Whiskey (or any liquor that is aged for flavor) only ages "in the barrel". Once it is bottled, it does not age anymore, because glass is inert. So if your grandfather bought a bottle of 12 year old Chivas in 1960 and left it gathering dust in his liquor cabinet for the next 49 years, you do not have 61-year old scotch, you have 12 year old scotch that's been in the bottle for 49 years. The value in these old bottles is not necessarily in their age per se, it's in their rarity - many of these old distilleries have long since ceased production and gone out of business, their recipes are lost, and the old bottles represent a legacy of sorts for the regional producers who thrived before giant corporations took over the production of spirits. It's kind of like buying NOS (new old stock) stickers for your MAME cabinet or arcade build. Only in this case, the "relics", such as they are, are a link to the past that simply can't be recreated once they're gone. The process that's descibed in the article ensure that the unscrupulous among us don't try to take advantage of people's desire to connect with that which came before.

So Google commits the most blatant act of copyright infringement in the history of mankind - basically stealing 7 million books and posting them on the Internet (with "limitations", which will be quickly circumvented with some clever Google "mash-up"). Someone steps forward, claims to represent the entire class of authors who has been wronged, accepts a pitiful "settlement" (well, it's pitiful if you are one of 7 million authors who are going to be paid $60 for your hard work, the $30 million cut for the lawyers is pretty impressive), and now the authors have two choices:

1. Accept a really crappy deal.
2. Sue one of the largests corporations on Earth, which can point to the 6.99 million plus other authors who took (or at least, didn't opt out of) the lousy deal and say, "This is what everyone else thought these rights were worth."

Meanwhile, a 12-year old downloads a crappy pop song onto her grandparent's blueberry iMac, and the RIAA gets to extort thousands of dollars out of dear old Grandma.

Why is "Hit Me Baby One More Time" worth so much more than something like "Innovation: The Attacker's Advantage"? And if it isn't, why can a bunch of lawyers step in for 7 million people and accept a crappy deal?

I see I wasn't the only person who watched "Idiocracy" on Comedy Central over the weekend. I bet Luke Wilson cries everytime he thinks about that movie.

Actually, there are battery designs where the container can be reused an "unlimited" number of times. One such design is the vanadium redox battery. Unfortunately, they do not begin to compare to lithium ion batteries in terms of energy density. However, if this tech or similar tech could be improved to the point where you could build an auto-sized vehicle that could get 150-200 miles per charge, then it's not hard to imagine a world where gas stations have been replaced by "electolyte swap facilities" where the discharged battery is "recharged" quickly by draining and replacing the electrolyte solutions. The same car could also be recharged by mains power at night.

Content providers don't want Hulu on your TV. The Boxee debacle proves that. Right now, they can't monetize the eyeballs delivered via Hulu as well as they can as the ones delivered via broadcast and cable. Until they figure out a way to do that, they're going to make it as painful as they can for you to get "TV" over the Internet. Look at how the amount of content on Hulu has actually shrunk lately (fewer full runs or full seasons of shows available, more "preview" and last three broadcast episodes shows).

Assuming the "rich" software engineers you're referring to made less than $250K last year, they actually got a tax cut from Obama. Stop drinking the GOP Kool-Aid for a minute and think about where your interests really lie. A 3% tax hike (actually, expiration of a previous tax cut) on the top 5% of taxpayers is not a march towards socialism, it's a sound fiscal move.

No, that's the exception that proves the rule.

Not to be pedantic or anything, but do you actually use hammers on a fairly regular basis? An 80-year old hammer would likely have a heavy wooden handle that transmits all of the shock and vibration right into the user's hand. It's likely worn smooth on the face so that the head might wobble on impact, sometimes slipping off the nailhead, causing you to have to re-drive more nails.

Modern hammers are much lighter (have fiberglass handles or are cast as a single piece of metal with a rubber handle), don't transmit as much shock to the user, and have a textured face that "bites" the nail and ensure that the head doesn't slip off when your strike is slightly off-center.

If I actually had to drive nails all day, I'd much rather have a newer hammer.

...you will tell him to get a professional to do this for him. Whether he understands it or not, your father's livelihood depends on having computers that are up and running, and from the limited picture you've given us, it sounds like he only thinks about information technology when something is going wrong.

Simply replacing his current hardware with newer gear is just kicking the problem down the road. In the last 15 years, there have been significant advances that he should consider taking advantage of, because they can make his business run more efficiently. But the only way to determine the "right" solution is to have someone who understands your father's business design a solution for him. A good place to start would be with the vendor who sold him his current setup, if they are still in business. They can most likely recommend a suitable hardware platform and assist with data migration to a newer, supported version of their software, and provide some sort of service arrangement that will ensure that these systems are maintained, not just used.

If you're bound and determined to do this yourself, the recommendations about virtualization are good ones - you can build a couple of VM images that you can backup to a USB flash drive nightly, or even better, several flash drives - learn about backup rotation schemes and design one that gives you the ability to recover two weeks worth of image data at least.

Up thread, someone said that if you do this, you will be supporting it for the next 10-15 years. You need to keep that in mind when deciding how to proceed. Best of luck!

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Make sure your are buying a processor (and motherboard) that supports VT otherwise you will most assuredly not be able to host other 64 bit systems.

There, fixed that for you.

Signed,
The idiot who bought a dual-core Pentium to do his own VM experiments.

You still send the request to the search server, the cookie just instructs it to send you to a page that looks like IE's "The page could not be displayed" error. It's not really opting out, it's just not showing you their ads. Anything that doesn't go through the browser is still broken.