There are several nice features of a landline, but they can't (in the UK, at least) compete on price. The line rental alone for a landline costs more than I spend on calls on my mobile (pre-pay, no contract, no monthly fees). Calls from my mobile are 3p/minute, a landline is £16/month. I'd need to spend almost 9 hours on the phone each month before I spent as much on my mobile as a landline would cost me before I even made any calls. And then, for the kicker, the calls from the landline cost 9p/min (+15p setup) for calls to other landlines or 12p/min (+15p setup) for calls to mobiles. There's no possible justification for calls from the landline costing 3-4 times as much as calls from the mobile on top of the extortionate line rental. If I wanted to pay BT even more, for another £3 I could get free evening and weekend calls to landlines, but calls to mobiles would still be the same price. For £7.50 on top of the line rental, I'd get free calls to landlines, and calls to mobiles would only be twice the cost of my mobile. Almost everyone I call has a mobile though, so in exchange for paying BT an amount equivalent to about 12 hours of calls on my mobile per month, I could then pay double per minute what I pay for calls on my mobile with no line rental.

I enjoyed that article, but it's worth noting that vi actually is standard.

I've lived in cold snow blasted parts of the US where roads can shut down for days due to winter storms. After a couple of days the super markets and liquor store shelves start looking a bit... bare. I have no doubt a few days of interruptions would cause problems. My solution is camping gear; including water purification kit; and a pantry which includes canned good and dried food such as lentils and dried fruit. A few days,,, meh. A month, then I will be taking notice.

C'mon. Victoria Neuland, dummy. Appointed under Hillary. You don't think of Hillary as a "neo-con" - but there she is! Appointing the Wife of Robert Kagan and former foreign policy advisor of... Dick Cheney! To the role of Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs.

Or you don't remember her little phone call? "Fuck the EU!"

Neo-con rim job. You don't see it, because the distortion field that Cheney described is in full-effect. You believe that an evil, Russian potentate wants to slowly steal your freedoms - not that a gang of pirates took over the former Russian state of Ukraine - using actual NAZIS to do it.

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actorsand you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

The original capital of the Rus, in the foundation of the state around 100 AD, was Kiev. No entity "Ukraine" existed. I figure even IF the Russians were agressive, they have a better claim on that land than the so-called Hebrews do on Palestine.

I'm not saying panic either. But I wouldn't blow them off. I would think that the biggest barrier they have is access to the equipment and materials to build what they want. They number in the tens of thousands at least, and we keep hearing how many were engineering grads or university students. They can't all be stupid. But sure another roadblock they will have are the throngs of stupid people they have lumped themselves in with. The thing is for biological warfare they don't even need weapons systems. They'll just infect a few hundred 'martyrs' and put them on a plane somewhere. Pneumonic plague (black death) doesn't need physical contact.

These aren't security experts FFS. Personally I wouldn't stop my life over this, but it is good to understand what some of them have in mind, and keep an eye on it.

Remember these guys are predisposed to killing themselves for the cause. We have to watch for things like getting themselves infected and travelling somewhere before symptoms show. They could weaponize themselves. As an example, look at how Ebola went to Nigeria and now some student sneaking into Senegal. Imagine if it was a whole bunch of nuts doing it on purpose. It's not something to just dismiss. Even if it didn't kill thousands, the panic caused in the general population who thanks to modern news organizations have no ability to filter or prioritize what they need to panic over. And western nations are too politically correct or have too much economic interest to test people at the borders or airports.

I'm not going to get bent about the whole thing, we should have already guessed guys like this have been trying to dream up ideas for years. But it shouldn't be discounted out of hand.

Yes, it's always better to be prepared after something very bad happens. Let's just ignore it for now.

3. We have antibiotics.

FTFY: We have antibiotics that we have rendered useless because we have fed them to cows to make them bigger which we then eat and so any germ we might encounter may already have evolved defences from said antibiotic.

FWIW, there are a lot of animals that can carry plague, not just rabbits (I know you implied that). But people don't know that most rodents in North America can carry it including squirrels, prairie dogs, rats, etc etc etc. And people still die from it occasionally.

ISIS is killing a CPR DOLL!

I can see how that would be relaxing, and I have an application at work where I may try this: cleaning up a mess of a telecom closet when I have some spare cycles to burn.

COINTELPRO

It's not just to fuck with darkies and commies any more.

Wow... I've seen lacing over the years but never gave it a second thought until reading your link. Interesting, thanks!

I believe they recently announced Star Wars theatrical releases for BluRay.

Interesting that wearing a wristwatch might now, again, be more eccentric than wearing a pocketwatch.

Sounds like weird innovation that as an old-school technologist I'm not comfortable with. I come to Slashdot for the opposite of those things.