I upgraded from an old Keyboard (which I'd had for several years) to a Voyage, and it was definitely worth it for the better display and the built-in light. Can't think of anything that would convince me to upgrade again until my Voyage dies, though.

My Voyage has been in airplane mode since I've owned it, and I left the wifi off for years on my old Keyboard. It increases the battery life tremendously. Plus, I transfer and manage all my books via USB with Calibre anyway, and I've always got a backlog of dozens of books loaded on the Kindle, so I really have no use for the wifi connectivity.

Back when I was with T-Mobile (on an old plan long out of contract), my bill went up twenty or thirty cents every couple of months like clockwork, despite the base price never changing. By the time I left them, I was paying well over $50 a month for my $35 plan (which, being an old plan, was 300 minutes a month and no data service). Now I pay $25 a month plus sales tax for a Virgin Mobile plan with 300 minutes and unlimited data, and the price never changes.

If a headhunter is charging *job seekers* money, then it's a scam and you should stay the hell away regardless of any promises they might make. Legit recruiters get paid by the companies they recruit for, not the potential employees.

I'll usually give someone a honk if they do something stupid and dangerous that nearly causes an accident. Most bad drivers will be too oblivious to know (or care) why you honked at them anyway, but there's always a small chance the offender will hear it and think "oh hey, I must have done something dumb there..." and then be more careful in the future. Getting all angry and laying on the horn and cussing at 'em incessantly doesn't do anything useful, though, and just makes you more likely to do something stupid yourself.

Mr Burns: "This man is costing my health plan five thousand dollars a day. I demand that he die with dignity!"

I used to work for a web hosting company, and it was amazing how many of our clients would submit support tickets demanding that we make their $15/mo shared web hosting accounts PCI compliant. We even had some actual *banks* hosting their web sites on our cheap shared accounts. I suspect a lot of the problem was that these customers had no IT staff or knowledge and didn't understand that their requests were ridiculous or what a terrible idea it was to store unencrypted financial data on a third party shared hosting platform. (Unfortunately, since we'd gotten out of the dedicated server business and only sold shared hosting, we weren't even supposed to tell these poor folks that it was a terrible idea and they really needed a dedicated self-managed system of some sort at a minimum, since that would mean we'd lose their account.)

There is little or no profit in selling sub-$10 hosting accounts. Your cheap hosting is subsidized by upselling other high-margin services, especially advertising services, to hosting customers, and often by monetizing your site itself. (Have you checked your site's default HTTP error pages lately? Odds are good that they're full of targeted ads based on your domain name.) If those revenue sources become less profitable, your hosting costs will eventually go up (or your hosting company will go out of business).

Missing option: Stained glass windows. I can do very nice electronic soldering, but it's whether you can solder 1" wide lead came with a 250 watt Hexacon iron with a 5/8" tip that separates the men from the boys. Hexacon makes bigger ones. I think they're for soldering together battleships or something. Recent accomplishment: Rebuilding all the leaded glass windows in the Yale University Art Gallery.

I wholeheartedly second the recommendation of "Tales Of Pirx The Pilot." Terrific short stories with a lot of humor. This would be the book I'd hand to a young person who had never read any science fiction before.

At any rate, whatever meaningful socialism there was in Hitler or in Nazism was wiped out ... during the Night of the Long Knives.

Whatever meaningful socialism there was in _______ was wiped out during ________

1) the USSR / Stalin's purges
2) communist China / Mao's purges
3) Cuba / Castro's purges

and on and on.

Socialism / Communism isn't a way of running a society. It is a method used to disrupt and destroy a society. The nuances and differences between socialism, communism and Progressivism are as meaningless as the nuances and differences between the effects of different types of nuclear weapons on a city. Socialism, Communism and Progressivism are a means to achieving totalitarianism, no more, no less.

With the exception that BAL is still in use today. If you do systems programming on IBM mainframes for any amount of time, You. Will. Learn. BAL.
 

I used Windows 2000 until a few weeks ago. Rock stable. Ran everything I wanted. I just recently built up a new system (Phenom II X6 1100T / 8GB / SSD) to replace my Athlon XP 2000 system and bit the bullet and put Windows 7 on it. I got a 12 year run out of Windows 2000. Not too shabby.
 

Heh. A DJ friend has a set of turntable mats with the slogan on them:

"Copyright infringement is your best entertainment value"

Says it all right there,

The worst I ever had to deal with was an IBM RS/6000 Model F50 with a lot of SCSI cards. This was in 1998. Boot time was upwards of 30 minutes. It did these incredibly long self-tests of every card in the system. IBM didn't seem to understand that spending 5-10 minutes self-testing a SCSI card wasn't acceptable when there were a half dozen or more of those cards in the system ...

That system really messed with us. I'd come in at midnight to take the system down, and if there was any problem that required multiple boot attempts, I would be stressing about getting the system back up by 8AM. Nothing like being blasted by industrial strength air conditioning at 5AM watching the little LED numbers change over and over again. Once the system got up and running it was pretty fast (for the time), but oh my god the boot times.