, and the blank sides of printouts, depending on what I've got handy.

When classic goes away, so do I. Copy this if you want them to get the idea.

I was thinking about that today, and yeah, I agree. When Classic is gone then I don't expect to continue using Slashdot anymore. When they just become every other discussion forum site then why would I need to limit myself to this one?

At one point I wanted to set up a gopher juarez server. I wanted it to reject web browsers emulating a gopher client too... I figured that something like three people would be left that would appreciate it though.

Heh. I used to write MS-DOS batch and config files with copy con: if the only other choice was edlin...

If it's any consolation, I didn't use vi for close to 20 years, using pico/nano instead. It wasn't until I started working with huge flatfiles that needed hundreds of lines of regular expression parsing that I learned how to use vi effectively.

I'd say that if you really need those advanced features that vi is the way to go, but admittedly pico/nano is a lot easier to use otherwise.


As for what I use that's old, I have a Dolby-AC3-capable laserdisc player and more than 500 titles and an S-VHS VCR with about 850 titles on tape, I'm hesitant to buy a laptop lacking an optical drive (though my pickings are quite slim these days), I'm still using a Gateway 2000 "Anykey" PS/2 124-key macro-programmable keyboard manufactured by Maxiswitch, the vast majority of my computer monitors are 4:3 ratio, I still have my SCSI Jaz2 drive, my SCSI Zip drive, a couple of 3.5" floppy drive, and one 5.25" floppy drive laying around, and my daily-use TV is a widescreen, high-definition tube . It works great! Cost me only $40! And at 126lb, no one is going to steal it. In fairness, it fits the built-in TV cabinet perfectly and at the time a similarly-sized LCD model was close to $600, so it made sense to go with the tube.

I don't necessarily equate old with obsolete. Obsolete is when it doesn't do the job that you need done satisfactorily. In that sense my 20 year old beater $700 pickup truck with no straight sheet metal and worn-out steering is fine, as I generally only drive it when either I need a truck specifically, or when one of the cars is out of commission and I need basic transportation in the interim. I'm typing this on a five-year-old netbook with an Atom processor, and I only recently replaced my Xeon-Gallatin-based dual processor workstation from a decade ago because the thing croaked after a power outage and doesn't want to come back up. It was a great box for a long time, even with only two cores. It's been replaced with a newer-used dual-quad Xeon workstation that I expect to use for another decade as my workstation and the whole-house server.

Your mistake is assuming monolithic intent. Even a single judge has intentions that vary from minute to minute...just as yours do. When you factor in a large number of judges you get a large variation in intent. Sometimes they are even worse than you are currently imagining. Sometimes they are focused on the rule of law. Sometimes they are of some idealistic bent or other.

So the kind of result that you are expecting is possible, but not inevitable, even with a judge that usually bends to the wind. And some judges rarely do that.

Even so, I figure that the trend toward centralized authoritarianism is designed into they sysstem, given the greatly improved speed of communication and transportation. And, of course, the closing of the frontier. There's now nowhere to go to escape them. This makes designs that were only a bit authoritarian at the start ("I smell a rat. It squints towards monarchy."--Patrick Henry on the US Constitution) much more authoritarian now. The British system, with all its faults, is a lot better, but then it *evolved* under tyranny. (Unfortunately, they've been disabling their safeguards over the recent decades. Now Lords can be members of the House of Commons, IIUC, and that's totally insecure. The change they *should* have made would be to continue the separation, but so automatically promote into the aristocracy anyone who is sufficiently rich and powerful. Possibly also a provision to demote from the aristocracy the heirs of anyone who loses their wealth and power...but with a time lag to allow them to recover without loss of "status".)

There really *is* a difference. It rarely translates into action, but it infuses the rhetoric used. The Democrats want more people to like them, and the Republicans want more powerful people to like them. So they say the things they think will cause that to happe, while acting as self-serving greedy immoral power-seeking proto-despots (who are trying to lose the "proto-").