WRT54G is well known for its stability and reliability.

I keep hearing that, but I've owned four of them and I kept having overheating problems or similar. I'd have to power cycle them once a week or more. The last one would shit itself when my lady fired up her Fujitsu T900 for no known reason.

What firmware were you using? I've been using a WRT54GL for somewhere around 10 years. I had OpenWRT on it for the first few years, and it mostly worked...had to power-cycle it every once in a while. I think it only started acting consistently weird when I started hammering it with BitTorrent traffic. I switched over to Tomato because I wanted easier-to-configure QoS, and it's been pretty smooth sailing ever since. It's currently using a Shibby build. The last time it was rebooted was when I was troubleshooting what turned out to be an outage in Cox's network.

All that said, I suspect my 25/5 connection might be approaching the limit of what it can handle. I've augmented my network with a D-Link DAP-1522 to add 802.11a/n, but that's all it does. One box that could replace both and have enough processing grunt to keep up with a faster connection would be nice, and I'm inclined to stick with something that runs Tomato. I'm leaning toward the Asus RT-N66U, as that's gotten favorable comments here and elsewhere, but I've not yet pulled the trigger on one.

IIRC, AOL didn't offer actual internet access until pretty late in the game.

Today's date is Tue Sep 7644 07:32:08 PDT 1993

but this is the perfect example of american greed the most pure and wasteful greed i have ever seen.

If you'd taken ten seconds to click over to TFA, you would've learned it's in this Georgia, not this Georgia, you America-bashing twat.

it has run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible

Are you sure it's not merely pining for the fjords?

Gas lines need nonconductive sections to protect from becoming long ground loops.

It sounds like this transformer had its center tap grounded and was the path to ground on one side of a ground loop as the geomagnetic field moved under pressure from a CME, inducing a common-mode current in the long-distance power line. A gas pipeline in an area of poor ground conductivity in Russia was also destroyed, it is said, resulting in 500 deaths.

One can protect against this phenomenon by use of common-mode breakers and perhaps even overheat breakers. The system will not stay up but nor will it be destroyed. This is a high-current rather than high-voltage phenomenon and thus the various methods used to dissipate lightning currents might not be effective.

In March 1989 much of Quebec lost power for the same thing.

They lost power because the common-mode breakers tripped, not because their system was actually damaged.

I love the quote, "Five hundred kilometres is pretty much as far as a normal person would want to drive in a single day." Oh, man, I've driven further to see a live show, and driven back essentially the next day

Indeed. Aren't things in Australia nearly as spread out as they are here? 300 miles is nothing. 300 miles won't even get you from Las Vegas to San Diego. I've done that as a same-day round trip. I've driven from Las Vegas to Denver in one day. 770 miles makes for a long day behind the wheel, but it's doable. You can cover 600 miles in 8 hours at 75 mph.

So my question is: what is holding everyone else back from freeing themselves from contacts and glasses?

I don't need contacts or glasses, you insensitive cl...oh, wait.

This story was not accepted for publication by Slashdot, and I am submitting it to another venue for consideration. - Bruce

I think it's more likely that more people are becoming obese because of exactly one factor: age. They are living artificially prolonged lifetimes due to access to adequate food and to medicine. It's easier to get fat when you are 50 than when you are 30 because of the natural changes in your metabolism.

:-)

You make it sound like starving people are getting fat too.

If they are becoming obese, the particular individual has a surplus of caloric intake, if only for this year or month. This is not to say that they have proper nutrition. So I am not at all clear that the fact that there is obesity in the third world is confounding evidence.

For most of the existence of mankind and indeed all of mankind's progenitors, having too much food was a rare problem and being hungry all of the time was a fact of life. We are not necessarily well-evolved to handle it. So, no surprise that we eat to repletion and are still hungry. You don't really have any reason to look at it as an illness caused by anything other than too much food.

Martin,

The last time I had a professional video produced, I paid $5000 for a one-minute commercial, and those were rock-bottom prices from hungry people who wanted it for their own portfolio. I doubt I could get that today. $8000 for the entire conference is really volunteer work on Gary's part.

Someone's got to pay for it. One alternative would be to get a corporate sponsor and give them a keynote, which is what so many conferences do, but that would be abandoning our editorial independence. Having Gary fund his own operation through Kickstarter without burdening the conference is what we're doing. We're really lucky we could get that.