Apparently they don't have DSL either, since the article is about "broadband's arrival." TV is definitely something they can cut out though. There's more than enough video entertainment/edutainment on YouTube et al. to completely replace, even exceed, what's available on TV.

I've been ignoring Beta fine. Do they still have Beta?

At the last call center I worked at, that would get you directed to the byzantine cancellation form on the web site. If you complained hard enough, it would maybe get you transferred to someone in the billing or "retention" department where you'd get to start a whole new runaround (notice how it's the "retention" department, not the "cancellation" department). What it would not do is get you to any kind of higher level tech support or get your issue resolved more quickly.

Generally they will have someone there with the skills to resolve your issue. They may or may not be available on the phone when you call (or available on the phone at all). You have to navigate the service providers' bureaucracy in order to get to them. There is no shortcut, there is no magic word - at least none that will work consistently across different providers. The system is designed for them to feed you BS. Trying to reverse that will be futile at best, and might just convolute the process further.

Maybe they were doing it to earn brownie points with other US gov parties - military guys, other intel agencies, politicians. I can think of reasons they would all want to get to Kaspersky, so the only reason the NSA needs is that they want to stay on all those parties' good side. Internal cooperation is needed to keep the whole US gov system working. The NSA can't put troops on the ground and the Army doesn't have some of the NSA's spying capabilities - they need eachother to keep the whole thing afloat. (How's that for "checks and balances"?)

About their plans to replace it...

TFA doesn't give any particular timeline, but it sounds like they are betting on it running for a few more years.

As for the need to overhaul the system eventually, reasons might be something like: Scarcity of parts increasing, parts and labor for working on this crufty system being outside of their established maintenance and IT contracts (meaning extra delays and extra cost when something finally does break.) Going without heat for weeks while they find+hire someone who can debug assembly on an Amiga might not be acceptable. The computer system communicates with the hardware by RF - probably without any kind of encryption. The same frequency bands are used by maintenance walkie-talkies, and TFA mentions the maintenance guys having to work around that by "OK, Nobody use the radios for the next 15 minutes so that we don't interfere with the HVAC system." All this sounds pretty compelling to me.
My guess is that the $1.5m - $2m cost cited is for a complete overhaul of the district's climate systems, not just to replace the Amigas. If the rest of the system is as old as the computers, there's probably a lot that needs replacing. At that point, building a cathedral of cruft around an Amiga on life support will be the thing they have no compelling reason to do.

"Working together" implies some kind of active collaboration between the two. Holding stock, however, does not always imply that sort of collaboration. Perhaps the reason you're not sure what they've collaborated on is because they haven't collaborated on anything? You seem very eager to make a connection between MS and FB. If you can actually come up with even a couple of examples from this "long history", everyone will come out of this discussion better-educated.

Shit, they'll give you more than the Ask toolbar...

The McAffee thing is still in Flash as of yesterday (I installed it accidentally.) Not sure if it is or was ever in Java.

Is the US gov. still a thing?

And the business, in turn, isn't legally required to serve you, as far as I know.

Morrowind was the last game Bethesda made with a non-crappy leveling system. It's an awesome game too, certainly within the top 5 RPGs of all time. It's definitely worth checking out if you like the Bethesda-style open world but don't like how dumbed down the leveling system of their newer games is. All the hand-holding BS from the newer games is absent. Morrowind is pretty much the full realization of the type of game they're going for - the other games are watered down versions of it. There seem to only be 2 complaints people have with it, which is the graphics look like they're from 1998 and the combat system isn't actiony enough for them - like the game considers hits or misses based on your character's skill levels, not whether the polygons of your sword and the enemy visually collide. People who are used to Skyrim will be like "This game sucks it's not registering any of my hits!" No, your character sucks, you have no points in the Long Blade skill.

I'll double up the recommendation of NoScript. In addition to what it actually does, it gives you quite a bit of information that's really an eye opener. There's hardly a web site out there these days that doesn't run scripts from at least a half-dozen domains. Some of them are up to 20. It's almost never more than 1 or 2 of the domains which actually belong to the owners of the site, the rest are third parties. Your data is getting spread far and wide each pageload.

Initially I thought it'd be too much of a hassle to use, but it really isn't. The majority of time I spend on the internet is visiting a dozen or so sites, I had all the necessary domains whitelisted for those on the first day. As for random sites, a lot of them don't need scripts to run for your average visit - most news sites, for example, will load the article text without any scripts running on the page. Occasionally they will have a "picture gallery"-type section that you'll want to look at where scripts are needed to scroll through the pictures, but it never takes more than a minute to determine which domain needs to be whitelisted for that. If you're feeling lazy you can "Temporarily allow all" scripts on the page which never fails. Sometimes I do that, remembering to clear the temporary permissions every couple days.

Does anyone know if there is an equivalently functional NoScript plugin for Chrome? Emphasis on equivalent - I don't want it to be like Adblock where it's a lesser version of the FF plugin. There's been a few plugins that keep me on Firefox, and NoScript is one of the big ones, but I'm really getting tired of the memory leaks, among other things...

70s? Shit... I grew up in the late 90s, and everyone played Pac-Man. My parents, who grew up in the 50s, also played Pac-Man at some point... I mean, I didn't ever see them, but they mentioned it and certainly knew what it was.

Really I think that part of the issue is they have no guidelines or limitations on the nominations. With the Rock & Roll hall of fame, there is a rule that a band or performer has to have released its first music at least 25 years ago to be nominated. The time aspect is important, it helps you recognize which releases are truly important and influential, and which ones are catchy but short-lived. The reason this game inductees list looks weird is that it's got WoW listed next to Pong and Tetris. Give it another decade, and it won't be so weird to see WoW in there. IMO they shouldn't be considering anything newer than the 90s for a few years.

That didn't stop them from nominating Kraftwerk. (Or for that matter, N.W.A., the Beastie Boys, and a bunch of other nominees and indeed inductees that are not rock.)