I mostly use trackballs, but even still, the longevity has been good. I use a Kensington Expert Mouse Pro (the one with the cueball-sized ball, four regular buttons and a smattering of other buttons at the top that I don't use) and it's been great for more than a decade. I use a Kensington Orbit Optical at work, and other than wearing through the paint on the plastic it's been good for more than eight years, though I still have to occasionally clean the glides that the ball slides on.

I've actually repaired a few mice, I have a female mouse Logitech that had a bad momentary for the primary mouse button, I swapped one from a male mouse and got it working again.

If I find a mouse shape that I like, I tend to stick with it. Same with keyboards; I'm using a Gateway 2000 "Anykey" keyboard at home still.

I don't think it's intended for rank-and-file workers to supplement the company's electricity, it's probably more that higher-ranking employees with company cars would end up doing this.

If work gave me a car to use for several years, I don't think that the negligible electrical costs that I might incur at home would be enough to make me bat an eye at such an arrangement.

This is why I've considered putting a generator head on the PTO of a Dodge/Cummins truck. Damn near idling the truck would produce enough power to keep the whole house running during power outages.

I've also considered building a battery room if I ever put solar on the house. Even running HVAC equipment it's doable.

Maybe they were in one of those depressed periods, where they decided to forego their alliances with the Anglophone world...

As for home delivery, it'll be sad to lose it but the alternative, the community mailbox a few doors down from most houses, will have one advantage: parcels will be loaded into it for you to pick up. Currently if you're not home you have to drive to the nearest sub-post office to get your parcels. This will be way more convenient.

I see a whole lot of mail returned to sender for being abandoned, or being discarded for being abandoned, in those communal mailboxes. I also see a lot of people only visiting their mailboxes weekly, like how they take out their trash cans for the truck to pick up, so mailboxes will be even bigger targets for thieves as there'll be more payoff for the effort than before.

What I don't get is why they just don't just raise the price of first-class mail. In the US, as a lower-volume mailer I'd be okay with spending a dollar to mail something, I end up mailing something about four times a year. It'd still be cheaper than using UPS or FedEx or the like...

I am personally acquainted with several MIT graduates that know how to operate heavy machinery, know how to go rock-crawling in old Jeeps, know how to quarter-mile drag-race in the eleven-second range, and my wife, also an MIT graduate, was a competitive ballroom dancer for a time.

I have five friends with PhDs, and all of them have had hands-on experience with equipment in getting their doctorates.

You're dreaming if you think that smart people are inept at interacting with the physical world in any way different than the regular population. If they were so terrible at it, their insurance rates would be higher than average, not lower than average.

Bear in mind, most of the people the world haven't structured their lives to understanding technology. They may like technology, they may be technology groupies, but they probably haven't really contemplated the ramifications of technology or how it can be used differently than their preconceived notions. They probably don't necessarily get that databases can be cross-referenced so easily or that unless they're willing to go through a specific amount of work each and every time they want to obfuscate their identities, it's likely that someone can figure out who they are.

Another thing to remember, it's never really been possible to be truly anonymous when saying something in text. In the days when the printing press was the preferred way, one still had to have trusted people to help print and distribute the words. In early electronic days when dialup was king, there were always phone records and one had to have accounts on bulletin boards, and systems like fidonet kept origination records. In the days of Usenet, messages could at least be tracked back to a newsserver of origin, and assuming that records were kept, the ISP information could be found and then the subscriber account could be identified.

Nowadays, unless the person wants to take the special laptop that's only used for this purpose, with a special add-on wifi adapter, go park next to a public wifi hotspot and use that public connection, being sure to store the equipment far enough away from themselves when not using it for plausible deniability, there's really isn't true anonymity. If one wants to truly remain anonymous, one generally has to not say anything. That's the tradeoff, true anonymity comes at the price of nonparticipation.

This is just a symptom of college and university boards wanting to attract attention to their institutions, which pushes tenure-track professors and researchers into 'flashier' research to help their cause to get tenure, which then drives what gets submitted to journals.

Either make tenure easier to get so that professors are less likely to pursue fad or headline-grabbing science in order to achieve it, or encourage more grants to scientists that aren't affiliated with particular schools, so that they don't have to dance for their boards...

Unfortunately most major companies aren't conducting basic research like IBM, Xerox, Bell, and other big organizations did fifty+ years ago, so getting grants from big entities is harder than it once was.

Actually the 6502 only had one accumulator, the A register. The 6809 had A and B. It is correct that the 6502 had very nice addressing modes. Zero page addresses acted more like machine registers. One commonly used addressing mode was z-page indirect indexed by Y. Two consecutive locations on z-page acted like a 16 bit pointer and register. Either that could be incremented OR Y could be incremented. So a block move of 1 256 byte page was easy.
I don't think I *ever* used ($23,X) where X selects the z-page locs ("register pair") to use as a pointer.

At one time I had an Apple 2+ with a hardware accelerator board which ran at 3 MHz instead of the standard 1 MHz. For many tasks, my fast 2+ outran a comterporary PC-AT machine. For word processing, the Apple was much more responsive.
The conventional wisdom at the time was that the 65xx was clock for clock 4x more powerful. 3x4 effectively was 12 MHz which was faster than an AT. (Yes I'm ignoring memory and disk....).

It's even worse for those who are overweight than it is for drug addicts. Drug addicts aren't constantly being bombarded with happy, uplifting advertising claiming how good it is to use drugs. Once weaned from their drugs, drug addicts don't have to continue taking measured amounts of drugs simply to survive.

There are so many aspects to why we're overweight as a society that it's stupid to cite any one thing as why. Sure, we don't move around enough, either at work or for our leisure time. We're taught that active, physical jobs are low-brow, and that the definition of success is to have others do things for us. We watch TV and sit at the computer instead of taking care of our homes and playing sports and working on things. We eat more than we should calorically. The kinds of things that we eat are bad for us. There aren't many rules about what companies are allowed to prepackage for food for us, and when rules do get passed, the public get pissed off and tries to reverse them.

This, "I don't wanna!" neoteny that our culture has fallen into, regarding getting out, being active, actually doing things is going to be our undoing. I actually support the idea of using medication to stimulate metabolism, at least enough to help us overcome the hump of inactivity, maybe if our metabolic rates were raised for a time before we get active, it'll be easier to get active in the first place.

I'm stuck in the same trap that we're all stuck in, it's Saturday morning and I'm sitting on my ass on the couch on my laptop, not really interested in fixing the compressed air distribution system in my shop or in insulating around the whirlpool bathtub or in putting new hatches on some of the openings to mechanical spaces, I'm warm and comfortable in my laziness. Yes, give me medication that makes it harder for me to sit still, and maybe I'll get my ass up and go do something. At least I finally accepted a few years ago that 99% of what's on TV is crap, so I have one less thing holding me here.

Like a 76 Chrysler New Yorker with a 225 slant 6 cyl

A friend if mine had a Canadian-market '68 Dodge Polara fastback that had been imported to the United States. He bought for his first-time-driver son, it came factory-equipped with the RG 225ci slant six. He pulled the factory motor and dropped in a G 170ci slant six and put in shorter gears in the differential, he didn't want him going too fast. Car strained to reach 65mph on the freeway.

His son wasn't real happy with him for a long time over that...

GP and you really don't know anything about Wagner beyond what you've seen on TV documentaries about the Nazis, do you?

Wagner himself may have held some horrible views, but the work that he produced was not geared toward racism, classism, or religious bigotry. His fascination with Norse Mythology was not based on an attempt to tie it to Prussian and later German history, rather to turn an epic tale into an opera and into profit for himself.

It's not Wagner's fault that fifty years after his death, Germany reappropriated his music, attempting to tie Norse Mythology, their concept of what a perfect human was (in the form of Scandinavian coloring) and finding a fit with his personal views (which I've already acknowledged were horrible) to attempt to redefine the music. Wagner never explicitly defined Jewish characters as foils or villains; one can argue that Shakespeare, in his body of work, was worse to the Jews through his character Shylock the Moneylender as being out for literal flesh when his borrower defaults.

Do you advocate banning Shakespeare for the same reasoning?

I tend to think of Wagner and his attitudes and personal history in a similar context to Al Jolson. Jolson's biggest hit was Swanee, demonstrably highly racist in that it was not only in Blackface, but pined for a fictional, idealized South that was kind to slaves that never existed. As such, some of Jolson's body of work doesn't appeal to me, but I can acknowledge the man's faults, choose to avoid those works that I don't agree with, and can enjoy what I don't find unpalatable. I can even acknowledge that given the history and legacy of the Minstrel Show, it's not surprising that at the end of the Blackface era, there was still acceptance of the style and that its commercial viability basically ensured that it wasn't going to go away quickly, and that Jolson and many other performers employed it because they were brought up finding it acceptable. I don't find it acceptable, so I don't embrace those elements of the performers' bodies of work.

It's possible to separate the man from the work.

If Amazon's drone hits somebody, Amazon--not the drone--will be sued in court by the injured party. If the people controlling the drone--the software engineer, the CEO, whomever--intentionally or recklessly caused the person to be hit, those people would be criminally charged by the state.

Hey, I've got some land down in Florida that you may be interested in...

They're still getting valuable data. As I understand it, part of what they're doing is using your physical location in the store triangulated from your phone. While using a VPN does limit SOME of the information they're gathering, it doesn't eliminate all of it.

> Mt. Gox? Seriously? How do you even pronounce it?

"Magic the Gathering Online Exchange."

That should scare you.