This has always baffled me too, especially among programmers, because programming involves endless iterations of writing code and then having the computer laugh in your face. How can you think you're such a genius when a zillion times a day, a machine tells you you're not?

With college students it makes sense though. Because they don't really notice things which haven't happened to catch their interest, they live in a tiny subset of the real world, and they've largely mastered that subset, so as far as they know they ARE geniuses. It takes them an annoyingly long time to realize that the 95% of the universe that they don't care about matters too.

It didn't have a name -- kernel 0.13 plus a wad of basic utils, around 1991. Booting from floppy only (LILO came later) and you had to patch the boot disk with DEBUG.COM to set the root. No networking (Taylor UUCP came soon, TCP/IP later). I was actually pretty offended when distributions came along and started charging $$$ for balling up stuff they got for free from Linus and GNU, but it quickly became the most reasonable way to get Linux as it became enormous. I forget whether I tried SLS briefly before switching to Slackware which is what I've used up until now. Even when it was N floppies you didn't really use N floppies -- for most of them you could rewrite the disk with the next image as soon as the installer spat it out since it wouldn't ask for it back. Very long evening, each time.

Seems to be the main problem!

Are we such a bunch of whores that $$$ and insurance are all we care about?

Totally! I *wish* I had more business than I could handle on paper ... but sadly it isn't even a pain in the neck.

I did a summer internship at Apple in the late 80s and I'm sure things have changed quite a bit since then, but still one thing I thought was pretty clever of them as out-in-the-open evil schemes go was that they made it very very easy for employees to have no life outside of work. There was *tons* of social stuff built into work (happy hour every Friday afternoon, off-site stuff like going to a ball game or an amusement park with your group during work hours), and there were showers in the building and sleeping in your cube was tolerated. Adding a nice restaurant seems obvious -- one more thing covered that might otherwise make you leave work.

From Buck Rogers!

Obviously you mean Dot Matrix!

Actually, the Arduino (or at least, the Arduino Uno I'm holding in my hand right now) does have a CE mark on the back. Now this is making me paranoid about some of my own projects! What does CE testing cost?

Why are we talking about the circumference when you can't be any more than one diameter away from any other point on Earth? It's not as if the poll is actually asking you to drill the tunnel, it just wants its length.

Depends how often it takes to count as really using it ... but my DEC RL01 (14" 5 megabyte cartridge drive) still works whenever I spin it up. Those things are built like tanks!

OK then they're not eligible to register either -- so it does seem like a needless extra step. And I'm a little uncomfortable at how easy things get when you ARE registered -- where I live (western Mass.) they don't even ask for ID when I vote. It'd be OK with me if it were a little harder to get in the door, but once you can prove you have a right to be there it doesn't matter whether you remembered to get your name added to a list ahead of time.

2K cache memory for the PDP-11/34a -- it made a *huge* difference!

Aw c'mon, you could totally fit a TCP/IP stack in 48 KB. Pretty much nothing else, but as you say, there's your security for ya!

Seriously! Great for development and no one bothers writing DOS viruses any more.