And I should have clarified this, it wasn't "I have to go to college...", it was "I have to go to a 4-year college for a full bachelor's degree to get anywhere".

Guess what I don't have now...?

Right, but at least in my experience, nobody educates you as to the downsides before you sign those papers. I was raised thinking "I have to go to college or I'll never get anywhere in life", by both parents and teachers, and for a straight-up middle class family, that means either scholarships/grants or loans. (My parents made too much for me to be eligible for most grants/scholarships, but I never saw a dime from them when I was living in the dorms.) And obviously the schools and the banks don't want to "discourage" you from taking their money/paying their tuition fees.

If I could go back to 7 years ago knowing what I know now, I'd skip college entirely, or maybe just go to the tech school that I ended up at anyway. I'd be out in 2 less years, with maybe a whole $5000 of debt, and probably working the same job I am now (with higher pay because I'd have 2 more years of being employed here).

Fair enough, I didn't know those existed.

Right, but do you buy them from the company that originally built the cartridges?

Nintendo is the only one I know of where this is even possible, and that's only through the virtual console stuff. If you're looking to replay your Atari classics, you've got two options that I see: either already own a working legacy console and buy the games from some secondhand source (such as eBay), or download an emulator and a ROM and work with it that way. Neither option gives Atari or its related companies any extra money.

I wouldn't have a single problem with the current business mentality towards copyright on games if the companies in question actually still sold the games. For a reasonable price of course, but for an awesome classic that could be a fairly high value of "reasonable". This is why I love Good Old Games and what they do...

I've got a lot of customers in town that use IE, and old versions at that, because they have crappy web-based applications that don't work with newer versions, or other browsers.

These are car dealerships, dentist's offices, etcetera. And there's not a damn thing I can do about it. I sure wish these nationwide companies would update their software...

I don't know if this deserves to be negative - I had to do a really dumb malware removal on a POS system, and the majority of the trouble was coming from software that was branded Baidu. Here in the middle of the great plains, at a Mexican Restaraunt.

It had several hidden portions that hijacked the browser, too, not to mention popup ads. Most cleanup tools didn't work on it, either - we ended up getting down and dirty with it and removing things manually as we discovered them.

I don't really know why I mention this, apart from to say that I dislike Baidu and I'm not at all surprised at any accusation of them being malware-ridden.

Compared to a planet, a comet is tiny. You essentially need a perfect intercept to minimize the delta-v required to enter comet orbit. Then they have to stick the landing and keep the probe from flying off the surface.

Gotta love KSP! I should look into modding in a tiny body like a comet just to test with. Someone on Reddit used Gilly as a comparable body for a "test run".

Nothing wrong with that. 10 Years in 2013 is close to half the time "Linux" has been available.

Besides, that AC could very well be like me: relatively young. I was 14 ten years ago. I didn't start playing with Linux and the like until maybe 2006, but that doesn't mean I can't feel slightly proud that I eventually figured it out, even if it's 2013.

I can't speak for AWD (I wish I had it but my car works fine and I can't justify/afford a new one right now) - but with RWD, my rule of thumb is: if you start fishtailing, let off the gas and make sure your wheels are pointing where you want to go. That's it. Don't touch the brake unless you know they won't lock up (I don't have ABS either).

Bingo. I'm pretty sure RLCs are illegal in South Dakota (not sure where exactly to look, but a google search seems to corroborate the theory), but in my town....there'd be an outcry if they tried to install them, at least during the winter.

I drive a 2003 Mustang. Rear wheel drive, not particularly heavy. Even with 250 extra pounds of icemelt bags in the trunk, it takes me an extra 5-10 seconds of feathering the gas to get moving on icy roads, and I have to start slowing down about 50 feet earlier than when it's dry.

Add to this that, during the winter, only the 4 or 5 major artery roads are ever satisfactorily cleared (and not due to plows, but due to the amount of traffic they get), sand is rarely re-applied to the intersections once it gets swept away by traffic, and it takes the city about 3 days after it stops snowing to actually start clearing the snow out in the first place.

Anyway, this morning's short drive to work is a perfect example. It was 31F yesterday - surprisingly warm, enough so that some of the snow and ice melted in the sun. Then it dropped back to 0F overnight, freezing the wet roads. This morning we had a thin-but-troublesome layer of ice pretty much everywhere. If I was less than 50 feet out of an intersection, even going slow, and the light turned yellow....if I hit the brakes, I'd end up in the middle of the cross street. Red light cameras here would wreak havoc on people who can't help that they can't stop in time.

I like my Pandora list, because it introduces me to new artists.

Not as much now as it did when it was new, sure, but I still find stuff I like by using their algorithm.

(Granted, this is Pandora piped through Elpis, so I don't have ads or "are you there" confirmations or anything...)

Thanks for that reference - I'd never heard of those drives before. Now I've got some learning to do.

I mean, I imagine solid state storage would be fine, but I can't see a mechanical disk behaving too well in this sort of environment. Unless it's completely watertight, of course. And I don't see disks going away anytime soon.

I suppose you could have a separate, air-cooled storage bay, but that would introduce new exciting engineering difficulties...


(To be absolutely fair, I imagine something like this is going to cost a bit, and if you are spending that much already you might as well be springing for solid state storage...)

It's not necessarily distance that's the problem, but the number of hops in between. As a simplified example, if you were 1000 miles apart but had a direct fiber line with powerful equipment between locations, your latency would be less than if you were 10 miles apart but had 10 routers in the middle (I'm ignoring distance limits on the fiber and assuming it's one line). The routers have to process each packet, adding a bit to the round trip time for each hop. Not much time, to be sure (a few milliseconds), but it's there. And the more you're transmitting (1080p video, for example), the slower it will seem. The default ping packets in Windows aren't particularly big, and can be slightly misleading if you're looking for slowdowns regarding large transfers.

Your architects are right, though, in that "distance" is a good way to put it. It also depends on how your company is laid out - VPN links between offices? point-to-point T1? Etc...

We use the single click executable (as mentioned in the parent comment). This doesn't actually install - it's a standalone exe. We run VNC in listen mode on our tech stations at the shop, and tell the customer over the phone who to click on to let us in. So, a reinstall won't help here.