I dunno. Of the two children who have died in my state, one had some prior health problems. The other was a young teenaged girl who had hardly had a sick day in her life and who had apparently been in excellent health before becoming ill. She died very quickly--over only a day or two--despite being hospitalized as soon as her symptoms became severe. I think that's probably what's so alarming to people in this area. I have no minor children, but if I did, I would be anxious to get them immunized. Oddly enough, I feel little or no anxiety on my own behalf.
Another thought: Macs seem to retain their value and to have longer useful lives. I'm on only my second Mac in nine years, and I haven't begun to think about replacing it. This is a three-Mac household because the old Macs just keep going and going. My original Mac, a G4, is now functioning quite happily as a file and print server. My husband uses one that was brought to the household by my elderly mother, who has since passed away. My current one is a 20" iMac about three years old, bought for somewhere around $1300. I haven't begun to think about replacement. I bought an HP mini-netbook last December for around $400, and it accompanies me to the library and on trips--I just map a drive to the old G4 and dump my files to it whenever I remember to do it. I'm planning to upgrade my Mac OS, and I need to update some software I use, but once I've done that, I figure I'm good for at least another couple of years.
I started to disagree with you, but you could be right:
If it looks like a duck, And quacks like a duck, And there's duck doo on your pickup truck, Then, brother, bet your bottom buck, It ain't no armadillo.
An absolute double-indemnified, genuine, authentic pain in the ass. They break down all the time, and when they do, here in Baltimore it can take days to repair them. Meanwhile, people are just supposed to refrain from parking in the affected block. They lie. You can put as much money as you want to in them. Baltimore has chosen to print any time limitations in such small print that they're virtually unreadable. It encourages feeding the public coffers. God forbid they should put up a legible sign that says something like "1-hour metered parking." To me, they look suspiciously vulnerable to bogus card readers, so I never go anywhere near one with a credit card. I still carry a pocket full of change when I have to go downtown. They don't accept dollar bills. You can buy a soft drink or some chips from a vending machine with a dollar bill. Why not pay to park with one? They encourage people to park stupidly and to waste space. Everybody hates to parallel park, but you can allow a reasonably small gap between your car and the one in front or in back--as opposed to half a car length. The old-fashioned meters pretty well determined exactly where your particular spot began and ended. They are a triumph of bad engineering.
There's a huge difference between "government healthcare" and "public health" at least as the term is used in the U.S. Public health traditionally concerns itself with disease control and prevention in communities of people--both small and large. It is concerned with the prevention of disease in entire populations as opposed to caring for individuals. Huge, enormous distinction there. If we're beginning to harbor populations with these parasitic diseases, we damned well want the Public Health Service involved and making recommendations for prevention, control, and treatment. We need them as watchdogs for occupational health, for control of epidemics (think Centers for Disease Control), and for identification and control of conditions that promote and cause diseases (dirty water, dirty food, the above-mentioned parasites). Even blatantly obvious functions like restaurant inspections fall under the general umbrella of "public health." It's short-sighted to ignore the conditions mentioned in the original article just because they're present only in poor or isolated segments of the population. They won't stay that way for long.
We replaced it with Vonage for my business (low cost toll-free number was a big factor). And we got a family plan from AT&T for personal calls. My elderly Mom was quite fragile in health, and I stupidly thought that a cell phone would give constant, reliable access. She died very early on a Sunday morning in the nursing home where she had lived for only a couple of weeks. There was a technical problem with Vonage (nothing new--they perpetually mix up the fax and phone lines, and the fax does not ring). So Vonage didn't work. And AT&T had "intermittent outages" during that time frame. I missed telling my Mom goodbye and only knew she was gone at 8:30 a.m. when I got up to check my voice mail. I was 2 1/2 hours too late. In a supreme irony, both our sons and most family members have AT&T, and their phones weren't working, either. I couldn't even call them from the desk at the nursing home when I finally got there. We got a couple of "we're profoundly sorry" communications from the two companies, but somehow it wasn't enough. Odds are a landline would have been just fine. If I had small children or elderly folk in my home, I'd hang on to that landline for dear life. And if anyone here ever becomes ill, I'm having one re-installed.
Who had these drugs pushed at her with a great deal of pressure to take them. She finally said, "I'm almost seventy, for chrissake. I'm SUPPOSED to be old. She also clued me in as to how these drugs are harvested or manufactured or whatever you would call it. They're extracted from the urine of pregnant mares. In order to do that, the horses are made pregnant. Then they are confined to their stalls, 24/7, so that the urine can be collected. They're never allowed outside, never allowed even to move around in the stalls--just made to stand there without a break for their rather lengthy gestation terms. When the foals are born, they are taken away from the mothers immediately and are often slaughtered. That kind of confinement would be torture for any animal--it is doubly so for a horse which needs to be able to move about and use its legs.
A few wrinkles in the fullness of time were much preferable to her, and so they will be to me.
People are using smuggled cell phones for arranging hits and drug deals from prison here in Homicide City, and we can't even get permission to jam the airspace over the prisons. We've resorted to specially trained cell-phone-sniffing dogs in Maryland, and apparently our methods are much requested by prison systems in other states.
What would be wrong with something like, "Keep your cell phones turned off. First offense, a week in jug. Second offense, two weeks in jug. Third offense, you don't get to finish the year..."? Maybe they don't put kids in detention any more.
If the cell phone carriers object as strenuously as they do to cutting off a bunch of felons, they're really going to begin screaming if somebody tries to cut off a bunch of high school students.
My mother in law had off-peak rates at the family home, and you couldn't get a damned shower unless you could shower at noon. Mornings and evenings were both out. You also couldn't wash the dishes after dinner (she didn't have a dishwasher). That led to all kinds of idiocies like warming up water for the dishes on the gas stove--a real savings!
Utility companies aren't out to conserve energy, and they're not out to help you save money on your bill. They're out to make money for their investors. If you want an example of utility monitoring, look no further than the elderly man in Michigan who froze to death in his home this past winter because there was some kind of governor on his electric meter. (http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/02/04/freezing.death.folo/index.html). And he had plenty of money to pay--he'd just lost his competency to handle his bills. "Smart" appliances are an open invitation for this sort of idiocy to increase.
Yours is the only post in this thread so far that makes any sense. Kids have to absorb enough shock and trauma from the real world that they shouldn't have to absorb it in fake format from people they need to trust. My other observation is that every teacher and administrator who participated needs to be sent back to school for a refresher on child development. This stunt would have been fun and perhaps effective in a junior high. First through third graders are still trying to ground themselves in the real world and haven't quite distinguished between the real and the magical or imaginary. It's why so many of them still believe in Santa Claus at that age. You must either have a child of your own, or you've retained your empathy.
They may make commercials about butt-dialing. But on the day after I got my iPhone, I hung up on a customer and dialed the veterinarian's office all without being aware I was doing it--with the side of my face. I therefore invented face-dialing. It took several days to get used to the keyboard, but it took longer to accustom myself to not mashing down on crucial icons while talking. I can use the keyboard efficiently now, but I suspect the learning curve would have been less with the keyboard described in the article. And it's not a mental learning curve. It's a physical skill like typing on a full sized keyboard.I'd also like to see them add a very slight lip around the perimeter of the screen where the silver metal is located. It would be a tactile reminder to keep the damned thing away from my face.
If we're talking about mechanical stuff, I have a clock that dates back to before the Civil War. I have a 1957 model sewing machine I use whenever I need to sew something. I have a gold pocket watch given to a distant relative in 1916--he died in combat in France shortly thereafter. I have a fountain pen engraved with the year 1910 that still writes, and several that date back to the 1920's-1950's, all in working order. I have a Colt 25 caliber automatic pistol that seems to have been manufactured around 1914--called the "Vestpocket" pistol. My upright freezer was first purchased 32 years ago. All this stuff has been in the family, and the secret is that it's all been used and cared for.
My oldest piece of working electronic equipment is a 1992 vintage Mac Duo Dock subnotebook.
Take care of your stuff, and your stuff will take care of you.
This was just one of a number of problems we've experienced recently. We've also been treated to the sight of a prison guard and inmate working in tandem to extort money from the family of another inmate for not killing him.
The CTIA's position is kind of interesting and involves the expenditure of lots of taxpayers' money:
We just tried and convicted a man in Baltimore who, from his prison cell, ordered the execution of someone who saw him commit a murder. Just a random citizen, husband and father, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and who came forward to testify. How was this hit ordered? On a contraband cell phone.
They're everywhere in the Maryland prison systems, aided and abetted by what must be the most corrupt guards on the planet. We even have trained cell-phone-sniffing dogs. But the illegal calls can't be stopped.
I can hear people saying, "There's a simple technical solution. Jam the signals." Problem is, you can't legally do that, even over the limited area covered by a prison. There's a Federal law against it, supported and lobbied by the cellular carriers, who are making millions off these illegal phones.
The plain truth is that human life or welfare are meaningless to them. The integrity of the courts and security of witnesses are meaningless to them. Nothing has any meaning but their bottom line. I'm sure they felt justified in letting this man die over $20.
Yes, it's a 5,000 year old marriage manual with religious overtones. But the good folks at Apple can't allow us to be distracted from their bestsellers--immortal classics like "Pee Monkey" and "Urinal Test..." (or whatever the hell it's called).
I dunno. A friend has been working for a large international agency in a very remote area of the Solomon Islands--a place where the electricity only operates for a few hours a day. She would certainly describe herself as "not technical," and when her cmos battery died, she sent out a general SOS. We decided that there was no problem replacing it--but how to get one to her.
The incredibly verbose email correspondence with Dell tech support makes for comical reading--if one can set aside the several hours to weed through it. She never did convince Dell's man in Rawalpindi (or wherever it was) that she couldn't just get into an outrigger and paddle for a couple thousand miles--and that FedEx does not make regular calls to her little corner of the jungle. Situation resolved by having a friend mail her a battery, which she popped in using the blade of a plastic knife.
The worst of it really was this idiot trying to impress her with his great technical prowess. You could almost see him puffing out his chest. Too bad he couldn't have spent five minutes looking up "Solomon Islands" in Wikipedia. If I'm ever packed off to the hinterlands, I won't be taking a Dell.
I've experienced a recent oddity. My public gmail account still traps and disposes of the usual range of adverts for pilules, fortunes from various dubious sources, and enlargement schemes. My business address has been suddenly deluged with adverts for otherwise-legitimate products; for example, garden plants and seedlings from known nurseries; "art" tchochkes from various "limited edition" emporiums, and golf and fishing equipment, and camping gear from known sporting-goods outlets. My server traps and black-holes enormous amounts of spam. This stuff is sneaking through.
1) It has to be configured for whatever application I want to use it for (games, office, netbook, class). 2) IT HAS TO WORK. 3) It has to be associated with reliable service.
Under those three requirements, Dell breaks down rather badly, and all the recipes and shopping tips they want to throw at me will fall on deaf ears.
This reminds me of trying to buy a car twenty years ago as a woman. If I happened to drag along my husband, the salesman always made the pitch to him--despite the fact that I was paying for the car and would be driving it. This was fairly common and always infuriating. At some point car salesmen realized that, yes, women do drive, and that they care about more than the coordination of the upholstery. There are even car saleswomen now.
Dell should take a page from the automobile sales book and pitch their laptops to everyone on the basis of quality, reliability, suitability, and service. Unfortunately they can't really do that and be truthful.
Mine is 1992 vintage and actually still works, though it is getting more difficult to move files between it and the newer stuff around here. Its chef virtue is that it weighs practically nothing and can be connected to its dock, which includes a floppy disk drive and place for a full-sized keyboard. Has a reasonably respectable 4mb of RAM and a whopping 80mb hard drive. I used it for years to write up notes. It's no good as a netbook because it can't use a browser compatible with most of today's Internet; it's got an early version of Mosaic on it.
I actually replaced it just this past Christmas with an HP mini netbook. I'm relatively happy with it, but as with its predecessor, all I do with it is carry it around to write up notes.
About early sewing machines, really isn't the patent fights. It's about the way they were sold. Singer sewing machines were the first big-ticket household items sold to average buyers on installment credit. Far too expensive for the average household, they were pitched to the housewife together with low, "easy" regular payments.
My mom died recently, and I inherited her sewing machine which is still in perfect condition but which was state-of-the-art back in 1959. She was incredibly jealous of it and allowed no one to use it--ever. I did a little reading on it and found that when new, it cost about two months's salary for my father. No wonder.
Isaac Singer was something of a failure before he came up with the easy payment plan. He had a product that was wanted and needed by people who couldn't pay for it all at once. The company he started thrived and succeeded for over a century thereafter. Too bad it's been absorbed now and is nothing more than a name--they made a damned good sewing machine.
If you (or more accurately the perception of you) shift from dedicated volunteer status to "dangerous hacker criminal" status, the company involved would cut you loose or turn you in with no compunctions at all--and find another volunteer. They don't have any "skin" in the game and therefore have nothing to lose.
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I dunno. Of the two children who have died in my state, one had some prior health problems. The other was a young teenaged girl who had hardly had a sick day in her life and who had apparently been in excellent health before becoming ill. She died very quickly--over only a day or two--despite being hospitalized as soon as her symptoms became severe. I think that's probably what's so alarming to people in this area. I have no minor children, but if I did, I would be anxious to get them immunized. Oddly enough, I feel little or no anxiety on my own behalf.
Another thought: Macs seem to retain their value and to have longer useful lives. I'm on only my second Mac in nine years, and I haven't begun to think about replacing it. This is a three-Mac household because the old Macs just keep going and going. My original Mac, a G4, is now functioning quite happily as a file and print server. My husband uses one that was brought to the household by my elderly mother, who has since passed away. My current one is a 20" iMac about three years old, bought for somewhere around $1300. I haven't begun to think about replacement. I bought an HP mini-netbook last December for around $400, and it accompanies me to the library and on trips--I just map a drive to the old G4 and dump my files to it whenever I remember to do it. I'm planning to upgrade my Mac OS, and I need to update some software I use, but once I've done that, I figure I'm good for at least another couple of years.
Pit bulls--the real ones--are notoriously illegal in Ontario: http://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/english/about/pubs/dola-pubsfty/dola-pubsfty.asp. Apparently that's not so in the rest of Canada, but since the government is located there, the press might want to consider attacking like a pack of chihuahuas, or perhaps Cocker Spaniels.
I started to disagree with you, but you could be right:
If it looks like a duck,
And quacks like a duck,
And there's duck doo on your pickup truck,
Then, brother, bet your bottom buck,
It ain't no armadillo.
An absolute double-indemnified, genuine, authentic pain in the ass. They break down all the time, and when they do, here in Baltimore it can take days to repair them. Meanwhile, people are just supposed to refrain from parking in the affected block. They lie. You can put as much money as you want to in them. Baltimore has chosen to print any time limitations in such small print that they're virtually unreadable. It encourages feeding the public coffers. God forbid they should put up a legible sign that says something like "1-hour metered parking." To me, they look suspiciously vulnerable to bogus card readers, so I never go anywhere near one with a credit card. I still carry a pocket full of change when I have to go downtown. They don't accept dollar bills. You can buy a soft drink or some chips from a vending machine with a dollar bill. Why not pay to park with one? They encourage people to park stupidly and to waste space. Everybody hates to parallel park, but you can allow a reasonably small gap between your car and the one in front or in back--as opposed to half a car length. The old-fashioned meters pretty well determined exactly where your particular spot began and ended. They are a triumph of bad engineering.
There's a huge difference between "government healthcare" and "public health" at least as the term is used in the U.S. Public health traditionally concerns itself with disease control and prevention in communities of people--both small and large. It is concerned with the prevention of disease in entire populations as opposed to caring for individuals. Huge, enormous distinction there. If we're beginning to harbor populations with these parasitic diseases, we damned well want the Public Health Service involved and making recommendations for prevention, control, and treatment. We need them as watchdogs for occupational health, for control of epidemics (think Centers for Disease Control), and for identification and control of conditions that promote and cause diseases (dirty water, dirty food, the above-mentioned parasites). Even blatantly obvious functions like restaurant inspections fall under the general umbrella of "public health." It's short-sighted to ignore the conditions mentioned in the original article just because they're present only in poor or isolated segments of the population. They won't stay that way for long.
We replaced it with Vonage for my business (low cost toll-free number was a big factor). And we got a family plan from AT&T for personal calls. My elderly Mom was quite fragile in health, and I stupidly thought that a cell phone would give constant, reliable access. She died very early on a Sunday morning in the nursing home where she had lived for only a couple of weeks. There was a technical problem with Vonage (nothing new--they perpetually mix up the fax and phone lines, and the fax does not ring). So Vonage didn't work. And AT&T had "intermittent outages" during that time frame. I missed telling my Mom goodbye and only knew she was gone at 8:30 a.m. when I got up to check my voice mail. I was 2 1/2 hours too late. In a supreme irony, both our sons and most family members have AT&T, and their phones weren't working, either. I couldn't even call them from the desk at the nursing home when I finally got there. We got a couple of "we're profoundly sorry" communications from the two companies, but somehow it wasn't enough. Odds are a landline would have been just fine. If I had small children or elderly folk in my home, I'd hang on to that landline for dear life. And if anyone here ever becomes ill, I'm having one re-installed.
Who had these drugs pushed at her with a great deal of pressure to take them. She finally said, "I'm almost seventy, for chrissake. I'm SUPPOSED to be old. She also clued me in as to how these drugs are harvested or manufactured or whatever you would call it. They're extracted from the urine of pregnant mares. In order to do that, the horses are made pregnant. Then they are confined to their stalls, 24/7, so that the urine can be collected. They're never allowed outside, never allowed even to move around in the stalls--just made to stand there without a break for their rather lengthy gestation terms. When the foals are born, they are taken away from the mothers immediately and are often slaughtered. That kind of confinement would be torture for any animal--it is doubly so for a horse which needs to be able to move about and use its legs.
A few wrinkles in the fullness of time were much preferable to her, and so they will be to me.
People are using smuggled cell phones for arranging hits and drug deals from prison here in Homicide City, and we can't even get permission to jam the airspace over the prisons. We've resorted to specially trained cell-phone-sniffing dogs in Maryland, and apparently our methods are much requested by prison systems in other states.
What would be wrong with something like, "Keep your cell phones turned off. First offense, a week in jug. Second offense, two weeks in jug. Third offense, you don't get to finish the year..."? Maybe they don't put kids in detention any more.
If the cell phone carriers object as strenuously as they do to cutting off a bunch of felons, they're really going to begin screaming if somebody tries to cut off a bunch of high school students.
My mother in law had off-peak rates at the family home, and you couldn't get a damned shower unless you could shower at noon. Mornings and evenings were both out. You also couldn't wash the dishes after dinner (she didn't have a dishwasher). That led to all kinds of idiocies like warming up water for the dishes on the gas stove--a real savings!
Utility companies aren't out to conserve energy, and they're not out to help you save money on your bill. They're out to make money for their investors. If you want an example of utility monitoring, look no further than the elderly man in Michigan who froze to death in his home this past winter because there was some kind of governor on his electric meter. (http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/02/04/freezing.death.folo/index.html). And he had plenty of money to pay--he'd just lost his competency to handle his bills. "Smart" appliances are an open invitation for this sort of idiocy to increase.
Yours is the only post in this thread so far that makes any sense. Kids have to absorb enough shock and trauma from the real world that they shouldn't have to absorb it in fake format from people they need to trust. My other observation is that every teacher and administrator who participated needs to be sent back to school for a refresher on child development. This stunt would have been fun and perhaps effective in a junior high. First through third graders are still trying to ground themselves in the real world and haven't quite distinguished between the real and the magical or imaginary. It's why so many of them still believe in Santa Claus at that age. You must either have a child of your own, or you've retained your empathy.
I dunno. It seems to me that if you live in a farm area, "Don't Fear the Reaper" has a whole different meaning.
I'm pretty stodgy. All I could think of was the Brownian motion poem:
Big whorls have little whorls
Which feed on their velocity.
And little whorls have lesser whorls,
And so on to viscosity...
They may make commercials about butt-dialing. But on the day after I got my iPhone, I hung up on a customer and dialed the veterinarian's office all without being aware I was doing it--with the side of my face. I therefore invented face-dialing. It took several days to get used to the keyboard, but it took longer to accustom myself to not mashing down on crucial icons while talking. I can use the keyboard efficiently now, but I suspect the learning curve would have been less with the keyboard described in the article. And it's not a mental learning curve. It's a physical skill like typing on a full sized keyboard.I'd also like to see them add a very slight lip around the perimeter of the screen where the silver metal is located. It would be a tactile reminder to keep the damned thing away from my face.
If we're talking about mechanical stuff, I have a clock that dates back to before the Civil War. I have a 1957 model sewing machine I use whenever I need to sew something. I have a gold pocket watch given to a distant relative in 1916--he died in combat in France shortly thereafter. I have a fountain pen engraved with the year 1910 that still writes, and several that date back to the 1920's-1950's, all in working order. I have a Colt 25 caliber automatic pistol that seems to have been manufactured around 1914--called the "Vestpocket" pistol. My upright freezer was first purchased 32 years ago. All this stuff has been in the family, and the secret is that it's all been used and cared for.
My oldest piece of working electronic equipment is a 1992 vintage Mac Duo Dock subnotebook.
Take care of your stuff, and your stuff will take care of you.
Oh, it's a problem all right:
http://wjz.com/local/black.guerrilla.family.2.1008915.html
This was just one of a number of problems we've experienced recently. We've also been treated to the sight of a prison guard and inmate working in tandem to extort money from the family of another inmate for not killing him.
The CTIA's position is kind of interesting and involves the expenditure of lots of taxpayers' money:
http://www.ctia.org/consumer_info/wow/index.cfm/2009/03/
Don't know if it's a problem elsewhere, but it's a huge problem here in Homicide territory.
Oh, it's a lot worse than that, believe me.
We just tried and convicted a man in Baltimore who, from his prison cell, ordered the execution of someone who saw him commit a murder. Just a random citizen, husband and father, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and who came forward to testify. How was this hit ordered? On a contraband cell phone.
They're everywhere in the Maryland prison systems, aided and abetted by what must be the most corrupt guards on the planet. We even have trained cell-phone-sniffing dogs. But the illegal calls can't be stopped.
I can hear people saying, "There's a simple technical solution. Jam the signals." Problem is, you can't legally do that, even over the limited area covered by a prison. There's a Federal law against it, supported and lobbied by the cellular carriers, who are making millions off these illegal phones.
The plain truth is that human life or welfare are meaningless to them. The integrity of the courts and security of witnesses are meaningless to them. Nothing has any meaning but their bottom line. I'm sure they felt justified in letting this man die over $20.
Yes, it's a 5,000 year old marriage manual with religious overtones. But the good folks at Apple can't allow us to be distracted from their bestsellers--immortal classics like "Pee Monkey" and "Urinal Test..." (or whatever the hell it's called).
I dunno. A friend has been working for a large international agency in a very remote area of the Solomon Islands--a place where the electricity only operates for a few hours a day. She would certainly describe herself as "not technical," and when her cmos battery died, she sent out a general SOS. We decided that there was no problem replacing it--but how to get one to her.
The incredibly verbose email correspondence with Dell tech support makes for comical reading--if one can set aside the several hours to weed through it. She never did convince Dell's man in Rawalpindi (or wherever it was) that she couldn't just get into an outrigger and paddle for a couple thousand miles--and that FedEx does not make regular calls to her little corner of the jungle. Situation resolved by having a friend mail her a battery, which she popped in using the blade of a plastic knife.
The worst of it really was this idiot trying to impress her with his great technical prowess. You could almost see him puffing out his chest. Too bad he couldn't have spent five minutes looking up "Solomon Islands" in Wikipedia. If I'm ever packed off to the hinterlands, I won't be taking a Dell.
I've experienced a recent oddity. My public gmail account still traps and disposes of the usual range of adverts for pilules, fortunes from various dubious sources, and enlargement schemes. My business address has been suddenly deluged with adverts for otherwise-legitimate products; for example, garden plants and seedlings from known nurseries; "art" tchochkes from various "limited edition" emporiums, and golf and fishing equipment, and camping gear from known sporting-goods outlets. My server traps and black-holes enormous amounts of spam. This stuff is sneaking through.
Well, I can state what I want in a laptop:
1) It has to be configured for whatever application I want to use it for (games, office, netbook, class).
2) IT HAS TO WORK.
3) It has to be associated with reliable service.
Under those three requirements, Dell breaks down rather badly, and all the recipes and shopping tips they want to throw at me will fall on deaf ears.
This reminds me of trying to buy a car twenty years ago as a woman. If I happened to drag along my husband, the salesman always made the pitch to him--despite the fact that I was paying for the car and would be driving it. This was fairly common and always infuriating. At some point car salesmen realized that, yes, women do drive, and that they care about more than the coordination of the upholstery. There are even car saleswomen now.
Dell should take a page from the automobile sales book and pitch their laptops to everyone on the basis of quality, reliability, suitability, and service. Unfortunately they can't really do that and be truthful.
Mine is 1992 vintage and actually still works, though it is getting more difficult to move files between it and the newer stuff around here. Its chef virtue is that it weighs practically nothing and can be connected to its dock, which includes a floppy disk drive and place for a full-sized keyboard. Has a reasonably respectable 4mb of RAM and a whopping 80mb hard drive. I used it for years to write up notes. It's no good as a netbook because it can't use a browser compatible with most of today's Internet; it's got an early version of Mosaic on it.
I actually replaced it just this past Christmas with an HP mini netbook. I'm relatively happy with it, but as with its predecessor, all I do with it is carry it around to write up notes.
Dilbert said it. I believe it. That settles it.
About early sewing machines, really isn't the patent fights. It's about the way they were sold. Singer sewing machines were the first big-ticket household items sold to average buyers on installment credit. Far too expensive for the average household, they were pitched to the housewife together with low, "easy" regular payments.
My mom died recently, and I inherited her sewing machine which is still in perfect condition but which was state-of-the-art back in 1959. She was incredibly jealous of it and allowed no one to use it--ever. I did a little reading on it and found that when new, it cost about two months's salary for my father. No wonder.
Isaac Singer was something of a failure before he came up with the easy payment plan. He had a product that was wanted and needed by people who couldn't pay for it all at once. The company he started thrived and succeeded for over a century thereafter. Too bad it's been absorbed now and is nothing more than a name--they made a damned good sewing machine.
There's one thing I think you could rely on:
If you (or more accurately the perception of you) shift from dedicated volunteer status to "dangerous hacker criminal" status, the company involved would cut you loose or turn you in with no compunctions at all--and find another volunteer. They don't have any "skin" in the game and therefore have nothing to lose.