Riiiight, and hey, while we're at it we can just do a final solution on the poor and most of the city dwellers right? I hate to break the news to ya sparky but we simply haven't developed a technology to replace gas yet and we have too many environmental groups to ever let us develop the oil oil in the gulf, which FYI will probably end up being developed by the Russians who'll then sell that oil to the highest bidder, most likely China.

The electric cars are a joke, you are talking $15,000 average price for the battery pack and it will last MAYBE 7 year under ideal conditions, and freezing cold snaps like we are having now or a normal southern summer will cut that time probably by a good third, most of the southern rural areas, you know, those places where the city folk get the FOOD from? yeah those, well i hate to be the bearer of bad news but a good chunk of it has no rail or public transport of ANY kind so you are looking at several trillion to develop an electric rail and mass transit system. Oh and good luck getting the money for that since more than 90% of the republicans in congress have signed Grover Norquist's "No new taxes on teh rich EVAR!" pledge and will never renege on that for fear of the "read my lips" effect, and finally you are in the middle of a recession (I'd personally argue its a depression and the government safety nets are simply masking the worst effects) and you have more than 15% of the population at or below the poverty level so good luck getting them the money to sell that used gas hog that's paid for for a brand new green car. of course without a vehicle you can watch unemployment soar, again especially among the rural states since it will be cheaper to sit on welfare than it will be to work and without gas they simply won't have a way to look for a job, or go to a job if they found one.

So we really only have THREE choices friend, choose one. 1.-We drill locally and develop our own resources while working on new tech, perhaps with bounties for fuel efficiency breakthroughs, 2.-We tax the rich and uberrich at 75%+ rates so we will have the funds to develop the massive amount of mass transit we will require and to basically give the poor cheap affordable green electric cars, or 3.- We give these crazy jihadists our money. which shall it be? You can't just raise gas taxes to $6 a gallon and magically get everyone to ride the buses that don't exist in many state ya know. Hell go to a state like AR or MS sometime, in AR there is the CAT bus line which covers less than 1/6th of the capital city and that's it, that's all. hell most towns don't even have taxis so if you don't have a car i hope you can walk that 30 miles to the store!

As for TFA the dumbass deserves to die for being an absolute total idiot. You are in a crazy jihad country so you tweet something nasty about their God, when these people will kill you for drawing a fricking cartoon, and then what do you do? to get away you go to ANOTHER crazy jihad country! Wow, that's really fricking smart, much better to run to an Islamist state than say Canada or the UK or pretty much anyplace that doesn't kill you for saying Muhammad sucks huh?

Are they renting the thing? Because I would think that big iron like that wouldn't be breaking down, hence why they were so popular. If its a support contract then obviously it would be cheaper to hire a couple of admins well versed in the Z-series and let them take care of the thing. But I looked that model up and it was released in 2005, that's barely broke in in mainframe terms. Now if they simply don't need that amount of power now that they've retired the shuttle that's understandable but I just hope it isn't an excuse to buy into some "cloud centric web 3.0 GPGPU blingapaloza" as lets face government agencies and blowing money go together like chocolate and peanut butter. I read TFA (I know I know, but I got bored) and there isn't a single word about what is gonna replace it, is it gonna be more costly? less? Are they simply not replacing it at all? A little more info would be nice.

Well we know now that the caps from the late 90s through mid 00s were crap due to industrial espionage where they stole only part of the formula and boned the recipe, but Atari before the Warner buyout (and for a year afterwards as they cleared out existing stock) frankly wasn't consumer grade quality, they actually put care and love into those. Compare them to someone like Coleco or Mattel who were toy companies that simply jumped on the electronics bandwagon and its night and day. With the Coleco you had both the Atari adapter and Adam PC plugin, both of which concentrated heat, and Mattel made good handheld in the 70s but their handhelds in the 80s like that one that took interchangeable carts (sorry i can't think of the name ATM, they had a Star trek game and breakout for it both of which I had) was really crap.

The ONLY real advantage I'd argue you had in the 80s were the boards were so primitive that replacing caps and other failed parts is easier simply because the boards are so big. Good luck replacing parts on a PS 1 or Xbox 1 or Dreamcast with those tiny boards and double sided chips. That's why i'm glad there seem to be emulators for just about all the machines (although the Xbox one is severally lacking) because most systems from the late 90s on up will frankly be unfixable. Like you said the odds of finding a late model P3 running are pretty slim, but surprisingly i'm find the P4 and early Athlon machines if they didn't get a batch of the bad caps are running like champs. I've got three of them sitting in the shop right now i need to slap on CL cheap, the 2.2GHz and up P4s and Athlons seem really hard to kill short of a lightning strike as long as they didn't get the bad caps. Some of them make great nettops BTW, the 1.8GHz Sempron I'm typing this on now surfs like a champ and is quiet as a churchmouse. Once i get those offlease sold I may just slap an ubercheap Athlon mobile in it just to cut power usage down even further.

Sadly a lot of these sites are either filled with scammers or datamine and spam the living hell out of anyone that signs up, i should know as i deal with a lot of folks that have gotten their first computer so I have to warn them and be on the lookout for them as they learn the ropes. Its made all the harder to warn folks because it seems like everybody knows someone who found their current SO through online, hell that's where I got my GF of 4 years, I signed up to get one of my buds to STFU about the stupid site and my little Cherokee princess saw I was a PC guy and asked if I could help her fix the sound on her desktop. I would have never met her IRL since we didn't travel in the same circles but my family just loves her to pieces and we've been happily together ever since.

So if you know anyone that is new to computers or are starting online dating please have them look at a site like Romance Scams so they can see what to watch out for, i know one of the mods and they are good folks just trying to warn the folks about how slick these new scams are. Like the malware I have to deal with daily it seems they get better and smarter at this each year and become harder for those that aren't alert to spot.

ATI graphics maybe? The only time I ever saw it was when someone installed an older ATI driver. As for how to fix your problem, did you try Revo uninstaller on high? frankly I've found that for the rare weird error like yours Revo on high will remove ALL the offending reg entries as well as any caches or leftover and you can then install it clean but frankly unless something asked for it I just wouldn't bother. Feel free to email with the error listed and I can probably walk you through a fix, again nearly all can be done by GUI and the worst I've ever had to do was send a customer a reg file and say "Go clicky clicky on this and reboot" which fixed it right up.

That is the only way to fix a weird error I've encountered called "Windows says no device under sound" which is caused by the Windows sound server subsystem getting corrupted by some shitty drivers the OEMs use, especially the hacked Realtek drivers some OEMs hand out with their boards. That's why I tell folks "Do NOT use that disc that came with the board, I'm just giving it to you as a courtesy and a last resort, call me instead" and I send them links to the correct drivers. The only time I haven't found the ODMs drivers to be better is on mobiles like laptops, their OEM drivers are often customized for the system, for example the EEE ATI drivers will run a little cooler than the default AMD drivers even though the AMD drivers install and run fine, but the Asus customized drivers are designed to be a little more aggressive when it comes to power saving.

But feel free to email me if you are still having the problem or want the sound server reg file, it works on anything from Win2K Pro to Win 7 X64, just clicky clicky and reboot. great little reg file to keep on your keyring thumbdrive just in case.

Actually ground clearance can be a blessing even if you never leave the black stuff. For example my mother is 71 years old and trying to climb down into a vehicle is impossible but my ranger has a high enough clearance she can just slide in and out, I had to take my late grandmom to the doc often because my dad's F350 was simply TOO high and likewise grandmom couldn't climb up into the cab. Also you have to remember that once you load that sucker down with friends or kids along with a ton of stuff from the mall, sports equipment (soccer moms are the biggest buyers of SUVs I've found) and other stuff you're gonna need that ground clearance with the crazy high speed bumps they put around schools nowadays to keep folks from speeding around those areas.

Again this looks to be a toy for rich people who want to say they are green, so some actor or musician can ride around with his posse and say 'I'm helping the environment!" which of course is big around Hollywood. Again nothing wrong with that, there is some crazy money to be made off the demographic, just calling a spade a spade here friend.

I'm sorry you apparently fail at reading comprehension so allow me to break it down. What you have was NOT consumer crap, what you have was designed for business and engineering which had waaaaay better quality parts. the caps and chips used in CONSUMER grade crap was then as now simply not up to the quality of professional instruments which is why we have workstations and desktops with the desktops having significantly lower quality caps, PSUs,fans etc.

We're talking about stuff built for kids in the early 80s and you are talking about HP back when they were THE scientific brand, I'm sorry pal but you couldn't be any more off base if you actually tried and those that marked you interesting obviously don't know how big a quality difference there was between HP and brands like Coleco whose other claim to fame was fricking cabbage patch dolls.

Actually if you read your history, and not just the American propaganda spins on history, then you'd know that for most of his tenure Khrushchev was trying to open things up and be more liberal, with artists and commerce being allowed much more freedom for the majority of his rule, which is why he ended up getting run out on a rail in favor of Brezhnev who was more a classical Soviet style communist which was much more what the old party heads wanted. Of course what followed was a long period of stagnation that was later named the Brezhnev stagnation which lasted for the most part all the way up to the fall of the wall.

As for TFA it just shows that money can't buy common sense or as we say in the south "Give a billion to white trash and all you get is white trash with a lot of money" or if this case give a ton of money to a dufus and you get a dufus with the money to do really dumb ubernerd things.

Hey who doesn't love ole Doc Brown? BTW just FYI but if you watch the first chase scene between Marty and the Libyans? look closely at the "Marty" driving the car. In several scenes you'll see Marty has RED hair because they had originally cast Eric Stoltz as Marty but he read the character way too dark so when Michael J Fox became available they fired Stoltz and reshot the movie but they didn't have it in the budget to reshoot the chase sequence.

As for TFA isn't calling this thing a battery kinda misleading? When I first read the headline I thought "What a breakthrough, this will help the poor get electricity AND drinking water! This person should get the Nobel Prize!" but reading TFA this thing doesn't really act like a battery at all, what a letdown.

Let me see if I have this straight, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. You first having to have a working one of these machines, we are talking consumer level quality of the early 80s, and THEN you are gonna have to take this working 30+ year old machine and take a soldering iron to it? Gee I wonder how this could go wrong......what are they nuts? It would be different if you were talking about a SoC to replace these system, maybe with some kind of universal adapter slot you could buy modules for for the carts and the controllers, THAT would make sense, but you are gonna take a soldering iron to a 30+ year old unit that its frankly a fricking miracle most of these things work at all? Do you know how damned fussy and temperamental some of these machines were to start with? I predict there are gonna be a LOT of "parting out" listings on eBay after this.