I almost always have to do CPU/Motherboard/RAM if I upgrade that part. Even if the RAM is compatible, it usually is nominally expensive to upgrade, and I usually get more of it at lower latency and faster clock than the original RAM, so I almost always swap that out at the same time.

For gamers, i5s are generally faster than i7s due to lack of hyperthreading overhead. Most games don't use much threading, but that is changing. I've read the Frostbite engine uses it extensively. The i5 is still better for me from a business app perspective, though, since I know my company's software is minimally threaded on the client (the server, on the other hand, is basically one big thread manager).

There were third party schemes to add more memory on Apple ][, so perhaps something like that existed on IBM. My mom had 768k in memory when she was writing her textbook in the early 1980s (1983-4ish, I'm guessing). Keep in mind a (side of) diskette back then was about 140k of storage. I think her final book was 6 diskettes. Her publisher is the only person I ever saw with more (he had a meg) until the GS's came out. I lost touch with the PC world around then (whether it be Apple or IBM or some other clone) and when I returned I got steeped deep with UNIX and by fall of 1993 I was running Slackware on a PC I got for free. My mom bought a mac, so I got steeped in mac, and my roommates all had PCs or C64s, so I got steeped in that as well. Great way to be platform agnostic is to know them all (I had no idea back then Microsoft would eventually dominate).

There is no such thing as whistle blowing in the US, since the US classifies giving classified information to "someone that is not supposed to have it" as treason under the Espionage Act of 1917.

And it isn't just whistle blowing - the White House recently committed treason by exposing the CIA operative in Afghanistan, for instance (and then said "whoops"). Note that the White House decided not to prosecute itself, just as it chose not to prosecute Dick Cheney and Richard Armitage for the same crime (in Plamegate).

If I do it sitting down, I usually do stuff like create and flesh out characters as if I was writing a novel, I've sat in slow bake tanning beds in the winter (24 minutes, less intense radiation than standard beds, so it takes a long time) where I probably couldn't take it if I didn't exercise my mind that way. Not that I use tanning beds often - once every 2-3 years or so during a depressingly long winter.

Series of bad choices? The main one is making the public domain articles in JSTOR available on the Internet instead of having to pay a dime a page for a copy (yes, PUBLIC DOMAIN). It was the government calling that a Terms of Service violation and thus "wire fraud" which is a felony under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (a horribly loose law that lifts wording directly from the Espionage Act of 1917, which itself is possibly the worst piece of legislation on the books). According to the CFAA, using the internet is a felony punishable by 30 years in prison if you basically visit any for profit website and use an alias. In other words, visiting /. is a felony unless you're using your real name.

The CFAA was meant for one main purpose - to protect ATM transactions. It was never meant for networked computers like the internet and should not be used as such. This is a blatant abuse of power by the US government, as is the espionage charge against Snowden (sorry, but you can't commit espionage by giving information to your own people - that is really fucked up - it is purely theft).

I can have beer (1 or 2) before bedtime, but I don't more because of the effects on my waistline. Much easier to keep the weight off (lost 30 pounds last year and kept it off with the no alcohol near bedtime plan).

Since Slashdot was founded in 1997 and bughunter is user 10093 and most early Slashdot users were in college, I'd make the guess that he is 35-45 years old. There is, you know, Internet dating and stuff. And even internet stalking for users named Creepy.

jk - uid was named after a computer I received Halloween 1997 because my preferred handles were taken. I also understand this woman thing at night, but mainly because my wife is more a morning person.

I saw the film on TV first, but my memory of it was foggy until I saw it again on VHS many years later. They ran it as a precursor to the TV series the first time I saw it, with the nudity edited out (which is quite significant for a PG movie). I was at an age where I had to beg my parents to let me see Star Wars because it was PG and had "Wars" in the name, so it was well before my tweens.

Except Carousel is at 21 years of age :)

I know, you are referring to the film, though - they extended it to 30 so they could use "known" actors and actresses.

Yeah, it is hard to tell in some cases, too. When you work for a diversified multinational company like I do, you can have 5% women in your IT division and 85% women in your health division. We also outsource far more jobs in India and China than we have in Europe or America, and in both those countries, tech is not taboo for women, so their ratios are vastly higher.

Finding qualified women is less difficult than finding qualified blacks as long as you aren't looking for qualified _white_ women. If I scrap management and QA from my company, we have exactly one white woman in tech. We have as many Hispanic women. To put that in perspective, we have more (at least semi) out of the closet gay and lesbians than either of those (with at least 3 lesbians in management). The only black guy I work (directly) with is native Ethiopian who attended college in the US and then got a green card and eventually citizenship.

When I interviewed prospective employees last, I interviewed 40 (mostly) white men, 0 women, 1 person of color (Indian from India), and one man from Ecuador that spoke English poorly. How are you supposed to diversify when you don't even have diverse candidates? We ended up hiring a white guy and the person from India, even though I recommended against him (most of the white guys were better qualified). Incidentally, HR wanted us to hire a woman for diversity reasons, but that is kind of difficult given that we didn't have any female candidates. We have hired women for my site, but mostly in India and China and then relocated them.

yeah - my thoughts exactly, as well.

Yep, and Netflix has even said that the reason the DRM is there is because the studios require it. Even when Netflix told them some of it is easy to work around (like region requirements), they still required it, and thus we get plugins like mediahint.

First off, let me say that I agree with your point - I am against the business subsidies of low wages.

But I think you're envisioning a very small subset of Socialism, specifically the subset applied to Communism.

I'm a full blown Socialist as far as my own business goes, since each employee owns a full quarter of it and (generally) earns 1/4 of the profits from it. Yep, that form of Socialism is basically Capitalism with joint employee ownership (yes, you still sell your goods and make a profit). In fact, this is the original form and probably clearest form of what Marx meant by Socialism. Where it got mucky is when merged with Communist doctrine where instead of profiting from the goods, you basically barter them for other goods. This got morphed even further with Lenin/Stalin-ism where the state just takes your excess production and distributes it as it pleases.

I also work for a full blown capitalist company with a multimillionaire CEO and peons getting paid much, much less (but still a comfortable amount, since I'm salaried in a tech company).

In any case, people seem to think Socialism just in terms of Communist doctrine and not that it spans between Capitalism and Communism depending on whether the goods are sold or traded for other goods you (hopefully) want. Since Marxism is a total pipe dream, I'd have to say I'm anti-Communism, since the "Socialism" practiced in other forms of Communism means the state takes your goods and redistributes them as it chooses and gives you what it thinks you want.