We will always need trucks for short haul. But long haul trucks can be eliminated quite effectively by rail transport. The warehouses and distribution depots can be located along the rail lines, and trucks can be restricted to driving no more than 100 miles from the depots. Or a formula like "trucks can only drive to the halfway point between depots".

The tax is to pay for maintenance because of road wear. Spewing 5x more pollution is bad, but it isn't the point of the tax to 'punish' anybody for anything. It's to tax everybody who uses the road equally for the wear they cause on the road.

And a heavy hybrid with the big battery might be causing more wear than, say, a VW Beetle that is in such bad shape it only gets 9 miles per gallon. So if anything the hybrid should pay more.

Wouldn't Oregon Trail be on punched paper tape? Or maybe 1200 BPI 1/2" tape?

I know there were later CD-ROM versions of Oregon Trail. For the newbs.

The aforementioned 2/3 of 'workers' probably don't need to be online to do their work. The simple fix is for their connection to the outside world to be snipped. Physical security measures can be used to ensure that the data is then 'protected' for the most part.

Obviously there are other means and ways for data to be stolen and leaked out, but the first order of business needs to be:

"You're too casual about security for any hardware you can access to be connected to the outside." Take away their connection. Several public shared kiosks can be set up in the office area they work in for essential needs.

Sorry, Facebook. Sorry Google.

The hardware producers deprecate drivers and eventually take them offline. So if you're working with an older version of hardware or need the drivers for an older version of the OS, you're out of luck.

That doesn't matter in the least for the 'shiney-new' crowd. It's 'easier' to just download the official approved drivers, and when the drivers are no longer available flash some plastic for the new hardware.

Why would anybody want 'old' stuff? Isn't it illegal to use 'old' stuff since it takes away from the producers who want you to pay them for 'new' stuff? (the boys in Washington need to get working on this issue)

If the teens DO use something, it's about to be dead. Or eventually will.

Physical distribution won't ever go away. There are entities that wish it would. But a TRS-80 Model 100 still has everything you need to write a novel. An HP-95 pocket computer still has everything you need for most mobile calculations.

Heck, an old Olivetti manual typewriter and a ream of paper is still a powerful set of tools for idea capture and creation.

Source code was distributed in interesting ways in the era when 'online' was the 7-bit ASCII stream.

I have the 'Forbidden Subjects' CD-ROM, sold by mail order out of the back of various magazines back in the 90's. It has a large collection of all the TABOO stuff from the internet back then. All the occult 'Black Magick and satanism' archives, including stuff published without permission from organizations like the OTO and TOPY.

It also has a large collect of phrack magazine and a bunch of virus newsletters and article archives. Reading it turned me off to the Virus scene because I had assumed it would have interesting discussions of exploits published as ASM source code. Instead all it featured for the most part was 'debug scripts' which were streams of characters to pipe into DEBUG to generate virus .COM files. I am sure that somewhere there were more than Script Kiddies out there, but the real hackers held their cards closer than the stuff published in the Forbidden Subjects CD.

I once encountered a floppy diskette that was part of the Microsoft Word 6.0 installation set. This was apparently a special edition, because it was on a 360K floppy diskette. I believe it was disk x of 100 something.

I still have Windows 98 on 5-1/4" floppies, because Microsoft offered to send it to you for free if you bought the edition distributed on 3-1/2" floppies. I have two sets because for some reason they shipped me two copies when I requested them.

The 5-1/4" distribution of Windows 95 is unique in that it's the only distribution of Windows 95 that doesn't require a CD key or fingerprint the diskette when you install it. For years I had a copy of that on CD that was the contents of all the diskettes copied into a single directory and burned to CD. It's the most primitive and first release of Windows 95, back when Microsoft was competing with CompuServ and AOL to be the 'Online Service', hence from before 'the Internet' had been discovered by Microsoft. It's really 'clean' and small with no Internet Anything installed. And as the first ever version of Windows 95 it has EVERY bug of the initial release (obviously)

It kind of annoyed me to see Walnut Creek being called 'shovel-ware' in the summary. They published whole archives of MS-DOS as a unit and provided a service to those of us who weren't well-connected. The SIMTEL MS-DOS archive and the CICA archive.

I would send images to this collector, but originals are going to one day be valuable collector's items.

I have the first Linux-on-CD distribution, it was published by Yggdrasil and it's called 'LGX' which I think they were hoping to coin as their own proprietary name for a Linux Distro. Yggdrail made numerous other versions of their 'Plug and Play Linux' distribution, but the first one was published with a plain white manual cover with green/black ink printing. It is THE first time Linux was published on a CD, in the Fall of 1992. I bought it at 'CD-ROM City' which was a storefront in Dinkytown. Back in the dialup era stores that sold a large variety of CD-ROMs were a godsend.

I bought the ID Anthology, which has fully registered 'legal' copies of every game published by ID. Up to Quake 1, which was the current game when the Anthology was published. There is more than the CDs in the box, there's also a Long Distance Dialing time card, some sort of pewter swag item, and there was a T-Shirt but I am certain I wore that out.

I have a lot of Walnet Creek CDs, too,

I also have a CD called the 'C CD' published by a company called Alde which was purportedly a C Source Code CD (it has a collection of public domain source code on it) but is really a hidden stash of girlie GIFs. The hidden directories are simply 'hidden' with the 'hiden' filesystem flag. It's also ISO-9660 non-compliant, I am not sure how, but it kicks out certain errors. I suspect it's either pre-ISO-9660 or was just from the era before the standard was strongly in place (or the publisher was sneaking out a CD of girlie GIFS and not paying much attention)

I hope someone is archiving the old CDROM porn collections. There were a number of publishers, and it was cheesy but quite expensive for the time.

The Trash Collection service I use is called something like 'D & R Trash Service.' (name changed to preserve anonymnity.) When I call their business number, either D or R answers the phone. They are husband and wife. It's a pretty small operation, they only have the one truck.

They never answer the phone 'master' so I assume they are not my slaves. Thus, they somehow have freely chosen to run their small Trash Hauling company because it generates revenue for them.

What the hell was your point again?

you are a socialist if you don't believe in minimum wage, because you want the government to fund worker's pay.

Wow. Do you live in Bizarro-America? Cute little bromide there. Our heads are now supposed to explode, right?

The next time you find a Economics Degree in your CrackerJacks box, don't believe it.

You weren't supposed to swallow your Wobblie Song Book whole. You were only supposed to sing or chant some of the songs.

As a non-welfare state, this should be a basic matter of public policy in the US.

The two halves of your sentence contradict themselves. We're not a welfare state, so there shouldn't be 'public policy' wage fixations. A minimum wage is essentially a form of 'welfare.'

It's also a huge incentive for businesses to adopt more automation and/or offshore as many jobs as they can to places where there are no minimum wages, for instance to the places where Obama and the Republicans are trying to export more jobs with their latest 'Trade Policy' adventure.

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'Tea Baggers' (except for the sexual ones, of course) are advocates of a single issue where it comes to 'tea party' stuff: cutting taxes. That's all. There are a ton of different sorts of people who lean toward the Tea Party thing. Please don't be so ignorant as to slap the label around recklessly.