They are working full time here on my phone lines. One calls regularly and asks if Barbara is home. When answered no, it lets me know it will call back at a better time and hangs up. It is not smart enough to understand she died.

It is not smart enough to know what that better time is.

I get other calls trying to interest me in college. I started asking them if they will answer a capita for me. The fun ones try to find a class for me on capita and want to know how soon I would like to take a class.

At one time having done apartment complex maintenance, I found the planned obsolescence is in the hardware, not the software. After doing some failure analysis on some dishwashers, it broke down to 3 primary failure items.

1 the water pump. The pump contains a plastic impeller on a steel shaft. The water seal was on the metal steal shaft. The plastic impeller on the steel shaft would fail when the steel shaft inside the impeller rusted and split the impeller. This resulted in non repairable failure of the entire pump as both the motor and impeller failed.

2 the drain valve. The drain valve, a solenoid operated valve diverted water between the wash cycle and the drain. Much like the rubber toilet flush valve in the commode, this rubber part broke down with the use of chlorinated city water just the same as the flapper valve in the toilet. Unlike a toilet, this valve, often integrated into the pump volute assy was not consumer replaceable. The failure was not obvious to the consumer as the wash water was lost during the wash cycle leaving dirt deposits on the dishes at the end of the cycle. Dishwashers were replaced thinking a newer model would work better than an older model. In reality the performance declined over the life of the valve.

3 The fill valve. The fill valve has a strainer that clogs and is relatively easily replaced, but the valve itself often fails when the plastic permeates with water and the magnetic core rusts. This results in the valve failing to open or limiting the motion resulting in only a trickle of water in the fill cycle. This too is seen by the consumer as a failure to properly clean dishes as the timed fill cycle results in too little water for the wash and rinse cycles and is often compounded by the failing drain valve. The consumer knows the dishwasher is running, but doing a poor job driving the desire for a replacement that works better.

These problems are seen on both electronic and mechanical timer models.

Maybe it is being knifed in the cradle like the DAT cassette tape.

There is a void. Serious competition is already looking at moving in.

If Google fibre or other service moves in with good high speed service, the local incumbent will be in for a ride.

As a cable cutter of 2 decades because I am not a sports fanatic, I dropped cable when the commercial free channels went away (cable started as subscriber funded and add free for those old enough to remember) which was combined by rising prices, and better content removed and placed in even higher priced priced packages.

In one channel, Netflix offers what cable dropped. Commercial free content at a reasonable price.

If Netflix is paying attention, if they break their model they will loose customers.

Cox, some customers want Internet to receive their content. In the days of increasing competition and larger data plans, if you try to ride the ragged edge of profitability between industry churn and retention, any serious competition for internet services will clean out your customer base that has TV to subsidize your internet service. Unhappy customers will flee as soon as a viable alternative penetrates the market. If you don't want to provide internet becasue it cuts into your base services, you will have the same problem SONY has when they added a media division that crippled their excellent hardware.

Comcast in my market lost me this way. I transitioned from dial up to cable and saw first had the attack on torrent traffic. A Linux distribution gradually slowed to nothing over 3 days, but a direct download mirror would download in less then 30 minutes. The connection fee was about $100 even though the cable was already in place and my home LAN already existed for wireless internet, printing, etc. $100 just to watch the tech plug into a modem, configure nothing, and connect it to my router WAN port always truck me as very wrong and over a barrel.

As soon as DSL was offered, the cable got cut. New customers got a $100 rebate, I more then doubled my speed and my subscription was about $20/mo less.

Comcast still tries to recruit me, and I still remind them why I am not interested as they did NOTHING in advance to retain me, or ensure I was sastified with the service.

Centruy link on the other hand has Increased my service speed without any action on my part. Comcast kept me on a 2 meg connection. Centeruy link signup was for 6 meg. Recently I've had much higher verified speeds, unlike Comcast who often ran well under the plan 2 meg.

Until the cable company makes major restructuring oriented to serving the customer base and providing advertised bandwidth (including peering with Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, etc) the competition is eating their lunch for both internet service and content.

The article is repeating a lie. The actual settlement and case do not contain the lie.

The Lie is Intel sold below cost.

Due to a fixed cost to operate a fab and process wafers, the cost per die is greatly impacted by line yield.

Due to the competitors line yield of about 50% at the time, it was assumed Intel had to be selling below cost. This was investigated and found to be false based on the number of raw wafers purchased and the number of die shipped. If two identical companies manufacture identical chips and one has 45% yield and the other 90% yield and offers bulk discounts that is 20% below the other companies cost to produce, it does in no way indicate the company is selling below cost. Read the lawsuit and settlement.

Intel agreed to change some business practices and settled, but still claimed they did nothing wrong such as dumping below cost, because they were not.

The cost per die was calculated based on the number of wafers purchased and the number of die shipped. Intel had much higher line yield than AMD.

AMD cut corners trying to compete, but did not solve the yield issue. AMD on the other hand had a policy of undercutting Intel on Price, but with their lower yield, they ran into the problem of having to sell below cost to meet their price points. This is where the incorrect assumption was made that Intel had to be selling below cost. This has been proven otherwise.

http://www.cnet.com/news/intel...
http://www.intel.com/pressroom...
"By contrast, AMD's investments in manufacturing capacity during this period were anaemic - because AMD had elected to change course. Through the late 1990s, AMD itself has acknowledged, AMD had persistent quality problems with manufacturing production and insufficient capacity."

Please do not repeat the lie that Intel sold under cost. They didn't. They had lower production costs due to higher yield.

If you could pay based on a percentage of their advertised speed, I could save a bundle. 25 meg, but still buffering with 2 Netflix streams. Pay the fill for 3 Meg instead of 30. Cable companies should and sometimes are shamed for their poor peering with the internet..

Another store near me prominently displays prints from the surveillance cameras of shoplifting.

My wife had that but for anal canal cancer. I recognized the machine and steel door. Amazing surgery. A year later there is no sign of the tumor. Unfortunately she is in radiation and chemo again for tumors on her lymph glands in her chest. I'm hoping they get it and it doesn't spread. Chemo has been rough.

I hope after you get your treatments completed that there is no new ones elsewhere. Be sure to keep up on the follow up appointments. Good luck.

Add write protect to all routers, BIOS, USB sticks, etc. Eliminate infections from and to memory sticks,

Follow some of the tech companies that thought the same thing and looked for lower cost data centre cooling bills. Hate to have the neighborhood become crowded, but have you seen the location of the air cooled Facebook Datacenter? Others are moving in for the same reasons. Nearest interstate freeway is about 50 miles away.

https://www.facebook.com/Prine... If you don't like big cities.

Since many are USB devices, and programmed by special barcodes to enable and disable various symbologies, with enough info on the target scanner, you can reprogram the scanner with a barcode to enable a full ascii symbology, then scan in the attack code. Like many thumb drives, BIOS, etc, there is no write protect to prevent unauthorised alteration of the configuration.

I wonder if they are going to learn from the Swiss that a Gun Free zone is a target zone. People should be trained and armed when there are valid threats in the area. Why just be victims? They have had one mass shooting. Want to guess how it ended?

http://world.time.com/2012/12/...

Someone tried to tell me that programs are the same length they used to be with the same amount for station breaks and words from sponsors. I didn't take them at their word but looked online for episodes of old shows and news shows and compaired the lengths.

Do it yourself. Find online episodes of Gilligan's Island or other popular '60s and '70s shows and check the run length of modern shows.
Season 1 episode 3 on Youtube is 23min+
Survivor Season 30 episode 8 is 37 min and 2 seconds.

Oldies 46 min of program per hour. Now 37 min per hour. Almost 10 minutes per hour more than what I grew up with. Save a lot of time just watching the episodes online on Youtube a couple years later with the commercials cut.

Don't let anyone pass the lie that there are not more commercials. It is a fact that in an hour there is LESS program.

Overseas security companies and the Streisand effect. Anonymous tip-offs by post with false return addresses of backdoors to security researches will be published. Streisand effect can't be stopped by 1 rogue nation on the global internet. Search for photos of Barbara's coastal home, Tienanmen square, German concentration camps, etc.