Then a hard drive fails and someone has to get very wet and make a big mess to replace it.

Why should an old person learn to use (in rapid succession) CompuServe, AOL, Yahoo, LiveJournal, Myspace, Facebook, Flicker, Pinterest, Instagram (and so on and so on), instead of his relatives putting a little effort into hand written letters and face time?

Because those handwritten letters and face time are going to become a chore very soon, and chores have a tendency to be "forgotten", especially when they only exist in the first place because their benefactee is too lazy to invest into learning modern communication methods.

If you make it hard for other people to stay in contact, they probably won't bother.

Let me treat you to a few more of "jp_831"'s comments on Slashdot. He hasn't been around long so there weren't many to choose from:

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

This is what 8chan has brought to Slashdot.

I think what this story is really about is drunk texting and emailing.

That's the one

Yeah, that's what happens when you don't trademark something. That was the original idea. It makes the name "organic" make more sense, several senses in fact:

Actually having a cyclical system is more "organic" by senses of the word which don't mean "on the USDA approved list" or "has a scary name"

I'm at Slashdot waiting for Voat to get some capacity in place. Right now it's behind a CloudFlare DDOS mitigation tool that blocks NoScript users.

Don't trust him.

I think a problem is the automatic assumption many young people make that the reason why an older person doesn't use something is because it's to complicated for someone older. I claim that this is largely false, and that the reason why older people don't use the technologies is because they suck, are intrusive, unreliable and fleeting.
Young people are less critical, and seldom think long term (and when they do, they think a year is long term).

Why should an old person learn to use (in rapid succession) CompuServe, AOL, Yahoo, LiveJournal, Myspace, Facebook, Flicker, Pinterest, Instagram (and so on and so on), instead of his relatives putting a little effort into hand written letters and face time?

The government has failed to restrict guns, that doesn't mean they don't want to, it just means that the 2nd Amendment is too clear to be overturned as easily as they would like.

The second amendment is so clear that until the 1980s it didn't cover individual ownership of guns?

The government wants to keep easily made guns out of our hands because they want to know who ha the guns.

So they just need to know who has the 3D printers.

Come on. You're smarter than that.

Oh, and the one guy that was perfect, you won't follow either

You mean Ronald Reagan, I assume?

Would Rampart have been better if it were about building a castle and then blowing it up with cannons?

I prefer "If you have any questions, you may direct them to that brick wall over there"

It's organic so long as everything you use is on the USDA organic list, because the USDA has control over the label now. It's not cyclical so it's not truly organic farming, but it's low-impact so who cares.

...researchers are exchanging information with those subject to the gag being kept out of the loop because, well, if you can't bring anything to the table...

Or, in short, if you outlaw information, only outlaws have information.

Constitutional Amendments - those guys with wooden teeth and slaves set up a pretty nifty system if you follow it.

If we followed the "pretty nifty system" the guys with the wooden teeth set up, we'd still have slaves and half the population would be forbidden from voting because they don't have penises.

Fuck your Founding Fathers. They were a bunch of wine snobs who didn't want to have to pay taxes. All the flowery rhetoric was so much bullshit.