This story is most timely for me! I know this will not relate well to many of you, but perhaps there are others like me. I retired from an industrial electrician's job in January 2018. My body was too tired to maintain the pace of a maintenance department setting. I did not want to finish my working days by being fired. So, I announced my retirement, and, on to a Social Security check I went. I truly thought I was done. I was at peace with this. Three weeks ago, completely unsolicited, I was contacted by a curriculum manager of a regional technical college. They had found my LinkedIn page. They want me to teach! There are still things that could go wrong with this, however, I am to report for my first day of work in about 32 hours from now. Whether or not this works out, it's been an exciting three weeks. If I don't cut it, I can just go back to being that quiet retiree. I owe this opportunity, at least in part, to that LinkedIn page I never took down. Yes, I know this does not address other well known issues with LinkedIn. I'm not going to be complaining for a while just yet! Best regards to you all.

For less than the budget mentioned, I recently bought a seven year old business class / "durable build" name brand laptop. I installed the current mint distro, allowing it to completely replace the obsolete version of MS windows that was on it. This worked out so well that I bought a second, and bought Win 10 for it. I wound up with 2 shiny aluminum clad business laptops with my two favorite operating systems. They even came with extra batteries. I know this is not what you asked for, but, I felt, worthy of consideration, and a good hobby computing experience. One last perk: although they had adequate memory, I found that the memory sticks are cheap for these older machines, so stuffed 'em! All good fun and my best regards to the Slashdot community.

This may speak more about a possible personal failure to seek out the best sources of information than it does about the quality of our current day Slashdot web site, nonetheless, I saw this first on Slashdot. An old web-haunt of mine, drawing an increasingly rough crowd, has once again proved it's worth to me. With Wikimedia / Wikipedia being perceived by me to be one of the Internet's greatest enduring assets, and, this, despite it's shortcomings, any news concerning turbulence in those waters weighs greatly upon me. I will do what I can to follow up, and, act according to my perceptions and beliefs. My thanks to the OP.

Be a scientist? Look at the data? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki... Glad I could fix that for you.

Probably a fascinating find no matter what it turns out to actually have been used for! The topic brings me recall of a long held fantasy wish I held from boyhood until the first decades of my adulthood, that I could somehow find a forgotten WW2 or similar asset and find a vintage transmitter or other "cool stuff".A young and unsophisticated fantasy of course. Anything of the sort found today would likely claimed by the powers that be and some of it hopefully wind up in a museum. Happy New Year fellow slashdotters!

Dear Mr. Linus Torvalds: I may not like your personality profanity, attitude, etc, but, completely agree with your stance on the "desktop". I am also a fan of your baseline achievement: creation of "LINUX". The "distributions", based on your work, continue to be a valuable component of my overall approach to PC survivability. I feel that I OWE you, and it does not matter whether or not I "LIKE" you, based on some comments posted somewhere on the web. You have a permanent "ally" in me, if you should ever need one at my level. Godspeed, and good health. Sincerely, Robert I. Baker.

Not only British soldiers, but, British engineering gave a much needed boost to the allied war effort. Think about the difference it would have made if we did not have the British Merlin engine, or the British radar tube, I think they called it the Magnetron...

QRZ OM? This is a loosely run net, but...

With my employer recently making an unexpected decision to modernize it's entire supervisory control and data acquisition system, it appears even we electricians will be learning to work with the RSLogix5000 development environment. And we are ripping out analog control wiring and replacing it with cat 5 all over the place!

Never confront a Bolo without an Electropass!

You took the time to learn versatile programming languages, are not put off by complexity, and would eventually like to tackle flight. Maximize your chances of success with the most powerful computing platform your budget and skills can deal with. Rasberry pi, or one of the newer platforms being written about such as micro form factor PC boards, etc. I'm a bit unsure of the names of the newer stuff but you will see them all mentioned here sooner or later. When you get seriously into flight, you will want good code running fast and lots of I/O for sensors and controls. A quadrotor based design will handle the weight and no doubt prove quite versatile. Good luck!

Insufferable Wall-E? Well, the OP is certainly welcome to his opinion and the sharing of it, and, I don't want to reduce the high voltage of Johnny 5' original performance, but for whatever my opinion is worth I liked Wall-E. I would gladly have either of these Hollybots as a guest. I'm probably in the minority on this I do realize.

Keep watching those movies Wild Dog! Every effort needs it's supporters. Maybe also write your representatives in Washington and tell them you think space is important. Then you will have helped with a real problem: paying for space research. My apologies to the community for taking this discussion further off topic. Average people are important too IMO.