I'm in the same boat. Or was, until the video card on my 2009 mac pro went out and the only compatible replacement I could find was a used one on ebay. And now it's getting flaky too.

I *used* to have El Capitan (OSX 10.11) installed on that 2009 pro (after a series of upgrades), but after a crashed HD and re-install, any attempt to install 10.11 is denied. Since I still have the disks (Yay disks!) for Snow Leopard I installed that. WOW! How much faster this machine is!!! Seriously, my 2009 Mac Pro with Snow Leopard is the *fastest* Mac I own, including my two year old macbook pro.

Yep. I'll stick with Snow Loepard from now on for my work machine, hands down. If I need texting or facetime or whatever the next thing is I'll just use my phone for that. (I also have a sacrificial mac mini for "research", nudge-nudge-wink-wink...)

Granted, most of the software I use is also from 2009-2012. And then there's that. Most of it WON'T RUN on the modern versions of OSX. WHY??? What's the point of that?

In most cases there is newer software available, but I still don't know what the fuck "save a version" is supposed to mean or what it's doing to my file system, etc... And Pages 2009 was supremely easier to use than the "modern" version of Pages, and Working Model doesn't exist for the new version, and I could go on and on and on...

Now I live in terror that my video card will expire and I won't be able to find a new one.

My ONLY option is to hackintosh, or maybe hackintosh a VM. I'd be cool with that, and I've tried, but somehow the "5-minute craft" video tutorials never actually work for me.

Anyone got any recommendations or suggestions? I'm seriously thinking of buying every 2009-2011 Mac Pro on ebay and holding them in storage, just in case.

(And trust me, I'm competent in Linux, but again, the software I need and use and invested half a lifetime learning isn't there. MS Is not an option. I abandoned it during the Vista fiasco. Now when my kids need help with their Windows machines, I'm like a newbie. Me, a former AIX sysadmin, can't figure out even the most basic "connect to wifi" thing on MS. To quote our so-called president, "sad.")

More accurately, The enemy of my enemy is potentially useful. If you're smart enough.

As a kid I was shocked, and in awe, of all the naked female breasts on prime-time TV in the original broadcast of Alex Haley's ROOTS.
This was the 1970s, in the USA.
But it was ok (I was told) because all the naked breasts bouncing and jiggling across the TV screen were black African women.
I guess they thought it wouldn't be arousing to us all-American white boys. They were wrong. They were very, very wrong.

I heartily agree!

Everything "smart" and requiring an app on your phone stinks of too many eggs in one basket.

Convenience comes at a price. It's not usually worth it. Because I have kids, I can hardly ever find the TV Remote, so I get up and walk across the living room to turn the TV on or off and change the volume. I wish the buttons and dials were still in the front of the TV like the old days. I wish the ROKU even had buttons!

There is no lesser evil. Evil is still evil.

I'm an aging reader AND I have kids under 25 (I was a late bloomer in every sense).

Now I'm looking at exorbitant "healthcare" (insurance) costs AND exorbitant higher education costs.

For reference, when I went to engineering school (UT Austin) back in the 1970s, my dad gave me $500/year. That's it. I paid for the rest of my schooling AND living expenses with a part-time job (bartender). I had no student debt. Never even applied for it. Didn't need to. Think about that for two seconds.

When my sister spent sixteen days in an ICU in 1982, the bill came to $40,000. Today, that's the cost for a broken leg.

I honestly don't know how my family is going to get through the next decade.

The time for revolution is near.

After reading this...

So, WHY Is this the best candidate the Dem's could come up with? Who orchestrated all this, and why?

Seriously. I was a republican long, long ago (Eisenhower style republican). But now their corruption and abuse of power has made them an enemy of the state in my humble opinion.

And I have to wonder, why are they so confident and so comfortably blatant about it, and why do the Dems seem unable to get a good candidate up there? What the hell is really going on behind the scenes?

And finally, how the hell is Biden going to be able to perform as President, and for how long? We've all seen the stress and toll it takes on people. You're probably not voting for Biden, you're voting for whoever the VP ends up being.

What new reality is coming for this once-admirable country?

As of a couple of days ago,

Korea had tested 300,000 people and found only a 2.9% infection rate. Of those, 20% had no symptoms. Of the ones left, 1.5% mortality rate.

For a 330,000,000 US population, that extremely optimistic result still gives us over 100K dead.

Consider this -- the Korean test costs $140 per person.
Sweden is only quarantining known infections, so the rest of the country can stay in business. And it's working.

Based on that... Testing every single person in the US would cost only $42 billion -- FAR LESS than the $2 trillion "stimulus."
Maybe we could piggy-back that on the US Census, which was already geared up to contact every person in the US, then hire people (with adequate protection) to help those who are infected, keep them home, get their groceries and supplies, and call the docs if needed.

Save money, save more lives, stay in business and create jobs all in one.

Can I be president now?

Unfortunately, you are wrong.

Autoplay was the default behavior of the original device -- the television. Turn it on, watch all day.

We here are a very tiny minority of intellectuals. The vast majority of people out there get mildly irritated every time they have to search for the remote that got lost in the couch cushions since the last time they paused something to go to the bathroom. Hell, I know people who don't even bother to pause it. Too much trouble, and they're not following the "story" anyway. It's just visual brain candy.

The prefer auto-play. It's easier. And they are the majority.

"The GDP of the United States is about $20 trillion. In a lump sum, $2 trillion is one tenth of that. That is a lot of money no matter how you look at it. So you want to spread it out over a number of years. How many years? Even 1% of our GDP would be a huge sum, and that'd be spreading it out over 20 years. How do you reclaim that? "

Go look up the economics of the Apollo moonshot program sometime. 25% of GDP... Somehow we survived, and prospered.

There's a current article on one of the on-line tech mags.
  The writer was able to defeat the system and steal produce by putting on sunglasses and a sweater change in the bathroom. After that, nothing he picked up got charged.
He included a photo of the receipt showing a two and a half hour shop time (actual was half an hour).

Every electron is identical to every other electron. (I read that in a physics book somewhere, along with the theory that there is only one electron, but it bounces back and forth from the beginning and end points of time, piercing the "now" so often as to give the illusion of many electrons.)

Ditto for quarks, et al.

If all particles are identical to their own kind, indiscernible from each other, then uniqueness isn't in the particles themselves, but the arrangement that matters.

Also, Arthur C. Clarke answered this philosophical question of exact duplicates in 3001. Basically, yes, it's the same thing.

Agreed. Some of us go to movies to forget about the current politics and just escape for a while.
This movie made me feel like I was watching someone try to figure out how to make a movie.

Does anyone else remember the iPod Nano? It recharged, uploaded and downloaded music from your computer all through the headphone jack. One jack to rule them all. And there's no upside down with the headphone jack. I don't have to look at it to plug it in. It's far, FAR more reliable than the sketchy "lightning connector" gets after a few years, and it's dirt cheap. (But maybe that's the problem.)

Way back in electronics school in the 1980s, my instructor confidently told me that any signal -- any -- can be transmitted, along with power, using only four or fewer conductors.

It's just a wire, a contact point and some software. There's absolutely no need for all these competing end-of-wire connector designs.
(Of course, there's always the profit-motive excuse that the connector type tells the device which software to use, but that's just being lazy.)

Japan has hundred-year mortgages. So nope, two digits are not enough.

In my case, insurance costs about the same as replacing the case every year. I've had an iPhone since the first one. Broken three-- two in cases, one without.

I like the thin, slick phone sliding in and out of my pocket a lot more than the friction and thickness of the case. To me, that's worth something.

Insurance: it's better than a case for protection.