I still can't get used to the 16 by 9 format.

I'm with you, there. Sadly, it looks like no one agrees with us.

Maybe that's the real reason we don't have it yet.

You're probably right about that.

While I don't really believe this, it wouldn't surprise me if, in the future, there was a big news story about how the cold fusion guys were right, all along. Why? Just think about how the world's power structure would change, if it was real. Demand for fossil fuels would drop to maybe 10% of what it is now, almost overnight... power companies would be out of business... and so on. Portable fusion reactors would dramatically transform the world, so there's plenty of incentive for the powers that be to supress such a technology.

Error messages, too, have disappeared

Wow, I totally agree with you, on that. For example, one reason I've always preferred Firefox over IE is that, when it couldn't get connected to a website, it would basically just say "I can't get connected to that site". My first question was always, "well why can't you get connected?". Were you able to find look up the name? Did you get a network error, like "connection refused" or "network unreachable?" Now, Firefox is doing the same thing. Holy crap, is that irritating.

Nowhere was this more obvious than right here on Slashdot where, a few years ago, some woman (I don't remember her username) who owned a hosting company in the Bay Area was whining that college grads were expecting to get $60,000/yr. I'd be surprised if you could even eat for that kind of money, there.

You might want to rethink that: http://www.infoq.com/news/2011...

Now mind you, I'm not saying that suddenly everyone should vote Republican (I'm registered as "no party" in my own state), but I want to know how the folks who support the President no-matter-what can continue the cognitive dissonance and devotion to the guy in spite of crap like this

Because, sadly, the alternative would have been worse. Do you seriously think Romney wouldn't have done exactly the same, at least as for as Network Neutrality and Patent Reform are concerned?

Even towards the end of the Bush years, you never saw this level of personality cult

You must live in a blue state. I live in a red state, and we have people here who still wish Bush was in office.

please tell me why not support someone such as a Green Party candidate

I'd love to. Does the Green party have any candidates who have even the slightest chance of getting elected?

I really didn't get vi, when I first started using Unix, so I used Emacs. Now that I've learned vi, though, I'd never go back. Nothing's as fast as vi, when you know what you're doing.

I suppose you could get information about evolution from Time Magazine, but there's this thing, called "The Internet", which allows you to get your information directly from an evolutionary biologist - you know, someone who actually knows what he's talking about: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/09/23/the-encode-delusion/

In the early 80s, my high school got a few microcomputers

Arrrgghhh.

In the early 80s, my high got a few microcomputers (Ohio Scientific, if you're interested). They had a 6502 CPU, 48K of memory, and two 8" floppy drives, with a total of about 540K of storage. They came with the old BASIC Star Trek game - the one that used numbers for commands, rather than the one that used three-letter abbreviations. I loved the game, but when I heard we could actually make modifications, or even write our own games, I was hooked. I wasted so much time in the computer room over the next couple of years, they had to ban me from it, a few times.

I remember one of the math teachers proudly saying that, if we upgraded to double-sided floppy drives, we could get more than full megabyte of storage online.

I recognize that message. I have one of those in my garage and, the last time I checked, it still worked. I finally wrote an emulator for the thing, copied the roms to a modern computer, and play with that, occasionally.

I think the best part about "Tapestry" is the fact that they took a two-minute piece of a previous episode, and made a whole new (and very good) episode out of it.

Reminds me of zip drives

It was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that Zip drives were a flash in the pan. I'm still amazed that so many people wasted their money on them, when they didn't even outlast the floppies they were supposed to replace.

And everyone should skip Ishtar.

Agreed.

My wife and I argue, occasionally, about which movie was worse: Ishtar or StarTrek III.

Can you read your MO or Bernoulli disks today

Yes, in fact, I can read my MO disks, today. Sure, my MO drive is more than 10 years old, but it still works, and the disks are still readable.