You are completely misrepresenting the point. It is not claimed or supposed to be cheaper than Big Ag. Read the summary - the stated appeal is: "access to open space, verdant fields and fresh food...To be able to walk down the street with my kids and get fresh, healthy food is amazing." Where did you pull "cheaper" out of that? This one-track mindset is so pervasive we have become blinded to it.

The Guardian link is reporting on a likely confirmation of gravitational waves. But the seismograph study seems to be ruling them out, at least near the frequency of 1 hz. They made a new, more sensitive detection mechanism and found nothing, thus ruling out the existence of any wave above a very low energy level. Am I missing the point?

I have always wondered how they handle heavy users, like if they allow commercial use, or if there is an unpublished cap. You could imagine somebody running a rural general store on it, or one kid at a dorm charging hundreds of others to use his Prime account for $2 a pop.

Well once we get good at this we COULD just grow the tusk part, in 3' by 3' cubes. Then you could glue a bunch of them together to make a minecraft-style ivory castle.

I do order quite a bit from Amazon using my Prime account. The thing is, it wouldn't hurt me to wait a couple extra days for most of it. The basic problem with Prime is you are (pre-)paying for fast shipping for every Prime order, even when you don't really want it enough to pay for it.

I meant, ...even if the cpu load is NOT 100%...

Good info. For a video player I am an absolute believer in hardware acceleration; even if the CPU load is 100%, software playback always causes stuttering. That is a definite hurdle in the "old laptop" route for that application, since the GPUs tend to be sub-par.

I like the idea of these cheap little boxes! But it should be noted that the $180 one you linked does not include an HDD/SSD, nor an ethernet port(!?) (No USB3 either, though it does have high-speed expandability via a Thunderbolt port).

I know it's not really the same, but I've had good luck with used laptops. Even if I use them primarily headless or with an external keyboard/mouse, you get low power consumption, built-in battery backup, and a built-in screen which is handy sometimes. The only trick is finding cheaper used laptops that have some sort of digital video out, not just a VGA port.

But punched paper tape is slow and makes a lot of noise.

Punched paper tape has better longevity than either floppies or optical media. You just need a really big roll and a lot of time.

The C++ mentality is that you should catch as many errors as you can at compile time. When you're launching a satellite, you want to be sure your code's as bulletproof as possible before it leaves the ground. Every time I've seen reflection used, it was by some terrible programmer who'd just learned about reflection and was looking for an excuse to use it. And every single time, they were using it as a crutch so they wouldn't have to think about the system they were building. You can almost hear them thinking "Cool! I don't really know what this bit here is supposed to do, so I'll just use reflection and once I've collected my paycheck and left, some other programmer can drop random objects in there later!" I've never seen its use actually improve a design. I've never even seen it make more loosely-coupled or reusable code, now that I think about it. Somehow they ended up with introspective systems that were so tightly coupled that you couldn't just break one object out to run a unit test on it. If they'd written unit tests. Which they didn't, because they were bad programmers.

Sure, when the ratio of unproductive old people to productive young people increases, the burden on the young people increases. This is true whether your accounting of chits uses dollars, entitlement programs, social customs (obliging children to support their parents directly), or anything else. There is no avoiding it. The only real questions are how to distribute the burden among the able-bodied, and how quickly the assets of the old are transferred to the young.

Who is that said democracies fail when the population discovers they can vote themselves bread and circuses?

I largely agree. I just wish people would quit blaming politicians for everything, when those same people keep voting to keep their benefits and not paying enough taxes to fund those benefits. This surge in payouts to retiring Boomers has been predicted as long as I have been alive. And yet still this belief in some mythical solution involving only cuts to "waste" and "inefficiency" persists.

Baloney, Social Security and Medicare were instituted by elected officials just like any other government policy. And the programs have so much support that Mitt Romney tried to run to the left of Obama in this case, claiming Obama was cutting Medicare whereas he (Romney) would not. If that's not a show of popular support, nothing is.

It's mostly "redistributing" money from people, to their older selves. It's effectively forced savings.

The bottom line is that the term "government spending" is highly misleading, since the government is exercising no discretion on how it is spent... the government simply sends it to individuals (mostly old folks) who decide what their individual priorities are and where to spend it.