I'd be happier with an OLED screen that was capable of displaying text that wasn't a blurry mess.

No, I'm in DFW. Houston I think is the 4th largest city. But DFW is the 4th largest metropolitan statistical area. Houston/Woodlands/Sugarland area is 5th.

There are some places around that can get symmetrical fiber, but my area of Arlington isn't one of them.

Supposedly the city signed a deal to roll out fiber to the whole city, but it's been something like 3 years since the "groundbreaking" and I haven't heard a peep of an update from the city, or the company they are working with to do the rollout.

Best I can get is Spectrum 1Gb down/40Mb up for $95. The download is fine but the slow upload speeds are driving me nuts, and of course the price is pretty bad considering what other areas can get for cheaper.

Hell, my friend has a cabin in Arkansas, about 45min north of Hot Springs. Absolutely the middle of nowhere. It's about a 30 min drive to the nearest gas station. But he can get symmetrical gig fiber for quite a bit less than what I'm paying.

As soon as such a thing is available to me, I'll sign up. Alas, there is no such service available to me despite living in the 50th most populous city in the country, in the middle of the fourth most populous metropolitan area in the US.

Something. something, lack of competition...

To be fair to Netflix, this isn't entirely their fault.

At first the other studios were happy to license their content to Netflix. It was a new revenue stream for them with little risk. But then Netflix became more popular than they imagined possible and the studios saw how much profit Netflix was raking in with subscriber fees. The studios decided to cut out the middle man and rake in that profit themselves so they started pulling their content from Netflix as the contracts expired so they could have them exclusively for their own streaming platform.

Netflix had no choice really. They could either start making their own content, or they could wither and die as they continued losing content to competing services.

This is the end of an era right here. Fry's played a huge part in my becoming a Sysadmin. I spent an inordinate amount of time and money at Fry's (and Wierdstuff) around Silicon Valley in the 90s, and I was super excited that there was a Fry's nearby when I moved to Tx.

  And while Fry's has been circling the bowl for several years now, the people who never got to experience Fry's in the 90s will never understand what has been lost.

I also miss the seats they had that faced each other. I'd get there early to get early boarding, then sit in one of those aisles and prop my feet up so nobody would sit there. Super selfish, I'll admit, but as long as the flight wasn't full, I got lots of extra leg room.

To my knowledge, SWA has never done this. They have always done a 'first come first serve' kind of thing. Whoever checks-in first, gets to board first and pick whatever seat they want.

I think you're confusing fuel efficiency with manufacturing efficiency. The auto makers certainly don't need much additional motivation to drive manufacturing efficiency since that delivers straight to their profits, but fuel-efficiency they didn't have nearly as much motivation to care about that, until the government started telling them they had to.

Maybe it wasn't a solution for you, but it is a solution for a lot of people. I too have had various programmable thermostats for years, and yes they were a great improvement over manual thermostats. You know what though? I don't have the same home/away schedule all the time. It fluctuates significantly. Sometimes I go into the office, sometimes I work from home all day. Sometimes I'm home in the evening or on the weekend and sometimes I'm not. So a thermostat which can automatically detect when I'm not home and lower the AC if I forget to do it on the way out the door solves one of my problems. And I've found other features of the Nest to be useful and it and has made a noticeable difference in my electricity usage.

So the Nest was a solution, just perhaps not for you.

Yes. It was terrible. And we are STILL encountering fallout from that idiocy.
See SSL FREAK vulnerability from last year.

What I think is that I'm pretty happy with my LG Watch Urbane.

Heard a lot of similar arguments about the internet in the early days.

Not to say bitcoin will definitely be successful at all, let alone as successful as the internet, but a lot of people see a lot of potential in bitcoin and blockchain technologies so I'm keen on watching how it all pans out. /feeding the troll

No, there is not a parent server "tracking" things. It's a whole peer-to-peer network that tracks things and only the blocks that the network as a whole agrees on become part of the chain. One would have to compromise a large percentage of the nodes on the network to directly "mess with" the data.

This is why the people who really want bitcoin to be successful want as many miners and full nodes as possible.

Typically I just use PuTTy in Windows to access my Linux environments. I don't do much command line stuff IN Windows so the Command Prompt is all I use for that.

When using Linux [as I do all day for work] I typically use XFCE's Terminal then use GNU Screen

It doesn't take generations. My child was going to a charter school. When she started in 1st grade, it was wonderful. The school was fantastic. By 3rd grade, the school had changed and it was no longer a good fit for her. We took her out of that school and put her in another school. We had the immediate choice and ability to move her to another school.

With regular public schools, you have no choice. You go to the school that the government tells you to go to based on your address. If that school is terrible and/or can't properly serve your child [whether it be because the child is gifted or because the child has learning disabilities], you have no recourse. Most people don't have the ability to move into whatever school district/zone they want to.

That's not to say that the charter school concept doesn't have issues, but I think it would make more sense to work to mitigate those issues rather than just saying that charter schools are no good and getting rid of them completely.