I'm sure you can get both for a lot less than $50 on Craig's List, or freecycle. I gave my setup away years ago. I only hope the person I gave it to got some use out of it before dumping it in the trash.

A good way to get the attention of somebody like a phone company is to file a complaint with your state's Public Service Commission. The PSC will forward the complaint to the company, who will have to respond officially to the PSC. If they're going to jerk you around, that's the best way to jerk them right back.

On the other hand, Ting is great for people like me who don't watch video on their phone. I do email and maps/gps/traffic. I save a ton of money over my old AT&T plan where I never came close to using up my minutes or data quota but had to pay for it anyway.

Which technology is Amazon using for their AWS instances? Their instance description page (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/) doesn't say one way or the other.

I've got 2 x 27" now, and I keep thinking if I were to do it all again, I'd go with a single 30. The problem with 2 monitors is you can't really have a window spanning the break in the middle. The OS supports it, of course, but it's annoying since the two halves never line up perfectly, and even if they did, there's a gap. Plus, of course, twice as many cables.

Or, maybe it's just a case of the grass is always greener on the other desktop.

Near as I can tell, very few people are actually violating your patent.

I looked at the "Getting Started With Digital Logic - Logic Gates" part. Anybody who has actually built something with TTL on a breadboard should know that 7400 series gates can sink a lot more current than they can source. Connecting a logic output to ground through a LED may not draw enough current to turn the LED on fully. The right way to do it is to connect the LED between the logic output and the Vcc rail in a pull-down configuration (with a current limiting resistor). Of course, that gives you inverted logic (LED on means logic 0, LED off means logic 1), but you get used to that. If it bothers you, use an inverter.

I graduated from a pretty typical suburban NJ high school in 1977. We had an HP 9810 (http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=51), and also a ARS-33 connected to a time-shared BASIC system a few towns away. I got to play with them my junior and senior years. That was my first introduction to any sort of computer. It was, or course, also my first introduction to computer games (hunt the wumpus, lunar landrer, and some kind of Star Trek thing where you got to explore the galaxy and blow up klingons with photon torpedos.

I was also lucky to spend the summer between my last two years of high school at a program run by Stevens Tech, where I was exposed to FORTRAN and PDP-10 assembler (both via punch cards).

Actually, 7 ring binders. They look like http://www.pooleys.com/prod_detail.cfm?product_id=843. Why 7 rings? So pages that get used day in and day out don't tear out of the binder.

I've made several attempts over the years to use Linux on the desktop. Every time, I end up running back to OSX. What I've got now is the best of both words. All of our servers are linux. I have a linux box locally I use for development. I also have a Mac Mini on my desk and use that for my desktop (and a MBP I use from home or when on the road). With a trivial amount of work, you can configure profiles in Terminal.app so you just click on an icon and you've got an ssh window open to whatever host you need to work on. I can export my linux file system and mount it on my Mac using NFS. It's all completely seamless.

The extra hardware cost is hardly worth mentioning (you can get a Mini for $4-600, depending on how you configure it). For the one or two times a year I need to get to the real linux desktop, I just hit the "input select" button on my monitor, and swap where my USB keyboard is plugged into. In theory, I can fire up X11 on my Mac to run linux X11 apps, but I can't remember the last time I bothered. At one point, I experimented with desktop sharing (Chicken of the VNC, gotta love that name), but that's far more pain than it's worth.

I wouldn't worry about it. If it's a legitimate hurricane, the Republican party has ways to try and shut that whole thing down.

In some cases, the product is the company, sold to the stockholders. That's the only sale that matters.

I've made several attempts over the years to run Linux as my desktop. I inevitably give up. Most recently, for about a year, running some relatively recent Ubuntu release. As a server, it's an excellent platform, but the desktop tools just suck. Every X11 app is just a little bit different in how it handles basic things like window management and copy-paste. It drives me nuts. I think I've found the sweet spot. I run a OSX on a Mac Mini for my desktop and do all my work on a Linux box. I get the best of both worlds.

Personally, I think it's great that carriers rip people off for SMS. I probably average 2 or 3 texts a month, and that only to respond to a very few people who text me. I'm happy that there's millions of other people out there forking over obscene amounts of money to the telcos to subsidize my voice and data usage.