Traditionally we use half&half (causing the rest of the world to ask for a translation; it's a thinner cream that's halfway between milk and whipping cream.) It's available in little ultrapasteurized single-servings as well as fresh.

But if keeping the dairy products refrigerated isn't convenient, there are powdered imitations that deserve the contempt you've expressed, and liquid imitations that are excuses for corn syrup and artificial flavors, and also non-dairy creamers for people who can't tolerate lactose or want something that's kosher to use at a meat meal.

My high school chemistry/physics teacher would boil water in a beaker over a bunsen burner to make his instant coffee with. The water was hard enough that the beaker had a sludge just from that.

After being exposed to Turkish coffee, my reaction has been "if the spoon falls over, your coffee's not strong enough."

But even when diluted by emigration to America, some parts of Scandinavian coffee culture remains. My experience with various church groups has been that the Lutherans (and spinoffs of Swedish Lutheranism) make better coffee than the Methodists I grew up with, and Southern Baptists make worse coffee (they're really iced tea people.)

Mining pools and custom hardware do make it possible for a large enough group to get over 50%, especially as the need for mining hardware crowds CPU and GPU miners out of the game. We'll see whether they decide it's more useful to stay over 50% and cheat, stay over 50% and not cheat, or split the pool into two or more pieces to keep the value of their Bitcoins higher than they would be if the market abandons Bitcoin because of perceptions of cheating.

Better than First Post!

And if this were Bitcoin, instead of Slashdot, I'd get to block the rest of you! Bwahahah! But it's not, so you'll probably crowd me out here soon enough.

Bwahahah!

Several of my friends were early Xanadudes. At one point there was a serious risk that they might actually ship a product, and Ted would lose his Golden Vaporware Awards, but somehow it never quite happened.

If it were portable and stable and still supported this decade, I'd really like NeWS, or at least OpenLook. The window system ran in PostScript, so What You See really Is What You Get. Iconizing a terminal window just cranked it down to a 1pt = 1 pixel font, and the icon was still a live window, so you could see the icon change when stuff scrolled. My supervisor kept switching between reading glasses and distance glasses, so we just set his default font size to 24 and everything was big and clear. It used a lot of memory, though - you needed the 8MB version of the Sun/3 instead of 4MB to get decent performance.

But realistically, FVWM or anything a half-step up from TWM was fine. Even Motif would do.

OS9 was a nice sort-of-Unixy operating system that ran on 6809 microprocessors, back in the day.

Somebody obviously didn't get the obvious, or at least didn't draw the obvious conclusions from it.

I never found pot did much beyond relaxation, a bit of silliness, and maybe some enhanced enjoyment of music. Yeah, everybody reacts to drugs differently, your mileage may vary, and "relaxation" for me included reduced muscle pain and indica couch-lock, but it wasn't particularly psychedelic. Closest I got to hallucinations from it was a bit of tunnel vision which came with a strong suggestion that I ought to sit down, right then, to avoid falling over.

1 Mbps =~= 10 GB/day = 300GB/month. If your cable company puts a bandwidth cap on your service, it's effectively slowing you down to less than DSL speeds.

Blocking inbound SMTP isn't going to prevent any spam; it's just going to force people to use commercial email services to get their mail. No excuse for it.

There are three kinds of users who send outbound SMTP

• Legitimate home email users.
• Infected zombies sending spam.
• Spammers using home systems.

Many ISPs have a policy of "block SMTP by default, but allow it if the user requests", which keeps out the zombies. It does force them to deal with occasional spam complaints because of customers who spam on purpose, but they're blockable.

I don't use Netflix, but here in Silicon Valley my 3 Mbps DSL is perfectly capable of playing standardish-definition TV from TV network websites, as well as playing YouTube. If I were a sports fan I might care about getting HDTV sports over the net instead of cable TV, since I assume Comcast's sports channel selections are as lame as their non-sports TV channel selections and sports actually does benefit from the higher resolution.

Back in the 90s and early 2000s, we were trying to sell businesses on using 8kbps G.729 calls from IP PBXs instead of 64kbps telco voice, and they would whine about Mean Opinion Scores and latency (and didn't get that India just wasn't going to get any closer and the speed of light wasn't going to change.) Cell phones convinced most of those people that they didn't really need to care - GSM was 13kbps or 6.5, and your office PBX phones had much better microphones than a typical cellphone and usually didn't have wind noise and trucks going by in the background.

I did have one friend who kept an analog cell phone around for a long time after most people had switched over to digital, because he spent a lot of time out in the mountains and back-country where there wasn't yet much cellphone signal, and a bad analog call was noisy, while a bad digital call just wouldn't stay connected.