I haven't booted my Windows PC to game in probably two years now. Been gaming just fine off an Ubuntu mini-itx box just using the onboard graphics card.

Granted, I've been finding myself less and less interested in big blockbusters and spending more time on a lot of the lighter indie games --- Undertale, Firewatch, Terraria, Bastion, FEZ and Torchlight II are all games I've gone through in the last couple years on this box.

Older triple AAA titles work fine as well, my friends and I are just now playing through Borderlands 2.

On a slightly related note.

I'm actually rather surprised how big of a truck you can rent without a CDL. You would think renting a 27' truck, loading it with a few tons of weight and then driving it across the country would require at least a little more cursory check then an old photocopied hand out on how to drive it.

In state where we've essentially outlawed any attempts at subsistence living? Yeah, go ahead and try to "quit" working and see how long before they drag you into court for something you've violated.

I don't understand people's obsession throwing money at an expensive adjustable desk. Just get a drafting table and a tall chair. Problem solved.

A random, wandering, self replicating, solar powered robot would stop on by and fix it replicating the necessary parts from junk it finds in your trash.

I would say this is coming too late. The cultural damage is already done. People have shifted away from thinking of attaching their internet identity to a handle and now find it normal and acceptable to attach their "real" identity with their "internet" identity to the point where they think it's odd that someone would rather go by a handle of their own choosing. Even if you let people specify their own handles, they would still sign up with their own names. Facebook has made this practice the normal behaviour of internet users.

My solution has been to dump cable for DSL. I look for the smallest, most local coop that I can. Typically end up paying 200% more fore a connection that's a fraction of cable' speed but at least it ends up being dedicated instead of shared. My main reason for doing this has been a positive experience in terms of the support being small and local. I can call in and get the same person on the phone each time. There's only one technician for my town and after I while we get to know each other, and they get to know that I know what I'm talking about and don't treat me like a rube.

Could you imagine what would happen if adware installers ever became a standard practice in the Linux environment. You run "yum upate" or "apt-get update" and find that someone added the ask toolbar as a requirement for some random C dev-lib?

I have a Windows PC for gaming still and every time I jump on it and find that I need to update software or download something that I've completely forgotten about how disingenuous businesses are towards their Windows clients. I don't even think about there being bundled installers on Linux, but its still in this day and age a standard practice for products in windows. Bewildering.

Reading over your comment it just occurred to me that a lot of novice users could very well potentially have an argument for why they would believe that Microsoft "knows" of their problems -- every time Windows XP had some process crash it would pop up a modal asking if you wanted to send a crash report to Microsoft. Pretty much every OS I've worked on does this, Ubuntu will even ask if you want to report a problem.

If I never used, or rarely used a computer and didn't come across these messages often it would not be a large jump of logic to presume that clicking "yes" on that modal would open a ticket on some help desk at Microsoft and some lowly tech-support would call you up some time in the future to fix the issue for you.

The time constraint argument is simply not true for an experienced cook.

I cooked throughout college and could typically prepare a full meal using only a cast iron skillet (which doubled as my plate) long before my roommates' frozen pizza cooked. There is also preparing food in large batches the way my grandmother fed seven children. In an hour, I can prepare enough stew to eat for a fortnight. I might be sick of stew after fourteen days, but hey, I've got fourteen days of healthy stew.

The food desert issue. I have lived in places like that, and that is a much harder one to get over.

Or for those of us who are more into the small-town/rural living telecommuting has opened up all kinds of avenues.

I tried to live in Seattle. Hated it. Hate cities. They're way to claustrophobic for someone who grew up in the woods and doesn't really have any interest in paying through the nose to participate in "cultural scene." The fact that the internet has made it so I only have to travel to the city four to five times a year to "keep in touch" with the office is perhaps the greatest Renaissance we can have.

My Dad ran into this problem a couple years back. Bought a house in a rural neighborhood. He had talked to the neighbors who had cable and presumed he would as well. Turned out, the cable company had only buried lines on the north-south roads and everyone on the east-west roads had none!

He went back and forth with the cable company a few times. They wanted him to pay $5,000 to extend the line a hundred yards over from the neighbor's property.

The trick was to start a business. I was working freelance at the time, so I had my "company" headquarters registered at my parents house. Called the cable company for them and negotiated for a year-long business lease to host my "servers." The cable company was more than happy to swallow the costs to bury the line for a business contract. My folks had to pay about $150/mo for the first year, but after that they could drop the business plan and sign up with residential.

People here don't seem to grasp what essential and non-essential means. They have a particular meaning for the government. Non-essential does not mean that they don't perform necessary work that must be done. Non-essential means that if they happen to be laid off for a week or a month the country is not going to descend into anarchistic chaos.

Take the Forest Service for example, law enforcement is essential and will be kept on staff (less loggers make a run on the forest while no one's enforcing), fire crews are essential since we don't want to just pull them off fires and just let it burn until congress sorts things out.

Civil Engineers and DOT funding are non-essential. So road construction, replacement of bridges, culverts, --- repairing all that flood damage in Colorado. Out the window until the government comes back. If a bridge is out right now, don't expect it to be fixed. If a flood washes a bridge out and it's your only way to get into town? Hope you know how to build a rope bridge.

Take the little Idaho town I'm in right now. A ridiculous portion of the population heats their homes with wood fuel for the winter. Yes, the smart ants went and got their permits in the spring, but there's a good number of people who've waited until the very last minute to stock up. The snow is already flying, and timber sales? Non-essential. They will not be able to get permits in time for the winter. Which means they'll either have to wait and hope the snow stays off until the government comes back or risk getting caught illegally cutting in the forest.

I talked with a lot of locals last night who did not understand this concept at all. People seem to think there's some kind of trove of useless bureaucrats who do nothing that are going to get cut. It's not that, its all government services, any government service you rely on or make use of is going out the window and the bare minimum to maintain social order is going to stay on board -- although, and here's the kicker, without getting paid.

It doesn't really sound like your using the service at all. Get rid of that home connection and replace it with a tethered phone and you'll go over that limit in a heartbeat. I live in rural northern Michigan. No cable line, no dsl. I have three options for internet dial-up, satellite, or Verizon. I've got a 5GB plan for $60/mo and I get very, very close to that 5GB cap each month and that's with nothing but web browsing -- no streaming video, no streaming music, no online games. Just facebook, slashdot, webcomics, e-mail, and chat. I wouldn't be able to go a month on 2GB unless I significantly cut down on internet usage, and I can't imagine how I could be using the internet less.