TeamViewer has issues you should be aware of.

A friend showed me how easy it was to use, and we decided to give it a try at our shop, where we do computer sales and service. Being able to do remote support would be very useful, we have several customers that live a good distance away from us and that occasionally need to schedule us to come out and help them, and this would allow us to help them at significantly lower rates.

We set up team viewer 6 (iirc) and bought one license. Come to find out that it could only be installed on one physical computer. We were used to remote apps that only allow one simultaneous USE at a time, and that's all we needed. Too bad the GM installed it on his computer before we could stop him. So now we have to go into his office to do remote support. (or HE has to do it)

I discussed this with teamveiwer and they basically told me to buy another seat or get lost. More on principle than cost I think, we continued to use it from that machine. They have a nice tool to create a wrapped installer that you put on your web site and your customers just click to download. It installs, and immediately launches, configures, and connects to us. I must admit that's slick. Too bad it only connected to the GM's computer.

So more frequently lately I just connect from my computer to the customer the more manual way. It pops up a "for non commercial use only" note on launch but hey we already paid for our license and I'm the only using it so whatever, it works fine. We never use more than one instance at a time, so as far as I see it, we're playing fair, we paid for one instance and are using one instance,

I had been seeing an update notice for teamviewer and I made the [i]mistake[/i] of running it and it upgraded me to version 7. Now it disconnects me after 15 minutes. Back to 6 I guess. Finally found the old app in a backup and reinstalled it. Nope! They "upgraded" my account online and now I can't use teamviewer 6 anymore. Bastards. I really hate it when computer software actively fights me trying to get my job done. (6 is compatible with 7, the only difference apparently is the timeout they added, so don't be a fool and "upgrade") So they're not on my Good List anymore. I have to pay twice to use once, and they absolutely do NOT care to work with me on it. Greed wins over customer service with them, unfortunately.

I hate to see that happen with good products. Alsoft DiskWarrior is the same way, incredibly useful product, horrible customer service.

to balance the interests of national security and intelligence gathering with privacy and 'protecting democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law.'

Am I reading that right? The "rule of law" is getting "balanced" by something else? I didn't think LAW was negotiable? Maybe that's the problem here? Someone's trying to "strike a balance" between legal and national security?

Government policy shouldn't be trying to draw a line between security and legality. Legality is THE LINE that is not crossed over, ever. If you can't do it legally, that means you shouldn't BE doing it. The correct response is not to consider bending the laws.

The US Constitution does not give the US President any authority to declare war. That is specifically a reserved power for the Congress.

that didn't do much to stop the vietnam war or the gulf war.

That will only work if the chief legal counsel believes the odds are against them.

Don't forget that an action that saves a few thousand dollars, that has a 10% chance of costing a million, is still a very bad risk, statistically speaking. That risk/loss multiplier is frequently a game-changer. We don''t buy insurance because we think we're going to run into a tree, we buy insurance because we can't afford it if we do - the odds of it happening aren't high, but aren't small enough to be able to ignore, and the loss if it happens is simply too great.

Possession of a scale and drugs of almost any quantity here will get you "with intent to distribute" tacked on. An ex dealer I know said all the dealers in town have small personal safes they keep their scales in. That totally confused me until they filled me in on that minor little legal detail. (not that a safe often stops the cops, but apparently it can help)

It is amazing how "intent" can be made illegal. How can you really prove intent without a telepath?

hah... nice. reminds me of Port Knocking

I live in Iowa. We grow a lot of corn here. But there are other crops, things like soybean and sunflower. You know what happens when the demand for ethanol goes up? The price of corn goes up. And then what? People stop planting as much soybean and sunflower because corn is making them more. And then what? The price of soybean and sunflower goes up because there's a drop in supply.

And that's why a large bag of sunflower seed for my birdfeeder darn near doubled in price a few years ago, everyone was pulling out their sunflower and replacing it with corn. You don't really notice all these effects until they start hitting you.

Farmers will hedge their bets, plant multiple kinds of crops in case one of them tanks due to weather, but the ratio they mix in varies, to balance return and risk. When return on their main crop goes up, they can take bigger risks by pulling more of the less profitable crops out.

I had considered that, but the issue there is, underburn results in not getting as far away from a gravity well as you intended, and that should introduce an exponentially increasing energy requirement to recover. In other words, if you only burn 10 liters in the time you meant to burn 12, you can't just burn 2 and make up for it, because it's going to require a little more than that to get where you should be?

five minutes is a pretty long correcting burn... I hope they didn't go through most of their spare fuel in the process. (TBH I wouldn't have expected them to have that much available in the first place, lifting spare fuel isn't like throwing a spare headlight in the trunk, five minutes' fuel is more like throwing a spare tire in the back seat) Anyone have any data on how much "buffer fuel" they carried, and how much they went through with this fix?

I thought work was being done on "battery swap" charge stations? If you can swap a battery, it can't be that hard to just drop one? I don't know if tesla cars support anything like that though

I'm sure that straight road is awesome when a deer jumps out in front of you at 100+ mph.

I'm just glad the deer over here in Iowa aren't jet-propelled yet.

I'd agree with that. "skype" is becoming a verb at this point. "I'll skype you when I get home".

Too bad to see MS is gonna kill backward compatibility with hardware. I know a LOT of people still using skype vers 2 because of all the crap that happened to it recently. MS sure loves to increment product version numbers. Oooo look we moved the Close button, bump the version!

Unless there's a lot of information we're not seeing here, someone's going to get burned for this. (send me a link and I'll contribute to the kindling fund)

Yes the warranty has to spell out what is to be searched for. But there are at least two issues then. First, was the warrant loosely worded, was the area searched and items taken within that verbiage, and was it illegally loosely worded? and second, officers often have some leeway to take contraband when searching for other things - if they bust down a door for a meth lab warrant, they can take that full auto assault rifle they find in plain sight too, even if it's not on the warrant.

Bigger courts tend to take a very dim view on exposing a reporter's sources. If someone manages to follow the money and tie the target of the whistleblowing to the raid, things will get real exciting. One other thing here, messing with the media's rights tends to get a lot more publicity than messing with Joe Citizen's rights. (they kinda "look after their own") so I hope this gets all the massive media attention it deserves. (it's also much more difficult to muzzle or pay off the media)

could this be a consequence of Microsoft not releasing 8.1 RTM to developers?

Seriously? They didn't seed that to the devs for a week or two? That's just plain stupid. Only reason I can see for pulling that is if there was a serious problem they needed to get fixed quickly.

Also raises the question of how much they really care about the performance and stability of RT on other manufacturers' boxes?

airlines need to be required to have a demo seat for cattle-class to try out at the check-in counter. Set it up with a pokey wall to the left where the passenger division is, so you know you won't be sticking your elbow in the other fellow's lap. And have the front partitioned to show the seat in front of you reclined.

Similar on topic, I'd like to see someone do a volumetric comparison between airline seats, all now, and comparing against previous years. A nice graph to show hard numbers of how seating space has steadily declined over the years.

Bonus points for airports that set up a row of seats in the lobby, so you can compare and decide who NOT to get a ticket from.