I don't remember enough about the Fidonet nodes that I had access to, but the local BBSes were Stonehenge BBS and Magrathea BBS, both in the Phoenix area.

Stonehenge ran on Wildcat, and was interesting in part because it had the longest un-rolled Tradewars game going, with only two real players left, and not enough resources in the universe left for one to defeat the other.

This is Yahoo, not Earthlink!

Then try looking at high voltage manufacturers and at conference room furniture. Leviton, Legrand, and Hubbell all make electrical devices meant for installation in furniture.

I also suggest visiting your local college or university library. They're probably already using this stuff, and will have solutions for both power and data in-place. Take a picture of what you like and look for it on those manufacturers' product catalogs.

I've found that very little is actually new. There have been tablet computers for some time. There have been wearable computers. There has been "social media" since the days of Fidonet. We had "SMS" fifteen years ago with bidirectional alphanumeric pagers and TAP.

Very little is new, it's just reinvented again and again and again. And again, and again. Accept this and just do what you need to do. Eventually you'll come to understand it and won't be stuck with some weird, antiquated version of Firefox running on your Debian 2.4 box because you refuse to change. It doesn't friggin' matter.

Maybe all that he has to do is to get a kiss from the pretty girl...

After all, it worked for Chris Stevens on Northern Exposure.

Maybe Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase can make a movie about it...

And make sure that you keep your helmet handy...

They could all be Climate Scientists!

that could be their secret...

My video games are unlikely to run on a VM due to the hardware acceleration needs of the games. I went from DOS to Windows 3.1, to Windows 95, to Linux and Windows dual booting, to Linux exclusively for about six years, then I had a new laptop that had a problem with the clock not working properly and had to keep it on Windows, then ended up slowly ending up more and more on Windows. Most of the computers still dual-boot but haven't been booted into Linux in awhile. I'm considering building some Linux boxes for XBMC, and building a MythTV server to connect those XBMC boxes to...

Firing too many staff would directly impact the quality of the games produced. But, if your games are already crap to start with then you've already lost the customer base, and unless you can float the labor costs until the next successful game comes out, you're screwed. As you cut staff, what's remaining of the core product gets worse, the customer base shrinks, and you end up losing more money and having to make more cuts.

I formatted a hard disk drive last night to use it for something else. Smashing it to pieces would have been much faster and more satisfying.

Just remove the casing and put the SSD board/chips into a microwave... If anything, physical destruction of an SSD should be even easier... Just pop the chips off the board with a flat knife and cut them into pieces with aviation snips...

...is to literally destroy the drive...

A small four-pound sledge and a suitable hard surface to act as an anvil and one can break the aluminum case into bits in a couple minutes and crease and crack the platters to the point that there realistically isn't anything being read from there. If you're REALLY worried, break out the plasma cutter and just cut the platters into bits...

Speaking of bits, Spanish colonial currency were "pieces of eight". "Shave and a Haircut, two bits" is a $0.25 cost. So, eight bits to a full unit... Coincidence for eight bits to a byte, or intentional?

don't fix it.

There's a point when the sheer number of paradigm shifts has made the implemented way silly. The power requirements alone should indicate that. I think that the IC in my computer keyboard is powerful enough to handle all of their tasks.

If you ever watch the Terry Gilliam film Brazil, pay attention to the tech. They took a basic tech and never expanded on it to improve it properly. Instead one had three inch screens with Fresnel lenses to make the image bigger, typewriters with electrical switches for keyboards, and such.

My folks used to make home-made noodles for holiday meals when I was a kid. If their product was similar to the expectations of an Asian noodle, then I can definitely comprehend the practicalities of automating the process. Making noodles is not all that hard, so long as a supply of fresh raw materials is kept in supply; a machine could very easily turn out batches as good as what a person could so long as those maintaining the machine don't get lazy about the maintenance.