I am so glad that I grew up in the 3dFX Voodoo days for my gaming. The cards were relatively cheap, and spending $200 on one seemed like a huge sum of money. Like, this-is-your-only-Christmas-present money.

Upwards of $1000 for a consumer-grade video card? I've spent less on road-worthy vehicles.

Ummm. . . all that stuff is happening because the Fed is printing money, lots and lots of money, not anything Obama is doing. Only contribution Obama is making is spending a lot of borrowed money in concert with Congress.

Printing money is a sure fired way to drive up a stock market. Its not really due to stocks going up as much as the currency being devalued. One reason the deficit is going down is all the capital gains rolling in from the artificially inflated stock market.

They are also engaging in financial repression, holding interest rates artificially low to punish savers while they save the butts of debtors, and this is stoking a new bubble in the housing market.

We are pretty much headed for twin bubbles in the stock market and housing market. When they pop its going to be 2008 all over again or probably worse. There is also an outside chance all this stimulus is going to provoke an inflation spike or hyperinflation if the bubble don't pop before the inflation really kicks in.

The one thing in the Fed's favor is the EU, Japan and China are printing money like there is no tomorrow too, so all the major world currencies are being devalued at the same time. The world is awash in electronic money generated out of thin air, or actually out of elections in a few central bank computers. Its not real wealth.

At least computers generating bitcoins have to work at it. The Fed is generating like $80 billion a month with absolutely no effort.

So, a different kind of joke then...

Then I think we ought to at least give him Emeritus status!

They buried all the local infrastructure lines last year in my area. Power, communications, gas.

That actually could be a problem in a flood. Outside Plant techs are supposed to use sealed splice cases for telecom, but high voltage stuff is probably not sealed against immersion, so if the right vaults flood then the power goes out. On top of that the transformers are all at ground level too.

My neighborhood has buried electrical and low-voltage, but the main distribution lines to the neighborhood themselves are above ground. This seems like a good compromise, keeps the bulk of the neighborhood looking nice but means that if one neighborhood takes a hit it many not knock out otherwise-unaffected neighborhoods.

I think DNF's release was a product of some new company executives that took over Apogee not realizing that it was supposed to be a joke...

That depends on which Natalie Portman movie... If it's Léon, eew...

I think that this is more of a "government snitches get stitches" kind of thing, where one assumes that all functions of that organization are bad.

In my view, the problem is that since the police are the only official authority to take such crime-related complaints to in the first place, this leak punishes those that are simply trying to get justice served, who have no other authority to take their complaints or other information to.

On another note, isn't the point of "Anonymous", written into the name and everything, that there is no real structure, that there are no real decision makers beyond everyone individually choosing what they're going to work on, and if they're going to participate with an idea that someone else has? Wouldn't it make more sense to compare "Anonymous" the entity as a medium through which individuals can collaborate for their own projects?

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 wonder what it would look like if it explodes"

Nope, it was most definitely "I wonder what it will look like when it explodes" and I found thinking it that way to be jarring in its own right. Ten minutes later I had the answer. Large numbers of people were watching and it caused a level of intensity of emotion and feeling among large numbers of people that the intensity was enough to function at a different and atypical energy level.

"Perhaps you should consider studying in the field of neuroscience, or perhaps deep in to the fields of physics"

I'm too old to change career tracks, I have absolutely zero interest in working in the repressive hamster cage necessary to do research in those fields, living in an ivory tower or playing research paper games. Those fields require a lab, equipment and a lot of money. As soon as you hit string theory and multiverse we simply don't have any way to do experimental research because everything is at a level beyond our current ability to measure anything.

Probably the only ones doing viable research on the subject are Zen masters, though they may also be masters of self deception.

I'm just not opting in to the reductionism that thinks just because we have huge digital computers that they are the right tool to simulate biological intelligence. You might actually be able to fake some of the mechanics but its going to be wildly inefficient and contrived, and I think critical peices will be missing, probably the parts that we call "soul".

"I think it's FAR more likely that your mind lied to you."

Ya know you actually don't have a clue what it was but you do seem to have that special kind of arrogance that makes you think can just fill in the blanks about something for which you have no actual information and make it fit your world view.

It was 10 minutes before the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded while watching the pre launch with no sound. The thought flashed through my head quite vividly, "I wonder what it will look like when it explodes". You could maybe explain it away that I'd deduced that conditions were ripe for it to explode but since I didn't really know anything about the O ring issues and cold at the time I had no basis for deducing that there was much of a chance it would explode beyond the fact that all launches have some chance of exploding.

It is a chronic characteristic of our species, especially the arrogant, intelligent ones like yourself that we think we have it all figured out and that everything falls to Occam's Razor. Time after time it turns out that we actually don't know it all, in fact we don't know much about a lot of things.

The people most likely to make the leaps of discovery are the ones who have no regard for "conventional wisdom". I wont be placing any bets on an AI, any time soon, to come up with an original insight on anything. You seem to have a lot in common with the brand of intelligence I would expect an AI to produce.

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.