Srsly. Don't get all exercised about it. It'll pass.

I'm actually kinda surprised FB aren't blanketing the nation with CD-ROMs.

I think I might pay $15 an hour not to ever wear 'em.

Several people had Glass at a recent conference I attended. Every time I saw one (my first live-and-in-person sightings), I thought "Oh, yeah, of course: they really DO make you look like a dork."

Agree: my office XP laptop (with an i5) took 12 minutes to boot to where I could even crowbar Outlook open.

OTOH, my SSD-upgraded 2008 Mac Book Pro on Snow Leopard goes from cold metal to ready to work in 20 seconds.

Eye tracking in the usability world has been in the 4- and 5-figure range for a while. At least one cheap ($1200) option required that you wear heavyish headgear.

Tobii makes some of this usability eyetracking equipment, and it's my hope that this device will be adapted to work with the popular Morae usability recording software.

Eyetracking will be part of nearly everyone's usability toolkit, vs. an expensive luxury, if so.

It might hold possibilities for eyetracking studies on mobile software as well.

Sorry, I think Catcher in the Rye is worth the read. Not life-changing, but yeah, read it - worthwhile.

++On The Road - awesome book - might supplement it with some third-party history of the beats.

Recommend Dune in the Science Fiction realm. Take the series as far as you wanna - but at least Dune.

Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug is essential for the web developer, and I think "Simple and Beautiful" by Giles Colburne a close second. Maybe top it with "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman - you'll never look at a door handle the same way again.

Recommend for ANY coder Kernigan and Ritchie "The C Programming Language" - such a brief tome, and a comprehensive document on how to write in the language that rocked the world. Would be a good read for any tech writer, as well.

Whatever they say about Steven Ambrose (and they say a WHOLE lot...accusations of plagarism, f.e.), "Undaunted Courage" presents the Lewis and Clark expedition in Technicolor - if only they could teach with books of this quality.

If you're gonna read any Stephen King, gotta read The Stand, for the sweep of it.

"LED bulbs are out of this world at Home Depot" Those prices are for 4- and 6-packs. Read your own search result. At between $10 and $12 for a Cree LED bulb at Home Depot, the price is right, and I'm VERY happy with equivalent light output, color temperature and performance with my Z-wave dimmers. No CFL or LED bulb so far has matched them. I've had to return one Cree bulb so far because it shipped with the glass envelope loose. Been perfect otherwise (4 bulbs installed for trial, roughly 6 months in). Full disclosure: I hold 100 shares of CREE. And this is my actual experience using the bulbs in my house.

What with the usual tenor of Slashdot comments, wanted to say early: awesome that you're working, doing it, trying to live in the "normal" world, where the normals don't often understand. My heart and thoughts are with you.

I wasn't thinking of burglary as a problem in need of the backup, but instead, your data getting into the hands of a stranger. You're basically doubling your risk of that happening, assuming your link is secure, and your neighbor is solidly honest and has a secure PC.

Instead, you could drop your encrypted disk in a safety deposit box and have physical security, encrypted data-at-rest and no network exposure during the backup process, no need to wonder how secure your neighbor's network/PC is.

Here in Atlanta, we had a 500-year flood at the same time California was experiencing massive wildfires.

Mudslides, earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, neighborhood-flattening gas leaks, the SWAT team trying to take out James DiMaggio/MOVE/David Koresh, or even the dipshit down the street burning leaves in a drought could take out both your houses.

The likelihood is small, but the consequences of failure are large. These are black swans. They don't usually happen...but they don't never happen either.

Y'know what's another huge risk, probably way more likely? Your backup failing. I remember being part of an IT project where an ancient SCA data drive went down on a database server. They had to get a replacement for the legacy hardware from the manufacturer's parts inventory, and spent 36 hours rebuilding the drive from backup tapes before figuring out that the database data itself had never been part of the server backup, because you'd have to disconnect the database to do that.

Fun.

Aren't you and your neighbor both sitting in the crater of just about anything bigger than a firecracker? I don't think of "next door" as off-site backup. Especially when you're talking burglary as a possible risk - you and neighbor probably have about the same odds of being hit.

Drop an encrypted disk in a safe deposit box at the bank.

Couldn't possibly buy one of these. My 3 and 5 year old get their TV from our carefully curated media server full of kids' TV. There's a month's worth of episodes of a number of their favorite shows (not just the 90-second clips the kids apps on the iPad want to show).

The PS3 is about the best frontend you can get for MythTV - navigates easier, more reliable, plays smoother, integrates into the home theater easier and builds the TV recordings into the rest of their entertainment.

Sony is doing all it can to get me to take my money and walk away.

I've seen 4K on a not-yet-released 20-inch Panasonic tablet - it's jaw-dropping. You might not be making "full use", but...oh, my it's beautiful. This from a guy who doesn't care much for TV or video.

OK, you're asking "why a 20" tablet? WTF?" - one vertical market for this is radiologists, who definitely need all the resolution they can get, high dynamic range, and a big screen. Saw it at a medical convention.

Lucky you can't get WiMax: your situation sounds like the way Clear works nightly: ISDN speeds for the crime of watching Netflix. Oh, you're not "capped". Certainly not. No, never. Is there a possibility your logs are just port scans (which suck, but aren't a DDoS), and your problem is that you're being traffic-managed by the ISP? That would "follow you instantly". I didn't think the log entries were close enough together in time to constitute a DDoS.

A Frontline documentary last year noted that tower work is done by small contracting companies that allow the big carriers to duck all responsibility, while pushing the firms to build so fast that safety gets shortcutted. Worth watching.

Oh wait...have one of those already. Check the oval office...

I thought a bus full of icons and widgets collided with a touch UI...

(this from a daily Android phone and tablet user...)