Back when it was Regents, you could get a "concentration" basically just by getting an above mean score on a GRE subject test. Since I believe the guy who started the Triple Nine IQ Society had about a dozen of them, that became a bit of a fad. I picked up English Lit, Sociology, Political Science and History -- yup, accredited as long as you say it's a "concentration" -- in a year for chuckles for slightly over a $1000 total back when the economy was good to add to my traditional two majors. I always had a sneaking suspicion the college hated our guts for making fun of the process and we may have screwed it for other people. You can still get credit but, offhand, I think it's more like half a concentration for a score significantly better than mean.

Nonetheless, if you pass several GRE subjects tests, I imagine that's still a lot of elective credits received very, _VERY_ cheaply.

Of course, most of the buses have had cams for years.

And since they're phasing out the old passes and pushing the convenient web account enabled smart passes that you can charge with your credit card from home, you better pay cash if you don't want your bus route tagged.

Need I say more? A series, no less: Hour of Judgement, Prisoner of Conscience, etc. Extra points for trauma.

$5 million probably isn't enough to set up much serious biology. Maybe better than giving it to the Vatican.

They're practically indestructable.

Who knew? I'm a Century Link DSL customer.

"A more likely punishment is a throttled connection, where connection speeds are severely degraded for a set period. The agreement specifically mentions 256 -640 kbps as an example."

I guess if it's totally unresponsive a person is SOL without a drive swap, but I leave the restore, and even the Windows partition, on our ThinkPads. Just leave the Windows on it and resize it down for a little insecure storage space.

Indeed. "Waste" is a polite, or innocent, synonym for corruption rotten to the core.

Zune, Nokia, now the death of Barnes & Noble. It's a shame. We liked the Nook.

Before this week's layoffs, Forbes did an analysis http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2012/01/02/why-best-buy-is-going-out-of-business-gradually/ back in January on why Best Buy was in a slow, horrible death spiral. This panic over demanding a driver's license is just part of the apocalyptic horror. And it's a demonstration of the short-sighted, reactive, anti-consumer leadership that painted them into this corner. Clearly, they've decided morons are their target demographics because who else will now buy more than one big ticket item at Best Buy more than once every 90 days? Guess it takes one to know one.

I'd have known a lot less about computers -- since the built-in decompiler came in handy when "compatibility" with C64 programs meant you had to recode because they moved the video addresses, among other things. I guess sometimes the best master is the one who throws you down a well and makes you find your own way out.

Indeed. I don't hear the statement saying that every employee is a uniquely valued snowflake. One can read a bit of the opposite in the tone, really, if the idea presented turns out to be stupidly thought out, but it expresses an open and non-punitive philosophy on the part of the company to keep an open ear to ideas that seems very reasoned.

It's true and it's weird. If you let a kid experience an hour at 300 baud on a Commodore he'd go crazy, but I'm sometimes surprised at how blase I am. Like the speed bump of a new computer that you're already used to the next day, it's all just been little bumps: maybe around 2400 bps when the text speed was getting pleasant, USENET, Mosaic, streaming audio, then video, then Skype, etc.

I quickly spent most of my time on GEnie. I think their leadership can be really proud of themselves. Like the article alludes to, it was clear that GE itself didn't really give a crap. It was just a way to pay for their computers in the off-hours. Despite what it must have been like working within that environment, somehow the GEnie team managed to create a really nice and competitive system. Didn't make it to '99 but I hung on to their text service longer than I should have into the Mosaic and early Netscape era.