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.

I read Keeper of the Isis Light one afternoon while waiting in the library for the computer to finish doing something. It wasn't bad, discussed the nature of a colony planet through the eyes of an orphan raised by the household computer system after her parents' deaths and how she was different than the colonists that followed the beacon that her family was ostensibly there to maintain. It's not terribly complex, but passable after a fashion. It lacks the sexuality of many science fiction writers like Piers Anthony.

I also enjoyed The Bromeliad by Terry Pratchett. It's a three-part story about what turn out to be aliens that generations-ago crash-landed on Earth on what effectively was an away mission, and how they come to reclaim their ship and their original birthright.

Unfortunately I can think of a lot more fantasy than I can science fiction for the YA reader. Most scifi seems to head into mature themes that a teacher probably can't recommend to a twelve year old on account of parental objection.

On the other hand, my wife is from Boston, she went to MIT, her folks live about five miles from the Arsenal Mall, and friends of ours ran the marathon, apparently finishing 12 minutes before the bombs went off, close enough that they were lucky to not have been hanging around the finish line.

So yeah, I paid attention.

Our school district preggo school was called "TAPP". Apparently it stood for "TeenAge Pregnancy Program"...

I'm curious as to which overpaid PhD thought of that one...