1) - Masking the password on the screen is UTTERLY USELESS unless you also have a towel or something draped over the keyboard. It's far easier for a touch-typist to figure out what someone is typing by looking at the keyboard (even from across the room) than it is to make out tiny letters on a typical crappy DC monitor from off-angle or at a distance

2) - If your monitor is facing in ANY direction but at a blank wall or the adjacent row of racks, you're doing it wrong. Always position yourself with your back to the wall, no matter where you are. Situational awareness is always important for one reason or another and it's much more difficult if you don't have control of your 6 o'clock.

Sell your computer immediately. You are too stupid to be on the internet without adult supervision.

I hope they hang this piece of shit up to dry and his scummy, criminal "hosting company" fades into history.

They aren't going to "crush" Comcast and Frontier. My FIOS fiber is already capable of 1 gb, but the interface on the side of the house says it's only good for about 250 mbps. They'd just need to change that and add some new stuff at the head end. I'm currently paying for 30/30, but I can see them offering 100 for the same price if Google starts sniffing around. Comcast is already offering 100 mb in some markets and they can probably steal more bandwidth from their cable TV spectrum to ramp up to a gig if it really becomes necessary. Coax has a lot of room in it as long as it's in good physical shape.

Remember that "Seattle" (including the suburbs) is about 100 miles long and 50 miles wide. Comcast covers nearly all of that. It took Verizon (who recently sold their local plant to Frontier) about 10 years to connect a few small areas in the 'burbs. It would be decades before Google could cover the whole thing. Comcast only has to beef up the areas that Google entered and that probably wouldn't include the FIOS areas. Remember that even though per capital income is pretty high here, the customer density is pretty low compared to the major metropolitan areas like NYC, LAX, etc. I think the whole region still only has about 2 million people. Google might do the East side just to piss off Microsoft though :-)

A word of warning - you don't get to call it "open" if there are ANY restrictions on usage. US currency clearly states that it is "legal tender for all debts public and private". That's the model you need to emulate, not self-righteous scumbags like PayPal and Google. Any system that restricts such things as gambling, adult media, sexual services, cash transfers, etc is a closed, proprietary financial system and the world is already polluted with far too many of those. When I can sell porn, poker, hookers, and blow using your system, then we can talk. Not before.

The best thing about this new technology is that no post-apocalyptic movie, book, or short story has EVER started out like this:

Virginia Tech scientists separated a number of enzymes from their native microorganisms to create a customized enzyme cocktail that does not occur in nature.

You're joking, but...

Assuming 50 lbs for 1k miles or thereabouts, you could probably build a 500 lb car (glass, electronics, frame, suspension, motors, interior, HVAC) and then add around 2500 lbs of batteries, constructed and arranged in a manner that provides structural integrity and enhances handling & stabilty, maybe even providing the actual exterior surface of the vehicle. That's roughly the weight of a modern ICE passenger car and it would give you about 50k miles of travel. The only real maintenance would be adding water, greasing the few moving parts, and washing the windows now and then.

I think the average person puts about 10k miles on a car per year, so you could drive it 5 years and then recycle the entire thing. If it was constructed with easy dismantling in mind and made from fully recyclable materials, it would indeed be a near-perfect "disposable car".

I suspect that someone with a brain reminded him that he, in fact, works for the people of his district and they could therefore demand HIS password.

EVERY computation in the history of mankind, both before and after the invention of mechanical and electrical computing devices, has been done for the sole purpose of arriving at a number. The computation NEVER has value. The value comes from what you are able to do with the resulting number.

Here's a thought. Maybe they don't want your business. If price is your main concern, you're either poor or cheap and neither of those is good for the T-Mobile bottom line. If their entire customer base is paying a minimum of $50 a month, the chances are good that a large percentage of them still aren't going to be using much more resources than you do with your $30 plan, so they increase profits while divesting themselves of cheapskate customers with no upsell potential.

Yeah, and that means the next time they have a megasale price reduction across the board to bump the numbers at the end of a problematic quarter, YOU don't get to take advantage of the new prices because your 2-year contract locks you into the HIGHER rate.

Private contracts can be good for both parties. A contract between a private individual and a public corporation ALWAYS results in the advantage going to the corporation because the individual has NO say in the contract language.

It's not necessary to buy a $600 phone. I just got a new (not refurb) HTC MyTouch 4G Slider (physical keyboard, 8 mpx camera) at Frye's for $200 outright. It's last year's model, but I was replacing my much older G-1, which is now about 50% phone and 50% dirt & pocket lint and was starting to get flakey.

I needed to update the hardware one of my video editing workstations to do 2k, 3k, & 4k renders in a reasonable amount of time. Built an i7 and decided to try Win8 because it was pretty cheap. (cheaper than the last OEM copy of XP I bought years ago) The machine has Vegas Pro 12, VLC, GOMplayer, Mplayer, and Gspot installed. That's pretty much it. I spent a few days trying to keep from driving over to Balmer's house and ripping his dick off for creating such a piece of shit interface, but with the help of the mighty Googles, I eventually figured out how to do REAL network sharing, turn off the bulk of the childish bullshit, and change all the settings to create something that resembled a functional work machine.

My workstations run for months at a time without restarts and the only time I see the Metro interface is on a rare reboot. The half dozen applications I use all got a desktop shortcut the way jebus intended. That's how I start them. Since I have a pair of 32" monitors on this box, bringing up the metro screen is like getting hit in the face with a sheet of plywood. Fortunately, I rarely need to access it.

My only real complaint so far is that the OS locked up tight a bunch of times when I was trying to mass copy about 100k files at once over the network (2 TB or thereabouts). No blue screen, no complaints or warnings. Complete pull-the-plug-to-restart style lock-up like I haven't seen since the 90s. I don't know if it was Win8 or a flakey chipset driver (Asus Z77 board) but I had to end up hand-copying top-level directories one at a time to finish the job. Robocopy blasted the whole drive to an outboard backup drive without any issues later that day, so I'm going to assume that whoever wrote the GUI file copy stuff is a graphics designer and completely unqualified to do real coding.

Outside of that, I've pretty much gotten used to the OS. The new highly-informational file transfer and Task Manager dialogs are completely worth the price of admission. (GUI copy is borked, but it looks nice) I completely ignore Metro and I never used the Start menu on 95 thru XP (desktop shortcuts all the way, bitches!) so its absence doesn't bother me in the slightest.

Not having a shutdown button on the taskbar is massive FAIL though. That really pisses me off. I still might drive over to Balmer's and set fire to his lawn gnomes or something.

I've been earning my living with Vegas/Vegas Pro since V3.0 (currently at V12.0) and it's the only thing keeping my workstations on Windows. If they ported it to Linux (an Enterprise distro, not bleeding edge) I'd run away from Windows like shit thru a goose. In fact I'd drive over to Balmer's house the same day it was released and punch him in the throat on camera, edit the video with Vegas on Linux, upload it to YouTube, drive BACK to Balmer's house, and force him to watch the video 42 times on a Nexus 7 while punching him in the throat again.

I'm calling possible bullshit. BOA does not charge anything for the first twenty 3-day direct deposits (it's about 80 cents each after that number) They also charge nothing at all for BillPay check services and when paying major corporations (and I suspect all government entities like tax authorities) they don't physically mail a check anyway. It's all done electronically thru ACH for free. If you are really paying $3 a pop for DD, you need to grab your "personal banker" by the throat and remind him that you can take your business right down the road to Chase or WF if they don't start treating you better.