...except for the three times a year that you have to do paperwork/reports on a G--d--'d IE6-compliant website.

Because it doesn't hurt to have a reminder that the people we deal with on a regular basis don't think the way we do, and don't necessarily have even the most basic knowledge we take for granted.

"Is this "Foxfire" thing the Internet Service Provider y'all use here?"---actual quote from today.

Yeah--you unplug if there's lightning: that "should be" common sense. Here, though, not so much lightning as "sweet raccoon love" on the transformer. Or big surges after blackouts, or golf ball size hail, or drunken accidents.

For not-worst-case-scenarios, I tell my patrons to get the highest rated surge protector available locally and to put an in-line protector on the adapter cable, and to change them out after any major surge, or annually, if they didn't notice a surge, as we usually get one major electronics-frying surge a year. The ones who listen don't come in with that kind of problem. The ones who come in with fried components are either new in the area or are the ones who didn't get the message the first time.

Not only that, if you live in a rural area (or anywhere with poor infrastructure), surge protectors are essential. In my town, a high-rated wall-plug surge protector combined with an in-line protector, changed out annually, prevents disasters.

I learned about the relationship between surges and fried motherboards the hard way.

Oh for a mod point.

Thanks (I had seen the restricted repositories page, but not the one-click page) --I tried it, but my favorite media players (VLC and SMplayer) will play mp4 and and some avi, but not play mp3, flv or other avi. Kaffiene plays all of 'em now, but doesn't have the controls I like. I guess I'm gonna have to play around with some CLI troubleshooting.

This.

...although the philosophy is admirable, this is often a problem on any free/libre-based system. I am still trying to track down proprietary drivers/codecs/packages after my 13.1 openSUSE upgrade. It frustrates me no end, because the packages "just work" on the Ubuntu and Mint test partitions.

Not to go off-topic, but sometimes I wonder if we in the F/LOSS community really want people using our products...

Have you seen religious films?--Sub-par acting, minimal plots, stories subordinate to the religious/doctrinal content and leading to unmistakeable climaxes--

We should have a system where we can place simultaneous orders from Amazon and competitors and have the drones race and/or fight it out with their shotguns. Entertainment and shopping!

When my town finally upgraded its water/sewer, they found that they were still using the wooden lines that my 104-year-old grandfather watched them put in when he was seven. Apparently, water swells the wood to keep it from leaking. It worked as long as it was undisturbed in the ground, but was mostly destroyed in removal.

Parent was using "stand-alone" in the sense that, even if the power goes you could still dial 911 and get your local emergency services. With "modern" telecommunication, if you interrupt the infrastructure, you truly "stand alone."

In the county where I live, there are large areas with no radio or cell reception. Law enforcement and emergency services must find someone's house and make a landline call to keep in touch with County Dispatch in those areas. Even the county seat has no radio reception and only has cell coverage because Homeland Security forced them to install a tower.

Our telco has installed fibre in the official communities and is slowly expanding, but when we lose power (which happens at least 2-3 times a year, sometimes more), we have no communications whatsoever. Once this year, our town's Maintenance Director had to drive out to another town in order to inform our telco that we had no service (Part of their network had gone down, and they hadn't realized we had gone down as well).

We just have to hope that we don't suffer an actual disaster, because we no longer have POTS as a a backup infrastructure.

In the county where I live, there are large areas with no radio or cell reception. Law enforcement and emergency services must find someone's house and make a landline call to keep in touch with County Dispatch in those areas. Even the county seat has no radio reception and only has cell coverage because Homeland Security forced them to install a tower.

Our telco has installed fibre in the official communities and is slowly expanding, but when we lose power (which happens at least 2-3 times a year, sometimes more), we have no communications whatsoever. Once this year, our town's Maintenance Director had to drive out to another town in order to inform our telco that we had no service (Part of their network had gone down, and they hadn't realized we had gone down as well).

We just have to hope that we don't suffer an actual disaster, because we no longer have POTS as a a backup infrastructure.