Actually, the accelerator and the genlock slot are both special-purpose slots.

What you really want to find inside of your Amiga 2000 is an '030 accelerator and an Emplant board with some Mac IIci roms on it, as well as a boatload of RAM (1 or 2+4MB, maybe?) with a fat or fatter Agnus, and some 2.1 ROMs. If you don't have all of those things, then you will always be tempted to blow more money.

All of this has made me wonder if I can score an accelerator or at least RAM expansion for the A1200 for a reasonable amount of money, though. That would be a fun casemod (separating the keyboard and the rest of the machine) and I've got one lying around. I was supposed to give it away but crap happened.

But unless it comes packed with a video card and an accelerator, there's not much point to even messing with it today. What you really want if you don't actually care about Amigas is a CDTV and/or CD32, which takes up minimal space, looks minimally crappy, and runs most of the respective software library depending on whether you want the old or newer chipset.

It would be hard for them to see the value in it, from where they're standing. And it would be hard for them to actually get a job paying more than minimum wage with their two-year degree. A few of them will, most of them won't. The world is just not flush with jobs right now, and more jobs have been minimum-wage year-by-year for years now.

Yes, yes it is. It's not too much to ask me, I have no intention of reproducing. But the education system is failing to prevent unwanted pregnancy, which to my mind is one of its most important jobs. If we're not going to manage education properly, and instead will sabotage it with nonsense like Common Core and NCLB, then we're going to have to subsidize unwanted pregnancy — especially if we're not going to subsidize birth control, let alone abortion.

So yeah, it's too much to ask. It shouldn't be, but it is. And until we return to the idea that we should educate our people and make them into the best citizens that they can be instead of failing to do so and prepping them to go either into prison, the military, or fast food, it's going to continue to be that way. We can either gripe about education spending, or gripe about both having a nation of slackjawed yokels, and spending money supporting their rugrats. Or, you know, we could criminalize all of this behavior, and simply throw all of the people who our society has failed to educate into prison so that some truly morally bankrupt pieces of shit can profit from our failure. That's a perfectly viable solution with no side effects whatsoever!

Expecting people to solve this problem through personal responsibility whilst being shit upon is a truly asshole point of view.

That is a complete lie. Bio-fuels are here right now. We would be able to buy butanol right now if not for patents.

Yes, but most of them come from the sun, which provides the primary resource for free.

No, that's a lot of shit. Algae does not compete with food crops for any of those things. You can grow it on dirty water or salt water and you can grow it in places not useful for food production, like deserts. You're ignorant.

No, in fact, they do not, and for the same reasons. You're ignorant.

We are not in fact employing any of these technologies to their fullest. What makes you think they cannot serve our needs? We have far more than enough land suitable for algae production in the USA completely unused for agriculture for us to replace one hundred percent of our transportation fuel needs with biodiesel-from-algae, using technology proven by the USDoE in the 1970s and 1980s which even includes carbon capture from fossil fuel plants. Granted, one hundred percent of our transportation fuel needs are not filled by diesel fuel, but Butanol is a 1:1 replacement for gasoline which you would be able to buy today if not for patents which should never have been granted on the basis of obviousness.

That's because you're ignorant. We've discussed this.

Again, that's because you're ignorant. We massively waste energy left and right. We do not mandate much insulation, nor other energy saving requirements. We permit companies to produce throwaway crap that cannot reasonably be serviced, at every level from pocket devices to major appliances. Simply eliminating a lot of waste related only to making it possible for already-wealthy people to get wealthier by enslaving poor people (typically by proxy) will save us vast amounts of energy. It's true that we must change our behavior, but we need not lower our standard of living. Only some people who add nothing to the system must do so, and they are a tiny minority of a tiny minority which have been taking advantage of the rest of us for literally millennia. There's no reason for the majority to care what happens to them. They're the class of people that go under the guillotine every few generations, and never soon enough.

If you're not ignorant, I apologize. I prefer to recognize shills. But a lot of the things you're saying are simply false on every level, and you should be ashamed at yourself for repeating these lies which benefit no one but those who are already very wealthy, and want for nothing save a conscience.

In countries with national health, it's perfectly feasible.

Supporting a family is a privilege of the wealthy and well-connected? If people aren't meant to have children that they cannot afford to raise, perhaps we should stop shitting on the education system so that doesn't happen. Of course, if our citizenry were to be educated we couldn't produce enough Republican voters to maintain the one-party system through the illusion of balance.

The minimum wage should be sufficient to raise a family. If the objection is that this will lead to overpaying teens and children, that problem can be solved for a lesser wage for them, but down that road lies a bunch of ageism and special cases anyway — do we really want to give people incentive to force children to labor in lieu of adults who need the money to exist due to our system, which criminalizes poverty? Didn't we already decide as a society that child labor is a bad thing? I moved out of the house at 15 because my mother was emotionally unstable and it was impinging on my quality of life. Did I deserve any less pay because of my age? I had every bit as much need of money as someone three years older. I realize you didn't even bring this up, but it is a typical part of the conversation when discussing the ramifications of increasing the minimum wage, especially when discussing whether it should be sufficient to support a family.

In short, yes, the minimum wage should be sufficient to support a family. Basic health care is not something that a person should have to pay for today; it is in all our best interests to be surrounded by healthy, happy people. We have a basic drive to reproduce, and if you don't give people the tools to overcome it, they're not going to be happy without satisfying it. I'll note also that we have an artificial housing shortage in this country. Banks are foreclosing on properties because they are greedy and they have the opportunity, and they are then refusing to sell them at fair market value (based on supply and demand, the latter of which is in turn based on what the market is able to pay) or to rent them out. This then causes the properties to lie empty, which promotes an assortment of crimes. Even when it does not, it still tends to result in property damage, because most homes are vulnerable to intrusion by plants, pests, and/or elements of weather when not occupied and maintained.

Our entire corporate system is based on people not being physically and mentally healthy, nor indeed capable in general. People buy more shit when they're unhappy. Most advertising is aimed at making people feel inadequate due to lack of a product; the remainder is split between attempts to breed familiarity (you know, those creepy ads where they show you a bunch of nice pictures, make some vague statements, and repeat the name of a corporation a few times) and advertising designed to make you feel better about purchases you've already made, to maintain brand loyalty even in the face of evidence that you've made a poor decision. It's all meant to trick you into doing something you don't want to do, or trick you into thinking that your bad decisions were good ones. It's lies all the way down.

Bollocks. It wasn't true then and it's not universally true now, but it's more true today because you used to be able to scrounge in the couch for gas money, and now you have to take out a loan using your children for collateral. I don't buy the cheapest fuel available, that comes from Rotten Robbie and it is shit. I buy about the third cheapest fuel available, which is from my local Express station which sells Chevron gasoline. I use Chevron because it is arguably the best, Shell having been inordinately proud of their high alcohol content for quite some years now.

The gas station attendant has gone away because they are a liability. It doesn't cost that much to add them to a busy station if you only account for wages and typical overhead. But if they check someone's oil and the your car runs out later, the owner might well sue the station. Better to then check their own oil, especially since that's typically not a specialist job any more. You look for the brightly-colored plastic ring and you pull on it. Now, trans fluid, on the other hand...

What kind of jobs are being created? Are they minimum-wage jobs that you can't actually live on?

Microsoft is mostly static. The big exception is their foray into the living room, on which they continue to choke. They've finally made some money at it, but they'd have made so much more if they hadn't totally blown the Xbox One launch. Otherwise Microsoft has been playing sit-still all along, doing the absolute minimum. It's been Windows and Office, Windows and Office, Windows and Office.

Because people love their cars, and you're not going to convince them overnight that they're being stupid and that their supposed freedom is largely illusory.

Heh heh. Did you see what they spent on the first model? You could put a car in orbit for that

it's funny you mention that, because the H2 storage tanks cost more and have to be replaced more often.

I won't really shed any tears if people aren't allowed to smoke in parking lots, but I'm not sure that's going to fly.

What we have already seen is biofuels. Now we just need to see more of them, notably Butanol. It is a 1:1 replacement for gasoline, whose octane can be diddled with the other products of the process which produces it: acetone and ethanol. All of these are clean-burning fuels which can be produced from algae, which is a completely renewable feedstock.

That's only true if they are running in a highly polluted city, but we've no shortage of those just now.

you know what happens to sites that do that? they wither and die. newspapers have had to make exceptions to their paywalls to avoid ceasing to exist for the same reason.

people don't want to see ads, the handful of really creative ones aside.