I believe you're confusing Vogons with wizards. Too much pipeweed, Gandalf?

All a smith needs is coal, steel or iron, wind, and water. The only tool he would have a hard time building himself would be the anvil, those are usually cast. The forge isn't all that hard to construct (maybe the fan or bellows) and all the other tools are trivial to make.

The only real cost is steel and fuel unless you have your own mine.

I took a blacksmithing workshop in college and one of the things the 74 year old instructor stressed most was that a blacksmith who doesn't make his own tools isn't much of a blacksmith. He taught us how to make all sorts of tools.

Who makes hammers and tongs? The blacksmith. Who writes compilers? Programmers. Maybe I'm getting old but a programmer who can't write a compiler or interpreter isn't much of a programmer (I wrote an interpreter once, years ago).

Why in the world would anybody need POTS in the first place? And why would anybody pay $40 per month for it?

Also, the title is misleading -- TFA says he didn't have cable, only phone and internet. No cable, no cable bill, he had a phone/internet bill.

I don't have cable, an antenna is good enough since TV went digital. I'm paying $40 for unlimited everything on my Android, $46 for DSL (unfortunately that's the cheapest internet available here, cable internet is almost twice DSL and since I live alone, DSL suffices nicely).

Your being an asshole doesn't excuse my being an asshole.

So if I walk into a bar and take my cell phone out of my pocket to show a friendl I should expect people to object?

Of course not, but if you pull it out and point it at someone you can expect a reaction.

I think that what one ought to imagine here is something like a smith who doesn't own his tools, but has access to tools which he does not control

That's a terrible analogy. Like a programmer, a smith can make his own tools. A carpenter would have been a far better analogy.

The same as Nobots.

Beta was just the straw that broke the camel's back, what you're talking about has been bothering me and others for quite some time. Apparently, Ars covered it but I can't find the link.

Try Soylent News. It's full of folks tired of /.'s direction. I'm staying at /. at least for a while, but S/N is refreshing. I'm posting my journals there before here, they can use it and Dice doesn't need it.

Oh, but the REAL reason I'm in such a good mood is someone owed me a shitload of money and paid me back in reefer and I'M RETIRING! Tomorrow is my last day of wage slavery!

They already do in most cases now. DSL/POTS are the only places they don't at this point. Cell and FIOS is entirely VOIP

A lot of the HAM activity only really pops up during disasters.

First, I don't understand the religious aspect. Whose freedom of religion are they trying to protect, Islam? Because Christians are forbidden from judging others, and ordered to love everyone. Neither Jesus nor Bhudda would agree with this law.

Second, why are you bashing the US rather than Russia or Uganda, where you can go to prison for life for being gay?

Third, WTF is this doing on "news for nerds?" The fact that a tech company, Apple, joined the NFL and a lot of other anti-nerd groups in opposing this does not make it "news for nerds". News for gays, news for bigots, news for Arizonans, yeah, but not "news for nerds".

Having stories like this on slashdot is worse than Beta, they're trying to attract a "wider audience" which means bringing in even more greengrocers and other aliterates (if you think that is a misspelling, you may be an aliterate!). This attracts all those n00bs who say "Nasa is a waste of taxpayer dollars" and "global warming is a hoax" and "they spent my tax money studying THAT??"

In short, they're attracting the folks I come here to escape from. I get enough non-nerd ignorance IRL.

Well, that's the thing. They're honestly going to have a college class about fortune telling? What's next, tarot and tea leaves? Futurism is bunk! Nobody seriously envisioned the internet, althogh Asimov had written about "mltivac" and Murray Leinster came damned close to predicting it in 1946, although his PCs were "logics", servers were "tanks", and his internet was heavily censored (in fact, the story revolved around how horrible it would be if a bug in a program overcame the censorship).

Nobody but Roddenberry foresaw cell phones. Nobody I heard of foresaw the end of the analog era. And more telling, the only ones who even came close weren't futurists, but fiction writers. The "futurists" have been wrong every single time. Flying cars? Disney's "home of tomorrow"? The "singularity"? Fusion power? Wrong every single time.

Yet you want to teach a class on it? Amazing.