You'd be astonished how many attorneys are (or present as) bi-polar. This lady sounds like one.

I'll go sorta OT here, but I am fed up with articles, here or elsewhere, that can be summed up as "here, watch this video."

Thanks for making me ingest content at the speed of the slowest talker in the video, not at my reading speed.

If you post a video in lieu of text, you just wasted the world's time.

Nø, really!

This could be spectacular! Tossing water droplets around in zero-G pales in comparison to getting that thing twirling like a baton at a Texas halftime show...

While I appreciate ESR's statements, pinheaded politicians and bureaucrats tend to take things the wrong way regardless how small the words are you use to spell it out. I can picture some knucklehead seeing the Gilmore quote and saying, "well, these internet geeks are getting militant! They're threatening us!" And then they do stoopid things like propose federal licensing of all network engineers backed by heavy fines and Federal prison terms, to where resetting your own WAP would get you a year in jail and a $50,000 fine.

Indeed. I've been off-grid at various times, and my ace in the hole is a 2x2 solar panel with alligator clips charging a 12v automotive jumpstart box that had a built-in inverter. Charge it all day, power the laptop and charge the phone all night.

Yep. About ten years ago I had a Gateway/ALR server with then-massive 2Gb of RAM. It insisted on checking that RAM at startup, 256K at a pop, a couple of steps per second. Yes, this means it took nearly 15 minutes *just to check the RAM that never failed*. Called Gateway and asked how that could be bypassed.

"Whyyyy would you ever want to do thaaaaaaat????" the rep mooed at me.

Ummmm... maybe because 32,000 people are waiting to use the site while this machine is counting its frickin' toes, that's why.

There was no bypass, no BIOS setting, no keypress. It was like the original IBM PC again.

Oh, and then Windows 2000 *started* booting.

And if it had to check the RAID array, forget it. Go home, come back tomorrow.

Sure, the days when I had to wait for a particular server to count through 2Gb of RAM 256K at a time at boot are gone, but in compensation, cell phones, which used to be largely instant-on, now take longer and longer to start. The worst example was a work-issued Blackberry 9630 earlier this year, running BBOS 5.x, which took an astonishing 13 minutes, 10 seconds to come to ready from a battery pull. Even my 9700 with OS6 takes over two minutes to fire up, down from five minutes when it was new with OS5.

It should be illegal to sell a phone that takes longer to start than the human brain can live without oxygen.

Let's ask two popular search engines the same simple question:

"Who's the black private dick who's a sex machine to all the chicks?"

Seriously. Try it on Bing, then try it on Google.

Game over.

TWAIN? Lolwut?

MS-DOS 1.0 was a variant of CP/M, not the other way around.

What the hell fun is THAT? I mean, this is the best thing since Girls On Trampolines, and they design a dress to defeat the most intriguing part.