I read "Inside the 2012 Lobster Prize" multiple times today. I thought it was connected to "Deadliest Catch" somehow..

If I have something that I no longer need and can't sell, my local freecycle group is always a good option! I think you'd have better results with them than posting for free on craigslist.

That's what the article is about.. HP has just developed this.

I work for a competitor of Alcatel and Siemens in the rail industry, and we are migrating some of our bigger customers off of VAXes.. We have been for 10+ years now, and the migration is nearing completion I believe. I don't specifically work with those projects, but for a time I was in charge of administrating a number of linux systems running VAX emulation software.. We used it primarily because we ran out of physical VAXes to use, and decided to stop buying them off of ebay (it's the only place you can get VAX parts now). I still have a drawer full of OpenVMS and Multinet licenses.

Wired had an article somewhat related to this.. It was a decent read.

My sister is blind, and has been for her whole life. She never writes by hand, and even if she writes her name the letters tend to be imperfect and disconnected. No one can fault her for it, but it's a challenge to maintain your place on the page. And she's not even completely blind, she has a very small amount of vision in one eye (she can mostly just see light and darkness).

If this woman is completely blind, I wouldn't expect too much detailed writing per page.. I can't imagine my sister getting more than a paragraph or so on a page if she were to try.

I listen to 3.1 on my computer. It's a 5.1 surround system, but I haven't ever got around to running the satellite speakers to the other side of my home office.

You're comparing to the previous gen Nook.. The Nook Tablet has a dual core 1GHz CPU, and 1GB of RAM, while the Kindle Fire only has 512MB of RAM. The Nook Tablet also has a microphone, so you can use skype, and it has a Micro SDHC slot. It also costs $50 more, which may be the approximate value of those add-ons. There's pros and cons for either one of them.

The 486 couldn't run "any program of your choosing" any more than the Kindle Fire can! If the 486 was running *nix then it couldn't run any MS executables. If it's running DOS/Windows it couldn't run Mac applications. The same holds true for the Kindle Fire. It can run Android apps because it's running Google's OS. If you were to put a version of Ubuntu, it could run a wider variety of Linux programs (probably to include your BBS application). If you can manage to load an embedded version of Windows to the Kindle Fire, you'll be able to run Windows executables. That's an issue of operating system, not the definition of a computer.