I'm not making that comparison. Not sure where you got that from. If you want me to make that comparison:
The net effect of taking that cash out and burning it or spending it on an Apple 1 assembly is the same. It devalued the moment you bought it as you have shrunk the market.
I'm certainly allowed an opinion and yes I will quite happily judge the validity of those things. Why shouldn't I?
The item has no inherent value to anyone other than the status of aquiring it.
This is a fine example of why the majority of people live in poverty, nothing more.
As I said elsewhere in the replies, if someone spent $900k on crack and whores, I'm sure you'd be right up there judging the purchaser and drawing arbitrary comparisons againt "you could have done X or Y with it" and I bet none of them were "buy an Apple 1 assembly"
Similar story. It started as a tidied up Debian fork. Then since about 12.04 LTS it turned into a tidied up Debian unstable fork with all the bugs in it. As a server only and LTS only user, I had no end of problems from there on with unstable kernels, duff and buggy packages, update roulette and terrible support.
We're on Debian 7 now and it's rock solid, relatively bug free in comparison and the support is good. Just where I want it to be.
The best outcome for me was that it caused Debian to rethink their release cycles a bit.
I, like many people here by the looks, spent a good deal of time removing them. We had one issue where the page response with an AJAX Manager (or whatever it was called) was 5x as slow than a full page refresh. Turns out it was POSTing 2Mb of crap for some reason.
I'd rather eat my own poop that use their software again.
Most people I know buy second hand TIs which aren't expensive. They are around the $20-50 (GBP conversion) mark here in the UK.
The Pi is not exactly a good proposition for a calculator either based on form factor and power usage. Also you really do need a tactile input system for calculators as they help avoid costly and confusing mistakes.
I'm not sure why there is so much hate for TI to be honest; they are very functional, very robust, have very good battery life and good resale value. I myself however use a $20 Casio 115/991ES PLUS.
The Earth's magnetic field and poles do change slightly, but it's not the end of the world as those guys would suggest. It's quite interesting really purely from a science and navigation point of view.
The net effect of taking that cash out and burning it or spending it on an Apple 1 assembly is the same. It devalued the moment you bought it as you have shrunk the market.
Could have thrown it at a charity.