I basically agree with your point aside from the fact that you don't have to change your domain name to add a _norobots.com suffix in order to opt out of web crawling.

He's putting the buggy whip manufacturers out of business!

I found out about these keyboards from an old Slashdot post about "Das Keyboard". Das Keyboard was revealed by a commenter to be a KeyTronic keyboard with the key labels removed. Aside from the "blank key" gimmick, there was one thing the Das Keyboard had going for it which it had inherited from the KeyTronic: five different spring weights for the keys, based on which finger is used to engage the key. That way your pinky doesn't have to work as hard hitting tab as your thumb does on space. After switching to KeyTronic keyboards on all my PCs, I never looked back. In fact, traditional everyday USB keyboards hurt my fingers after enough use, but I never have that problem with the KeyTronic.

My old notebook - a Tecra A8 - had a GigE ethernet connection. Many times when I wanted to move a few gig of data, I would skip the Wifi and connect directly to the ethernet. Linux never had a problem reaching high transfer speeds.

It finally came time to upgrade to a new laptop, and to my horror I discovered that many of the manufacturers aren't including GigE any more, because they seem to think Wireless N is enough. Under ideal conditions, I still have to wait a lot longer to transfer large files onto my new laptop than I did with my old.

My whole computing life I've been used to watching things get faster/smaller/cheaper, etc... this is probably the first time I've had to suffer a downgrade because of an upgrade.

You so beat me to it!

Color me surprised!

...is that thanks to the lack of an IOMMU on consumer x86 computers, JavaScript exploits in the browser can now give you access to all the computer's memory, and along with it, ring 0. I can't wait to see the first whitepaper on the subject :)

Excuse me, how does deregulation have anything to do with SEC incompetency? The financial services industry in America is one of the most regulated industries in the world.

I should amend that to refer to the 20th and 19th century. We haven't yet had enough time in the 21st to make it 3.

Yeah, that's a good thing, but that free speech we all value is constantly being eroded by the government we elect to defend it. I wonder how the founding fathers would have felt about free speech zones, having to get a permit to hold a protest, or enormous government spy agencies monitoring the communications of Americans en masse, categorizing them as "threats" based on political views or affiliations.

Don't forget that presidents in this century and the last jailed people merely for opposing their wars.

Yeah, the booers aren't getting mowed down by tanks. But my pride as an American comes from the fact that we still have a few citizens left that realize even that freedom is under assault.

When you operate with a government-granted monopoly, you get to do all the crazy things government does and get away with it. Especially when your phony ratings extend to things like government bonds which the government absolutely wants good ratings on, no matter how miserable their real financial picture is.

It was the government that created all those distorted incentives in the first place... what with a fiat currency, interest rates at 1%, government regulations requiring banks to lend to people who couldn't afford it, government pushing Fannie and Freddie (corporations created by FDR in the New Deal) to extend their implicit government guarantee to sub-prime mortgages...

And you still think we should trust the bastards to watch our back? They didn't just miss all of this stuff, they lit the fire and then poured gasoline all over it!

Don't forget that it was an individual from the private sector that independently investigated Madoff's fund and tried repeatedly to warn the government, which continued to tell investors that Madoff was a-ok.